Acts 16, Judges 9, Lydia, Abimelech, certain, woman, intellectual, moral
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argues men are blinde” (ll.1-2). She elaborates:
A certayne woeman of the multitude Sayde,
“Blest be the paps that gave oure Savioure foode.”
A certayne woeman too a milstone threw
And from the wall Abimelecke she slew.
There likewise was as holie writ doth say
A certayne woeman named Lydia. (ll.5-10)
A glance at Acts 16:14-15 and Judges 9:53 reveals just how aware Harington must have been of his preacher’s error, and suggests strongly that he anticipated the poem would be corrected:
Acts 16
14: And a certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira, which worshipped God, heard us: whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul.
15: And when she was baptized, and her household, she besought us, saying, If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house, and abide there. And she constrained us.
Judges 9
53: And a certain woman cast a piece of a millstone upon Abimelech’s head, and all to brake his skull.
Cheke’s answer fulfils the role set out for it by Harington, the specificity of whose challenge to find particular passages indicates the degree of control he exerts over the debate and the content of her answer. She answers his sonnet line by line and her six additional lines contain nothing other than the answer to the question he has set her. Her verse response is simply the mirror of Harington’s verse and the echo of his thoughts. On a more general level, Cheke also keeps within acceptable thematic parameters, adopting a dialectical position that was already well established in literary debates between men over women’s intellectual and moral status. She manages little other here than to perpetuate such objectification of women as the focus of moral debate. In doing so she defers to male intellectual interests, and to patriarchal control over the dissemination of knowledge. She even colludes willingly in her intellectual disempowerment with her self-
John Harington, Knight (printed for John Budge, 1618), sig. Hivv, STC 12776.
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