symbolic, inviolable, masculine, courtiers, Petrarchan, heroine, rhetorical, German humanist, Paul Schede
<< previous
next >>
248
her symbolic, inviolable masculine body as a prince. The suitability of answer-poetry as a medium with which Elizabeth could discourse with her courtiers is reflected by its prevalence among her extant verse.
410
The precedent of the ventriloquised Petrarchan heroine in Henrician court answer-poetry may have been known to her directly and, as such, would have also presented a means of demonstrating affinity with her Tudor heritage.
The role of the Petrarchan heroine may be one that her courtiers often contrived for her but, as May recognises, it was a role that she was often able to turn to her own advantage.
411
We have already seen how she used an answer-poem as a formidable rhetorical tool in a verse response to Mary Queen of Scots. Even she, however, appears to have felt restricted by the protocol of courtly discourse between the sexes. She is sensitive to the constraints imposed upon her through the process of objectification, and seems aware that the answer-poem provides a particularly useful means of redressing the balance. This is apparent in a response ascribed to her (‘Reginae Responsvm’) that answers a Latin verse by the German humanist Paul Schede (known as Paulus Melissus Schedius). In his ‘Ad Elisabetham Angliae, Franciae, Hiberniae Reginam’ (‘To Elizabeth, Queen of England, France and Ireland’) Schede, like the Petrarchan lover, figures himself as her slave, and places Elizabeth on a pedestal, at once both apotheosised, above him, and objectified under his gaze. He appears to have enjoyed a fair amount of success at eliciting patronage from Elizabeth through numerous verses dedicated to her.
412
In this instance, however, it is the social efficacy of Elizabeth’s response that most stands out. Schede had written,
Regia me dedo sub juga servitii.
410 Of her, less than twenty, extant verses seven form part of verse exchanges (see Cat. E 11722 and H 153).
411 May (1999), p.135.
412 See, for instance, J. A. Van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors: Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers, and the Leiden Humanists (Leiden: Leiden UP; OUP, 1962), pp.96-7.
<< previous
next >>
Stumble It!
