"In sort as she it sung": Spenser's "Doleful Lay" and the Construction of Female Authorship

Abstract

Lay of was printed in 1595 as one of the elegies Sir Philip Sidney appended Colin Clouts Come Home Againe.1 The volume consists of Spenser's poem Astrophel, Doleful Lay of Clorinda—attributed to a persona identified as Sidney's sister that Clorinda hight—but narrated by the male speaker of Astrophel, and elegies written by Lodowick Bryskett, Sir Walter Raleigh, Matthew Royden, and either Sir Fulke Greville or Edward Dyer. None of these poets is clearly identified within the text itself. Of these elegies only Bryskett's is introduced to the reader in a comparable way to Clorinda's: using a pastoral persona (Thestylis, also a speaker in Colin Clout, which Clorinda is not) and interpellated into the end of the preceding narra tive (Clorinda's) where the narrator reappears as the speaker of the ensuing elegies: which I here in order will rehearse, / As fittest flowres to deck his mournfull hearse (107-8). All of the elegies circulate under another's sig nature, including Spenser's own text, where the first person pronoun is not attached to any proper name save, by extrapolation, that of Colin Clout. Bryskett's Mourning Muse of Thestylis refers to the Lay, or at least to the Countess of Pembroke's elegiaic function: His noble sisters plaints, her sigh es and teares emong, / Would sure have made thee milde, and rue her pain (130-31). It is not clear how his poem connected to the Lay, or whether what Bryskett writes here is merely part of the usual gesture of acknowledgment to Sidney's sister, but it does reveal an insistent preoccupa tion in the volume as a whole with the Countess of Pembroke's position as chief mourner to Sidney. Bryskett's poem has been lightly edited in the move ment from manuscript to print; some lines have been deleted, and Bryskett's original & lovely rue her pain is altered to inly rue her paine, bringing it

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