52-) English Literature

52-) English Literature

Emilia Lanier

Emilia Lanier (also Aemilia or Amelia Lanyer, 1569–1645), née Aemilia Bassano, was an English poet and the first woman in England to assert herself as a professional poet, through her volume Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail, God, King of the Jews, 1611). Attempts have been made to equate her with Shakespeare's "Dark Lady".

Biography

Emilia Lanier's life appears in her letters, poetry, and medical and legal records, and in sources for the social contexts in which she lived. Researchers have found interactions with Lanier in astrologer Dr Simon Forman's (1552–1611) professional diary, the earliest known casebook kept by an English medical practitioner. She visited Forman many times in 1597 for consultations that incorporated astrological readings, as was usual in the medical practice of the period. The evidence from Forman is incomplete and sometimes hard to read (Forman's poor penmanship has caused critical problems to past scholars). However, his notes show she was an ambitious woman keen to rise into the gentry class.

Early life

Baptiste Bassano died on 11 April 1576, when Emilia was seven years old. His will instructed his wife that he had left young Emilia a dowry of £100, to be given to her when she turned 21 or on the day of her wedding, whichever came first. Forman's records indicate that Bassano's fortune might have waned before he died, which caused considerable unhappiness.

Forman's records also indicate that after the death of her father, Lanier went to live with Susan Bertie, Countess of Kent. Some scholars question whether Lanier went to serve Bertie or be fostered by her, but there is no conclusive evidence for either possibility. It was in Bertie's house that Lanier was given a humanist education and learnt Latin. Bertie greatly valued and emphasized the importance of girls receiving the same level of education as young men. This probably influenced Lanier and her decision to publish her writings. After living with Bertie, Lanier went to live with Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland and Margaret's daughter, Lady Anne Clifford. Dedications in Lanier's own poetry seem to confirm this information.

Lanier's mother died when Lanier was 18. Church records show that Johnson was buried in Bishopsgate on 7 July 1587.

She was baptized Aemilia Bassano on 27 January 1569, daughter of court musician Baptist Bassano, whose will describes him as a "native of Venice," and Margaret Johnson, his common-law wife. Though her father died when she was seven, Aemilia grew up with access to Elizabethan court circles, and spent some of her early years in the household of Susan Bertie, Countess of Kent. By the time Aemilia's mother died, Aemilia, who was eighteen, was sufficiently in court favor to attract the attention of Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon, Queen Elizabeth's lord chamberlain, whose mistress she remained for several years. Despite the forty-five-year age difference, Lanyer looked back on her time with Hunsdon with great fondness, and apparently resented being married off to Alphonso Lanyer, a court musician, when she became pregnant by the lord chamberlain in 1592. Her son, Henry, was born early in the following year. A daughter by Alphonso, Odillya, was born in December 1598, but lived only ten months.

Astrologer Simon Forman, whom Lanyer visited several times during 1597, recorded in his diary that Lanyer was concerned about her husband's prospects for a knighthood or other advancement (he was a soldier on an expedition with Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, during her visits to Forman); that she was subject to miscarriages; that she had enjoyed the good favor of Queen Elizabeth and missed her days at court; and that Forman found her attractive. In fact, he made an effort to have sexual relations with her, and, although she was friendly, she apparently did not allow him to consummate the relationship. The only extant physical description of her comes from Forman, and it is hardly a full portrait: "she hath a wart or mole," he wrote, "in the pit of the throat or near it." The modern historian A. L. Rowse, who misreads some of Forman's diaries, argues from them and from Lanyer's association with the lord chamberlain that Lanyer was William Shakespeare's "dark lady," assuming that her Italian background gave her a dark complexion and that her flirtations with Forman showed her to be a loose woman. Although the world of middle-class artistic servants of the court was not large, and Lanyer, as the lord chamberlain's mistress, may well have encountered some of the Lord Chamberlain's Men (the theatrical troupe that included Shakespeare), there is no evidence that she knew Shakespeare.

Church records show Lanier was baptised Aemilia Bassano at the parish church of St Botolph, Bishopsgate, on 27 January 1569. Her father, Baptiste Bassano, was a Venetian-born musician at the court of Elizabeth I. Her mother was Margret Johnson (born c. 1545–1550), who was possibly an aunt of the court composer Robert Johnson. Lanier's sister, Angela Bassano, married Joseph Hollande in 1576, but neither of her brothers, Lewes and Phillip, reached adulthood. It has been suggested, and disputed, that Lanier's family was Jewish or of partly Jewish descent. Susanne Woods calls the evidence for it "circumstantial but cumulatively possible".Leeds Barroll says Lanier was "probably a Jew", her baptism being "part of the vexed context of Jewish assimilation in Tudor England."

Adulthood

Not long after her mother's death, Lanier became the mistress of The 1st Baron Hunsdon, a Tudor courtier and cousin of Queen Elizabeth I. At the time, Lord Hunsdon was Elizabeth's Lord Chamberlain and a patron of the arts and theatre, but he was 45 years older than Lanier, and records show he gave her a pension of £40 a year. Records indicate that Lanier enjoyed her time as his mistress. An entry from Forman's diary reads, "[Lanier] hath bin married 4 years/ The old Lord Chamberlain kept her longue She was maintained in great pomp ... she hath £ 40a yere & was welthy to him that married her in monie & Jewells."

In 1592, when she was 23, Lanier became pregnant with Hunsdon's child, but he paid her off with a sum of money. Lanier was then married to her first cousin once removed, Alfonso Lanier. He was a Queen's musician; church records show the marriage taking place at St Botolph's Aldgate on 18 October 1592.

Forman's diary entries imply that Lanier's marriage was unhappy. The diary also relates that Lanier was happier as Lord Hunsdon's mistress than as Alfonso's bride, for "a nobleman that is ded hath Loved her well & kept her and did maintain her longe but her husband hath delte hardly with her and spent and consumed her goods and she is nowe... in debt."   Another of Forman's entries states that Lanier told him about having several miscarriages. Lanier gave birth to a son, Henry, in 1593 (presumably named after his father, Henry, Lord Hunsdon) and a daughter, Odillya, in 1598. Odillya died when she was ten months old and was buried at St Botolph's.

In 1611, Lanier published her volume of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Lanier, 42 years old at the time, was the first woman in England to declare herself a poet. People who read her poetry considered it radical, and many scholars today refer to its style and arguments as protofeminist.

Older years

Lanyer spent her later years near her son's family. Henry, who had become a court flautist, married Joyce Mansfield in 1623 and had two children, Mary, born in 1627, and Henry, born in 1630. After Alphonso's death in 1613, Aemilia Lanyer continued to pursue rights to the hay-and-grain patent on behalf of herself and later her grandchildren. She was listed as a "pensioner," a designation indicating a steady income. In her seventy-six years she had seen most of the reigns of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) and Charles I (1625-1649), as well as all of the intervening reign of James I (1603-1625).

A middle-class woman of no fortune, Lanyer nonetheless enjoyed the attention of some important Elizabethans—the queen, Lord Hunsdon, the countess of Kent, and the countess of Cumberland. Both the entries from Forman's diaries and Lanyer's own poetry suggest that she was a woman of considerable intelligence and spirit. Although James's reign offered the Lanyers some financial security through Alphonso's patent, it was not a reign sympathetic to women, particularly women who spoke out publicly. It is impossible to know whether Lanyer received any substantial patronage from her remarkable book of poetry, but the evidence of her legal battles strongly suggests that she did not. Whether or not she continued to write, she apparently never attempted publication again.

After Alfonso's death in 1613, Lanier supported herself by running a school. She rented a house from Edward Smith to house her students, but disputes over the rental led to her being arrested twice between 1617 and 1619. Parents then proved unwilling to send their children to a woman with a history of arrest and Lanier's aspirations of running a prosperous school came to an end.

Lanier's son eventually married Joyce Mansfield in 1623; they had two children, Mary (1627) and Henry (1630). Henry senior died in October 1633. Later court documents imply that Lanier may have been providing for her two grandchildren after their father's death.

Little else is known of Lanier's life between 1619 and 1635. Court documents state that she sued her husband's brother, Clement, for money owed to her from the profits of one of her late husband's financial patents. The court ruled in Lanier's favour, requiring Clement to pay her £20. Clement could not pay immediately, and so Lanier brought the suit back to court in 1636 and in 1638. There are no records to say whether Lanier was ever paid in full, but at the time of her death, she was described as a "pensioner", i. e. someone who has a steady income or pension.

Emilia Lanier died at the age of 76 and was buried at Clerkenwell, on 3 April 1645.

Poetry

Aemilia Lanyer was the first woman writing in English to produce a substantial volume of poetry designed to be printed and to attract patronage. The volume comprises a series of poems to individual patrons, two short prose dedications, the title poem on Christ's Passion (viewed entirely from a female perspective), and the first country-house poem printed in English, "The Description of Cooke-ham," which precedes the publication of Ben Johnson's "To Penshurst" by five years. Lanyer's poetry shows evidence of a practiced skill. The volume is also arguably the first genuinely feminist publication in England: all of its dedicatees are women, the poem on the Passion specifically argues the virtues of women as opposed to the vices of men, and Lanyer's own authorial voice is assured and unapologetic.

Central to Lanyer's published work are her associations with Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, whom Lanyer claimed as her principal inspiration and patron, and Margaret's daughter, Lady Anne Clifford. "The Description of Cookeham" celebrates a sojourn Lanyer enjoyed with these ladies at a country place then in the possession of Margaret's brother, William Russell of Thornhaugh, and praises its extensive grounds as a lost paradise for a learned and religious female community. The details and exact date of the visit are obscure, but it occurred sometime during the first decade of the seventeenth century, and Lanyer credits the visits and the countess with inspiring her to write religious verse.

Lanyer's volume of poems, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, has no discernible early reception history, although the survival of versions in which some of the dedicatory poems have been omitted argues care in targeting her readership. One such volume was apparently given by the countess of Cumberland to Prince Henry, heir apparent to the throne, and another was given by Alphonso Lanyer to Thomas Jones, Archbishop of Dublin, with whom he had served in Ireland. The book did not make Aemilia Lanyer's fortune. After Alphonso died in 1613, she found herself in protracted legal battles with his relatives over the income from a hay-and-grain patent he had received from King James in 1604. From 1617 to 1619 she ran a school in the wealthy London suburb of St. Giles in the Fields, where she sought "to teach and educate the children of divers persons of worth and understanding," but she lost the lease to the building she was using, and there is no evidence that she attempted to teach again, nor is anything more known about what she taught or whom.

In 1611, at the age of 42, Lanier published a collection of poetry called Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail, God, King of the Jews). At the time it was still highly unusual for an Englishwoman to publish, especially in an attempt to make a living. Emilia was only the fourth woman in the British Isles to publish poetry. Hitherto, Isabella Whitney had published a 38-page pamphlet of poetry partly written by her correspondents, Anne Dowriche, who was Cornish, and Elizabeth Melville, who was Scottish. So Lanier's book is the first book of substantial, original poetry written by an Englishwoman. She wrote it in the hope of attracting a patron. It was also the first potentially feminist work published in England, as all the dedications are to women and the title poem "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum", about the crucifixion of Christ, is written from a woman's point of view. Her poems advocate and praise female virtue and Christian piety, but reflect a desire for an idealized, classless world.

Influences

Source analysis shows that Lanier draws on work that she mentions reading, including Edmund Spenser, Ovid, Petrarch, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Agrippa, as well as protofeminists like Veronica Franco and Christine de Pizan. Lanier makes use of two unpublished manuscripts and a published play translation by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. She also shows a knowledge of stage plays by John Lyly and Samuel Daniel. The work of Samuel Daniel informs her Masque, a theatrical form identified in her letter to Mary Sidney and resembling the Masque in The Tempest.