Episode 73

From Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, by Emilia Lanyer

Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum by Emilia Lanyer.

Poet

Emilia Lanyer

Reading and commentary by

Mark McGuinness

From Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

(Lines 745-768)

By Emilia Lanyer

Now Pontius Pilate is to judge the Cause
Of faultlesse Jesus, who before him stands;
Who neither hath offended Prince, nor Lawes,
Although he now be brought in woefull bands:
O noble Governour, make thou yet a pause,
Doe not in innocent blood imbrue thy hands;
But heare the words of thy most worthy wife,
Who sends to thee, to beg her Saviours life.

Let barb’rous crueltie farre depart from thee,
And in true Justice take afflictions part;
Open thine eies, that thou the truth mai’st see,
Doe not the thing that goes against thy heart;
Condemne not him that must thy Saviour be;
But view his holy Life, his good desert:
Let not us Women glory in Mens fall,
Who had power given to over-rule us all.

Till now your indiscretion sets us free,
And makes our former fault much lesse appeare;
Our Mother Eve, who tasted of the Tree,
Giving to Adam what she held most deare,
Was simply good, and had no powre to see,
The after-comming harme did not appeare:
The subtile Serpent that our Sex betraide,
Before our fall so sure a plot had laide.

That undiscerning Ignorance perceav’d
No guile, or craft that was by him intended;
For, had she knowne of what we were bereav’d,
To his request she had not condiscended.
But she (poore soule) by cunning was deceav’d,
No hurt therein her harmlesse Heart intended:
For she alleadg’d Gods word, which he denies
That they should die, but even as Gods, be wise.

But surely Adam cannot be excus’d,
Her fault, though great, yet hee was most too blame;
What Weaknesse offred, Strength might have refusde,
Being Lord of all the greater was his shame:
Although the Serpents craft had her abusde,
Gods holy word ought all his actions frame:
For he was Lord and King of all the earth,
Before poore Eve had either life or breath.

Who being fram’d by Gods eternall hand,
The perfect’st man that ever breath’d on earth,
And from Gods mouth receiv’d that strait command,
The breach whereof he knew was present death:
Yea having powre to rule both Sea and Land,
Yet with one Apple wonne to loose that breath,
Which God hath breathed in his beauteous face,
Bringing us all in danger and disgrace.

And then to lay the fault on Patience backe,
That we (poore women) must endure it all;
We know right well he did discretion lacke,
Beeing not perswaded thereunto at all;
If Eve did erre, it was for knowledge sake,
The fruit beeing faire perswaded him to fall:
No subtill Serpents falshood did betray him,
If he would eate it, who had powre to stay him?

Not Eve, whose fault was onely too much love,
Which made her give this present to her Deare,
That which shee tasted, he likewise might prove,
Whereby his knowledge might become more cleare;
He never sought her weakenesse to reprove,
With those sharpe words wich he of God did heare:
Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke
From Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke.

If any Evill did in her remaine,
Beeing made of him, he was the ground of all;
If one of many Worlds could lay a staine
Upon our Sexe, and worke so great a fall
To wretched Man, by Satans subtill traine;
What will so fowle a fault amongst you all?
Her weakenesse did the Serpents words obay,
But you in malice Gods deare Sonne betray.

Whom, if unjustly you condemne to die,
Her sinne was small, to what you doe commit;
All mortall sinnes that doe for vengeance crie,
Are not to be compared unto it:
If many worlds would altogether trie,
By all their sinnes the wrath of God to get;
This sinne of yours, surmounts them all as farre
As doth the Sunne, another little starre.

Then let us have our Libertie againe,
And challendge to your selves no Sov’raigntie;
You came not in the world without our paine,
Make that a barre against your crueltie;
Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine
Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?
If one weake woman simply did offend,
This sinne of yours hath no excuse, nor end.

Podcast transcript

In 1999 Carol Ann Duffy published The World’s Wife – a book of poems in the voices of the wives, lovers and significant others of some of the ‘great men’ of history, literature and mythology. It included poems spoken by Mrs Midas, Mrs Aesop, Mrs Darwin, Queen Herod, Frau Freud and Pilate’s Wife, as well as Salome, Medusa, Delilah, Queen Kong and Elvis’s Twin Sister. It’s a dazzling collection, full of clever and witty and timely take-downs of patriarchal pretensions, and I thoroughly recommend it.

And what I have just read you is a poem that is not a million miles away, in its basic approach, from Duffy’s subversive feminist project, except that this one was published 400 years ago. It is another monologue in the voice of the wife of Pontius Pilate. She makes only a fleeting appearance in the Bible, in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 27 Verse 19, at the point where Pilate, the Roman Governor of Judea, is sitting in judgment on Jesus:

When he was set down on the judgment seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.

We don’t learn anything else about Pilate’s wife, but this kind of thing is irresistible to poets, and Carol Ann Duffy and Emilia Lanyer have both seized on this little kernel of story and expanded it into poems that pass a kind of judgment on the men who judged and executed Jesus.

If you follow contemporary British poetry, you’ve almost certainly heard of Carol Ann Duffy, but even if you’re a fan of Renaissance poetry, it’s possible that Emilia Lanyer is a new name to you. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum was the first book of original poetry published by a woman in England, but it failed to make a splash, and wasn’t reprinted for almost four centuries, and she was left out of anthologies of the period until quite recently.

So who was Emilia Lanyer?

She was born in London in 1569 to an English mother, Margret Johnson, and a Venetian immigrant father, Baptiste Bassano, who was a musician at the court of Elizabeth I. Growing up in a family of musicians, she may well have become an accomplished player herself, but what is more surprising is the fact that she received an excellent education, which was very unusual for a girl at the time, especially from the servant class to which musicians belonged. In her terrific book Eve Bites Back, Anna Beer says we don’t know for sure where Lanyer got her education, it may well have been at the household of the Countess of Kent, but in that case we don’t know why the Countess would have bothered to do this for such a lowly person.

What we do know for sure is that the adult Emilia Lanyer, an intelligent and educated woman and accomplished musician, became the mistress of one of the most powerful men in England – Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, cousin of Queen Elizabeth and her Lord Chamberlain. He also happened to be patron of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company of players who included William Shakespeare. She evidently enjoyed the high life at court, until she became pregnant with Carey’s child and was swiftly paid off and married to Alfonso Lanyer, another court musician.

In recent years some scholars have identified Emilia Lanyer with the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and her book was first reprinted in 1978 under the title of The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. But we don’t care about that, do we? It’s just boring gossip, isn’t it? And it reduces her to a minor character in Shakespeare’s story, rather than a very accomplished and interesting poet in her own right.

Her contemporaries saw her as a mistress, a wife, and a mother, but she evidently saw herself as a poet. In another passage from Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, addressed to the Countess of Cumberland, she claimed that this vocation was hers from birth:

And knowe, when first into this world I came,
This charge was giv’n me by th’Eternall powres,
Th’everlasting Trophie of thy Fame
To build and decke it with the sweetest flowres
That virtue yeelds;

Is this just hyperbole to flatter her patron? Maybe. But I also think it bespeaks a real sense of vocation and commitment, and the sense of confidence and responsibility that comes from being given a ‘charge’, a duty, by ‘th’Eternall powres’ – especially in an age where many of the readers of poetry would have scoffed at the idea of a woman poet.

So Lanyer makes some bold claims for herself as a poet, but she can really back them up, as we can see from the passage I’ve read for you today. It’s from the longest poem in Lanyer’s book, what we would today call the ‘title poem’ of the collection: ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, which is Latin for ‘Hail God, King of the Jews’. It’s a devotional poem that begins with the Passion of Christ, and segues into a disquisition on Adam and Eve and the role of men and women in original sin.

So just to refresh our memories, in Christian theology the death and resurrection of Christ was necessary in order to redeem humanity from sin and grant them salvation in heaven. Where did sin come from? The Garden of Eden, where the serpent tempted Eve to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and she then gave the fruit to Adam, who ate it too. And of course this was the one tree whose fruit God had explicitly told Adam he wasn’t allowed to eat.

And because of this, generations of Christian theologians blamed the origin of sin on Eve, and claimed that her weakness and sinfulness had been inherited by women. Which is one reason Lanyer found herself living in a society where it was taken for granted and written into law that women should be ruled by men, who were much stronger and wiser than them.

So that’s the backdrop to this poem, in which we hear the voice of Pilate’s wife pleading with Pilate not to condemn Jesus to death. And in the poem, Lanyer very wisely says nothing that contradicts scripture, which would have got her into trouble. But she does give us a very unusual slant on the material. Because Pilate’s wife points out that everything being done to Jesus is being done by men, not women:

Let not us Women glory in Mens fall,
Who had power given to over-rule us all.

She describes the killing of Jesus as ‘man’s fall’, as opposed to the ‘fall from grace’ associated with Eve, and makes the radical claim that this sets women free from the consequences of their ‘former fault’, since it appears ‘much less’ by comparison:

Till now your indiscretion sets us free,
And makes our former fault much lesse appeare;

Then Pilate’s wife begins an extraordinary defence of Eve:

Our Mother Eve, who tasted of the Tree,
Giving to Adam what she held most deare,
Was simply good, and had no powre to see,
The after-comming harme did not appeare:
The subtile Serpent that our Sex betraide,
Before our fall so sure a plot had laide.

Far from being the source of evil, Eve was ‘simply good’, and ‘had no powre to see’ the consequences of her actions; her mistake was down to the ‘subtile Serpent’, who easily outwitted her ‘undiscerning ignorance’.

Not content with defending Eve, Pilate’s wife lays the blame firmly on Adam:

But surely Adam cannot be excus’d,
Her fault, though great, yet hee was most too blame;
What Weaknesse offred, Strength might have refusde,
Being Lord of all the greater was his shame:

This is a brilliantly executed judo move on the argument for patriarchal power. If, as we are told in the Bible, men derive their power and authority over women from Adam, who was Lord of all, including Eve, then surely it follows that men must be responsible for their own sin? If Eve was so much weaker than Adam, then surely Adam’s strength could have refused what she offered? He was the one in charge, so surely he should take the blame?

It’s hard to argue with the logic. And it must have been galling for Jacobean male readers to read such a cogently argument coming from a supposedly inferior woman. So it’s not hard to guess why her book disappeared after a single printing.

And Lanyer, channelling Pilate’s wife, really hammers the point home: Adam had been granted power power over land and sea, so how come he was won over by a single apple? If Eve was at fault, she was persuaded by a clever adversary in the serpent, but Adam had no such excuse – Eve simply offered him the apple and he took it and ate it without offering the least resistance.

Lanyer is careful not to say that Eve was blameless, but says that her sin was less than that of Adam, for several good reasons that we find in the Bible: she was weak and therefore persuaded by the clever serpent; her weakness meant she could not have persuaded Adam with argument, and she didn’t even try to do this; and she had no idea of the consequences of her actions.

And even the evil that was in her must have ultimately come from Adam, since the Bible clearly states that she was made out of Adam’s rib:

If any Evill did in her remaine,
Beeing made of him, he was the ground of all;

It’s probably no coincidence that these lines occur just after Lanyer has reminded us that men owe their knowledge, which they take such pride in, to Eve:

Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke
From Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke.

So in this reading, Adam gave Eve evil, and she gave him knowledge in return. It doesn’t sound like a very fair exchange, does it?

Then Pilate’s wife returns to the judgment of Jesus, and tells her husband that killing Jesus will be even worse than Eve’s crime, because of the motive:

Her weakenesse did the Serpents words obay,
But you in malice Gods deare Sonne betray.

Eve sinned through weakness, but malice is worse than weakness. Pilate’s wife then expands on the theme with a terrific stanza making the contrast unmistakable:

Whom, if unjustly you condemne to die,
Her sinne was small, to what you doe commit;
All mortall sinnes that doe for vengeance crie,
Are not to be compared unto it:
If many worlds would altogether trie,
By all their sinnes the wrath of God to get;
This sinne of yours, surmounts them all as farre
As doth the Sunne, another little starre.

Isn’t that final couplet marvellous? This sin of yours is so much greater than all the other sins put together as the sun is bigger than a tiny star:

This sinne of yours, surmounts them all as farre

As doth the Sunne, another little starre.

But she hasn’t finished yet. The final stanza I’ve read today contains an astonishing appeal for liberty:

Then let us have our Libertie againe,
And challendge to your selves no Sov’raigntie;
You came not in the world without our paine,
Make that a barre against your crueltie;
Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine
Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?
If one weake woman simply did offend,
This sinne of yours hath no excuse, nor end.

Give us our freedom, don’t take all the sovereignty, the power, to yourselves; you only came into the world through our pain, the pain of childbirth, so surely that should prevent you from being cruel to us? Your fault is greater, so why shouldn’t we be your equals? One weak woman ‘simply’, i.e. ignorantly, did offend, but your sin ‘hath no excuse, nor end’.

This is startling stuff, in a deeply patriarchal society. And the poem isn’t just challenging established gender relations. Class and rank and equality are recurrent themes throughout Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, and it’s startling that this passage, with its revolutionary language about ‘liberty’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘tyranny’, was published in 1611, thirty years before the English Civil War began.

It’s amazing that the book was published at all. Not only because it would have been harder for a woman to persuade a publisher to take her on, but also Jacobean books were liable to censorship, to prevent subversive or seditious ideas finding their way into print.

But somehow Lanyer managed to get her book published. For her, it may well have felt like a failure – there’s no evidence that it made any impression on contemporary readers. It wasn’t reprinted in her lifetime. And in spite of featuring dedications and appeals to numerous prominent women, it did not secure any lucrative patronage for its author.

On the other hand, maybe – and I really hope this was the case – maybe she felt vindicated, in spite of her lack of worldly success as an author. I hope she did feel that she had discharged some of that ‘charge’ she felt had been given to her at birth by ‘th’Eternal powres’.

And… her poetry has survived because she made the effort to publish it, against the odds. And what poetry it is. It challenges the patriarchal religious establishment, not only in its argument but in the fact that she – a commoner and a woman – is making the argument in skilful and sophisticated verse. And her verse is not just clever, it’s witty and entertaining, even 400 years later.

From the point of view of poetic craft, Lanyer’s book is a virtuoso performance, she uses a series of different stanza forms in different poems, with consummate skill. The title poem, which I’ve read from today, is in ottava rima, an eight-line stanza form that originated in Italy, which rhymes ABABABCC – i.e. you’ve got three ‘A’ rhymes, in the first, third and fifth lines, interwoven with three ‘B’ rhymes, in the second, fourth and sixth lines. And the last two lines of the stanza are a rhyming couplet.

You may recall back in Episode 54, about Shelley, I talked about the difficulty of writing terza rima in English, because it’s made up of interlocking triple rhymes, i.e. three lines sharing the same rhyme. A lot of these poetic forms originated in Italian, which has a lot more rhyming words than English does, so it’s harder to do them in English. And ottava rima is another verse form with triple rhymes, it has two triple rhymes in every stanza. I’ve written some ottava rima myself, a translation from the Portuguese poet Camões, and I can assure you it’s really hard work.

One of the most famous examples of ottava rima in English is Lord Byron’s long poem Don Juan, where he makes a virtue of necessity, by using a lot of polysyllabic rhymes for comic effect. Here he is taking a swipe at poor Coleridge:

And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,
But like a hawk encumber’d with his hood,
Explaining Metaphysics to the nation —
I wish he would explain his Explanation.

I think we can detect something of this effect here and there in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, where Lanyer also rhymes on multiple syllables, such as:

For, had she knowne of what we were bereav’d,
To his request she had not condiscended.

So she not only rhymes the two syllables of ‘perceav’d’, ‘bereav’d’ and later on, ‘deceav’d’, but also rhymes ‘intended’ with the last two syllables of the long word ‘condiscended’. (The word ‘condescended’ here means ‘agreed’, so it’s just saying that she agreed to go along with the serpent’s request.) And I do think it’s intentionally funny, rhyming on the final two syllables of that long word. It helps to lightens the tone, which feels more like a witty retort to patriarchy, rather than a laboured rebuttal.

And then a few stanzas later, we find this very Byronesque final couplet, rhymed on the final two syllables:

If Eve did erre, it was for knowledge sake,
The fruit beeing faire perswaded him to fall:
No subtill Serpents falshood did betray him,
If he would eate it, who had powre to stay him?

Again, this lightens the tone and gives me the impression that she’s not just criticising Adam, she’s mocking him – the one thing that many powerful men, even to this day, cannot stand.

So we’ll hear the poem again in a moment, so that we can savour the daring, the cleverness and the wit of Lanyer’s poem once more.

But before we do that I’d just like to give a shout out and thank you to Podcast Review, one of the most useful and respected guides to good podcasts, because for the third year running, A Mouthful of Air has been included in their list of the best poetry podcasts. The list has expanded to 11 shows this year, and one of the new additions is Close Readings from the London Review of Books, so it’s great to be on the list alongside such an esteemed literary publication, as well as shows from The New Yorker and the Poetry Foundation in the US.

So a big thank you to Podcast Review and to Alice Florence Orr for her kind review. It’s so kind in fact that I would blush to quote it, but if you’d like to read it and remind yourself of what a discerning listener you are, for listening to A Mouthful of Air, then I’ll put a link in the show notes, or you can just Google ‘best poetry podcasts’ and you should find it.

OK, time to listen to Pilate’s wife berating her husband once again.