Abstract
In 1567, ‘certaine letters and writynges well knawin, and by othe[r]s to be affirmit, to haue bene written with the quene of Scotes awne hand to the Erle Bothwell…’ were discovered encased within ‘one small gilt cofer’.2 These texts, which allegedly encompassed a series of sonnets, were subsequently taken south in 1568 by members of the Scottish Protestant nobility; they were to form part of the evidence against Mary in the English commission sanctioned by Elizabeth’s government into the murder of Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley. What constituted the subject of the eleven sonnets and single sestain was female erotic desire. Their discovery arguably constitutes the most significant articulation of eros and poetry in sixteenth-century Scotland for it seemed that the moment eros was feminised, and rendered explicitly monarchical, Scotland entered political turmoil. That authorship of these lyrics could be claimed of the increasingly unpopular sovereign Mary became a political imperative. Authorial attribution possessed the power to stain the queen sexually, morally and, according to the anxious responses of Ronsard and Pierre de Brantôme (c 1540–1614), aesthetically.3 Freedom from auctoritas would have granted Mary exoneration from the charges of adultery, possibly murder and, indeed, might have ensured the possibility of papal canonisation.
il fault plus que la renomee pour dire et publier
Above all, she was entering into public discourse, exposing the beauty of her language, akin to her body, to the masculine gaze1
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Notes
Fragment inscribed. in Mary’s Book of Hours: facsimile NLS Adv. 81.5.8, f. 81v; Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990), 28, on the voyeuristic exposure of the Renaissance woman writer per se.
Detectioun of the duinges of Marie Quene of Scotts, touchand the murder of her Husband, and hir Conspiracie, Adulterie, and pretensit Mariage with the Erle Bothwell. Translatit out of the latine, quhilk was written be M.G.B. (n.p, n.d. but believed to be in London by the printer John Day in 1571), sig. Oijr. The sonnets are found in sigs, Qiiijr-Sir. This text was based on George Buchanan’s earlier anti-Marian Latin tract denouncing Mary for her part in Darnley’s murder, De Maria Scotorum Regina, which appeared in 1571 together with the Actio contra Mariam by Thomas Wilson, and two poems by ‘G.M.’ and ‘P.R. Scotus’; see John Durkan, Bibliography of George Buchanan (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1994). Another vernacular Detectioun was printed at St Andrews by Robert Lekprevik in 1572. A French edition entitled Histoire de Marie, Royne d’Escosse also appeared in 1572, allegedly printed in Edinburgh by ‘Th.Vwaltem’, but actually in La Rochelle, as an expression of French Protestant sympathy for the antiMarian movement. The moment of the casket’s discovery became a topos of anti-Marian writing; the incriminatory casket was in fact produced by the Earl of Moray on 7 December 1568 at the first of the trials instigated by the Elizabethan government at Westminster; see
Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots (1969; London: Mandarin, 1993), 460–1.
Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme, ‘Discours Troisième sur la Reyne D’Escosse’, Receuil des Dames ed. Roger Gaucheron (Paris, 1926), 44–5; Brantôme’s work was originally published posthumously in 1665 at Leyden. The testimony of Ronsard was particularly injurious.
Cited in Andrew Lang, The Mystery of Mary Stewart (New York: AMS Press, 1901), 344.
For a representative range of literature on the authenticity debate, see Samuel Cowan, Mary Queen of Scots and Who Wrote the Casket Letters? (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co, 1901);
T.F. Henderson, The Casket Letters and Mary Queen of Scots (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1889);
John Hosack, Mary Queen of Scots and her Accusers (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1869);
Walter Goodall, An Examination of the Letters said to be by Mary Queen of Scots to James Earl of Bothwell, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1824); John Kerr, The Casket Letters and the Keys (Robert Maclehose and Co, n.d.);
John Skelton, Maitland of Lethington and the Scotland of Mary Stuart: a History, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1894); Fraser, 379ff;
Jenny Wormald Mary Queen of Scots. A Study in Failure (London: George Philip, 1988), 178.
Records of the Privy Council, Edinburgh, 16 September 1568, in James Anderson ed., Collections Relating to the history of Mary Queen of Scots, 4 vols (London: 1727–8), vol. 2, 258.
R.H. Mahon, The Indictment of Mary Queen of Scots (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 25; the letter to La Mothe Fénelon is printed in
Alexander Labanoff ed., Lettres, Instructions et Memoires de Marie Stuart Reine d’Escosse, 8 vols (London: Dolman, 1844), vol. 4, dated 22 November 1571, desiring that the tracts in her defence be published as freely as the denunciations against her (the Medicis were particularly anxious to ensure the destruction of the Detectioun and other anti-Marian treatises).
Philip J. Ford, George Buchanan. Prince of Poets (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1982), 108.
John Leslie, A Defence of the Honour of Marie Quene of Scotlande (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970), 300; the text was originally published in 1569.
Shoshana Felman, ‘What Does A Woman Want? The Question of Autobiography and the Bond of Reading (Postface)’, in What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 6.
Readings of the sonnets vary in length and detail, often inhibited by the crisis of authorship. See Betty S. Travitsky ed., The Paradise of Women. Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981);
Helen Hackett, ‘Courtly Writing by Women’, in Helen Wilcox ed., Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 169–89 (173–4);
Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘Rewriting the Renaissance language of love and desire: the “bodily burdein” in the poetry of Mary, Queen of Scots’, Gramma, 4 (1996), 181–95; ‘Scottish Women Writers c1560-c1650’, in Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan eds, A History of Scottish Women’s Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 15–43 (17–26); ‘The cre ation and self-creation of Mary Queen of Scots: rhetoric, sovereignty, and female controversies in sixteenth century Scottish poetry’, Scotlands, 5.2 (1998), 65–88; Peter C. Herman, ‘Mary Queen of Scots’, in Reading Royal Subjects (forthcoming; I am most grateful to Professor Herman for allowing me to read the essay in advance of publication);
Mary E. Burke, ‘Queen, Lover, Poet: a question of balance in the sonnets of Mary, Queen of Scots’, in Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda E. Dove, and Karen Nelson eds, Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 101–18.
There is an interesting early account in David Dalrymple, ‘Of the Sonnets attributed to Mary Queen of Scots’, Remarks on the History of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1773); Dr Sally Mapstone drew my attention to this piece.
Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 168, 189.
Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); see also Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s reading of triangulation in Shakespeare’s sonnets in Between Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), which begins with Girard.
James Melville, Memoirs of his own life (Edinburgh, 1827), 176.
Agnes Strickland ed., Letters of Mary Queen of Scots, and documents connected with her personal history, 3 vols (London: H. Colburn, 1842–3), vol. 1, 305, undated, but probably 1568; see also the letter to Elizabeth, vol. 1, 72. In the context of Mary’s self-defence in the later Babington controversy, Lewis notes that ‘Mary […] cast the written word as itself a traitor of sorts because it deprived her of her rightful sovereignty’ (47).
The phrase is borrowed from Chantal Thomas, The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette, trans. Julie Rose (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
See the portrait of Mary attributed to Francois Clouet, ‘The Bath of Diana’, and the anonymous portrait of the semi-nude yet chastely beautiful ‘Lady at her toilet’, believed to be Mary: Helen Smailes and Duncan Thomas eds, The Queen’s Image (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1987), 13–14.
See R.D.S. Jack, ‘Mary and the Poetic Vision’, Scotia, 3 (1979), 35–40.
Susan Frye, Elizabeth I. The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 12–13.
For revisionist readings of the Elizabethan image or icon, see Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen. Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995)
Julia M. Walker ed., Dissing Elizabeth. Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
Frye, 105. See also Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed’, Rewriting the Renaissance. The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123–42
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned. Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1996), 197–8, for analysis of Elizabeth’s corporeal presence.
David Parkinson, The Poems of Alexander Montgomery, STS, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 2000), vol. 1, 147.
Tertullian, cited in Alcuin Blamires et al. eds, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended. An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 51.
J.E. Phillips, Images of a Queen. Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature (Ithaca: University of California Press, 1964).
See Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print. Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); on the Scottish pamphlets, see Phillips, 41–2. Sandra M. Bell, ‘“The Throne of Trial”: Reformation Satire and the Scottish Monarchy’, unpub. PhD diss. (Queen’s University, Ontario, 1995), 36–43, contends that the anti-Marian satires were a profound questioning of monarchy to which James’s later legitimisation of political and cultural autonomy was a deliberate response.
Visual emblems also served to remind the populace of Mary’s corrupt sexuality: for example, her representation on a 1567 placard as a mermaid (icon of the prostitute): see Rosalind K. Marshall, Queen of Scots (Edinburgh, 1986), 140.
Detectioun, sig. Giir. Robert Gore-Brown, Lord Bothwell (London, 1937), proposes that Anna Throndssön, with whom Bothwell had an affair before his marriage to Lady Jean Gordon, wrote the sonnets attributed to Mary, and tailors the sonnets to fit a new biographical narrative (106–9, 412–415).
William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 138.
Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament. Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), sovereignty promises a fantastic, a perfect but imaginary closure to the very yearning it brings into being’ (71).
One could also cite in parallel the aestheticistion of sexual assault in pastourelle; see Evelyn S. Newlyn, ‘The Political Dimensions of Desire and Sexuality in Poems of the Bannatyne Manuscript’, in Stephen R. McKenna ed., Selected Essays on Scottish Language and Literature. A Festschrift in Honour of Allan H. MacLaine (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 75–96. On the dark erotic corporeality of the female blason, see Sawday, 197–212.
See Luce Irigaray, citing Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Theory: Another Look’, Ce Sexe qui n’en estpas un (1977), trans.
C. Porter, This Sex which is not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 66.
Margaret Caroll, ‘The Erotics of Absolution’, The Expanding Discourse. Feminism and Art History ed. Mary Garrard (1992), 138–58, cited in
Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and its Alternatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23.
Roy Porter and Sylvana Tomaselli eds, Rape (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 10.
Rape as an historical, social and cultural phenomenon pre—1600 is addressed in Angelike E. Laiou ed., Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies (Washington, D.C: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1993);
Nazife Bashar, ‘Rape in England between 1500 and 1700’, in The Sexual Dynamics of History. Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 1983), 28–42, offers a cogent account of legalistic conceptions of rape in the period.
Phrase taken from ‘The Trial and Condemnation of Merwin Lord Audley Earl of Castle-Haven at Westminster, April the 5th 1631’, extracted in Charlotte F. Otten ed., English Women’s Voices 1540–1700 (Florida: Florida International University Press, 1992), 33–40, (34)
See Wolfthal, 183–4, for analysis of the Lucretia myth. Machiavelli in the Discorsi cites it ‘among many examples to be found in the ancient histories of rape leading to legal and political change’: Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking. The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 3.
Baise m’encore, rebaise moy et baise: / Donne m’en un de tes plus savoureus’ (sonnet 18: 1–2) in Françoise Charpentier ed., Oeuvres poétiques avec Pernette du Guillet Rymes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983).
Labé’s lover conceives herself as the spiritually inferior but sensual ‘corps’, lacking the completion of ‘ame bien aymee’ (7: 3–4). As in the Marian sequence, desire can also be self-annihilating in its intensity (cf. 13: 9–11). See Deborah Lesko Baker, The Subject of Desire. Petrarchan poetics and the female voice in Louise Labé (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1997).
For a comprehensive survey of the Renaissance identification of woman with sensuality, infirmitas, and weakened rationality from a variety of sources, see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 16–17.
What Jensen terms ‘the insistent trope of female suffering’: Katharine A. Jensen, ‘Male Models of Feminine Epistolarity; or, How to Write Like a Woman in Seventeenth-Century France’, in Goldsmith ed., Writing The Female Voice. Essays on Epistolary Literature (London: Pinter, 1989), 25–45, (33).
Ficino, The Philosophy of Love trans. F. Freidelberg Seeley, 198; in the original text see the Second Oration, cap. iii, ‘Quo Pacto Divina pulchritudo amorem parit’, and the Fifth, cap. iv, ‘Pulchritudo est aliquid incorporeum’, Commentarium Marsilij Ficini Florentine in conviuium Platonis de amore, Divini Platonis Opera Omnia quae extant Marsilio Ficino interprete (Lugdini, 1590), 775 and 780–1; Plotinus, The Enneads trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 63.
Cited in Nesca A. Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London: Allen and Unwin, 1934), 51.
Donald L. Guss, John Donne, Petrarchist. Italianate conceits and love theory in the Songs and Sonets (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), 160.
Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve. Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 242; endorsed by Jones, 141–7.
Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: writing rape in medieval French literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 41, in her Praefatio she proclaims ‘cum femina fragilitas vinceret et virilis robur confusionis subiaceret’ (27).
Patricia Berrahou Philippy, Love’s Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Lyric Poetry (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 128–9.
Monique Wittig, ‘The Trojan Horse’, in The Straight Mind and Other Essays (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 69.
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© 2002 Sarah M. Dunnigan
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Dunnigan, S.M. (2002). Feminine Eros: Mary Queen of Scots and the Emergence of Desire. In: Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932709_2
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