More than the Dark Lady: Aemilia Lanyer's "Eve's Apology in Defense of Women"

Today we look at Aemelia Lanyer's pioneering and influential work, "Eve's Apology in Defense of Women" from 1611's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.

Transcript

Welcome, everyone, to the Classic English Literature Podcast, that little bubble floating in the ether where rhyme gets its reason.  This is our first full show that’s not about Shakespeare for quite some time and I feared for the psychological health of regular listeners if we just quit him cold turkey – don’t want anyone getting the literary DTs.  So, we’ll wean ourselves off a bit, move one step beyond the Bard himself to, perhaps, one of his close inner circle.  In the last episode on his sonnets, I noted that the final couple dozen or so are addressed to a persona scholars call the Dark Lady, and I also listed a few of the major candidates for her real life counterpart.  The frontrunner of these is a woman called Aemilia Lanyer, who happens to be the first Englishwoman to seek patronage and publish a volume of poetry in exactly the manner a man might.  And it is to that volume that we turn our attention today.

But before we do, remember that the email at which I can be reached is classicenglishliterature@gmail.com.  Send along any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or rapturous compliments.  TikTok is still a thing, as is Facebook and Instagram, so be sure to follow those for updates and oddities.  The support the show button eagerly awaits the gentle tap of your finger should you care to make a financial contribution – keep the lights on and the cat fed.  Thank you for all your support – I am eternally obliged.

Despite her manifold contributions to English literature, readers forgot Aemilia Lanyer for simply ages until, in the late 20th century, feminist scholars rediscovered and reevaluated her poetry. Today, most see her as a significant figure in early modern English literature and a pioneering voice for women's rights and perspectives.

Lanyer was born around 1569, likely in London – the daughter of Baptista Bassano, a musician of Venetian-Jewish descent who had settled in England. We don’t know much about Lanyer's early life, education, or family background, but she was likely well-educated, possibly through the patronage of Susan Bertie, Countess of Kent.

Her association with the Herbert family, particularly with Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke and sister to Sir Philip Sidney (herself a notable literary figure and patron) allowed the young poet’s work to gain some recognition among the cognoscenti. Even her day job had a bit of glamour, serving as a maid of honor to Queen Elizabeth I and later to Anne of Denmark, wife of King James I.  

Her most famous work is "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum," published in 1611, a work significant not only for its literary merit but also for its feminist themes and theological arguments. Here, Lanyer defends women's virtue and capabilities, critiques male-dominated interpretations of religious texts, and celebrates the role of women in Christianity, particularly focusing on the figure of Eve.  It’s mostly a series of dedicatory poems – a bit of strategic toadying for past and potential patrons.  We’ve got a couple to Good Queen Bess, one to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, Anne, Countess of Dorset, and so and so on.  There’s also a shout out to “all virtuous ladies in general” – scooping up any fish that may have avoided the net.  Deft, but typical, paeans to their greatness and generosity and Christian example. 

The title of the volume, and of its eponymous poem, translates from the Latin as “Hail God, King of the Jews” which recalls to us the satiric inscription placed above Jesus at his crucifixion.  The poem is, appropriately, a meditation on the Passion of Christ which draws a distinction between the flawed and vicious men involved in the death and resurrection of Christ and the good and compassionate women who attempt to minister through it.

The poem is also among the first female-authored entries in an informal body of texts called querelle des femmes – variously translated as “the woman question” or “the dispute of women.”  This term, regardless of its translation, indicates a group of writings, from the Middle Ages through the early modern period, delineating and debating the nature of women, usually, of course, by men, who, after all, understand female experience best.  Without identifying them as such, we have discussed a couple of the more notable entries on this show: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.  Certainly, not all such texts evidenced the nuance and subtlety of mind apparent in Alison and Katherine.  Many, unsurprisingly, dwelt upon the familiar negative assumptions about women: they are mentally inferior, emotionally unstable, easily tempted to vice, and untrustworthy.  But Lanyer and her contemporaries meet such calcified misogyny with reasoned argument and eloquent address.

The best, and most famous, example of this in Salve is the subsection called “Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women,” and this is what we’ll focus on today.  It’s a rather audacious mash-up of two Biblical incidents: the first, of course, being the fall of humanity in the Garden of Eden and the second is the dream of Pontius Pilate’s wife during Jesus’s trial in Jerusalem.  Here is the relevant passage from the Gospel of St. Matthew 27:19:

When [Pilate] was set down on the judgment seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.

In fact, the speaker of the poem is Mrs. Pilate who uses the apostrophic mode to urge her husband from condemning the Galilean preacher.   In so doing, not only does Lanyer call our attention to a rather minor female character in the Gospels, but she also does much to renovate PIlate’s wife’s reputation in the Jacobean age.  Pilate’s wife was a rather prominent figure in the medieval mystery plays at York.  In that telling, her dream is a spell from the Devil, warning her that if Jesus dies, the Pilates will lose their power – so she becomes something of an updated Eve, duped by suggestible weakness.

Before we begin a close reading of the poem, let me clarify a couple of things about the title: Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women.  Firstly, Eve is not the speaker, yeah – that’s Pilate’s wife – and secondly, we must not think of an apology here as an admission of guilt or plea for forgiveness.  Rather, an apology, as used in this sense, is a defense or a justification of something.  So, the poem seeks to justify Eve’s complicity in the Fall of Humanity through Mrs. Pilate’s reasoned argument against her husband executing Jesus of Nazareth.

Lanyer writes a series of Iambic pentameter octaves – that is, 8 line stanzas – the first six lines of which alternately rhyme: ababab.  She concludes each with a heroic couplet, introducing a third rhyming sound cc.  I’m so happy she does it this way – it lends some dignity and perhaps even heroism to the defense.

Let’s have a look at stanza 1:

Now Pontius Pilate is to judge the Cause

Of faultless Jesus, who before him stands;

Who neither hath offended Prince, nor Lawes,

Although he now be brought in woeful bands:

O noble Governour, make thou yet a pause,

Doe not in innocent blood imbrue thy hands;

But hear the words of thy most worthy wife,

Who sends to thee, to beg her Saviour’s life.

Fittingly, obviously, the opening establishes the frame narrative of the poem.  The Roman Procurator has been given the case against an allegedly seditious Galiliean but is interrupted by his wife who will privately plead the case for the defendant.  The stanza, as it focuses on Jesus' innocence and faultlessness, will come to establish a parallel to the subaltern position of women, which, of course, necessitates the exhortation of line 7 to “hear the words” of his wife.

 I’d like to draw your attention to the first A rhyme at the end of line one: the word “cause.”  My edition glosses the word as “case,” which makes sense in a judicial setting such as this.  So Lanyer could have used that word, not cause – the sense of case as an instance of litigation had been in use in English since the late 1300s.  And case certainly would have been easy to rhyme later in the stanza.  So why pick “cause” instead?  Cause, meaning to produce an effect, came into English about the same time, but its use as “motive” or “grounds for action” predates that by about two centuries.  So either would have done.  But if we keep our eyes on the enjambment – a term which means that the sentence in a poem continues past the meter of the line – we get some interesting additional resonances from cause that would not be so with case.  So if we read lines 1 and 2 together as a single independent clause and not, as people often clumsily do, as two disparate lines of verse, we get: “Now Pontius Pilate is to judge the Cause Of faultless Jesus, who before him stands.”  I count at least five meanings at work here for the word cause: 1) the legal case itself; 2) the grounds for action against Jesus; 3) that which advocates for Jesus – like, “I’ll support his cause; 4) that which Jesus himself believed in, the cause he supports; and 5) the reason Jesus existed, the Incarnation itself – the cause that effects the salvation of humanity.  That’s quite a bit of heavy lifting for a single syllable to take on, but Lanyer manages it elegantly.

Stanza two argues that true justice is paradoxically the administration of mercy: Pilate is urged to “take affliction’s part.”  She continues an appeal to the senses, not only hear, but now “open thine eyes, that thou the truth may’st see.”  That truth is, startlingly, that Jesus is Pilate’s savior, a fact Mrs. Pilate already perceives (women are, routinely, faster at noticing such things).

But the couplet for stanza two almost seems a non sequitur.  Line 7 reads, “Let not us women glory in men’s fall.”  Is this a shift in address?  Is she talking to herself? the reader?  And what has it to do with the preceding lines about Pilate’s metaphorical blindness?

The following stanza begins with a similarly ambiguous address: “Til now your indiscretion set us free.”  Who is your?  Men, I presume.  But it’s a little fuzzy through here.  Then she drops her thesis:

Our Mother Eve, who tasted of the Tree,

Giving to Adam what she held most dear,

Was simply good, and had no power to see,

The after-coming harm did not appear.

So the core of the defense of Eve, and thus of womankind, is that she was innocent, had no intention to sin, no purpose to supremacy.  She was “simply good” – and I take “simply" in the more philosophical sense of meaning “only” or “solely.”  And this brings up something that’s always troubled me about the Fall in Eden story – what exactly would Adam and Eve have understood by death or dying?  When they are admonished against taking the fruit of the tree of knowledge, lest they surely die – did that make any sense to them?  How would they have been capable of comprehending a concept like death – it’s completely beyond their experience.  Indeed, if we take the story on its face, there was no such thing as death in God’s creation.  I know they say ignorance of the law is no excuse, but I’ve always wondered about this.

Well, this and whether or not Adam and Eve had belly buttons.  Y’ever wondered that?

I digress.  Lanyer implicates, as does Genesis, the subtle serpent, whom Eve, in her innocence, would have no reason to suspect of deception – again, completely outside her experience: 

That undiscerning Ignorance perceived 

No guile, or craft that was by him intended; 

For had she known, of what we were bereav'd, 

To his request she had not condescended.

This kind of goes to my point – she had no idea what was at stake.  Completely made no sense to her.  But what about Adam?

Ah, here’s where Lanyer gets clever.  I’ll read two stanzas here:

But surely Adam can not be excused, 

Her fault though great, yet he was most to blame; 

What Weakness offered, Strength might have refused, 

Being Lord of all, the greater was his shame: 

Although the Serpent's craft had her abused, 

God's holy word ought all his actions frame, 

For he was Lord and King of all the earth, 

Before poore Eve had either life or breath. 

Who being framed by God's eternal hand, 

The perfect'st man that ever breathed on earth; 

And from God's mouth receiv'd that strait command, 

The breach whereof he knew was present death: 

Yea having power to rule both Sea and Land, 

Yet with one Apple won to lose that breath 

Which God had breathed in his beauteous face, 

Bringing us all in danger and disgrace.

Wow, that was what the kids used to call a sick burn.  The sense is clear enough, yeah?  Why blame Eve?  Adam was right there, too, and he is a man, and men are stronger and smarter than women right?  And he was the perfectest man – handcrafted, free range, single-barrel, locally sourced, organic, GMO free, small batch, all natural – made by the Creator himself.  How could that guy drop the ball?  Huh?  Riddle me that!

And for an apple?  What a waste.  Now, if it was a taco tree . . . well, I might have rolled the dice, too.

Anyway, Lanyer sardonically plays to the stereotype of weak and feeble-minded women only to point out the hollowness of male supremacy.  Moreover, Lanyer squarely locates the culpability not so much in the taking of the fruit itself, but in the consciousness that doing so is forbidden.  Lanyer absolves Eve – questionably, perhaps, since Eve does repeat the injunction to the Serpent (but did she know what it meant?) – arguing Even could not know what it meant.  Adam, however, in his vaunted superiority, should have known, must have known, and so he consciously violated his God’s commandment.  That, then, is the real sin.  Willfulness.  Lanyer writes: “If he would eat it, who had power to stay him?”  Now, this introduces an idea we’ve mentioned before, I think in the King Lear episode, about free will as the cause of evil.  Pilate’s wife indicates Adam’s rather nascent ideas of individual sovereignty.  Which makes her demand of men a few stanzas later:  “Then let us have our liberty again, / And challenge to yourselves no sovereignty” – something of a sliding signifier – liberty and sovereignty, that is – since she seems to see it as both the root of sin and as a positive natural right.

Weaving in and out of these stanzas, I detect a gentle critique of contemporary beliefs about Renaissance “progress.”  The line: “If Eve did err, it was for knowledge sake” refers to the Genesis telling that part of the reason Eve accepted the Serpent’s words was that the tree of knowledge was “to be desired to make one wise.”  Now, I know that the general takeaway from this story is supposed to be something like “stay in your lane,” but it seems to me that Eve is condemned for doing that most human of things – seeking understanding, striving to better comprehend experience.  Renaissance humanists certainly saw things that way.  Then, Lanyer turns that, too, into a rhetorical dagger: “Yet men will boast of knowledge, which he took / From Eve’s fair hand, as from a learned book.”  So, if men brag about being so smart, they got their smarts because the “dumb” woman got them for them.  Woman, then, is positioned as the progenitor of human knowledge, of the sophistication of which men boast.

Some of you may have noticed that Pilate’s wife is playing both sides against the middle here, but . . . you know, she’s being comprehensive.  Leave no turn unstoned.

Mrs. Pilate concludes her argument in the apology’s ninth stanza, recapitulating Eve’s innocence as a victim of Satan’s duplicity (in the form of the serpent, yeah?) and contrasts that to her husband’s incipient culpability – the Roman procurator becomes a form of Adam and the Serpent in that his knowledge makes his actions sinful:

Her weakness did the Serpent’s words obey;

But you in malice God’s dear Son betray.

Lanyer deftly emphasizes the oppositions at work in the apology by rhyming the antonyms “obey” and “betray” just as the poem shifts back to its framing device, and that final line is actually enjambed – that is, its meaning continues into the next line – really the next stanza.  Should PIlate condemn Jesus of Nazareth, his crime would dwarf all the evils ever committed and by extension, the tyranny of men over women would have “no excuse and no end.”  This stanza rhymes “die” and “cry” with “try” (there’s also a nice little bit of front rhyme [?] with “by”).  We know why “die” is there – the whole poem sees Jesus’ potential condemnation as the condemnation of all humanity.  “Cry,” as used in the line “All mortal sins that do for vengeance cry,” is nicely ambiguous – cry as in call for or demand, so justice cries for retribution – and cry as in weep, the sorrow of the penitents or of the victims of sin.  The tension is, of course, according to Christian theology, that Christ will cry and die as retribution for the sin in the Garden and all the sins afterward.  Then, Lanyer rhymes “try” – again, nicely ambiguous: try as in to attempt.  The line speaks of all the world trying to rouse the wrath of God: 

If many worlds would altogether try,

By all their sins the wrath of God to get

And there you hear the “try / by” adjacent rhyme – but we also hear the word try in its current setting – a criminal trial, a case or cause being pleaded.  

Pled?  Pleaded?  Hmm . . . well, pleaded sounds more proper to me but I think I say pled in real life.  Let’s see . . .  AP and Chicago style manuals say pleaded.  Oops! Pled is North American or Scottish variation.  Ah!  Well, I’m North American and of some Scottish ancestry . . . .but pled sounds stupid in the sentence: we also hear the word “try” in its current setting – a criminal trial, a case or cause being pled.  Pleaded.

Nevermind.  Mrs. Pilate’s summing up before the judge begins

Witness thy wife (O Pilate) speaks for all;

Who did but dream, and yet a message sent,

That thou shouldst have nothing to do at all

With that just man.

From here, the poem rather leaves the feminist defense behind and Lanyer provides us with a very elegant and interesting fleshing out of the Gospel’s sparse rendering of the interplay between the Pilates.  She warns him against preferring popularity over justice – like releasing Barrabas, the thief and brigand, instead of the innocent Jesus.  She calls upon his professional ethics, or marvels at his dullness – “Art thou a judge, and asketh what to do With one in whom no fault there can be found?”  Great line, yeah?  I can hear the exasperated tone of decades of sit-com moms gobsmacked by sit-com dad’s blundering befuddlement.  Mrs. Pilate excoriates too his fearfulness, his impiety, and his guilt: she calls him 

a painted wall,

A golden Sepulcher with rotten bones;

From right to wrong, from equity to fall:

If none upbraid thee.

She notes that Jesus’ scourged body, the Crown of Thorns, and the bloody purple robe with which the soldiers in mockery clad him actually yielded the true “light of grace” – so the very opposite of a painted wall or golden sepulcher.  

The final stanza, though not really part of the “Eve’s apology” proper, begins:

For lo, the Guilty doth accuse the just,

And faulty Judge condemns the Innocent.

And that seems as good a precis of not only her case to acquit Jesus, but of her case against the injustice of misogyny.

It still stuns me that Amelia Lanyer published this in Jacobean England, and that she was a woman able to make a living by writing such progressive material at such a time.  I know, we often like to think in a somewhat Whiggish way, that all preceding eras were morally or politically or socially or technologically benighted compared to our own present perfections.  So it’s easy to think that people didn’t even consider the rights of women, or enslaved people, or Jewish people until the mid 1960s.  Of course, that’s a crude and self-congratulatory way of seeing the arc of history.  We’ve seen Chaucer and Shakespeare take up complex issues of social justice and representation, as did other writers throughout history. 

But Lanyer is among the first women to actually challenge patriarchal attitudes without relying on the goodwill of men to address their own myopism.  And she does so on the same intellectual and poetic grounds that they do – she meets them on their own turf – and with confident verse in a high style dismantles the textual, logical, historical, theological, and even biological assumptions that have othered women.  And, as we saw with the quite targeted dedicatory poems at the beginning of her volume Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Lanyer consciously seeks to establish a community of good women to her project, almost an antecedent to 1970s consciousness-raising groups in second-wave feminism.  This, to me, seems evidence that we in the 21st century are not so morally advanced over our early modern ancestors – social issues today are those of yesterday, and people were as aware then as they are now.  

Yet while noting Lanyer’s importance as an early and professional advocate for women’s dignity, we must not not reduce her poetry to mere pamphleteering or agitation.  Despite the persisting vogue among some scholars to level all forms of cultural expression, regardless of mode, or genre, or (gasp!) intent, – they say “a text is a text is a text,” as if there were no difference between a news bulletin, a grocery ad, or a sonnet – and they do so usually in order to reveal a rather crudely understood framework of social power relations.  I fear I may have left that impression in this episode, that Lanyer’s art is only significant insofar as it reveals the oppressive workings of the patriarchy.  I hope I haven’t, because that kind of reading (if left at that) is absolute asswater – serious readers must remember that writers choose their modes of expression, they choose their words, and they choose their effects with great care to produce a particular effect or meaning.  While we may not have absolutely accurate access to authorial intention, and we must allow that a text’s meanings can extend beyond the author’s control, we must attend very carefully to what the author’s choices convey, what the writer hoped to communicate to us.  Lanyer wrote a poem, a meditation on the passion of Christ, and in that meditation saw a particular dynamic of social relations that seemed absurd to her in light of her understanding of the poem’s main subject.  Lanyer is an artist, not merely a polemicist, and I hope that’s been clear in my discussion today.

And I’d like to end this show with the end of Miss Amelia’s book.  At its conclusion, she explains how the title Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum – Hail God, King of the Jews – came about.  In doing so, she invokes the poetic trope of the dream vision, one which we’ve discussed in many episodes.  Here, certainly, we see that Lanyer sees here work as something more transcendental than the evanescence of social politics.  Note that she speaks of her intentions and that she feels that she’s been chosen to write:

Gentle Reader, if thou desire to be resolved, why I give this Title, Salve Deus Rex judeorum, know for certain; that it was delivered unto me in sleep many years before I had any intent to write in this manner, and was quite out of my memory, until I had written the Passion of Christ, when immediately it came into my remembrance, what I had dreamed long before; and thinking it a significant token, that I was appointed to perform this Work, I gave the very same words I received in sleep as the fittest Title I could devise for this Book.

Thanks for listening, everyone.  Talk to you soon.