The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From Heroidean to Tristian Complaint

Reid, Lindsay Ann

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-42946-1_5

Lindsay Ann Reid⁵

Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History ((EMLH))

504 Accesses
6 Citations

Abstract

Calling attention to the Ovidian contours of Isabella Whitney’s cursus litterarum, this chapter reconsiders the literary heritage of the personae she adopts in The Copy of a Letter (c. 1566–67) and A Sweet Nosgay (1573). Existing analyses of Whitney’s Ovidianism have tended to emphasize her debts to the female-voiced epistles of the Heroides while simultaneously overlooking profound intertextual connections between A Sweet Nosgay and Ovid’s exilic writings. In contrast, this chapter argues that the outlines of a self-consciously classical career trajectory (its stages demarcated by Whitney’s subtle aesthetic shift from Heroidean amatory complaint to Tristian exile complaint) can be detected when The Copy of a Letter and A Sweet Nosgay are read contiguously.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 89.00; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 119.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 119.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
See Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) and Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
2.
Philip Hardie and Helen Moore, “Literary Careers—Classical Models and their Receptions,” in Classical Literary Careers, ed. Philip Hardie and Helen Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1.
3.
Hardie and Moore, “Literary Careers,” 2.
4.
Susanne Woods, Margaret P. Hannay, Elaine Beilin, and Anne Shaver, “Renaissance Englishwomen and the Literary Career,” in European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 302.
5.
Woods et al., “Renaissance Englishwomen,” 303 (emphasis my own).
6.
Hardie and Moore, “Literary Careers,” 9–10.
7.
Linda Gregerson, “Life Among Others,” The Virginia Quarterly Review 83, no. 1 (2007): 208.
8.
Patrick Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 240, 236, 239. Cheney again advances a similar argument about Whitney’s Ovidianism in “Literary Careers,” in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Volume 2: 1558–1660, ed. Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 182. Cheney’s extensive work on career criticism also includes Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993) and Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).
9.
As Whitney has ascended from obscurity to canonicity over the past four decades, there have been numerous speculative attempts to expand her oeuvre. This began with R. J. Fehrenbach’s propositions that Whitney might have anonymously contributed a number of items to Richard Jones’s printed miscellanies A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions and A Handful of Pleasant Delights: “Isabella Whitney and the Popular Miscellanies of Richard Jones,” Cahiers Elisabéthains 19 (1981): 85–7 and “Isabella Whitney, Sir Hugh Plat, Geoffrey Whitney, and Sister Eldershae,” English Language Notes 21, no. 1 (1983): 7–11. Building upon this work, Lynette McGrath later postulated that “Whitney [may] have had a more or less regular place among a group of writers tapped by Jones to supply poems for his publications”: Subjectivity and Women’s Poetry in Early Modern England: “Why on the Ridge Should She Desire to Go?” (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 126. One of Fehrenbach’s suggestions was also championed by Randall Martin: “Isabella Whitney’s ‘Lamentation upon the death of William Gruffith’,” Early Modern Literary Studies 3, no. 1 (1997): n.p. More recently, Raphael Lyne has advanced the theory that a translation of Ovid’s Heroides 7 and corresponding “answeare thereunto” appended to F. L.’s translation of the Remedia Amoris in 1600 might be Whitney’s work: “Writing Back to Ovid in the 1560s and 1570s,” Translation and Literature 13, no. 2 (2004): 155–64. Given the tentative nature of these attributions (and the fact that all of these poems are, unlike The Copy of a Letter and A Sweet Nosgay, relatively short, standalone pieces), I limit my own analysis in this essay to the two substantive volumes of poetry that Whitney is definitively known to have authored.
10.
Thomas Churchyard, trans., The Thre First Bookes of Ouids De Tristibus (STC 18977a; London, 1572), sig. B2r.
11.
See Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit, 3–48. Cheney argues that the Ovidian career paradigm offered early modern authors at least two possible genre-based models: the trajectory from amatory poetry to tragedy to epic (that Ovid initially intended for himself, as outlined in the Amores) or the alternative trajectory from amatory poetry to epic to exile poetry (that the historical poet unexpectedly found himself following after his unanticipated banishment). Another attempt to define the Ovidian cursus can be found in Alessandro Barchiesi and Philip Hardie, “The Ovidian Career Model: Ovid, Gallus, Apuleius, Boccaccio,” in Classical Literary Careers, ed. Hardie and Moore, 59–88.
12.
Thomas Underdowne, trans., Ouid His Inuectiue against Ibis (STC 18949; London, 1569), sig. A7r.
13.
Underdowne, Ibis, sigs. A4r-A4v.
14.
Churchyard, Tristibus, np.
15.
Churchyard, Tristibus, sig. B6v. I cite the corresponding Latin text of the Tristia from Ovid, Tristia; Ex Ponto, ed. Jeffrey Henderson, trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler, rev. G. P. Goold (1924; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 2.207–8.
16.
Jennifer Ingleheart, “Introduction: Two Thousand Years of Responses to Ovid’s Exile,” in Two Thousand Years of Solitude: Exile after Ovid, ed. Jennifer Ingleheart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.
17.
Thomas Cooper, “Ouidius,” in Thesaurus Linguae Romanae & Britannicae (STC 5686; London 1565).
18.
Ovid, P. Ovidii Nasonis Opera (STC 18926.1; London, 1570), sigs. 4r-6r.
19.
Ovid, P. Ovidii Nasonis Opera, sig. 8r.
20.
Ovid, P. Ovidii Nasonis Opera, sigs. 6v-8r.
21.
Averill Lukic, “Geffrey and Isabella Whitney,” Emblematica 14 (2005): 397.
22.
This possibility was first suggested in Fehrenbach, “Isabella Whitney, Sir Hugh Plat.” Jessica L. Malay has pursued this line of enquiry further, in “Isabella Whitney, ‘Sister Eldershae,’ and Cheshire Recusancy,” English Language Notes 43, no. 2 (2005): 18–22.
23.
Lukic, “Geffrey and Isabella,” 406.
24.
M. L. Stapleton, “Letters of Address, Letters of Exchange,” in A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), 367.
25.
Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay (STC 25440; London, 1573), sigs. C6r, C7r, D1v; Elizabeth Heale, Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 34–40; Meredith Anne Skura, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 149–67. Along similar lines, see Jean E. Howard, “Textualizing an Urban Life: The Cases of Isabella Whitney,” in Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices, ed. Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 217–33.
26.
Isabella Whitney, The Copy of a Letter (STC 25439; London, c. 1566–67), sig. A1v; Heale, Autobiography, 11.
27.
Barchiesi and Hardie, “Ovidian Career Model,” 65, 64.
28.
Stapleton, “Letters of Address,” 367.
29.
Crystal Bartolovich, “‘Optimism of the Will’: Isabella Whitney and Utopia,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39, no. 2 (2009): 414; Elaine V. Beilin, “Writing Public Poetry: Humanism and the Woman Writer,” Modern Language Quarterly 51, no. 2 (1990): 253; Laurie Ellinghausen, Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1557–1667 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 20.
30.
Allison Johnson, “The ‘Single Lyfe’ of Isabella Whitney: Love, Friendship, and the Single Woman Writer,” in Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, ed. Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 117.
31.
Michelle O’Callaghan has persuasively argued that the single extant copy of The Copy of a Letter likely represents not the first but an expanded and revised later edition, for “[b]ibliographic evidence suggests a publishing history in which a single-authored collection [featuring the two letters attributed to Whitney] was subsequently turned into a little anthology of female and male complaints”: “‘My Printer must, haue somewhat to his share’: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books,” Women’s Writing 26, no. 1 (2019): 18. That Whitney may have written the two male-voiced letters as well as the two female-voiced epistles ascribed to her in The Copy of a Letter is a possibility entertained by Maggie Ellen Ray, “‘The Simple Fool Doth Trust/Too Much before He Try’: Isabella Whitney’s Revision of the Female Reader and Lover in The Copy of a Letter,” Early Modern Women 6 (2011): 130, 141.
32.
Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 47.
33.
I borrow the useful term “epistoler” from William C. Dowling, The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 12.
34.
Whitney, Copy, sig. A2r.
35.
Whitney, Copy, sig. A5v.
36.
Jones, Currency of Eros, 43; Whitney, Copy, sig. A6r.
37.
Johnson, “Single Lyfe,” 123; Ray, “Simple Fool,” 137–8
38.
Ovid, Ars Amatoria, in The Art of Love and Other Poems, ed. Jeffrey Henderson, trans. J. H. Mozley, rev. G. P. Goold (1929; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1.17.
39.
Patricia Phillippy, “The Maid’s Lawful Liberty: Service, the Household, and ‘Mother B’ in Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay,” Modern Philology 95, no. 4 (1998): 440.
40.
Phillippy, “Maid’s Lawful Liberty,” 440.
41.
Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 306; Paul Gleed, “‘I lov’de thee best’: London as Male Beloved in Isabella Whitney’s ‘The Manner of her Wyll’,” The London Journal 37, no. 1 (2012): 11.
42.
Johnson, “Single Lyfe,” 127; Ellinghausen, Labor and Writing, 27.
43.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. C7r.
44.
Ellinghausen, Labor and Writing, 26.
45.
Whitney, Nosgay, sigs. C6r–C6v.
46.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. C7r.
47.
Lyne, “Writing Back,” 158.
48.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. A5v.
49.
Whitney, Nosgay, sigs. B1v, B1r.
50.
Whitney, Nosgay, sigs. A5r, B1v.
51.
Stapleton, “Letters of Address,” 368.
52.
Stapleton, “Letters of Address,” 368.
53.
Lyne, “Writing Back,” 158; Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry, 239.
54.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. D3r.
55.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. D3r.
56.
Johnson, “Single Lyfe,” 123.
57.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. D3v.
58.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. D3v.
59.
Ellinghausen, Labor and Writing, 27.
60.
Ingleheart, “‘I shall be thy devoted foe’: The Exile of the Ovid of the Ibis in English Reception,” in Two Thousand Years, 120.
61.
Liz Oakley-Brown, “Elizabethan Exile after Ovid: Thomas Churchyard’s Tristia (1572),” in Two Thousand Years, ed. Ingleheart, 103.
62.
Barchiesi and Hardie, “Ovidian Career Model,” 59; Ingleheart, “Introduction,” 6.
63.
Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3; Ingleheart, “Introduction,” 10; Matthew Woodcock, Thomas Churchyard: Pen, Sword, Ego (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 159.
64.
Churchyard, Tristibus, sigs. A3r, A4v.
65.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. E2r.
66.
Helen Wilcox, “‘Ah Famous Citie’: Women, Writing, and Early Modern London,” Feminist Review 96 (2010): 22–3 (emphasis my own).
67.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. D2r; Gleed, “I lov’de thee,” 2.
68.
Whitney, Nosgay, sigs. C6v, C7r, D2r, D2v, D6v, A6r, D2r.
69.
Whitney, Nosgay, sigs. A6v, E3r, D6r.
70.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. C7r.
71.
Whitney repeatedly describes herself as “lucklesse” throughout A Sweet Nosgay: sigs. A6r, C6v, D3r, D6r. For her claim to be out “of Fortunes fauour,” see sig. C6r. Elsewhere in the collection, Whitney’s persona blames “Fortune fell” for “conuert[ing]/[Her] health to heapes of payne” (sig. D3r), and her various correspondents in the “Familier Epistles” frequently echo this imagery of Whitney’s victimization by Fortune.
72.
Churchyard, Tristibus, sig. A1v; Woodcock, Thomas Churchyard, 159.
73.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. E2r; Churchyard, Tristibus, sig. C4r. Intriguingly, in 1575 Churchyard published an autobiographical-sounding poem entitled “A Tragicall Discourse of the Vnhappy Mans Life,” which incorporates testamentary rhetoric reminiscent of Whitney’s “Wyll and Testament” in A Sweet Nosgay. Woodcock has previously gestured to a possible connection between these roughly contemporary pieces, and Churchyard’s status as translator of the Tristia invites speculation that he and Whitney were inspired in analogous ways by Ovid’s exilic writings: Thomas Churchyard, 276 n 33.
74.
Louise Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 4.
75.
Whitney, Nosgay, sigs. C6v, C7r.
76.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. D2r.
77.
McGrath, Subjectivity, 155–56.
78.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. C7v.
79.
Michelle M. Dowd, Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 33; Ann Rosalind Jones, “Maidservants of London: Sisterhoods of Kinship and Labor,” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25.
80.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. C8r.
81.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. C8r; Jones, “Maidservants,” 25.
82.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. C8r.
83.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. D6r.
84.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. D7r.
85.
Ingleheart, “Introduction,” 15.
86.
Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart, 5.
87.
Whitney, Nosgay, sig. C6v.
88.
Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart, 5. Whitney’s figuration of A Sweet Nosgay as gift at this juncture in the collection also echoes (albeit somewhat distortedly) a similar formulation found in her dedication to Mainwaring.
89.
Churchyard, Tristibus, sigs. A1v, A1r.
90.
Churchyard, Tristibus, sigs. A1v, A1r.
91.
Matthew McGowan, Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the “Tristia” and “Epistulae ex Ponto” (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 3; McGrath, Subjectivity, 146.
92.
Ellen Oliensis, “The Power of Image-Makers: Representation and Revenge in Ovid Metamorphoses 6 and Tristia 4,” Classical Antiquity 23, no. 2 (2004): 297; Woodcock, Thomas Churchyard, 159.
93.
Woodcock, Thomas Churchyard, 160.
94.
Rosalind Smith, Michelle O’Callaghan, and Sarah C. E. Ross, “Complaint,” in A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, ed. Bates, 340.
95.
Syrithe Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 12, 4.
96.
M. L. Stapleton, Spenser’s Ovidian Poetics (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009), 47.
97.
Oakley-Brown, “Elizabethan Exile,” 103 (emphasis my own).
98.
Ellen O’Gorman, “Love and the Family: Augustus and the Ovidian Legacy,” Arethusa 30, no. 1 (1997): 104.
99.
Ingleheart, “Introduction,” 6.
100.
Woodcock, Thomas Churchyard, 159; Maggie Kilgour, “New Spins on Old Rotas: Virgil, Ovid, Milton,” in Classical Literary Careers, ed. Hardie and Moore, 182.
101.
Danielle Clarke, “Ovid’s Heroides, Drayton and the Articulation of the Feminine in the English Renaissance,” Renaissance Studies 22, no. 3 (2008): 392.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
Lindsay Ann Reid

Authors

Lindsay Ann Reid
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lindsay Ann Reid .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Sarah C. E. Ross
The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
Rosalind Smith

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Reid, L.A. (2020). The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From Heroidean to Tristian Complaint. In: Ross, S., Smith, R. (eds) Early Modern Women's Complaint. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42946-1_5

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42946-1_5
Published: 24 July 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-42945-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-42946-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics