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ABSTRACT
Scholarship on Isabella Whitney often positions her in relation to George Turberville. Her Copy of a Letter is habitually juxtaposed with—and oftentimes assumed to derive from—Turberville’s Heroycall Epistles (i.e. the earliest full translation of Ovid’s ancient Latin Heroides to appear in English print). Further similarities have been observed between Whitney’s Copy of a Letter and the Heroidean missives attributed to the fictive “Pyndara” in Turberville’s roughly contemporaneous auto-miscellany Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets. While there are a number of provocative parallels between Whitney’s and Turberville’s early works, the extent of the former’s reliance upon the latter may well be overstated in existing criticism. Reinvestigating various Whitney-Turberville connections, this essay calls renewed attention to the fact that the sequence in which The Copy of a Letter, The Heroycall Epistles, and Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets first reached print in the mid-1560s is hardly conclusive: it is therefore just as plausible that Whitney helped to shape Turberville’s Ovidian aesthetics as it is that Turberville provided the pattern for Whitney’s.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Raphael Lyne, “Writing Back to Ovid in the 1560s and 1570s”, Translation and Literature, 13.2 (2004): 151.
2 Rosalind Smith, “Woman-Like Complaints’: Lost Love in the First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania”, Textual Practice, 33.8 (2019): 1344; Michelle O’Callaghan, “London and the Book Trade: Isabella Whitney, Jane Anger, and the ‘Maydens of London,’” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540–1700, eds. Danielle Clarke, Sarah C. E. Ross, and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 294.
3 Paul D. Stegner, “Complaint” in The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Sixteenth-Century British Poetry, eds. Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 342; Paul A. Marquis, “Oppositional Ideologies of Gender in Isabella Whitney’s Copy of a Letter”, The Modern Language Review, 90.2 (1995): 317; Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 90.
4 Belinda Jack, The Woman Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 139; M. L. Stapleton, “Letters of Address, Letters of Exchange”, in A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), p. 367.
5 Felicity Sheehy, “Reading Isabella Whitney Reading”, Studies in Philology, 118.3 (2021): 495.
6 Ann Rosalind Jones, “Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women’s Lyrics”, in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and Sexuality, eds. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 65; Tina Kronitiris, Oppositional Voices: Woman as Writers and Translators in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 153 n 10; Mary Ellen Lamb, “Isabella Whitney and Reading Humanism”, in Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation, eds. Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Sauer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), p. 46.
7 Elizabeth Heale, “Misogyny and the Complete Gentleman in Early Elizabethan Printed Miscellanies”, The Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 246.
8 Florence Verducci, Ovid’s Toyshop of the Heart: “Epistulae Heroidum” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 15.
9 See, for a discussion of the importance of Chaucer to Whitney, Michelle O’Callaghan, “How Isabella Whitney Read ‘Her’ Christine de Pizan”, this issue, 31–48.
10 References to Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes throughout this essay refer by page number to the influential, revised second edition of 1557, as edited by Paul A. Marquis: Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes: The Elizabethan Version (Tempe: ACMRS, 2007), pp. 24–5, 171, 145–6, 119–20, 206, 13–14, 17–18.
11 Barnabe Googe, Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes (STC 12048; London, 1563), sigs. C3r–C7r.
12 I refer by page number to the 1584 edition of A Handefull of Pleasant Delites, ed. Hyder E. Rollins: A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1924; New York: Dover, 1965), pp. 12–14, 50–1, 56–7, 68–9. For a suggestion that Whitney herself may have authored “The complaint of a woman Lover”, see R.J. Fehrenbach, “Isabella Whitney and the Popular Miscellanies of Richard Jones”, Cahiers Elisabéthains 19 (1981): 85–7.
13 Turberville’s translation included not only the twenty-one letters of the Heroides generally regarded as genuine today, but also three spurious replies (from Ulysses to Penelope, Demophoon to Phyllis, and Paris to Oenone) penned in the fifteenth-century by Angelo Sabino. On the Sabino letters, see Lyne, “Writing Back”, 145–6.
14 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, and Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
15 I have silently regularized early modern usage of u/v and i/j here and throughout this essay.
16 I employ William C. Dowling’s terminology of “epistoler” and “lector”, as defined in The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 12.
17 Isabella Whitney, The Copy of a Letter (STC 25439; London, c. 1566), sig. A2r. Subsequent references to The Copy of a Letter are parenthetical. For Whitney as “Tudor herois”, see Stapleton, “Letters of Address”, p. 366.
18 Whitney, Copy of a Letter, sig. A3v.
19 Whitney, Copy of a Letter, sig. A3v.
20 Whitney, Copy of a Letter, sigs. A5v, A8v.
21 Whitney, Copy of a Letter, sigs. A6v, A6r.
22 Whitney, Copy of a Letter, sigs. A7v.
23 Here and throughout this essay, I have, for clarity, consistently referred to the epistles of the Heroides by the numbers used in modern editions of the text (which vary somewhat from those found in Turberville’s translation).
24 On the Heroidean character of this auto-miscellany, see Lindsay Ann Reid, “‘The Argument to the Whole Discourse’ and Other Etiological Tales in Turberville’s Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets”, in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, VI: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, ed. Arthur F. Marotti (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2019), pp. 121–41.
25 Melih Levi, “George Turberville, Constancy, and Plain Style”, in Audience and Reception in the Early Modern Period, eds. John R. Decker, Mitzi Kirkland-Ives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), 193.
26 George Turberville, Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets (STC 24326; London, 1567), sig. B3r.
27 Heale, “Misogyny”, p. 246.
28 Turberville, Epitaphes, sigs. D3r–D4v.
29 Turberville, Epitaphes, sig. D4r.
30 Turberville, Epitaphes, sigs. E6r, E7r.
31 Turberville, Epitaphes, sigs. E6v, E7v; Whitney, Copy of a Letter, sigs. A6r, A7v.
32 Hyder E. Rollins, “New Facts about George Turbervile”, Modern Philology, 15.9 (1918): 129–54.
33 Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Register of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A.D., 5 vols. (London, 1875–94), I:328.
34 Arber, Transcript, I:329.
35 Arber, Transcript, I:335.
36 On Bynneman’s multiple entries for Turberville’s Eglogs, see Arber, Transcript, I:334, 340. Of potential interest here is the fact that Whitney mentions reading Mantuan at the outset of A Sweet Nosgay—though it is not certain she specifically refers to Turberville’s English translation: A Sweet Nosgay (STC 25440; London, 1573), sig. A5v.
37 Arthur Golding, The Fyrst Fower Bookes of P. Ovidius Nasos Worke, Intitled Metamorphosis (STC 18955; London, 1565), sig. A1v.
38 Thomas Peend, The Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (STC 18971; London, 1565), sigs. A2r–A2v.
39 Turberville, Epitaphes, sig. *2r.
40 Rollins, “New Facts”, 154. This dating is upheld by John Erskine Hankins in The Life and Works of George Turbervile (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1940), p. 35.
41 Rollins, “New Facts”, 132.
42 George Turberville, The Heroycall Epistles of the Learned Poet Publius Ovidius Naso (STC 18940; London, 1567), sigs. π8r–π8v.
43 Turberville, Epitaphes, sig. *5r.
44 Arber, Transcript, I:329.
45 Notably, the particular dramatic situations (married love, adulterous/incestuous love) recalled in Heroides 1 and 4 mean that these letters stand out as some of the epistles in Ovid’s collection to which Whitney’s pieces in The Copy of a Letter bear the fewest superficial resemblances.
46 Lynette McGrath, Subjectivity and Women’s Poetry in Early Modern England: “Why on the Ridge Should She Desire to Go?” (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 133.
47 Michelle O’Callaghan, “‘My Printer must, haue somwhat to his share’: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books”, Women’s Writing, 26.1 (2019): 18.
48 O’Callaghan, “‘My Printer”, 18. O’Callaghan’s argument is further developed by Kirk Melnikoff in “Isabella Whitney amongst the Stalls of Richard Jones”, in Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, ed. Valerie Wayne (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 147–8.
49 On Jones’s career, see Kirk Melnikoff, “Richard Jones (fl. 1564–1613): Elizabethan Printer, Bookseller and Publisher”, Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, 12.3 (2001): 153–84.
50 Hyder E. Rollins, ed., A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1584) by Clement Robinson and Divers Others (1924; New York: Dover, 1965), p. viii. For A Handefull’s registration, see Arber, Transcript, I:313.
51 For Jones’s repeated fines, see Arber, Transcript, II:847, 849, 854.
52 Recent examples of such readings include: Melnikoff, “Isabella Whitney”; O’Callaghan, “London and the Book Trade”; and Lindsay Ann Reid, “The (Lost) Tune of ‘Raging Love’ and its Reverberations in Isabella Whitney’s Copy of a Letter”, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 102.1 (2020): 103–20.
53 See O’Callaghan, “How Isabella Whitney Read”, this issue, 31–48.
54 Maggie Ellen Ray, “‘The Simple Fool Doth Trust / Too Much before He Try’: Isabella Whitney’s Revision of the Female Reader and Lover in The Copy of a Letter”, Early Modern Women 6 (2011): 131; Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 45; Allison Johnson, “The ‘Single Lyfe’ of Isabella Whitney: Love, Friendship, and the Single Woman Writer”, in Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, eds. Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 124.
55 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), lines 1254–59.
56 Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, lines 1368–76.
57 Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, lines 1890, 2226–27.
58 Tottel, Songes and Sonettes, p. 145.
59 Tottel, Songes and Sonettes, p. 146.
60 Another reason may be a false sense of parallelism: Whitney’s later Sweet Nosgay (1573) is explicitly positioned by the author as a response to a male contemporary’s slightly earlier work—in that instance, Hugh Plat’s Flouers of Philosophy (1572).
61 Betty Travitsky, “The ‘Wyll and Testament’ of Isabella Whitney”, English Literary Renaissance, 10.1 (1980): 78.
62 Stapleton, “Letters of Address”, p. 368.
63 Whitney, Nosgay, sig. A5v.
64 Whitney, Copy of a Letter, sig. A6r.
65 Tottel, Songes and Sonettes, p. 203.
66 Whitney, Copy of a Letter, sig. A6r.
67 Ovid, Ars Amatoria in The Art of Love and Other Poems, Loeb Classical Library, trans. J. H. Mozley, rev. G.P. Goold (1929; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1.659–62.
68 See, for example, Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 1.45–50, 387–96, and 755–70.
69 Whitney, Copy of a Letter, sig. A8v.
70 On the remarkably wide range of poems classified as “sonnets” by Turberville and his contemporaries, see Cathy Shrank, “‘Matters of Love as of Discourse’: The English Sonnet, 1560–1580”, Studies in Philology, 105.1 (2008): 30–49.
71 Heale, “Misogyny”, 246.
72 Rollins, “New Facts”, 136.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lindsay Ann Reid
Lindsay Ann Reid is a Lecturer in English at the University of Galway. Much of her research centers on classical reception, and she has a particular interest in the reception of Ovid’s poetry in early modern England. She is the author of two monographs, Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book (2014) and Shakespeare’s Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval (2018). Her prior work on Isabella Whitney includes pieces published in Cahiers Élisabéthains (2020) and in the edited collection Early Modern Women’s Complaint: Gender, Form and Politics (2020).