The ‘Great Queen of Lightninge Flashes’: The Transmission of Female-Voiced Burlesque Poetry in the Early Seventeenth Century

Abstract

Women are the frequent, even ubiquitous subject of bawdy poetry in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 1 Examples of female speakers of erotic verse, which is bawdy in varying degrees, include the anonymous ‘Nay phew, nay pish? nay faith and will ye fie’, in which a woman protests against and then succumbs to the sexual advances of her lover, a dialogue between two sisters about an erotic dream, ‘Methought as I lay slumbring on my bed’, and a poem sometimes given the heading ‘The complaint of Mistress A. H. upon her second match to an old rich man’ (’When I was young scarce apt for use of man’). 2 However, it is very difficult to ascertain whether these anonymous verses voiced by a female speaker were actually written by a woman. As Marcy North points out, One can speculate about anonymity’s usefulness to women or try to identify female voices and points of view in the body of anonymous literature, but these methods rarely tell us definitively whether women authors lie hidden behind particular anonymous works. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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