Revisiting a Sixteenth-Century ‘Erotic’ Poem Wrongly Ascribed to Elizabeth Dacre

Abstract

This article puts on trial the assumed authorship of a sixteenth-century manuscript poem reminiscent of Ovid’s Heroides, currently ascribed to Lady Elizabeth Dacre. After establishing a revised edition of the text, it provides arguments based on historical, material, literary and textual analyses of the source, strongly indicating the unlikeliness of its supposed attribution to this English noblewoman. The arguments suggest that, while Dacre was probably the scribe of the manuscript, the author of the text was most likely her husband, Sir Thomas Dacre. This outcome is used as an example evincing the fundamental importance of usable and informative text editions for historians and literary scholars alike, increasingly calling for close collaboration across disciplines, as well as a renewed appreciation of textual editing.

In March 2010, an unknown sixteenth-century manuscript poem was found hidden within a 1561 edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Woorkes in West Virginia University Library’s Special Collections.¹ This was the discovery of every scholar’s dreams. Granted, many—perhaps even most—of such manuscript poems have never attracted any scholarly interest. Yet, this archival find provided something special and quickly drew wider attention. The manuscript, a single page glued to the pastedown of the Chaucer edition, offered an original fourteen-line Latin poem alluding to the sad and melancholic style of Ovid’s fictitious Heroides, concluded by a witty distich taken from Martial’s Epigrams (XIV.151). The poem was addressed to Sir Anthony Cooke (1501–1576), known as the (unofficial) tutor to Edward VI and an advocate of liberal education for women (his daughters were taught both Latin and Greek).

Yet, it was not the name of the addressee, but the alleged author of this poem who brought this modest discovery international attention. Below the original manuscript, on another pasted-in piece of paper, the name ‘Elizabeth Dacre’ catches the eye. Unfortunately, we know only little about this woman (née Leyburne), who lived from 1536 to 1567 and belonged to the English nobility. Dacre married Lord Thomas Dacre (c. 1527–1566), Fourth Baron Gilsland, in 1555, with whom she bore five children.² A year after he died in 1566, she was again married to Thomas Howard, the fourth Duke of Norfolk. She tragically died, however, in childbirth during that same year. No writings from Lady Dacre seemed to have survived—at least not until now.

In her 2011 article on the discovery and significance of the poem concealed in the Chaucer edition, Elaine Treharne was the first to attribute this poem unequivocally to Dacre.³ Based on this attribution, she interpreted the work as a personal love letter that ‘surely illustrates the work of a strong-minded, educated, independent woman, who is deliberately rejecting (albeit in private) the contemporary stereotype of the modest woman’.⁴ Her reading had bold implications: as a married or betrothed woman, Dacre would have written a risqué love letter to Anthony Cooke, that is, to someone other than her husband. The amorous genre of the text, the learned language of communication, the gender and the marital status of the author, in short, clearly seemed to make this work stand out from the myriad of contemporary occasional poems known to us. If authored by Dacre, the poem would be a highly exceptional text in the corpus of extant literature by sixteenth-century English—or, for that matter, European—women. As such, it would constitute a significant contribution to our understanding of the literary production and agency of early modern women.

The present article revisits this remarkable find and critically examines the attribution to Dacre. Offering a revised edition and translation of this intriguing text, I argue that Dacre’s husband Thomas was the likely author of the work. This argument is based on a combined historical, material, literary and textual analysis of the poem. The conclusion underlines the fundamental importance of useable and informative text editions for early modern literary and cultural historians, providing recommendations for better editorial practices and future collaboration.

Establishing the Text

Before any arguments about the authorship of the poem can be made, it is necessary to establish a consensus about the text presented in the manuscript. In the case of the manuscript under discussion, this is especially important for two reasons. First, the sole edition of the poem to date—henceforth referred to as T (= Treharne)—contains a number of serious paleographical errors. Second, I argue that the text as presented in the manuscript also contains some grievous solecisms. In other words, the current state of the edited poem suffers from errors both of the modern editor and of the early modern scribe. These textual errata have not yet been commented on, even though the transcription errors strongly imply that we are dealing with a copy of a (lost) original text, rather than a holograph, as will later be explained.

The revised edition that I propose makes use of the Leiden Conventions (Leydener Klammersystem), which are commonly used in modern editions of epigraphical and papyrological texts.⁵ This well-organized system is particularly suited to describe the relevant paleographical details of the text as featured in the manuscript. The mise en page of the manuscript has been retained as much as possible, and this will later be adduced as an argument against Dacre’s authorship. All punctuation and capitalization, however, are editorial, to facilitate the present-day reader. The letters u/v and s/ſ have also been edited to reflect modern spelling conventions of classical text editions. My translation aims to be literal but respectful of English idiom and is deliberately ambiguous about the gender of the so-called lyrical subject.

Ad Antoniu(m) Cokum

Quod conata loqui non dixi<t> lingua ‘valeto!’,⁶

quodq (ue) oculi nostri te(r)ga dedere tuis:⁷

ille tristis amor qui vultu inhesit eunti⁸

abstuli<t> – oh! – visum sustuleratque vocem;⁹

Sic quoq(ue) Penel{l}ope, coniu(n)x dum liquit Ulixẹs,¹⁰ [5]

mlta fuit; causa est quid nisi dulcis amor?

Post tunc̣ absenti musas fert Naso salute\s/[[m]]¹¹;

sic tibi semoto chartula n(ost)ra dabit.

Spero igitur mutu(m) non dedignabere Dacrum;

nam, licet obtituit, mens tibi fida fuit.¹² [10]

Crede inter servos non est fidelior ullus¹³

Plotino Planco, q(uam) tibi Dacrus erit.

Nor servo mansit Plancus fidelior ullo

    quam servo Dacrọ, Coke, suaue manes.¹⁴

Martialis de zona

Longa satis nu(n)c sum, dulci zed ponder<e> venter [I]

    si tu miạt, fiam tu(n)c tibi zona brevis.

tit. Antoniu(m)] -ḥ- changed into -o- | Anthonin(us) Cokinii T || 3 eunti] perhaps emend to euntis || 4 ob T || 6 mlta] read muta, as suggested in T || uisi T || 7 tum T || absenti] -i- changed into -s- || musas] likely mutas is to be read || 9 Dacrium T || 10 licet] luet T || obtituit] read obticuit, as suggested in T || 12 q(ua) T || 13 nor] read non | no(ste)r T || 14 Dacre T || I zed] read sed, as suggested in T || II tu miạt] read tumeat, as suggested in T

To Anthony Cooke

With regard to [the fact] that my tongue tried to speak but did not say ‘farewell!’,

and with regard to [the fact] that our eyes turned their back to yours:

it is that dejected love that hung about [your] countenance when you [/I] disappeared,¹⁵

that robbed me – oh! – of my sight and took away my voice;

in this way, Penelope, too, when her husband Ulixes left,

was speechless; what is the reason, if not sweet love?

Then, later, Naso sends speechless greetings to the absent one;¹⁶

similarly, our scrap of paper will give [greetings] to you, who are separated [from me].

I therefore hope that you will not disdain [your] speechless Dacre;

for although [Dacre] fell silent, the mind [i.e., Dacre’s] has been loyal to you.

Be convinced that among the servants there is no one more loyal

to Plotinus Plancus than Dacre will be to you.

Plancus did not remain more loyal to any other servant

than you, Coke, remain dear to your servant Dacre.

Martial about a girdle

I am long enough now, but if with a sweet burden your belly

should swell, then I will become too short a girdle for you.

The corrections of T that are suggested in the present edition are based on grammatical, prosodic, orthographic and/or semantic reasons.¹⁷ The expanded forms ‘Anthoninu(s)’ and ‘q(ua)’ in T (in the title and in line 12), for instance, cause ungrammatical and non-sensical readings. The preposition ‘ad’ must take the accusative (thus ‘Antonium’) and the Latinized name of Anthony Cooke was spelled ‘Antonius’, not ‘Anthoninus’.¹⁸ The abbreviation ‘ꝙ’ in line 12 cannot be a relative pronoun but represents the adverb ‘quam’ complementing the antecedent comparative form ‘fidelior’ (a similar and parallel construction with ‘quam’, this time written in full, occurs in lines 13–14). The reading ‘Cokinij’ in T should be corrected based on the commonly used orthography of Cooke’s Latinized surname ‘Cokus’ and the absence of any dots in the manuscript (which the scribe wrote above the majority of ‘i’s). The manuscript reads ‘oh’ in line 4 instead of the preposition ‘ob’ printed in T, which would leave one to wonder about the seemingly missing object of the predicate ‘abstuli<t>’. Moreover, one only needs to look at other ‘h’s and ‘b’s in the text to realize that ‘h’ is the correct reading. Similarly, the word ‘luet’ in T (line 10) would cause faulty syntax and should, without doubt, be emended to the concessive particle ‘licet’.

Fig. 1

The manuscript poem ‘Ad Antonium Cokum’ glued on the pastedown of the 1561 edition of Geoffrey Chaucer, Woorkes, edited by William Thynne. The small piece of paper below the poem reads: ‘Elizabeth Dacres’. At the top-right margin the words ‘stanza from’, written in pencil, are visible. Image used by permission of the Rare Books Collection of the West Virginia University Libraries.

Concerning the poetic form of the text, Treharne remarked that the poem consists of fourteen lines and should therefore probably be understood as a quatorzain.¹⁹ Strengthening this argument is her statement that the poem would have ‘a regular attempt at fourteen syllables per line, and thus might be emulating a syllabic prosody, rather than a metrical one’.²⁰ The presence of an amorous tone, a fourteen-line structure and a distinct volta at line 9 (marked by ‘spero igitur’, indicating a shift from the ‘proposition’ in the past to its corresponding present and future ‘resolution’) may, indeed, suggest the poem’s influence from the sonnet or quatorzain. As such, it appears to reflect how early modern poets creatively adopted, as Giacomo Comiati aptly puts it, ‘[t]he literary tesserae drawn from Petrarchan vernacular texts ... to forge their new lyrical Latin mosaics’.²¹ Regardless of the eliding syllables, however, one keeps counting in vain to find the regular attempt at fourteen syllables claimed by Treharne. This is hardly surprising. After all, the poem is written in elegiac couplets, the most obvious poetic form to adopt for any author composing verse resonant of Ovid’s Heroides.

Following the rules of classical versification, every even-numbered line presents a hexameter, consisting of a variation of six dactylic and spondaic feet. The uneven lines, on the other hand, are pentameters and consist of a variation of two dactyls or spondees plus one long syllable, followed again by two dactyls (no spondees) plus one more syllable. As a rule, the author of the poem adheres to these principles. Moreover, the author’s awareness of classical prosody also appears from the faithfully observed word break that coincides with the juncture between the fifth and sixth half-foot of every line. This creates a natural breathing pause, known by the technical term of semiquinaria or penthemimeral caesura in hexameters (e.g. after ‘Quod conata loqui’ in line 1) and diaeresis in pentameters (e.g. after ‘quodque oculi nostri’ in line 2). The few prosodic deviations from the classical norm of ‘golden’ Latin that do occur in the poem (including the words ‘ille’, ‘vocem’, ‘fidelior’ and ‘suave’ in lines 3, 4, 11, 13 and 14), rather than the result of inexperience or negligence, seem to reflect the fact that, outside of Italy, it was only in the course of the sixteenth century that the knowledge of and respect for classical prosody steadily increased.²²

These insights into the poem’s actual prosodic form help us spot and correct other errors, both in T and in the manuscript. The reading ‘no(ste)r’ in T (line 13), for instance, does not fit the hexametric line that it should, as only one syllable is needed. We are therefore not dealing with an abbreviation. This leaves ‘non’ (erroneously written as ‘nor’ by the scribe) as the only meaningful reading. Similarly, the reading ‘visi’ (line 6; spelled ‘uisi’ in T) does not fit the pentameter: both ‘i’s are naturally long vowels, yet we have room for only two short ones. The correct reading, therefore, is ‘nisi’. This also makes much more sense given the preceding ‘quid’, since together these words constitute a frequently used hypotactic construction. We should also read ‘tunc’, and not ‘tum’, in line 7, since the latter would cause elision (‘t’ absenti’) and leave one long syllable lacking in the hexameter. Moreover, the reading ‘Dacrium’ in T (line 9) should be corrected to ‘Dacrum’, because otherwise, there would be too many syllables (the dot visible on the photograph above the ‘r’ is most likely just a spot on the paper). Finally, the reading ‘Dacro’ in line 14 should be preferred to ‘Dacre’ (T), which is a vocative that prosodically, grammatically and semantically hardly makes sense, whereas ‘Dacro’ does. The reading of the final ‘o’ in the manuscript, however, is admittedly ambiguous if read in isolation.

While Treharne introduced a number of errors in her edition, a strong case can be made that the manuscript, too, contains significant errors. Treharne correctly suggested ‘obticuit’ instead of the manuscript reading ‘obtituit’ in line 10, which is a clear scribal mistake.²³ More instances, however, should be added to this list, including ‘mlta’ and ‘nor’ (lines 6 and 13), as well as ‘zed’, ‘ponder’ and ‘tu miat’ in the concluding distich of Martial. These words, which have all been silently emended in T to their correct forms, will prove important in the later discussion of the poem’s authorship (see ‘Textual Analysis’ below).

There are other errors in the manuscript that have neither been identified nor corrected in T. In the first line, for instance, the word ‘lingua’ may raise eyebrows. The hexameter dictates that the final ‘a’ should be short in quantity, which indicates that the word is used in the nominative case rather than the ablative. This is peculiar, because the predicate ‘dixi’ is first person singular, meaning that the subject of this line is ‘I, the tongue’, rather than the more obvious third person ‘my tongue’. A simple solution, however, would be to emend ‘dixi’ to third person ‘dixit’ (which has no consequence for the prosody). This emendation becomes even more probable if one considers lines 3–4, in which a very similar problem occurs: the seemingly first person predicate ‘abstuli’ appears to lack a clear subject in the main clause, as the preceding third-person subject clause ‘ille tristis amor’ cannot agree with it. Again, however, the issue is solved when adopting the same kind of solution, that is, emending ‘abstuli’ to ‘abstulit’. This emendation is all the more convincing because it also solves a problem that would otherwise arise in the prosody: the long final syllable of ‘abstuli’ does not fit the pentameter, whereas ‘abstulit’ appropriately ends in a short syllable.

Finally, the word ‘musas’, too, should probably be understood as a mistake by the scribe. The word as written poses problems concerning both the grammar and meaning of the line, regarding what to do with this accusative denoting the Muses. The sentence already has a clear object (‘salutes’, ‘greetings’), which might perhaps indicate that the author intended the word as the equivalent of ‘musaeas’ (‘inspired by the Muses’), that is, as an adjective modifying ‘greetings’.²⁴ This reading, however, although certainly meaningful, seems unlikely, because it would require accepting a serious and clear grammatical error in the archetype text, which otherwise seems to be free from such mistakes.²⁵

Considering the other corrections that have been proven necessary, I would like to propose ‘mutas’ (‘speechless’) as a conjecture (see apparatus). This reading not only solves the grammatical problem but also occasions a meaningful anticipation of line 9. Just as Ovid wrote ‘speechless greetings’ on behalf of his heroines—they were unable to speak directly to their distant lovers and were therefore compelled to write letters—this written poem, too, functions as a remedy for the narrator’s failure to have bid the addressee farewell in person. This emphasis on the written form of communication, distinct from oral speech, permeates the Heroides.²⁶ The contrast is particularly evident in line 10 of Phaedra’s letter to Hippolytus: ‘dicere quae puduit, scribere iussit amor’ (‘what modesty forbade to say, love has commanded me to write’).²⁷ This passage in Ovid occurs almost directly after lines 7–8, which served as a clear inspiration for the author of the poem in the opening distich, as observed by Treharne.²⁸ Additionally, numerous introductory lines in Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto highlight a similar contrast.²⁹ This overlap may suggest that line 7 of the poem is perhaps not (or not solely) alluding to ‘Naso’ as the author of Penelope’s fictional letter but could also reference the exiled poet in Tomis and his tragic attempt to stay in contact with his homeland through his letters. The occurrence of the words ‘Naso’ in combination with ‘salutem’ in line 7, too, could be seen as a specific allusion to Ovid’s Epistulae.³⁰

The written and voiceless character of letters, in short, encapsulates a crucial element in the poem’s intertextual entanglement with Ovid’s work. Furthermore, it plays a pivotal role in shaping the overall structure of the argument. It is repeatedly hinted at during the first eight lines, culminating in the narrator’s implicit apology in line 9: it is hoped that Cooke ‘will not disdain speechless Dacre’.³¹ This apology, addressing both past and present speechlessness, allows the narrator to continue the argument: the failure to have spoken a farewell and current inability to communicate in person—the poem’s raison d’être—should not be construed as a lack of fides (‘loyalty’).³² The remainder of the poem, then, is a plea aiming to demonstrate Dacre’s trustworthiness.

Besides these grammatical and exegetical arguments, the plausibility of the conjecture ‘mutas’ is reinforced by a formal observation: the words ‘mutas’ and ‘mutum’ in lines 7 and 9 occupy identical metrical positions, thereby emphasizing the correlation between these lines. Finally, the notorious paleographical confusion between the written ‘t’ and long ‘ſ’ may well explain the manuscript reading ‘musas’, rendering ‘mutas’ an even more convincing option.

Historical Analysis

This newly established text allows me to proceed with my argument about the authorship of the poem. I shall start with some historical remarks that should elicit suspicion about the current attribution of the poem. First, it is worth noting that no (other) sources mention that Dacre enjoyed a liberal education. Similarly, no other evidence points to her supposed mastery of Latin and Latin verse composition. This is significant, as writing in elegiac couplets is a highly specialized skill that normally takes years of training to master—training that very few women received.

If Dacre had been educated to such a high level, her remarkable learning would very likely have left some (near-)contemporary traces. A woman of letters was often seen as a curiosity worth commenting on—to the point that writing about learned women became a genre of its own.³³ Although most of the written legacy of female intellectuals has not survived the test of time, their names and talents, at least, were often diligently recorded by their contemporaries.³⁴ Jane Stevenson even provocatively argues that ‘it is modern scholarship, rather than early modern, which has caused the woman scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to vanish’.³⁵ The daughters of Anthony Cooke, for example, quickly became renowned because they had been highly educated, in both Latin and Greek.³⁶ Importantly, however, the high visibility of most sixteenth-century Latinate female aristocrats in England was not only the result of the publicity they received but also a consequence of the public lives which they lived and to which their knowledge of Latin proved a useful asset.³⁷ While the fact that we lack any other sources to support Dacre’s purported ability to compose Latin verse is not hard evidence, it should at least warrant caution about attributing, especially so categorically, this Latin poem to her.

Another reason for suspicion is what perhaps constitutes the most intriguing aspect of the current attribution of the poem. If Dacre was indeed the author, this would mean that she, as a married or betrothed woman, wrote this letter to someone other than her husband. Yet, if we assume a love letter, as Treharne suggests, why would she have used her husband’s surname—stressing her union with him—and not her maiden name, first name (which would certainly have been more affectionate) or simply no name at all?³⁸ And even if we assume that the poem should be understood as reflecting an erudite kind of friendship rather than an amorous relationship, this would still remain a most peculiar text in the context of the social, moral and literary gender norms of the sixteenth-century English aristocracy. In this context, expected female modesty, piety and chastity were not just rare abstractions but widely recognized, if not internalized, precepts.³⁹ While male poets could easily afford to write explicitly sexual (fictitious) poems in the long-established tradition of authors like Ovid, Martial and Catullus, women were usually extremely careful to maintain a chaste appearance when it came to matters of authorship. Notably, some male authors writing in the heroine genre also limited the ability of their female personae to empower and assert their sexuality compared to Ovid’s heroines, as Deborah Greenhut has argued.⁴⁰

As a result, it should come as no surprise that Latin love poetry by Renaissance women is almost non-existent. The small number of poems that we have were usually produced in the ‘safe’ context of marriage.⁴¹ Yet even among married women, a language of virginity was sometimes upheld, both by female authors and those around them, to reflect that their literacy and authorship did not come at the expense of their required pudicitia (‘chastity and modesty’).⁴² For the same reason, we know that many early modern Dutch women probably quit writing altogether as public figures after their marriage.⁴³ Hence, the existence of a heroine letter from a married (or betrothed) woman to another man would be an anomaly in this age, particularly if the man in question was a religious conservative, married for at least thirty years and, as Treharne remarks, associated with ‘no hint of impropriety or scandal’—in other words, a figure like Anthony Cooke.⁴⁴

Material Analysis

In addition to these historical arguments, the material context of the manuscript and the book in which it is pasted also suggest that we should be hesitant to attribute this poem to Dacre. My analysis proceeds from clear observations, which yield two likely interpretations of the signature below the manuscript and the hand of the poem. The consequences of both interpretations will be explored in detail, leaving us only one probable option.

First: the observations. We are very fortunate to have two signatures of Dacre. One is written on a small, separate piece of paper that has been glued directly beneath the poem on the pastedown of the Chaucer edition (Fig. 1). The second is found on the title-page of the same book (Fig. 2). Interestingly, these two signatures appear to be written in markedly different hands. The hand of the title-page signature, however, seems to correspond with the hand of the manuscript poem, as Treharne noted.⁴⁵

Fig. 2

Title-page of the 1561 edition of Geoffrey Chaucer, Woorkes, edited by William Thynne. Partially abraded at the top right of the illustration is the name: ‘Elizabeth Dacres’. Image used by permission of the Rare Books Collection of the West Virginia University Libraries.

It seems altogether unlikely that the signature below the manuscript poem was written by Dacre. Why would she write her own name on a separate small piece of paper, only to paste it below a poem that was hers but was somehow not written in her own hand? Why, instead of writing her name on the poem itself, would she make so much effort to claim its authorship? It is, on the contrary, very likely that Dacre did write her signature on the title-page of the Chaucer edition. Like many then and now, she presumably wrote it there as a mark of her ownership of the book.⁴⁶ Assuming the signature is hers, this would imply that she was also probably the scribe of the poem, since it seems to be written in the same hand. The likely scenario runs as follows: after Dacre wrote the poem on a piece of paper, she or another person for some reason hid it in the Chaucer volume; later, someone found the poem and, recognizing the similar hands of the manuscript and the title-page signature, inferred her authorship; this person then glued the poem onto the pastedown of the back cover of the book, together with another small piece of paper to indicate their inference that the poem was written by Dacre. Treharne suggests, I think correctly, that the repositioning of the poem onto the pastedown may well have occurred at some time during the nineteenth century, that is, during the time that the book was probably rebound.⁴⁷ Yet, the real possibility that the separate piece of paper with the signature was created as part of the same process of rebinding remains puzzlingly unmentioned in her article.

This, the most plausible scenario, leaves us with two important questions that challenge the current attribution of the poem. First, are the assumptions that the poem is written in Dacre’s hand and that someone else (only in the best case a contemporary, but likely a nineteenth-century bookbinder) wrote her name underneath it sufficiently convincing that we should attribute the poem to her? And second, if so, why did she apparently write her name on the title-page of her Chaucer volume but not care to write her signature under her own poem?

Literary Analysis

Apart from the improbability that a married or betrothed woman from the sixteenth century would author a poem of this genre, there are other literary elements that should make us suspicious that the poem is a holographic love letter. Starting from a broad perspective, it should first be noted that the poetic epistles in Ovid’s Heroides, undoubtedly the most important reference work of the poem, constitute a fictional and cross-gender genre par excellence. In accordance with the spirit of his work, this kind of Latin poetry was almost exclusively written by men pretending to be famous (and often mythological) women plaintively voicing their amorous misfortune.⁴⁸ This allowed poets to display their mastery of verse composition and their learning about the history of classical antiquity. Therefore, Treharne’s view that ‘the personal and tender lament’ of the poem seems indicative of ‘an amorous relationship’ rather than ‘a display of poetic erudition’ does not qualify as a good argument;⁴⁹ it supposes a false dichotomy between precisely those terms that were ideally synthesized by Renaissance authors operating in the footsteps of Ovid—or, for that matter, any other classical poet, almost all of whom produced love elegies while remaining docti poetae.⁵⁰

Let us now consider a more specific literary element of the poem, the Plancus comparison in the final four lines. The underlying story derives from the first-century AD Latin work Memorable Doings and Sayings by Valerius Maximus, a memory bank of (pseudo-)historical exempla endorsing virtuous conduct.⁵¹ For this reason, the text held a significant place in the humanist educational programme; and it seems most likely that the poem’s reference to the Plancus episode arose from this context, perhaps through the use of a commonplace book.⁵² In the passage, Valerius describes how the Roman Caius Plotinus Plancus, the wealthy brother of an ex-consul and censor, was once hiding in the region of Salerno, fleeing proscription by the Triumvirs.⁵³ The strong perfume he used, however, betrayed his place of shelter to the investigators. As he lay hidden, they arrested his slaves and tortured them to disclose his hiding place. His slaves remained surprisingly loyal to their master, however, and maintained their ignorance. Plancus, when notified, could not bear that his slaves, who displayed such exemplary loyalty, should continue to be tortured. He therefore finally revealed himself and offered his throat to the swords of the soldiers. Valerius concludes: ‘Such a contest of mutual well-wishing makes it hard to determine which was the more deserving: the master to find such steadfast fidelity in his slaves or the slaves to be freed from the cruelty of interrogation by their master’s just compassion’.⁵⁴

The relevance of this comparison is to some extent explained by the poem itself. Plancus, the master, stands for Cooke, while the slaves represent Dacre. The obvious tertium comparationis is the extreme mutual loyalty between all the parties. Assuming a love letter, however, the question arises as to why the story of Plancus and his slaves is taken as the comparatum, as it seems to stress not only an affectionate but also a notably hierarchical (and certainly not erotic) relationship between those involved. Why would the author of a love letter resort to this particular story, tellingly entitled ‘On the Loyalty of Slaves to Their Masters’?

At this point, I would argue that the possibility that we are dealing with a poem meant to strengthen intellectual and amicable ties rather than an amorous relationship (whether real or fictional) becomes much more probable. It is true that the so-called lyrical subject of the poem is intimately affectionate—most clearly in the choice of the heroine genre. Yet, the subject also seems to create a respectful distance from the addressee. This happens, for instance, by means of the hierarchical Plancus comparison, but also by using surnames instead of first names throughout the text.

It is known that in Renaissance poetics of patronage, the languages of love and hierarchy are frequently merged—to the extent that they sometimes become almost identical.⁵⁵ The oxymoronic fusion of romantic and detached discourses in the poem may well therefore be justified if we assume that there was a kind of literary or intellectual patronage between the author and the addressee of the poem. Moreover, we should bear in mind that the distinction in Latin between the amorous language of love, on the one hand, and non-erotic affection, on the other, is, at times, negligible. In fact, the word amor (‘love’) itself could be used both erotically—or, as the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae rather clumsily and conservatively puts it, ‘inter sexus diversos’ (‘between the different sexes’) —or in an affectionate way, such as the love between family members or friends.⁵⁶ The poem under discussion appears to make clever use of this ambiguity with phrases such as ‘tristis amor’ and ‘dulcis amor’ (lines 3 and 6), allowing the amorous intertext of the Heroides and the realm of friendly affection to merge.

In short, I would argue that the poem most probably should be interpreted not as a romantic, but as a literary, intellectual and amicable tribute to someone highly regarded by the author. Admittedly, this interpretation does not exclude Dacre as the possible author. It does, however, make it more likely that what has previously been regarded as an amorous letter from a woman may have been written by a (married) man expressing his loyalty to another man through the use of amorous and servile similes.

Textual Analysis

From the literary, we pass now to the textual analysis. This credibly yields the strongest arguments against the current attribution of the poem and is based on text-critical, graphic and grammatical reasons.

The first reason follows from the text-critical observations that were made at the start. The revised edition and the accompanying justification made clear that the text in the manuscript contains a large number of errata. To this, it should be added that the nature of the individual mistakes (including the erroneous forms ‘dixi’, ‘abstuli’, ‘Penellope’, ‘mlta’, ‘obtituit’ and ‘nor’ [lines 1, 4, 5, 6, 10 and 13], as well as ‘zed’, ‘ponder’ and ‘tu miat’ in the concluding distich of Martial) is very remarkable as well. These errors appear so frequently and are so conspicuous that it is difficult to believe that they were accidentally committed by the author of the poem. In fact, I think these mistakes can hardly have been made by someone highly skilled in writing Latin elegiac couplets—or, for that matter, by someone with only a rudimentary and passive knowledge of Latin verse. While the supposed original text is itself written in a somewhat stilted style, the copyist’s layer of alterations is clearly of a different nature. These alterations do not merely result in unidiomatic expressions or awkward metaphors and prosody, but also repeatedly cause syntactic errors, gibberish words and incoherent sentences. They strongly suggest a copyist who could not, or at least seriously struggled, to make sense of the Latin text, rather than a proficient yet inattentive author.

In the same line of thought, the mise en page of the poem also arouses suspicion. A long-established tradition prescribes that the pentameter of elegiac couplets should be indented (also known as eisthesis).⁵⁷ Thus, the seventeenth-century poet Margareta van Godewijck, for example, whose competence in Latin prosody was no better than that of a beginner, was quick to correct herself in her autograph manuscript as soon as she realized that she had erroneously written her pentameters without indentation.⁵⁸ The scribe of the poem in the Chaucer edition, however, seems to be ignorant of this tradition. While no studies have yet provided statistics or data regarding the actual observance of this rule across different times and places, it is generally acknowledged that this classical practice continued to be widely adopted during the Middle Ages.⁵⁹ Moreover, it is entirely likely that its observance only increased after this period due to the humanists’ programmatic reform of handwriting, layout, ruling and decoration.⁶⁰ The layout of the poem again points to a scribe who was unfamiliar with Latin elegiac verse and thus to a poem originally written and authored by someone else. Treharne’s observation that ‘the leaf on which the poem is written is in excellent condition, unfolded’ also supports this interpretation.⁶¹ Thus, if we assume that the hand of the poem belongs to Dacre, this implies that she was unlikely to have been the author of the poem.

This leads us to the final and most decisive point, based on the grammar of the Latin declension system. Reading the Latin text of the manuscript, it is noticeable that the slaves in the four-line Plancus comparison are all referred to by (inflections of) the word servus. This poses a problem, as in the singular, this prototypical masculine word refers only to an enslaved man. Assuming that Dacre was the author of the poem therefore raises the obvious question of why she used this word to refer to herself, rather than a more fitting form such as serva or ancilla. Perhaps even more surprising, however, are the masculine forms of the surname Dacre (‘Dacrum’, ‘Dacrus’ and ‘Dacro’ in lines 9, 12 and 14).⁶² Latinized surnames of early modern women did not form an exception to basic grammar. The daughter of Fredericus Schurmannus, for instance, was the renowned seventeenth-century intellectual Anna Maria Schurmanna. Elisabeth Hoofman (1664–1736) changed her Latin name to Kolartia when she married Pieter Koolaart. Anthony Cooke’s learned daughter Elizabeth first used the Latinized surname Cokia and later, when married to Thomas Hobaeus, assumed the name Hobaea. The masculine surname ‘Dacrus’ (and its inflected forms) thus strongly call into question the current attribution of the poem.⁶³

Discussion

The evidence against the current attribution of the poem to Dacre does not, admittedly, amount to a 100%, sure-fire rejection of her authorship. As has been shown, however, the same can be said for the main argument in favour of the attribution: the appearance of Dacre’s name below the poem, written on a separate piece of paper in a different hand. In light of the manuscript’s material and historical context—regarding the sixteenth-century English nobility, in general, and what we know and do not know about Dacre, specifically—it seems highly unlikely that she is the author. Furthermore, the literary and philological characteristics of the text itself, too, raise serious problems about her authorship. To borrow legal terminology, the preponderance of evidence does not favour Dacre’s authorship. In fact, we can go one step further. Beyond a reasonable doubt, I am willing to wager that she is not the author.

Naturally, it is necessary to consider the person to whom the work should be attributed. Most likely, I argue, this person was Dacre’s husband, Lord Thomas Dacre, Fourth Baron Gilsland. It is his surname, in clear masculine form, that features prominently in the work. As a member of the English Renaissance nobility, Thomas, whose father played a role in the establishment of a grammar school at Morpeth, had almost certainly enjoyed a thorough humanist education in Latin and verse composition.⁶⁴ Unfortunately, we know nothing about his relationship with Anthony Cooke, but considering what we do know, we can speculate that Cooke may have been his tutor or a learned friend of his.⁶⁵ The age difference between the two of about a quarter of a century could explain the respectful tone of the poem. I would, however, dare to go further and argue that the servile Plancus comparison in combination with the amorous language is reminiscent of the discourse of early modern patronage. While a financial dependency on Cooke cannot be ruled out, given the status of Thomas’s family as a major landowner in the county of Cumberland as well as his noble lineage, it seems unlikely. Instead, in the absence of additional sources, it is plausible to assume that Thomas perceived a kind of intellectual hierarchy between himself and Cooke.

While the larger purpose of the poem seems to have been maintaining bonds with Cooke by paying him a polite tribute, it is also likely that Thomas wrote it as a response to a specific historical event, that is, as a truly occasional poem.⁶⁶ As Treharne suggests, this occasion may have been Cooke’s religiously motivated exile between 1553 and 1558.⁶⁷ Cooke voluntarily opted for this exile after he had been committed to the Tower of London on suspicion of involvement in the case of Lady Jane Grey. We know that despite his physical absence, he remained in touch with his homeland through correspondence and established a wide network of intellectual contacts while he was settled in Strasbourg.⁶⁸ If this exile was indeed the reason for Thomas’s writing, the allusions to Ovid’s Heroides (and possibly to the Epistulae ex Ponto) may suggest that he did not have the opportunity to say goodbye properly at the time of Cooke’s departure; the intertext would befit the sorrow of this occasion, as well as the lengthy distance between both parties.

Nevertheless, another, less dramatic interpretation is, I think, more likely. We should arguably be careful not to overemphasize the relevance of the Heroides as an intertext when considering the historical context in which to situate the poem.⁶⁹ It is not necessary to assume an exile, in the end, to explain why Thomas might have felt compelled to apologize for inadequately bidding farewell to Cooke. In my view, it is more probable that this urge arose in the recent wake of a less intense meeting or social gathering, unrelated to Cooke’s exile. At the end of this event, Thomas had conceivably failed (or feared that he had failed) to part from Cooke properly. Subsequently, he penned this poem in an elegant, perhaps even witty, attempt to remedy any offence. Presumably, this all happened in or around 1561, the year in which the Chaucer edition enclosing the manuscript was printed, and hence after Cooke’s return from exile.

Whatever the precise occasion and date of the poem, sometime after its composition, Dacre conceivably copied it on a fresh sheet of paper to preserve it. This is made plausible by the hand that seems to be hers, but also by the fact that the numerous scribal errors in the copy reduce the likelihood that we are dealing with a holograph. The copy was possibly made in or after 1561, although Dacre could also have made the copy at an earlier date before the book came into her possession. It has not been observed yet that the edition of Chaucer’s works may have suggested itself as a suitable receptacle for this poem because it also included the Legend of Good Women. In this work, Chaucer recounted the stories of ten renowned women from Greco-Roman antiquity, clearly following and drawing from, among others, Ovid’s Heroides.⁷⁰ The overlap between Chaucer’s Legend and the poem, both obvious forms of a particular kind of Ovidian reception, may have prompted someone—maybe Thomas, maybe Dacre, maybe someone else—to unite the two works.

While Thomas is almost certainly the author of the poem, we cannot exclude the possibility that Dacre, too, may have had a hand in its composition. While impossible to exclude, however, this is also an improbable theory, given many of the same arguments that have been discussed above. Again, this would require Dacre to be Latinate and exceedingly learned compared to other contemporary women; yet there are no sources that confirm this mastery, and the paleographical evidence of the poem suggests a considerable struggle with Latin and verse composition on her part. Moreover, the poem speaks in an intimate voice that is obviously singular and male. Therefore, there seems to be no good reason—at least on literary, historical or textual grounds—to assume any involvement of Dacre beyond copying the poem.

An intriguing and unsolved aspect of the manuscript constitutes the concluding epigram ‘About a Girdle’. Should this Martial epigram be read in tandem with the poem addressed to Cooke? If so, what was the connection and reason for adding it? If not, why were these two texts written on the same page? Many possible connections can be envisaged. Perhaps Thomas had simply sent his letter together with a belt as a present. Or maybe the present was not a belt, but some calorific food product—with the epigram jokingly referring to the swelling belly of the future consumer.⁷¹ Alternatively, it may have served a more literary function in keeping with the heroine poem, urging Cooke to come home to assist the author’s—or perhaps someone else’s—alleged pregnancy (a metaphor for ...?). The option that there was no intended connection between the two texts is, although underwhelming, also very possible. The claim made in this article that the manuscript is a copy of an original poem especially invites such an interpretation. In this case, the author of the poem never conceived any connection between these two texts. The later copyist, presumably Dacre, had her own reasons for writing them on the same sheet—perhaps just to save some paper or for other reasons that cannot be recovered.

Despite the unlikely authorship of Dacre, the West Virginia manuscript does not lack an interesting story and merits scholarly attention. Assuming that she copied the poem from her husband’s original, the manuscript is a valuable document testifying to her elegant writing and undoubted literacy. It has been observed that, generally speaking, the hands of Renaissance women writers often have a relatively ‘scribbled’ character.⁷² If girls were educated, reading and writing did not necessarily go hand in hand. For them, the development of fluent writing skills was often deemed of less importance than reading proficiency. Dacre’s relatively well-developed humanist hand can thus be regarded as a ‘fashionable social and cultural accomplishment’, suggesting that she was part of an intellectual elite and had an advanced writing ability.⁷³

In the same vein, it is quite possible that the copied poems were originally part of a larger manuscript miscellany, including, among other things, the occasional verse written by and to Dacre’s family.⁷⁴ This would suggest that she played an active role in promoting and preserving her family’s socio-literary status. That she copied out two Latin poems may, moreover, point to her interest in the language. Given the arguments presented above, however, there are serious grounds to question the depth of her mastery and comprehension of Latin. Credit is also due to Treharne for pointing to the significance of Dacre’s ownership of the Chaucer volume, which ‘unequivocally demonstrates the appeal of Chaucer to an educated and well-connected Catholic woman’.⁷⁵ It is, therefore, especially regrettable that Dacre’s hand is known only from copying the work of others, while no texts authored by this unquestionably literate woman herself seem to have survived.

Conclusion

In general, the foregoing arguments concerning the textual basis and probable attribution of the poem hidden in the Chaucer edition illustrate the continuous need for and dependence on usable and informative text editions for historians and literary scholars alike. By discussing, among other features, the material context, historical setting and literary background of the text, this article has shown that what was previously considered a remarkably subversive love poem from a strong and independent woman is more likely a commonplace socio-literary tribute from one male intellectual to another. Unfortunately, it does not have as much to say about early modern women’s authorship as previously assumed. Yet, the (mis)interpretations of this text do have plenty to say about the need for better textual practices among early modern literary scholars.

Usable and informative text editions should, I think, primarily be geared to providing access to a wide readership of interested students and academics. They are ideally accompanied by an accurate and idiomatic translation into a modern language. In the case of Neo-Latin texts, the adaptation of the original orthography and punctuation to reflect those of modern editions of classical authors is often justified to serve the same interest.⁷⁶ This practice also helps avoid arbitrary decisions when trying to reflect the original capitalization of a manuscript. Moreover, as mediating experts, editors should not feel hesitant to point out any (con)textual problems and to admit their doubts or ignorance. As a consequence, making a so-called ‘diplomatic’ or ‘conservative’ edition should never be an excuse to gloss over the difficulties posed by a text. Moreover, we might also question the value of diplomatic editions in the first place. Today, as floods of manuscripts are available at the fingertips of anyone with an internet connection, many would probably prefer high-quality pictures rather than a bare and potentially flawed transcription without a critical apparatus.

More specifically, this article suggests that editions of early modern occasional poetry especially benefit from a material, historical and literary commentary. Neo-Latin poems are notoriously complex due to, on the one hand, their typically close connections with contemporary social, political, religious or scientific occasions, and, on the other hand, their complicated interactions with both classical and contemporary literature.⁷⁷ Only a rich commentary can provide the necessary platform for a deep understanding of the various contexts relevant to the motivation, usage(s) and afterlife of a text—and consequently of the historically plausible interpretations of the text itself. The toolkit needed to make a usable and informative text edition is, admittedly, substantial. Therefore, future editions can and, I hope, will increasingly be based on a close collaboration of scholars across disciplines and fields. For the process of peer review, mutatis mutandis, the same also applies; this means that academics should be receptive to reviewing papers that might in some respects fall outside their usual area of expertise or the journals with which they typically engage.

The philological and interpretative reliability of editions and commentaries will always, however, require a high proficiency in the source language on the part of both editors and reviewers. It is, therefore, regrettable that training in Latin philology and the discipline of philology more broadly has suffered a widely recognized decline across countries in recent decades.⁷⁸ As Jan Ziolkowski has aptly noted, it is somewhat ironic that ‘the modishness of “manuscript culture” has coincided with an era in which it has become ever rarer for graduate students to acquire grounding in palaeography or editing, and even harder for administrators to comprehend the difficulties entailed in the preparation of an edition based on manuscripts’.⁷⁹ With regard to the essential editorial toolkit, these threatening developments should be of serious concern to anyone working with historical (Latin) texts. For medieval and early modern studies, fields in which there are still relatively few commentaries on and editions and translations of Latin sources, the stakes seem especially high, as there remains a wealth of untapped potential waiting to be explored. The recent revelation by Erika Valdivieso that an alleged seventeenth-century Jesuit letter is a twentieth-century forgery is just one recent testament to the significant gains of applying rigorous linguistic analysis and textual criticism to post-classical sources.⁸⁰ These philological skills remain a much-needed resource for editing and interpreting texts. Accordingly, they should be valued, embraced and firmly promoted by graduate programmes and academic institutions, ensuring that future editions continue to build on them.