Sappho and Jane Shore as male models of female speech and subjectivity, England, 1513-1624

I examine a literary tradition of male poets who use a "fallen" female figure as their speaking subject in non-dramatic works designed for linguistic innovation and professional alliance.;In the late sixteenth century subjective female complaints were written by male authors who were attracted to the marginal position their female speakers occupied with respect to the dominant discourses of their time, primarily the traditional neo-Platonic and Petrarchan rhetorics. Using poststructuralist and feminist models of reading and interpretation, I focus on English Renaissance representations of Jane Shore and Sappho in the literature of the female complaint. The competitive design of Thomas Churchyard's first female monologue in The Mirror for Magistrates (1563), Anthony Chute's "Shore's Wife" (1593), and Michael Drayton's "Epistle of Mistress Shore, To King Edward the Fourth" (1598) throws into relief a fundamental function of female complaints derived from Ovid's Heroides: these female speakers represent imaginative attempts at articulating female experience and sites of male literary rivalry and innovation. I also discuss in depth "Sapho to Philaenis," John Donne's autoerotic anti-elegiac representation of Ovid's fiction of Sappho in the fifteenth epistle of the Heroides. I am particularly interested in how these Elizabethan male writers appropriate the voice and body of an historical woman for their rite of literary self-inscription. Included is a brief study of Sappho's role in both the defense of women and the early feminist protest of the querelle des femmes: I focus on Thomas Salter's A Mirrhor of Modestie (1579). Thomas Heywood's female genealogy Nine books of the various history concerninge women (1624), Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies (1521 English trans. Ansley), and Jane Anger's "Protection for women (sic) " (1589). A brief literary reception of Ovid's Heroides in Renaissance England and a chronology of Sappho's presence in English literature 1542-1800, is also included.