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Sasha Roberts On Women Reading PDF
Sasha Roberts On Women Reading PDF
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1� 2 1i1(l.f23. 0tq 1Cjjg writers articulate of private space, female sexuality and reading
Shakespeare; a topos that assumes the act of reading is shaped by
the material habitat of reading, and that points to the fraught status
Shakespeare creepes into I of women's privacy in early modern EngJand. In theory at least,
private space allowed women to place themselves beyond the sur
the womens closets about veillance of their fathers and husbands, to define their own reading
acts: turning the key of their bedchamber and closet doors against
bedtime': women reading in others, women could fashion for themselves some measure of inde
pendence. Personal chambers with the privacy they apparently
a room of their own afforded, are repeatedly revealed to be highly charged sites of read
ing: the Shakespearean text is reported to engage not only with the
Sasha Roberts bodies of women readers, but with the spaces they inhabit. I explore
this interweaving of textual and material culture by outlining
domestic, private reading spaces commonly available to the elite; I
then tum to the concerns raised in seventeenth·century accounts of
While Shakespeare's women characters have long been the subject
women reading Venus alld Adonis and question the examples of two
of literary criticism, his women readers have not. This is particularly
seventeenth·century women readers of Shakespeare's poem.
so for the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the historical
Finally, I return to the construction of privacy within the home by
record provides few dues for women's reading of Shakespeare. But
examining the use of locks and keys in elite houses, and the rela·
although surviving accounts of women reading Shakespeare in
tionship between privacy and female subjectivity.
early modern England are fragmentary, they can be used to ques
tion contemporary perceptions of women as consumers in the
literary marketplace. My concern here is with notions of reading
PRIVATE READING SPACES
and private space articulated by male commentators on women
readers of Shakespeare's most frequently reprinted text before
Acts of reading take place in different material settings, whether
1640, Venus and Adonis. The poem was arguably Shakespeare's
institutional or domestic, metropolitan or provincial, public or pri·
'besHelling' text in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth cen
vate. The early modern home is conventionally described as 'the
turies: nine editions had appeared before Shakespeare's death in
private realm'; a realm set apart from the 'public' arenas of politics,
1617, with a further six reprints by 1640; it was the only work by
paid work, education and entertainment; a realm that was the
Shakespeare to be printed by a woman in the seventeenth century
province of women.2 But the identification of the home with 'the
(Elizabeth Hodgkinson, 1675), and published in Scotland before the
private' can sometimes mask the many distinctions of communal
eighteenth century (Edinburgh, 1623).1
Although the poem has
and personal, open and secret, public and private space within the
now fallen to the margins of what has become the Shakespearean
elite home itself. Country houses, in particular, had to meet both
canon, Venus and Adonis attracted considerable contemporary com
public and private needs: as Francis Bacon argued in his essay· 'Of
mentary, providing rare descriptions both of women and men as
Building', 'I say, you cannot have a perfect Pallace, except you have
readers of Shakespeare and of Shakespeare's status as a writer.
two seueral sides ... the One for Feasts and Triumphs, and the
Seventeenth·century accounts of women reading Venus and Ado
Other for Dwelling:3 Halls and great chambers provided families
nis are discovered in a range of texts, induding drama, poetry, prose
with spaces in which to meet, entertain and administer hospitality
and conduct-books, concentrated in the period 1610-41; they do not
to their guests, as well as an opportunity to demonstrate outwardly
offer authentic records of actual reading acts, but rather fictional
their taste and status through the use of furnishings and decora
and rhetorical images of readers. My interest is in the tapas male
tion. While the size and splendour of these formal rooms increased
30
32 Sasha Roberts Women Reading in a Room of Their Own 33
in the late sixteenth century, private space within the home also Both Fumerton and Ferguson raise the important relationship
became more diversified. One of the key developments in late between subjectivity and space in early modern England. But
sixteenth<entury architecture, Alice 1: Friedman points Qut, was how fragile or 'forever deferred' was private, female subjectivity is
'the creation of smaller and mOTe private rooms in domestic struc. a matter open to debate; my sense is that the experience of privacy
tores of aU types'.4 In addition to existing withdrawing and bed among early modern elite women was more diverse than Fumerton
chambers, parlours, studies and closets were incorporated into elite and Ferguson allow. While we can point to general patterns of
homes, while in the newly built 'prodigy' houses, such as Elizabeth architectural development in early modern England, it should be
Shrewsbury's Hardwick HaU, private chambers became ever more remembered that the sheer variety of houses across different
detached from service areas and large formal rooms. The increasing regions with different internal structures and living arrangements
specialisation of space in the elite house made it a complex domain, make it difficult to draw broad generalisations about individual
with different thresholds of communal and personal, private and experiences of private and female subjectivity. Certainly private
": public space. space within the home was important - and affordable - to the
Privacy, and so private space, is historically specific. James elite. Thus Sir Henry Wotton, advising gentlemen on the building
Knowles has already. pointed out different conceptions of privacy of 'Lodging-Chambers' in his Elements of Architecture (1624), took
in (or applied to) early modem England (pp. 3-22): the intertwining issue with the Italian fashion of casting partition walls so that 'when
of privacy and status; the distinction between being 'private' in all Doors are open, a Man may see through the whole House', for it
chosen company and being alone; privacy as principally familial put 'an intolerable servitude upon all the Chambers, save the
not individual; and privacy as an 'inescapably public' gesture of inmost'. Instead of constructing private spaces, Italian families:
withdrawal. Indeed, the opportunity for early modem men or
women to 'achieve' privacy within their own homes has been ques . must be forced to make as many common great Rooms ... that
tioned. Patricia Fumerton has argued that 'even the most private thereby they want other Galleries and Rooms of Retreat, which I
rooms in Elizabethan houses (and certainly the royal bedchamber) have considered among them (T must confess) with no small
were sites where privacy could never be achieved. Private rooms Wonder; for I observe no Nation in the World b y nature more
were essentially public, readily open to servants and visitors.'s private and reserved than the Italiall, and on the other side, i n no
Moreover, the private rooms of the Elizabethan household were Habitations less Privacy, so as there is a kind of Conflict between
reached only through a series of public chambers, an act which, their Dwelling and their Being?
according to Fumerton, 'forever deferred any final arrival at inner
most privacy'. Fumerton's concern is with what this means for the Wotton articulates a subtle understanding of relations between
construction of private subjectivity - 'the truly "private" Eliza. subjectivity and space, between 'Being' and 'Dwelling'. Arguing for
bethan self': 'the incessant segmentation and recession of rooms, the importance of 'Privacy', located in 'rooms of retreat', he
"houses," service, stuff, and eating habits - all of which accelerated expresses surprise at the 'servile disposing of inward Chambers'
towards the end of the sixteenth century - record a privacy whose as 'common' rooms in Italy. English houses, Wotton implies, do not
resident identity was forever elusive, unlocatable' (pp. 74--6 and demand of their inhabitants the same 'kind of Conflict between
130). Margaret Ferguson has questioned how far women, in parti their Dwelling and their Being'. The paradox of 'private experience
cular were able to construct their own subjectivity in their own as inescapably public' (Fumerton, p. 69) was more applicable, so
rooms given the 'experience of feeling themselves expropriated by Wotton seems to suggest, to the Italian context than to English
a misogynistic discursive tradition'. She cites the examples of Chris homes.
tine de Pizan and Virginia Woolf: although both women belong to For the purposes of this essay, I shall consider privacy as a
'that historically small and privileged group of women who have controlling act - the ability to choose your own companions, or to
actually had a room of their own, neither can find therein a refuge be alone - enabled by material conditions: the creation of with
from her culture's definitions of her sex'.6 drawn, hidden, personal or secure spaces. In many country houses
34 Sasha Roberts Women Rending in a Room of Their Dum 35
of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, "rooms of retreat" Earl of Huntingdon's 'writing chamber' at York House (lS96)Y But
were placed beyond communal and public rooms; the corridor, usually the most private, and smallest, room of the elite house was
which allowed individual access to rooms and therefore greater the closet. Oasets were usually found leading off the bedchamber,
privacy for their occupants, was not in standard use until the eight or perhaps secreted into walls and passages: among the accounts
eenth century. Leading off the great chamber was the withdrawing for improving York House in 1607, for instance, are p�ments 'to
chamber which, argues Gervase Jackson-Stops, marked 'an
, make a little dassel in the passage for the Lady francis'. 1 The closet
entrance into female territory .8 Used as a private sitting-room for was used. for storing confidential papers, treasured objects (often
conversation, eating, work or reading, the withdrawing chamber locked away in desks or cabinets) and valuable household items,
offered more intimacy than formal rooms: Anne Clifford, for and for working, reading and religiOUS devotions: 'when thou
instance, reports in her diary that at Knole her husband 'dined prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door,
abroad in the great Chamber and sURped privately with me in the pray to thy Father which is in secret' (King James Bible, Matt. 6:�).
.. Drawing Chamber' (my emphasis).9 Although the bedchamber T hey were typically furnished with reading. writing and storage In
. (often found beyond the withdrawing chamber) could accommo
mind _ with books and shelves, tables and stools, cabinets and
date private activities, it was not necessarily a solitary room: it could chests, and Turkish carpets for comfort. For instance, the King's
be used for conversation and light meals with friends and family, closet at Knole, decorated in sumptuous green mohair, was just
while personal man- or maid-servants who accompanied gentle large enough for a chest, a single chair and table, and a small
men and women in their bedchambers often slept in the room at day-bed, while the Earl of Essex's green velvet closet at Wanstead
IS
nighl on a truckle bed (in ]633, for instance, the fourth Earl of contained a bed, a chair and high stool, and a folding table.
Huntingdon's bedchamber at Donington Park contained both the Alan Stewart and James Knowles have pointed to differences in
Earl's 'blacke bedstead' and a 'truckle bed'),l0 Items of furniture the functions between men and women's closets in the period:
recorded in inventories of elite bedchambers indicate the use of the while the woman's closet might be used for solitary reading, reli
bedchamber for sitting, working, reading or writing in comfort and gious devotions, writing, sewing and storage of precious objects
warmth: Lady Arabella's bedchamber at the Countess o f Leicester's and domestic goods, according to Stewart the gent1eman's closet
residence (]634), for example, included a bedstead, a little table, two was 'not designed to function as a place of individual withdrawal,
chairs and three stools, a court cupboard, a carpet and tools for the but as a secret non-pUblic transactive space between two men
fire, while the 'Queens lodgings' al the Earl of Essex's house at behind a locked door'. Stewart highlights the contrast between
Wanstead (1597) were furnished with a single folding table and a the items kept in Sir William More's closet and that of his wife at
chair, a cupboard made of walnut, stools and footstools, a c1ose Lasetey Hall (1556): whereas Sir WiUiam's closet contained numer
stool and chamberpol, and a gilt bedstead dressed in while taffeta ous papers, writing implements and a large selection of English,
(an appropriate colour scheme for a Virgin Queen),lt Inventories French, Italian and Latin texts, his wife's closet 'is a room stuffed
seem to reveal few differences in the basic furnishings of elite bed with household utilities, a room where she may retire to read a
chambers belonging to men and women. The probate inventory of rather restricted selection of books alone'. Such gender distinctions
Essex House (1601), for instance, lists footstools, quiJts, rugs and in the use of the closet were, however, subject to considerable local
blankets in both 'my Ladies Bedchamber' and in the Earl of Essex's variation in different households. Anne Clifford, for instance, used
bedchamber; the most obvious contrast between the two rooms lay her closet as a· personal retreat after 'falling out' with her husband -
in the value of their beds - 'my Ladles' bed cost £221; the Earl's bed as in January 1616 when she went 'to see the things in the closet
was valued al £300.12 and began to have Mr Sandy's book read to me about the Gove.rn
Where houses contained a study they were furnished for read ment of the Turks, my Lord sitting the most part of the day readmg
ing, writing and keeping confidential papers; there might even be in his closet' - but important1y she also had access to her husband's
room for a small fireplace - the Earl of Essex's study at Essex House closet and the books within it, such as on 16 April 1617 when she
(1601) contained andirons and tongs for the fire, likewise Henry 'spent the evening in working and going down to my Lord's Closet
36 Sosha Roberts Wame'! Reading in a Room of Their Own 37
where I sat and read much in the Turkish History and Chaucer' were not a standard feature of large houses until the eighteenth
(pp.47 and 66). While Anne Clifford's closet (and her husband's) is century). Thus in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Imogen keeps a copy of
associated with retreat and reading in her diary, in ]634 the Coun. the Metamorphoses (the source of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis) at
tess of Leicester kept her pictures and books in her 'draWinge her bedside: books were usuaUy found in the bedchamber, argues
chamber' and apparently used her closet for storing valuables - it Chartier, because it had become common to read before going to
contained a 'truncke of plate' fuU of precious items including "one sleep (p. 140). Similarly in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare adds the
gould case for a boeke'.16 By contrast the closet in the garret of contemporary detail of Lavinia retiring to her 'closet' with her
Thomas Hanbury's house at Buriton (1611) contained a still; as father to read 'sad stories' from her sister-in-Iaw's copy of the
distilling was usually undertaken by women it seems likely that Metamorphoses?l The closet, study and bedchamber offered men
this particular closet was associated with women's household activ and women an intimate and comfortable reading habitat inducive
ity and productivityY At Hardwick Hall in 1601, women's closets to long hours of uninterrupted and intensive reading. in which
,,: were variously furnished for storage, for sitting and for personal they could choose their own company; personal chambers repre·
hygiene: the closet within 'the gentlewomens Chamber' contained sented distinct sites of reading, differentiated from communal
an 'Iron bounde Cofer' and two trunks; Elizabeth Shrewsbury kept tooms in the home and a marked contrast from an institutional
'a great Cofer, a wood Chest', two trunks and 'a little Close stoole' reading space such as the university library.22 Indeed, the privacy
in her closet; while the 'Closet within the Maydes Chamber' con these rooms offered was sometimes deliberately sought out by
tained 'a great Iron bounde Cofer, a wood Cofer, trunckes' and a readers: in February 1668, for instance, Samuel Pepys retired to
IS
single 'Chare covered with lether and guilt', indicating the use of 'my chamber' to read 'the most bawdy, lewd book that ever I
the room for a woman to sit in, and perhaps retreat to, alone. saw', L:Escholles des Filles: he deemed the book too provocative for
Peter Thornton argues that Elizabeth Shrewsbury'S withdraWing his wife but (seeking to justify his own double-standards) claimed it
chamber, which adjoined her bedchamber, 'seems to have been 'doth me no wrong to read for information sake (but it did hazer
more in the nature of a large private closet into which she could my prick para stand all the while, and una vez to decharger); and
withdraw': it was furnished for comfort (with chairs and a fire) and after I had read it, I burned it, that it might not be among my books
storage (with cupboards and chests), whiJe desks and chairs for to my shame ,?3 As Robert Darnton has argued, 'the "where" of
writing were kept in her bedchamber, and it was probably from reading is more important than one might think, because placing
here that she carried out her extensive correspondence.19 The broad the reader in his (sic) setting can provide hints about the nature of
contrasts that we may draw in men and women's use of their his experience,.M Privacy aUowed for a range of reading experi
closets need, then , to be qualified by the diversity of spaces and ences not easily afforded in public habitats - above all devotional,
living arrangements in early modern England; at the same time, we melancholic (see Helen Hackett, pp. 64-85) and erotic.
should not automatically relegate the objects women stored in their tn what we might term the gendering of private space, women
rooms - many of which are not detailed in inventories - to a lesser were specifically encouraged to identify their closets and bedcham
status than books: personal items and souvenirs can be a powerful bers as chaste spaces. As Richard Brathwaite put it in The English
means of self-expression. Gentlewoman (1631), 'we may be in security so long as we are
The thresholds of the bedchamber, closet and study doors sequestred from society. Then, and never till then, begins the infec
marked important boundaries between communal and personal tion to be dispersed, when the sound and the sicke begin to be
space within the home. These rooms, as Roger Chartier points promiscuously mixed.' Society, Brathwaite argued, posed a threat to
out, aUowed for considerable privacy, 'hiding what could not and women's chastity: thus he reminds women that 'You are taught to
should not be seen (care of the body, natural functions, the act of Enter your Chambers and be still. StiU, and yet stirring still .... Make
love) and offering a place for practices more than ever associated then your Chamber your private Theatre, wherein you may act
with isolation , .20 It was in these rooms that books were kept and some devout Scene to Gods honour' (in the space of her private
where reading in the elite home commonly took place (libraries chamber, devotional reading and contemplation acted as a signifier
Warnell Reading in a Room of Their Own 39
38 Sasha Roberts
her, and finally resumes the hunt - only to be killed by the...hpar; as remarked Thomas Freeman in 1614; when asked 'what's thy judg
Venus grieves over Adonis' dead body, he is transformed into an ment of William Shakespeare' in the anonymous Returne from Parnas
anemone. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis dwells upon Adonis' sus (performed at St John's College, Cambridge, c. 1601-2), the
effeminacy and Venus' 'quick desire', describing at length the stra press-corrector Judicio replied, 'Could but a grauer subiect him
tegies of seduction she employs to satsify her 'glutton-like' sexual content/Without loues foolish lazy languishment'.31 In The Scourge
appetite (548). In one notorious passage Venus presents her own oj Folly (c. 1611), John Davies of Hereford classed Shakespeare as
body as an erotic landscape ripe for sexual exploration, inviting one of the 'Paper-spoylers of these Times' for his Venus and Adonis-
Adonis with her 'round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough', 'Fine wit is shew'n therein: but finer 'twer/lf not attired in such
'sweet bottom grass' and 'pleasant fountains' (229-40). Taking pos bawdy Geare' - while in his marginalia Gabriel Harvey noted that
session of Adonis' 'rich treasure', she makes him 'her object' (255): 'The younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare's Venus and
'he now obeys, and now no more resistethJWhile she takes aU she Adonis; but his Lucrece, and his tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of
can, not all she listeth' (563-4). Venus dominates Adonis sexually, Denmarke, have it in them to please the wiser sort:32 Francis
verbally and physically: the poem enacts a role reversal with a Johnson has argued that the poem was actually priced as erotica:
woman taking the part of seducer, making a 'siege' upon a man's apparently costing over three times the normal price of fiction in
body (423) - 'Would thou wert as I am,' she laments, 'and I a man' 1593, the expense of a copy of Venus and Adonis was, he claims, 'due
(370)." to the book being classified under erotiCil rather than to Shake
The immediate success of Venus alId Adonis helped fuel the vogue speare's as yet relatively unmade reputation,.33
for Ovidian narrative poetry or epyllia (little epics), one of the most Certainly the seductive possibilities and erotic enjoyment of
popular poetic genres of the 1590s. While the most obvious reader Shakespeare's text by male readers was dramatised by contempor
ship of Elizabethan epyllia were the classically educated young ary playwrights. In Jervis Markham and Louis Machin's The Dumbe
gentlemen of Oxford, Cambridge and the Inns of Court - elite Knight (1608), for instance, two male visitors discover a gentleman's
institutions to which almost all writers and dedicatees of epyllia clerk in his master's bedchamber, enthusiastically reading aloud
belonged (with the notable exception of Shakepeare) - the transla from 'maides philosophie, or Venus and Adonis': at the bawdy
tion of tales from the Metamorphoses in the form of epylUa made a lines 'Graze on my lips, and when those mounts are drie)Stray
body of erotic myths avaiJable to a readership uneducated in Latin; lower, where the pleasant fountaines lie', he knowingly exclaims:
a readership that included women. Elizabethan epyllia typically 'Go thy way thou best booke in the world.'34 Shakespeare's poem
present 'bold' and beautiful women anxious for sexual gratification, was shown to be used, like Ovid's Art of Love, as a seduction
but their lust is rarely condemned - merely described, like their manual by its male readers - as Hic Mulier explained in Haec Vir
bodies, in sometimes graphic detail. While Shakespeare adds the (1620), 'a Man court[s1 his Mistris with the same words that Venus
,
odd moral overtone to his description of Venus ( careless lust stirs did Adonis, or as neere as the Booke could instruct him'.3S Thus in
up a desperate courage, / Planting oblivion, beating reason back, / Thomas Heywood's Faire Maille of the Exchange (1607), BawdIer
Forgetting shame's pure blush and honour's wrack', 556-8), the attempts (unsuccessfully) to seduce Mall Berry with lines from the
poem does not attempt the instruction in 'the prayse of vertues: sal" passage enjoyed by the gentleman's clerk in The Dumbe
_
and the shame / Of vices' that Golding claimed was necessary for Knight; Heywood assumes that his audience would be familiar
reading Ovid's Metamorphoses.30 Indeed, in his dedication of the enough with Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis to develop a comic
poem to the third Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare disclaimed scene featuring considerable (mis)quotation from the poem. Sim
the poem as lightweight, promising Wriothesley 'some graver ilarly in The Returne from Parnassus (c. 1600), the gallant Gullio
labour' in the future (usually assumed to be his Lucrece). Contem quotes supposedly 'pure Shakspeare' from the opening stanzas of
porary commentary on Venus and Adonis repeatedly drew attention Venus and Adonis to demonstrate how he would go about seducing a
to the poem's lascivious subject maUer. 'Who list read lust there's woman, and claims to keep his copy of the poem in an appropriate
Venus and AdonislTrue modell of a most lascivious leatcher', setting for a text of seduction - in bed, 'under my pillowe,.36
42 Sasha Roberts Women Reading in. a Room of Their Dum 43
Thomas Cranley's Amanda or the Reformed W hore (1635), similarly a 'Iiberall aris' degree in the ars anumdi, 'so that those who are most
locates the act of women reading Venus and Adonis. Amanda's prompt in this faculty of liberality, with most celeritie proceede
prostitution is signalled by the books she keeps by her bed: graduates' (p. 13). Cupid's guided tour of the University takes
Johnson through various public halls and lecture theatres; they
And then a heape of bookes of thy deuotion, drop in on a seminar where Johnson observes that the female
Lying upon a shelfe dose underneath, students 'were all perfect in their syllables, both English & Laline',
Which thou more think'sl upon than on thy death: hinting perhaps at contemporary concerns about the appropriate
They are not prayers of a grieved soule, ness of women leaming Latin and reading classical literature (p. ]3).
That with repentance doth his sumes condole, Finally, they arrive at 'Loves Library, which was very spacious, and
But amorous Pamphlets that best likes thine eyes, completely filled with great variety of Bookes of all faculties, and in
And Songs of love, and Sonets exquisit: all kindes of Volumes'. Cupid explains to Johnson thai 'our courtly
Among these Venus and Adonis lies, Dames' study the Library's books 'onely to exect or cut off their
With Salmads and her Hermaphrodite: thread·bare curtesans, and induce fresh and new furnished ones':
Pigmaliot!'s there, with his transform'd delight. Cupid's 'courtly' women read in order to master strategies of
seduction. Various authors are represented in 'Loves Library': two
(p. 32) Spanish poets (unidentified), Dante, Massinger, Shirley and Sir
Philip Sidney (perhaps the Arcadia, as mentioned by the Earl of
The 'amorous' subject matter of Ovidian narratives - Shakespeare's Northumberland to his son in 1609). Their texts are represented as
Venus and Adonis, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602) ascribed to recreational, not scholarly: 'I have ordained many hours of recrea·
Beaumont, and Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image tion and as many sorts of pastime', Cupid explains, 'that our Tomes
(1598), censored by the Bishop of London in 1599 - as well as may alwayes be imployed. 0 what a pitiful! University should I
their physical position 'upon a shelfe close underneath' her bed, have if I permitted vacations!' (pp. % and 101). Johnson singles out
are symbolic of Amanda's sexual depravity; her misplaced 'devo· one writer for women's recreational reading in private:
tion'. A woman reading Vellus and Adollis in bed becomes, in Cran·
ley's narrative, a prelude to her entertaining a lover, or client, in the There was also Slwkespeere, who (as Cupid informed me) creepes
bedchamber. (Similarly, in 1609, the Earl of Northumberland into the womens closets about bedtime, and if it were not for some
warned his son that vvives often turn 'to an Arcadia, or some love of the old out·of·date Grandames (who are set over the rest as
discourses, to make them able to entertain a stranger upon a hearth their tutoresses) the young sparkish Girles would read Shakespeere
in a Privy Chamber'.)41 Thus when Amanda's spiritual and sexual day and night, so that they would open the Booke or Tome, and
reformation takes place, it is marked by her reading matter and use the men with a Fescue in their hands should point to the Verse.
of space: 'she did abandon every earthly pleasure/Delighting onely (p. 99)
in religious bookes', enclosed herself within her room and 'forth of
the house she seldom times would walke/Unlesse it were to In their closets the girls choose to read Shakespeare's 'Verse': prob
Church, and backe againe'. ably a reference to Venus and Adonis, given that the students are
The implied connection between Venus and Adonis, a woman's learning the ars amandi and that 'Loves Schoole of Poetry' in
private chamber and female seduction is further developed in a Cupid's Academy is replete with figures from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
curious fantasy of young women readers, John Johnson's Tile Aca· The girls are described as 'sparkish' (easily inflamed), while Shake·
demy of Love describillg ye folly of younge men and ye fallacy of womell speare is perSOnified as a closet·creeper: a surrogate lover, a pimp,
(1641). Johnson recounts a dream in which he found himself in or perhaps a voyeur, who sneaks into young women's rooms 'about
'Love's University', presided over by its Vice Chancellor, Cupid. bedtime' when they are preparing for bed and perhaps undressing.
The University teaches 'women of several ages, witts and beauties' In the space of the woman's closet, the Shakespearean text impli·
46 Sasha Roberts Womell Ret2ding i" a Room of Their Own 47
cates both the author and his woman reader in erotic innuendo. women reading. as about male readers deriving £Ieasure from
Admitting the Shakespearean text into their closets is akin to admit imagining that they are watching women reading'. In addition,
ting a man; hence the sense of scandal surrounding reading both Johnson and Cranley perpetuate misogynistic stereotypes of
'Shakespeere day and night'. Indeed, the girls are accompanied in women's sexual appetites. Cranley can only envisage extremes of
their rooms by men who point to the verse 'with a Fescue in their female depravity or piety, while Johnson frames his dream with a
hands', vehemently misogynistic opening and ending, displaying his fear
In his Dictionarie of tilt French and English Tongues (1611), Randle and revulsion of female sexuality. The dream was inspired, he
Cotgrave defined the fescue as 'a straw, rush, little staulke, or explains, by his horror of the 'greedy desire' of his mistress who
sticke'; the OED notes that the fescue was commoruy used as a with 'that insatiable appetite of Sylla making me the cadnver of her
reading aid. But objects may not always be put to their orthodox love to feede her helluous gorge, never ceased to crave' (p. 1). Like
uses. Cotgrave suggests a range of alternative uses for the fescue Shakespeare's Venus, Johnson's mistress is never sexually satisfied.
.. besides reading in his Dictiollarie: 'fetuser. To touch, or wipe over TIle Aazdemy of Love and Amanda or the Reformed Wlwre hinge upon
.
with a feskue; also, to tickle by touching with a feskue'. The mul the disparities between the orthodox use of a space or object and
tiple uses of the fescue as both a reading aid and a tickler would the actual use made by women of their material worlds. The status
seem to resonate in The Academy of Love; rather as Brathwaite of women as subjects in their own rooms is fraught with difficulty
characterises idle books as 'Jjght�feat1ter 'd inventions', Johnson char for Johnson, Cranley, Davies and Brathwaite (as indeed for fictional
acterises the act of reading Shakespeare's verse as a 'tickling', characters like Middleton'S Harebrain): for them, private space
implicitly erotic experience. In an earlier episode we learn that a enables a woman to place herself dangerously beyond her hus
young student 'departed to a private closet, as I thought to lay up band's surveillance. The woman's closet and bedchamber are fash
her gold, whether it was so or not I am not certaine, because the ioned as sites of independent and illicit acts of reading - acts that
young gallant traced her forth, and tickled her too, as a man would compromise a woman's chastity - and it is to the closet and bed�
probably imagine, because she laughed so heartily': she had just chamber that Shakespeare's verse is shown to belong. This does not
been reading to the gallant 'a few straines' of her own poetry that mean that seventeenth-century women were furtively reading ero�
featured figures from the Metamorphoses (p. 33). Johnson implies tic literature in their private rooms: at work here is a topos of private
that women's familiarity with Latin, Ovidian literature and indeed space and female sexu'ality focused in the figure of the woman
with Shakespeare's verse prefigures their sexual familiarity with reader - a tapas that reveals more about the anxiety women's
other men in their private rooms. Shakespeare's verse becomes privacy could evoke for men than about historical acts of reading.
cast as a key textbook of female seduction; part of a young gentle In articulating this topas women are imagined as a distinct reader
woman's training in the ars amandi. ship for Shakespeare's poem - a readership that behaved differ
Cupid's female students studying the ars amandi, like the penitent ently from men, and responded to the text in particular ways,
Amanda, are, of CQurse, fictional characters; rhetorical constructs cultivating a dangerously intimate relationship with the poem
ostensibly designed to inspire moral improvement among women andlor its author; a readership unable to impose sexual self�
while providing a salutary warning for men. But Johnson and restraint, especially in private. The operating assumption here is
Cranley tread uneasily between condemning illicit sexuality and that women cannot be trusted with literature open to erotic
playing the voyeur themselves ('thy swelling brests are not dis� innuendo for it merely feeds their 'veneTian speculation'. As Mary
play'd enough/puU them up higher', instructs Cranley of Amanda. EUen Lamb has argued, 'at stake both in their reading and their
In tum, The Academy of Love and Amanda or the Reformed WllOre sexuality is the status of women as subjects, able to think, to desire,
arguably offer voyeuristic pleasures to the reader - a snoop at to produce meanings in their minds and bodies' .43 While this char
women's private rooms and sex lives. As Helen Hackett has acterisation of women reading Shakespeare spans a thirty�year
observed for Elizabethan romance, the narrative foregrounding of period (1611-41) it seems to heighten in the 16305 (the decade in
the female reader by the male writer 'may not be SO much about which Brathwaite and Cranley's texts appear, followed shortly by
4B Sasha Roberts Women Reading in a Room of Their Dum 49
Johnson's in 1641). For male commentators writing a generation ubiquity. In her commonplace book (c. 1631), Lady Anne SouthweU
earlier in the 15905 and early years of James' reign, Venus and Adonis copied out her short prose defence of poetry, originally written as
seems more significant in terms of encouraging male effeminacy a letter to her friend the Lady Ridgway (a maid of honour to
rather than female sexual depravity; by the 16305, the target of Elizabeth I). 'To my worthy Muse' is interesting not only as a rare
commentators' criticism and concern became women readers. This piece of poetry criticism by a seventeenth-century woman, but for
perhaps suggests a shift in the perception of the notional female the texts Anne Southwell mentions. 'How falles it out (noble
sexualised reader - and the literary markets supposedly supplying Ladye)', she asks, 'that you are become a sworne enemye to Poe
her - in the early decades of the seventeenth century:' an increasing trie'?
anxiety about women readers of erotic literature towards the 16305.
How, then, might we begin to access seventeenth-century women's I will take uppon mee to knowe, what hath soe distasted your
contact withVenus and Adonis? palate against this banquett of soules, devine Poesy. Some wan
The frequent reprints of Veil/Is and Adonis, especially in the early ton Venus or Adonis hath bene cast before your chast eares,
part of the seventeenth-century, together with the aUusions to the whose euill attyre, disgracing this beautiful nimph [divine
poem in contemporary drama, poetry and prose, indicate the poetryl, hath unworthyd her in your opinion . . . To heare a
poem's renown; it was 'one of the most popular books of its time', Hero & Leander or some such other busy nothing, might bee a
argues Harry Farr (p. 235). Brathwaite's Englis/l Gentlewoman and meanes to skandalize this art. But can a cloud disgrace the sum
Cranley's Amanda, both texts targeted at women, assume their mer?45
readers would be familiar enough with Venus and Adonis for them
to casuaUy refer to the poem. Examples exist in contemporary Anne Southwell expects her woman reader to share her own famili
literature of women displaying a careful knowledge of the text, arity with Venus and Adonis. Although this does not necessarily
such as the young woman who recognises 'an old passage between mean that Southwell actually read the poem (it was not listed
Venus mId Adonis' used as a seduction-piece by her suitor in John among her books), her comments are revealing for her character
Taylor's Divers Crab-Tree Lectures (1639) - while the tale may not be isation of the poem as wanton and for the authority she adopts as a
true, it had to be credible to Taylor's readers given his claim that the reader of literature. While she concurs with the view Brathwaite
'Lectures' were based on 'real life' episodes."" A similar claim is puts forward in The English Gentlewoman that women should read
made by the figure of Hic Mulier in Haec Vir (1620) when she divine poesy and not Venus or Adon s,
i she does not let a man speak
attacks the effeminate man's theft of women's proper 'inheritance': for her: she appropriates for herself the ability to discern what
'{you have) rauisht from vs our speech, our actions, sports and makes good reading, and trusts her own literary judgement (in
recreations. Goodnesse leaue mee, if I haue not heard a Man fact, her own library of over a hundred books included works of
court his Mistris with the same words that Venus did Adonis, or as literary 'criticism', such as the �duancement of Learning by Sr. frn:
neere as the Booke could instruct him' (sig. Ct). Hic Mulier implies ,
Bacon in quarto ).46 Moreover, unlike Cranley, Johnson or
she can recognise passages from Venus and Adonis; moreover, she Brathwaite, Anne SouthweU's concern about the 'wanton Venus or
effectively incorporates Venus' words, and by extension Venus and Adonis' is not with women's ability (or lack of it) to read the poem,
Adonis, within a community of female readers and speakers - part but with its impact upon the status of poetry per $e. For SouthweU,
of women's 'inheritance'. The 'Man-Woman' figure of Hie Mulier Venus and Adollis is not so much a threat to women's chastity as it is
and her claim to Venus and Adol1is is layered with ironies that can be to the reputation of literature.
read in many ways, but the implici t reference to women readers of Lady Anne Southwell's distaste for the poem, however, does not
Venus and Admlis in this and other contemporary texts suggest how seem to be shared by Frances Wolfreston, who openly acknow
pervasive Shakespeare's poem had become. ledged her ownership of the poem: the only surviving copy of
The only seventeenth-century commentary on Venus and Adonis the first edition of Ven us and Adonis, Q1 of 1593, is inscribed with
by a woman that I have found confirms this sense of the poem's her name and 'hor bouk' on the title page.47 Frances Wolfreston
50 Sasha Roberts Women Rending in a Room of Their Own 51
(1607-77) lived for most of her life at her husband's country estate LA:s The good womans clUlmpion; or, A defence for the wenker vessell
of Statfold Hall, near Tamworth (Staffordshire), where she built up (16501), upon which Frances wrote 'in prais of wemen a good
a library of nearly a hundred books. We know these were Frances' one'.49 Her sympathetic annotation to a 'defence' of women invites
books because she wrote her name in them in order, suggests Paul us to consider how a seventeenth-century gentlewoman might
Morgan, 'to distinguish this loan collection from other books at come to interpret a text, or indeed approach the act of reading
Statfold' (p. 200). Her collection comprised theology, history, CUT itself, with a strong sense of her own authority as a reader.
rent affairs, medicine, Latin and French, but was dominated by In turn, the different responses of Anne Southwell and Frances
English literature - including plays by Chapman, Dekker, Hey Wolfreston to Venus and Adonis are a useful reminder of how early
wood, Marlowe, Massinger and Shirley, poetry by Donne, Drayton, modern women readers might bring very different interests and
Greene, GaSCOigne, and no fewer than ten Shakespeare quartos.48 agendas to their reading and should not therefore be universalised
Morgan argues that Frances Wolfreston's books 'represent the as a reading group (a strategy employed by Brathwaite, Davies,
.. leisure reading of a literate lady in her country house, not consid. Cranley and Johnson). In fact, the two women's personal libraries
. ered important enough to be bound . . . the "idle bookes and riffe were very different: while nearly half of Frances Wolfreston's
raffes" specifically excluded by Sir Thomas Bodley from his library'. library was made up of contemporary fiction, Anne Southwell's
But Frances seemed to place considerable value in her books and library contained only a handful of literary texts (among them
sought to make them available to her daughters; she made special 'Orlando Furioso in folio', 'Spensers Fayrie Queene in folio', 'Dr
mention of them in her will, instructing that they should remain in Donnes Poems in Quarto' and 'The Swaggering Damsell a Comedie
a single collection and bequeathing them to her eldest son 'con in quarto') and was dominated by non-fiction - theological treatises
ditionally (that] if any of his brothers or sisters would have them and meditations, travel narratives, tracts on current affairs, books of
any tyme to read, and when they have done they shall returne reference, classical texts, critical works and, intriguingly, treatises on
them to their places againe, and he shall carefully keepe them military strategy and conductwbooks for men. Gentlewomen's
together' (cited by Morgan, p. 200). The presence of Venus and libraries (made up of both newly bought, loaned and inherited
Adonis in Wolfreston's library reveals how the prescriptions on volumes), and their access to books (such as Anne Clifford's use
women's reading put forward by writers like Brathwaite and Cran. of her husband's Chaucer) varied widely, pointing to a more
ley were not necessarily followed by women - indeed, Paul Morgan diverse picture of women's reading in early modern England than
condudes that Wolfreston's books 'may best be regarded as reveal prescriptive texts generally allow.
ing the reading tastes of a literate lady of the mid-seventeenth This raises the question of early modem women's agency in their
century' (p. 210). Her example points to the disparity between the reading. Seventeenth-century commentaries on women reading
fashioning of a female readerShip for Shakespeare's poem in fic
. Venus
alld Adonis fashion women as independent consumers in
tional and rhetorical texts, and the historical realities of women the early modern literary marketplace (while the printing of the
reading Shakespeare. Frances Wolfreston (like Lady Anne South poem by a woman, Elizabeth Hodgkinson, in 1675 indicates the
well) seems to bear little resemblance to the 'sparkish Girles' or possibilities for women as producers in the early modern literary
'coyest Dames' reading Shakespeare for their 'dosset-games': a marketplace):_ their unwritten premise is that women make their
quarter of her library was made up of religious texts, and she was own choices about what to read, buying or obtaining books for
commemorated (predictably perhaps) as 'a provident and vertuous themselves, and reading them in their own rooms. While we can
wife' upon the tablet erected to her memory in the family burial not assume that this measure of independence was commonly
plot at Statfold (Morgan, p. 199). She also took an interest in both enjoyed by literate women, it does suggest that there was more
the work of 'literary criticism' (she owned a copy, for instance, of flexibility for women as readers and consumers of books in early
Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie) and contemporary debates about modem England than is normally granted by writers of conduct
the nature of women: her collection included Swetnam's books (such as Brathwaite's English Gentlewoman) or rhetorical,
'reforming' narratives (such as Cranley's
The
arraignment of lewd, idle, froward and unconstant women (1645), and Amanda), or indeed some-
52 Sashn Roberts Women Rending in a Room of Their Own 53
times by historians of literacy,SO It is important to remember that late sixteenth century, increasingly elaborate locks with decorative
women's consumption of literature in early modern England was casings and complicated internal mechanisms were available to the
shaped by local differences, not only at the level of the household _ wealthy; in order to qualify as journeymen, locksmiths' apprentices
with different material possibilities for private reading offered by had to produce 'masterpiece' locks that could take up to an aston
different houses and different living practices adopted by different ishing three thousand hours to make.54 Coats of arms, personal
families - but in terms of the book trade. Frances Wolfreston might devices and classical motifs were engraved on casings, while the
have acquired her books while visiting London, but she could lock itself might incorporate an extraordinary range of anti-theft
equally have bought them from local booksellers such as John devices, including false keyholes, special buttons disguised within
Brooke in Coventry or Thomas Simmons in Birmingham.51 We the design to activate the lock, coats of arms covering the real lock
know that VnlUS and Adonis was sold further north than the Mid mechanism - even steel jaws with the power to amputate the
lands, Frances Wolfreston'5 territory: the poem is listed in an thief's fingers, pistols aimed to fire at the thief, or devices designed
.. inventory of ]616 for a bookseller's shop at York.52 Regional diver to shoot a sudden blast of pepper at the unsuspecting intruder. As
sity in early modern literary culture (a subject which requires John Evelyn was to remark, with the 'Improvement of our Lock
further research) must have afforded women different obstacles Smiths work [we] are now come to Produce Works as Curious for
and opportunities in the consumption of erotic literature. While the Filing, and admirable for the Dexterity in Contriving, as any we
rhetorical texts such as Brathwaite's English Gentlewoman and Cran meet with abroad:S5
ley's Amanda effectively treat women readers as a group and make My concern, however, is with the access that a lock and key
generalisations about their patterns of reading, the fragmentary affords; the power and status of entry into particular rooms within
surviving records of women readers and the early modern book the home. Both male and female patrons requested their locksmiths
trade point instead to the locality and diversity of women's reading to construct unique devices so that they could ensure maximum
experiences. security: as early as 1415, for instance, Isabell of Bavaria commis
sioned a lock which needed five keys to open it (apparently fitted
to the doors of the chambers of her ladies-in-waiting to exclude
TURNING THE KEY, THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF PRIVACY unwelcome male visitors), while Henri II had three separate locks
put on the door of his mistress (to deter intruders) which he could
There are two sides to a locked door: inside and outside. The locked operate at one stroke with his own 'master key' (Monk, p. 16).
door that encloses a woman within her chamber can also be used to Duplicate keys, though not unknown and frequently depicted in
shut a man (or woman) out: to exclude. The lock and key controUed literature for their strategic role in discovering secrets and arran
thresholds of privacy: personal space was created not only by ways ging illicit meetings, were apparently rarely used.56 As Thomas
of thinking, but by material artefacts. Tusser explained in The Points of Housewifery, United to the Comfort
Locks and keys assumed considerable significance during the of Husbandry (1580), not only do 'two keys make waste' but 'two
Elizabethan period. They had long been used as a metaphor for keys to one lock in the end is a thief'. As a measure of their
female sexuality; in The Academy of Love, for instance, Johnson writes importance in the household, Tusser devotes four stanzas to the
that if a man brings one of Cupid's students 'the golden key, hee use of locks and keys in his text on housewifery, advising that 'a
unlocks their modesties closet doore, and enters as freely, as a door without lock is a bait for a knave' and commanding the
knowne Puritane into his owne Congregation' (p. 57). The key housewife to 'Keep keys as thy life' .57 Without duplicate keys read
could also be used to denote housewifely thrift - a material as ily available, men and women were sometimes locked out: Anne
weU as sexual control, as an emblem from The Theatre of Fine Devi
ces Clifford, for instance, records that when she and her mother rode to
(1614) explains: 'the key doth note, she must have care to guidP/ 'Wrest, my Lord of Kent's' in 1603, 'we found the doors shut and
The goods her husba(nJd doth with pain prouide:53 But the lock none in the house but one servant, who only had the keys of the
and key were also important as symbols of power and status. By the hall, so that we were forced to lie in the hall all night, till towards
54 Sasha Roberts Women Reading in a Room of Their Owu 55
morning, at which time came a man and let us into the higher kept keys to the gallery, the door linking the gallery to the with
rooms where we slept three or four hours' (pp. 7--8). In the interests drawing chamber, 'the greate chamber dare at the staire hed' and
of safekeeping, written records were made noting the whereabouts 'the dore of the drawing chamber next my lords chamber'. One
of keys: on 17 February 1615, for instance, Sir George More William Billaday, probably yeoman of the wardrobe, kept keys to
recorded the delivery to Francis Copp of two papers and 'a title 'my Ladies Wardrope' and 'my Lords Wardrope', while the keys to
key, recovered from a cabanet' belonging to the Earl of Somerset, the banquetting house and 'the little garden dare against the par
then went to the trouble of having the record witnessed by four ler' were held by Goodman Thome. Women kept the keys to their
men.58 Household records also listed who held responsibility over personal chambers and, it seems, to the rooms immediately adja
which key: useful as an inventory, in emergencies, and perhaps in cent to them: the ladies' maids, for instance, held the keys to 'the
recriminations over lost keys. Today, such lists of the distribution of chamber next where the young Ladies lie', 'the staire hed dare by
household keys can be used to map men and women's access to the young Ladies chamber' and 'the chamber where the maids lie
next my Ladies chamber'. This suggests an arrangement of female
. Symondes' inventory of linen 'as J founde in my House at Cock.
£lifferent rooms within the home.
space in the Huntingdon household: a suite of rooms o�pi and�
esden, the taste of February, 1610, after the death of my Wife' is a controlled by women, to which only they had access Wlth a smgle
case in point.S9 Linen, a valuable commodity within an elite house key.
hold, was commonly kept in chests and trunks for safekeeping; The steward's list of double-plated locks reveals how access to
Symondes made a list of who held the keys to which trunks, at ceremonial, public and private space was carefully demarcated
the same time noting the condition of the locks and keys in his within the Huntingdon household according to gender and status.
household. Symondes predictably kept all the keys to the chests in Even if we cannot precisely reconstruct the spatial arrangements of
his 'studdy roome' (induding 'a fayer desk with his key' and a early modem houses, his list is an important reminder both of the
Cyprus chest 'with a good lock and key'); he also made a note of differentiations of private space withi" the elite home and of the
the 'new lock and key in the dore next adjoyning my studdy, complexity of social relationships in a large household, w.hereby
leading into the newe entry, and which William Turner made, and different men and women inhabit or take control of different
also in the dare a good iron boult'. But even after his wife's death, � �
spaces. For gentlewomen this differentiation cou d lIow for the
Symondes did not retain the keys to the chests in her rooms. The establishment of their own personal space and w ith It some mea
key to 'a Wainscott Cheast with a good lock, in the Iyttle chamber sure of independence. Certainly in Lady Anne Halkett's diary, the
within my Wifes Chamber' was 'in Frances keeping', while in the key becomes a way of enacting control: when working as a lady-in
'Garrett over my Wives Chamber' was 'a little black fosser, whereof waiting to 'Lady H', for instance, Anne relates how:
Besse hath the key'. Symondes apparently continued to observe
distinctions of gender in access to personal spaces and objects at there was something of concerne I had to say to her Ladyship,
Cockesden, keeping strict control over the items in his own study and asked where I might have her alone. Shee told mee shee
but with women taking responsibility for the chests in his wife's would come within a litle while to my chamber, where I wentt,
chambers. and within a litle while shee came there, and I, taking her in my
Nearly 20 years later, in May 1629, the steward to the Huntingdon arms, kist her and weUcomed her to my chamber as a great
estates drew up a schedule of 68 doors with double.plated locks. stranger. So locking the doore, wee satte downe . . . . While wee
The keys to prestigious public rooms were kept by high-ranking .
were att this discourse sir Ch. knockt att the doore. Wee let him
,
male servants: the steward held the keys to the great chamber, the in, and hee smiling said, 'I hope you understand one another .61
door linking the great chamber to the withdrawing chamber, the red
bedchamber (probably the prestigious guest or 'best' bedchamber), The women's 'discourse' concerned Sir Charles' apparent (adulter
the Armory door, the chapel door, the great wardrobe, the parlour ous) attraction to Anne and was resolved amicably, but my interest
and, interesting1y, the 'gentlewomans dining roome'.60 The yeoman in this passage lies in what it reveals about the etiquette of personal
56 $osha Roberts Women Reading in a Room of Their Own 57
space in an early modern elite household. Behind the locked door to marginalise women from 'public' life. Thus when Anne Halkett's
of Anne's chamber, the two women consider themselves 'alone' - in mother came to punish Anne for her earlier conduct in a clandes
private, and in confidence; although master of the house, Sir tine courtship, she did not send her to her room, but deprived
Charles has to observe the privacy of the woman's locked door Anne of her personal space and privacy: 'my chamber and liberty
and respect Anne's personal space {in fact Anne habitually secured of lying alone (was] taken from mee, and my sister's woman was
her privacy in the household, as she reveals in her comment that to be my guardian, who watched sufficiently so that I had nott
'after dinner retiring into my chamber as I usually did, the doore the least operhlnity either day or night to bee without her' -
beeing locked and I alone, I was reading a sermon with which I was an instance, perhaps, of matriarchal domestic enclosure and surveil
very well pleased' (p. 35]). lance (p. 16). Similarly, Mary Wroth gives voice to the 'liberty' of
Alice T. Friedman has persuasively argued that 'while the creation the woman's private chamber in The Countesse of Montgomeries
of the country house helped to place domestic work and family life Urania (1620): Pamphilia, for instance, 'went into her bed, but
directly under women's control, it also opened up the possibility for not with hope of rest, but to get more fibertie to expresse her woe',
an identification of women with the home and for the virtual while Bellamira explains how 'being come to my chamber, and
exclusion of women from publiC life' (p. 49). This sense of exclusion having liberty by privatenesse to exercise my sorrow in the absence
is powerfully voiced by Anne Clifford in her lament while her of all but it seife, I thus began to mourne' (my emphasis; pp. 51
husband was 'abroad' in London 'I stayed in the country having and 331). As Helen Hackett has observed, in Urallia private
many times a sorrowful and heavy heart . . . so as I may truly say, I chambers are the places in which women talk, read, and write -
am like an owl in the desert' (p. 28). But while it is true to say that powerful and sometimes empowering sites of elite, female subject
'woman was defined as a private rather than a public being' in early ivity in an otherwise restrictive world.63 This should indicate the
modern EngJand (Ferguson, p. 97), we need to remember the possibilities for agency that privacy could offer early modem
different ways of being 'private' in early modem England, and women.
the different distinctions of privacy that were both fashioned and Indeed, this sense of agency is precisely what Brathwaite, Davies,
secured in 'the private domain' of the home. As Jane Rendall, Karen Cranley and Johnson seem to fear. Their accounts of women read·
Offen and Ruth Roach Pierson have argued, the conceptual dual ing Venus and Ado1l;s voice an anxiety about the nature of women's
isms public/private, male/female 'contain intrinsic dangers: the first independence within the home and literary marketplace. While the
is that of universalising a particular pattern of experience. The image they fashion of the furtive woman reader of erotic literature
second is that of essentialising, o f implicitly acquiescing in the may be regarded as conventional rather than historically authentic,
separation of spheres in writing the history of women's worlds:62 we should interrogate the appearance and prevalence of such
Not only did many women move beyond 'the private sphere' of the images in particular periods; in other words, we can question
home in their lives, but 'the private sphere' itself is a complex literary and rhetorical conventions in terms of their historical and
domain that we should resist essentialising. cultural relevance. The configuration male writers articulate of
Against the context of the many restrictions imposed upon women's reading, sexuality and space point to important areas of
women in early modern England, the relative independence and tension in elite culture in the early part of the seventeenth century,
control that privacy offered - made possible by material objects and particularly perhaps the 16305: reading and female sexuality; the
spaces; chambers and closets, chests and cabinets, locks and keys - role of women as consumers in an expanding literary market; the
was surely of significance to gentlewomen, and should not be control of private space within the home; the use women made of
obscured by genera1ised rubrics of private experience as 'inescap their privacy. Feminist criticism has often associated women's priv
ably' public, or 'forever deferred'. Private chambers could offer acy with their subordination - women's exclusion from the 'public
women a degree of personal freedom, self-expression and arguably sphere'; the patriarchal 'domestic enclosure' of women - but as
empowerment which was unavailable to them elsewhere - even Helen Hackett and Lorna Hutson have observed, this axiom can
as, in different discourses, privacy was used as an ideological tool obscure the subtle topographies of gender and space operating in
58 Sashn Roberts Women ReJlding in a Room of Their Own 59
the early modern period.M The 'liberty by privatenesse' that 8. 'A British Parnassus: Mythology and the Country House'. in Fll5hion
women voiced, secured and protected surely indicates the import ing and Functioning of the British Country House, special issue of Studies
in the History of Art, '25 (1989), p. 231. Withdrawing rooms were to
ance of private space to the expression of female subjectivity - the
become 'still more feminine in character', Jackson-Stops argues, in
intimate relationship between 'Dwelling' and 'Being' within the
The Diary of Lady Anne Clifford 1590-1676, ed. Vita Sackville-West
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries (p. 232).
home, to use Henry Wotton's words. We do not always need to
(London: William Heinemann, 1923), p. 63.
9.
write early modern women Qut of their homes in order to discover
their opportunities for self-expression and empowerment. Rather, it 10. An Inventory of the household stuffe of the fourth Eart of Hunti,zgdon at
DOtznington Hirk, April 1635, Hasting Inventories Box 11: Huntington
is only by addressing the complexity and diversity of domestic
Library. On the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bedchamber, see
living arrangements that we will better understand both contem
Girouard, Life in IhL English Country House, pp. 109-10; Summerson,
porary practices of femaJe subjectivity and the place of books and Architecture, p. 53; Jackson-Stops, 'A British Parnassus', pp. 232-4;
reading in women's lives. Friedman, House and Household, pp. 142 and 147; Peter Thornton,
(London: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 293-6; and Orest Ranum,
Seventeenth Century lnt�rior Decoration in England, France (md Holland
•
ed. F.T Prince (London: Rout1edge, 1988), pp. xi-xx (aU references to
reprinted in James O. Halliwell, Ancient Inventories of Furniture, Pic
private rooms in early modern houses, see Girouard, Life in Ore English
University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 8. On the n i corporation of 'Refuges of Intimacy', pp. '125-7; Thornton, Seventeenth Century Inter
ior Decoration, pp. 303--4; and Friedman, HoUM and Household, p. 146.
Arthur Maynwaringe, 'Acrount of Disbursements at York House since
Country House. A Social and Architectural History (London: Yale Uni
versity Press, 1978), pp. 104--8; Lawrence and Jeanne c. Fawtier Stone,
14.
56, }22, 129-30, 135, 149, 152, 169-70 and 173-4; Thornton, Seventeenth
132 and 137; Mark Girouard, Lif� in the English Country House, pp. 47,
5. Cultural AesthLtics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Orna
Century Interior Decoration, pp. 290-3; Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics,
'A Room Not Their Own: Renaissance Women as Readers and Writers',
ment (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 76-7.
6.
pp. 1'25 and 128; and Alan Stewart, 'The Early Modern Closet Dis
in The Comparative Perspective Oil Literature: Approaches to Theory and
covered', forthcoming in Representations (I am grateful to Alan Stew
17. 'Thomas Hanbury, Inventory of his goods and chattels al Buriton' grateful to Peter Blayney for discussing Johnson's figures with me; he
'A Short Commentary on the Hardwick Inventory of 1601', in The 34. Cited in The Shakespeare Allusion Book, vol. I, p. 188.
The Furniture History Society, 1971), pp. 32-3. for a bound or unbound, new or second-hand copy.
35.
19.
Hardwick Hall illvelltories of 1601: IS-W, p. 16; see also pp. 31-2 of the
36.
Haec-Vir: or, tire Womanish-Mall (London, 1620), sig.Cv.
20.
Inventory. Cited in The Shnkespeare Allusion Book vou, pp. 67-8.
,
'The Practical Impact of Writing', in Philippe Aries and Georges A Survey of History, p. 272
38.
37.
Bejin, eds., A Hstory
i of t� Private ute, vol. 3: 111-69, p. 163. It is conunon in contemporary allusions to Shakespeare's work to
21. Titus Androllicus, IVi.41-64, ed. Eugene M. Waith (Oxford: Oxford refer to the text's leading characters rather than use a standardised
22.
University Press, 1992). notation of the text's title, as in Gabriel Harvey's remark that 'the
On being 'confined to the librarie' as a form of punishment practised younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis'
orie Plant, TIre English Book Trade. An EcotlOmie History of the Making and
at Lincoln College Oxford in the early seventeenth century, see Marj (see Shakespeare Allusion Book, vol. I, p. 56).
40.
Cited in Shnkespeare Allusion Book, vol. I, p. 189.
Cited in Shakespeare Allusion Book, vol. I, p. 220.
39.
Sale of Books (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974), p. 41.
23. TIre Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews Cited by Alice T. Friedman, House aud Household, p. 50.
(London: Bell & Sons Ltd, 1976), p. 59.
41.
24.
42. ' ''Yet teU me some such fiction": Wroth's Urania and the "Feminin
The Kiss of LAmourette. Ref/eetolls
i in Cultural History (London: Faber ity" of Romance', in Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760, ed. Clare
Brant and Diane Purkiss (London: Routledge, 1992): 39--68, p. 40.
43. 'Women Readers in Mary Worth's Urania', in Reading Mary Wroth:
and Faber, 1990, p. 167.
25. Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentlewoman (London, 1631), pp. 43
and 47. Representing Altertlatives in Early Modern Englalld. ed. Naomi J. Miller
46.
28. The Anatomie of tile Eng/isll Nunnery at Lisbon in Portugall (1623; lon Poetry', in HR, 14:3 (Autumn 1984): 281-4.
don, 1662), pp. 16-17. 'A List of my Baokes', in The Commonplace Book of l.Jldy Anne Southwell,
Venus and Adons i has attracted little critical attention, but on its por
Paul Morgan, 'Frances Wolfreston and "Hor Bouks" ', in The Library,
29. Folger Library MS: Vb.198.
trayal of sexual relations, see Willirup Keach, Elizabethan Erotc i Narra
6th series, XI:3 (September 1989): 197-219, p. 200. I am grateful to
47.
tives. Irony and Pl2thos in the Ovidum POt!try of Shnkespeare, Mar1moe, and
their Contemporaries (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977),
48.
Mark Thornton Burnett for bringing this article to my attention.
pp. 52-84; Coppelia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shake I discuss the implications of private ownership of Shakespeare's
speare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981): 21-46; Heather plays in quarto and a seventeenth-century woman's annotation of
Dubrow, Cspti1Jt: Victors. Shllkespeare's Narrative Poems (London: Cor
nell University Press, 1987), 15-78; and Jonathan Bate, 'Sexual Perver
the First Folio for notions of textual authority ni 'Reading the Shake
Cast. The Secoud Bow/e, cited in The Shakespeare AI/usiou Book, vol. I
31. SO. David Cressy, for instance, describes gentlewomen readers as 'privi
of women's limited powers of reading. Lorna Weatherill concluded (London: Phoenix, 1961); Albert A. Hopkins, The Lure of the Lock (New
in her research into women's possessions for the period 1675-1725 York, 1928); Keys and 1.Jxks in the Collection of the Coope.r·Hewitl
that household inventories contradict 'the received wisdom that
Blair, 'The Most Superb of all Royal Locks', in Apollo, LXXXXIV
Museum (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1987); and Claude
women were much less literate than men', for books were recorded
'in equal proportions in both men's and women's inventories'; (December 1966): 493-4.
similarly. the 'ce<:eived wisdom' of gentlewomen's limited reading
Parallel of the Ancient Archite.cture with the Modern (London, 1723),
55. An Account of Archite.cts and Archite.cture, reprinted in Roland Freart, A
blematic given the lack of historical records that have survived - but
Accessing women's reading of Renaissance texts is necessarily pro
key te<:hnolgy with me.
Victoria and Albert Museum for discussing early modern lock and
the field si too important to be ignored. For different approaches to Reprinted in Daughters, Wives and Widows: Writings By Men about
Women and MDrriage in England, 1500-1640, ed. Joan Larsen Klein
57.
Renaissance women's reading. see Mary Ellen Lamb, Genrkr a"d
Authorship in the Sidney Circle (London: University of Wisconsin (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992): 205--30, p. 225.
Press, 1990), pp. 7-10; idem., 'The Agency of the Split Subject: Lady 58. Folger Library MS: loseley Papers, L.b.647.
Anne Clifford and the Uses of Reading', in ELR, 22:3 (Autumn 1992):
60. 'Schedule of doors with double.plated locks' (May 1629), Huntington
59. Reprinted in James O. Halliwell, Anciwt Inventories, pp. 59-86.
Gender in &rly Modun England, ed. Jean Brink, vol. XXIII of Sixtmth Writing Women's History: lntenwtiollal Perspedives ed. Rendall et al.
62. Jane Rendall, Karen Offen and Ruth Roach Pierson, 'Introduction' to
Century Essays /lnd Studies (1993): 5--17; Louis B. Wright, 'The Reading
of Renaissance English Women', in Studies in Philology 28 (1931):
(London: Maanillan, 1992), p. xxxiii.
63. 'Wroth's Urania and the femininity of romance', p. 52.
54.
53. Cited by Ziegler, '''My lady's chamber'' ', p. 76.
Shire Publications, 1974), esp. pp. 13, 16-17 and 22. On early modem
See Eric Monk.. Keys: Their History and Collection (Princes Risborough:
locks and keys, see also Vmcent J.M. Eras, Locks and Kt:ys throughout
the Ages (London; Lips' Safe and Lock Manufacturing Co., 1957);
Gary Hogg. Safe Bind, Safe Find: the Story of Locks, Bolts and Bars