By elevating his own status as poetic authority through repeated invocations of Elizabeth, Puttenham transforms a bid for financial patronage into a political agenda that silences dissenting literary traditions, especially those developed by women other than the queen. He locates himself as a central figure in English poetics—as historian, critic, rhetorician, and poet—at the same time that he positions Elizabeth as the culmination of an English literary history that helped shape modern understandings of Protestant poetics.14 But recent archival discoveries have revealed that this maker of English literary history was not what The Art of English Poesy made him seem to be. He was no court favorite; on the contrary, “the historical documents suggest that his public reputation was, in the eyes of most established courtiers, mainly a spectacle of disgrace.”15 For the purposes of this Introduction, it is unnecessary to detail the lawsuits, excommunications, assaults, and imprisonments that characterized Puttenham’s life.16 But his violent history with women is worth pause, especially considering how it may illuminate The Art’s erasure of Catholic women from English literary culture.
As a result of his spousal abuse and frequent adultery, Puttenham’s advantageous match to the Lady Elizabeth Windsor—ten years his senior, twice widowed, and likely a practicing Catholic—is well documented in the legal record.17 Lady Windsor initiated divorce proceedings in the ecclesiastical Court of Arches in 1575, and seventeen witnesses were deposed to support her case. We thus have a paper trail on Puttenham depicting not simply an adulterer but a sexual predator who seduced or attacked numerous young women: Izarde Cawley, Mary Champneys, and Elizabeth Johnsonne, among others, are named as victims of rape, abuse, kidnapping, and imprisonment at his hands.18 Lady Windsor hoped to “seperatte [her] selfe from the company of soe evell a man,” and urged the court not to give “creditt to his gloryous and paynted speache whose custome is all supreme aucthoritie and ordynarye civil governement as a mockarye to use.”19 Her fear of Puttenham’s “gloryous and paynted speache” suggests a long history of rhetorical embellishment that would eventually culminate in The Art’s portrait of an author at the center of court culture. Puttenham’s treatise thus offers a rhetorical practice that matches its theory: in writing, he obscures his own violent sexual history behind a rhetorically compelling text. So, too, he theorizes a poetic tradition that not only effaces women’s writing but quite literally drowns out their voices.
The relationship of historical life, writing practice, and poetic theory throws into stark relief the relish with which Puttenham describes the epithalamium, especially the possible violence of the initial sexual encounter between bride and groom. By praising the continental neo-Latin tradition of authors such as Johannes Secundus and narrating the progress of folk epithalamia, Puttenham emphasizes the aggressive and erotic elements of the genre—the very elements that seventeenth-century English poets would soon repress.20 The wedding song, he explains, must be “very loud and shrill, to the intent there might no noise be heard out of the bedchamber by the screaking and outcry of the young damsel feeling the first forces of her stiff and rigorous young man, she being as all virgins tender and weak, and inexpert in those manner of affairs” (139). For Puttenham, the first sexual encounter is an “amorous battle,” followed swiftly by “second assaults” (140), and poetry is an essential part of this ritual of sexual violence: the wedding song drowns out the voice of a woman who is lucky to “escape with so little danger of her person” (141). She is nonetheless physically transformed: “the bride must within few hours arise and apparel herself, no more as a virgin but as a wife … very demurely and stately to be seen and acknowledged of her parents and kinfolk whether she were the same woman or a changeling, or dead or alive, or maimed by any accident nocturnal” (140–41). Puttenham thus depicts a literary culture in which women are bodies to be acted upon, marked, and read by others, and one in which the transformation from virgin to wife is a violent and inevitable alteration of the self. Yet the epithalamium in Puttenham’s telling is also a form that acknowledges and is predicated on the existence of women’s resistant voices, even as it elides the possibility that they may remain virgins or choose a life without marriage. The unnamed objects of the epithalamium are not silent: instead, their words are submerged within the very poetic tradition that Puttenham celebrates for its exclusion of them. Here and elsewhere, The Art alludes to the poetic significance of those whose words it refuses to include—not only a Scottish Queen but also virgins and resistant wives.
Unlike the brides whose cries are muffled by a song, Lady Windsor’s divorce proceedings enable her to tell her own story and record the stories of others abused by Puttenham. These narratives offer an anticipatory rebuke to Puttenham’s description of the epithalamium and its social function, particularly in their attention to the relationship between pleasing rhetoric and violent physicality. In his attack on Mary Champneys, a “waitinge gentlewoman of [Lady Windsor’s] beinge of tender yeres,” Puttenham
to wynne his ungodly purpose … firste practized with faire wordes and rewardes who neverthelesse resisted the same with a verie godly mynde disposed ˄But sith he cold not so wynne her he did dayly˄ [illegible] so beate her from tyme to tyme in suche sorte that the maiden shold wax wery of her Service / After which practize he the said George assaulted the said maiden in moste wicked Maner and therewithall shewed her what thraldome and miserye she shold sustayne [illegible] and therefore the next way was to assente unto him in his Carnall Desires / And that then she shold lyve in the estate of a gentlewoman in greate quietnes and in no lesse wealeth and felicitie…. after that he begote her with child and caried her to Andiwrappe in Flanders beyoynd the Sease where she was delivered of child who is yet lyvinge and lefte her in there in grete misery as it can be Proved.21
The deposition suggests two cultures at odds: Puttenham’s desire “to Wynne his ungodly purpose” clashes with her “verie godly mynde.” As a result, he abandons his initial seduction, modeled on the “faire wordes and rewardes” of rhetorical manuals and love lyrics, and instead “dayly so beate her.” He turns from glorious and painted speeches to physical assaults, from rhetoric to violence, and thus substantiates the implicit—and sometimes quite explicit—associations that would later appear in The Art, in which a lady who “was a little perverse and not disposed to reform herself by hearing reason” must have reason “beat into [her] ignorant head” by “the well-spoken and eloquent man” (225).22 In response to Champneys’s coerced consent, Puttenham promises that she will live like a gentlewoman, but this life of “quietnes” and “felicitie” instead mutates into a life of exile on the continent: Puttenham took the pregnant Champneys to Antwerp and abandoned her there.
Champneys was not Puttenham’s only, last, or even most pitiable victim, and her brief story is simply one of the many pieces of evidence Lady Windsor marshaled to support her case for divorce. But I would suggest a literary afterlife for this young woman, an alternative to what Woolf imagined for Shakespeare’s sister and Puttenham imagined for brides on their wedding nights, in the manuscript life of an early modern English nun. The historical link between these two women is speculative and circumstantial—a coincidence of names, dates, and locations that may or may not point to a shared life—but exploring it suggests the importance of being attuned to the omissions that have erased Catholic women from English literary history and the texts written by and about nuns and recusant women that were essential to that history. Steven W. May has suggested that “Puttenham’s Art, stripped of its bogus connections with the court, now deserves a thorough reassessment of its actual, and still significant, place in literary history.”23 But I would suggest that the fabrications and exaggerations at the heart of Puttenham’s treatise have always been essential to The Art’s “actual … place in literary history.” Puttenham mythologized not only himself and his relationship to the court but also early modern England and its literature as that literature was being written. The unsavory life that lies behind the courtly work was just one of the many historical narratives that his project obscured through its choice of emphasis. In The Art, Puttenham “constructed his identity—for himself, for his readers, and for us. For himself especially, such an identity might help displace that other, decidedly historical one.”24 At the same time, he was one of many authors