The Subjective Petrarchan Heroine in the Verse Answers of Elizabeth Tudor and Frances Prannell Seymour, Countess of Hertford

Elizabeth Tudor and Frances Seymour are two women who use critiques of Petrarchan love as a means to avoid their objectification under the male gaze and to take command of their subjectivity and self-representation. Their roles as pedagogic mistresses recall the Petrarchan heroine as she is represented in the Henrician answers-poems responding to Wyatt, Surrey and their peers whereby the verse exchange juxtaposes the rationality of the female respondent with the irrationality of her male suitor. Their answers might be regarded as representing a further stage in the development of a female literary identity that is self-defining rather than defined. Like their fictional counterparts in the courtly, female-voiced answers of the 1530s they serve the function of private counsellors exhorting their interlocutors to amend their perspectives, to embrace reason and a mean of conduct. However, whereas in these earlier poems male poets colonise both the subject and object positions (both that of the Petrarchan persona and the female-voiced respondent), these women wrest subjectivity from correspondents who attempt conspicuously to monopolise the subject position.

Elizabeth Tudor

The combined attributes of chastity, desirability and intellectual superiority associated typically with the sort of Petrarchan heroine that we have encountered presented a role of obvious utility for Elizabeth. Moreover, since these verse answers are male ventriloquisations of a female voice, they naturally offered a courtly context for the synthesis of her natural, frail feminine body with

⁴⁰⁹ Bell (1998), p.100.