The “Great Queen of Lightninge Flashes”: the transmission of female-voiced burlesque poetry in the early seventeenth century

O'Callaghan, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6084-0122 (2014) The “Great Queen of Lightninge Flashes”: the transmission of female-voiced burlesque poetry in the early seventeenth century. In: Pender, P. and Smith, R. (eds.) Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan UK, Basingstoke and New York, pp. 99-117. ISBN 9781137342430 doi: 10.1057/9781137342430

Abstract/Summary

The essay uncovers evidence for the construction of the ‘woman author’ in the largely male vogue for bawdy burlesque poetry by tracing the circulation of a pair of verses through seventeenth-century manuscript and print miscellanies. It argues that just as these verses are reworked and recontextualised through the process of transmission, so to their ‘authors’ are re-embodied and ascribed different identities in different publication contexts. Female-voiced bawdy poetry raises particular problems for authorial attribution, rather than searching for the real woman behind the text, the essay examines how the ‘authors’ of female-voiced bawdy poetry were produced and reproduced through shifting formal frameworks and socioliterary networks.