ELH

And whereas it is said, I permit not a Woman to speak, as saith the Law: but where Women are led by the Spirit of God, they are not under the Law.

—Margaret Fell, Womens Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures ¹

Given Lanyer’s questionable past, her evident concern to find patronage, and her continuing focus on women, contemporary and biblical, we might be tempted to suppose that the ostensible religious subject of the title poem, Christ’s Passion, simply provides a thin veneer for a subversive feminist statement—but that conclusion would be wrongheaded. Lanyer is a woman of her times, and her imagination is governed by its terms.

—Barbara K. Lewalski, “Of God and Good Women” ²

Lamenting A. L. Rowse’s proposal that Aemilia Lanyer was Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady,” Barbara Lewalski remarks, “the unfortunate effect of Rowse’s speculation has been to deflect attention from Aemilia Lanyer as a poet and from her poems.” ³ If not quite a deflection from her work, a related circumscribing of that work can be seen in more recent, post-Rowse critical attention which, while concentrating on Lanyer’s 1611 Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum for its creation of a community of good women, itself suppresses or downplays the connection of what Lewalski terms “the ostensible religious subject of the title poem” to the creation of this community, or of this community to that religious subject. Although, as many critics note, religious verse was an area more open to Renaissance women writers, it is too easy to see Lanyer’s choice of Christ’s Passion for her subject as simply reflecting, as Lewalski suggests, that Lanyer’s “imagination [End Page 359] is governed by [the] terms” of her times. On the contrary, Margaret Fell’s words, written over fifty years later in defense of women’s speaking in church, remind us that Scripture could be used not only to justify this speaking (or writing) but also to justify women’s silence. Furthermore, it is also misleading or limiting to accept the argument that, as her recent editor Susanne Woods contends, Lanyer’s “religious topic is not on the surface exceptionable.” ⁴ For what Lanyer does with this allegedly unexceptionable topic is quite exceptionable, quite imaginative, and quite bold—both within the context of her focus on women and in comparison to contemporary religious verse by men. ⁵

Placing a passage from Lanyer’s Salve Deus next to one from George Herbert’s “The Cross” helps to illuminate her innovations. Consider first, Herbert’s:

  Ah my dear Father, ease my smart! These contrarieties crush me: these cross actions Do wind a rope about, and cut my heart:   And yet since these thy contradictions Are properly a cross felt by thy Son, With but four words, my words, Thy will be done.⁶

If Herbert’s speaker is oppressed and crushed by the pressures and disappointments of the world, Lanyer’s demonstrates a sensitivity to the paradoxical mix of “Joy” and “Griefe,” to the contending “Contrarieties” which characterize Christ’s Passion:

O wonder, more than man can comprehend, Our Joy and Griefe both at one instant fram’d, Compounded: Contrarieties contend Each to exceed, yet neither to be blam’d. Our Griefe to see our Saviours wretched end, Our Joy to know both Death and Hell he tam’d. ⁷

Yet Lanyer’s main concern in Salve Deus is not to resolve the imbalance in this mix, not to repay Christ for his “large expence” (1200). Rather she chooses to stress the comfort her addressee, Margaret, the Countess of Cumberland, can take in viewing the Passion as the exemplification of Christ’s constant love for her. For, in Salve Deus, the contending “Contrarieties” are not only the doubleness of “our Joy and Griefe” prompted by Christ’s being crucified, but also the Petrarchan-inflected suffering-for-love demonstrated by Christ. Accordingly, although a “wonder, more than man can comprehend” (emphasis added), Lanyer’s Christ is comprehended [End Page 360] both by the speaker and by the Countess. ⁸ The suffering Christ...