Poetic Exchange Between Sir John Harrington and Lady Mary Cheke

Women's Studies 539A
A Poetic Exchange Between
Sir John Harrington I and Lady Mary Cheke (ca.1527-1616)

AN OBSERVATION AGAINST
Woemen fondlie gathered out of
the scriptur & thus turned in
            to verse.

There was not certaine when a certaine Preacher,
That never learn’d, and yet became a teacher:
Who having read in latine thus a text,
Of (erat quidam homo*) much perplext
Hee seem’d the same with studie great to skan,               5
In English thus, there was a certaine man.
But now, quoth hee good people note you this
Hee saith there was, he doth not say there is:
For in these dayes of ours it is most certaine
Of promise, oath, word, deed no man is certaine              10
Yet by my text, you see it comes to passe
That surely once a certaine man there was;
But yet I thinke in all the Bible no man
Can finde this text, there was a certaine woman.

*erat quidam homo, Latin for "There was a certain man," the initial words of many stories in the Bible.

THE SAME FULLIE AND
fairely answered as followeth.

That in the bible no man yet could finde
A certaine woman argues men are blind;
Blind was the preacher and had little learning
The certaine cause of his so ill discerning.
A certane woeman of the multitude                                     5
Once blest the papps* that gave our Savour food
A certaine woeman eke a milstone threw
From Thebes walles and so Abimilech slew;*
And ift be true that holy writt doth say,
There was a certaine woman call’d Lydia,*                      10
Nay more, though it by men be overswaid
The text reportes there was a certaine maid:
Which argues there weir certaine woemen then,
Certaine indeed, more certaine farr then men.
Well might your preacher then stand much perplext,    15
To see how grossly hee bely’d his text.
And blush his matter was no better suited,
Then by a woeman thus to be confuted:
Yet for his comfort one true note be made
When there is now no certain man he sayd.                     20

*papps, breasts
*Abimilech, Abimelech, bastard son of Gideon and ruler of Israel for a short time, whose story is told in Judges 9.
*Lydia, a Christian convert mentioned in Acts 16:14-15.

Lady Mary Cheke was an attendant on Queen Elizabeth I and extraordinary lady of the Privy Chamber at Elizabeth's coronation (Stevenson and Davidson, Early Modern Women Poets, 21); Sir John Harrington was the queen's nephew (through his father's marriage to a "natural"--bastard--daughter of Henry VIII). Their "answer poems" are an example of "flyting," a ritualized war of words popular at the Tudor court. (See Chris Boswell, The Culture and Rhetoric of the Answer Poem 1485-1626 .) Like many other answer poems in early modern England, they circulated in manuscript among the literati of the era.

These two poems serve as unattributed epigraphs to the polemical tract Womans Worth by William Page (1590-1664). Page was an English divine and fellow of of All Soul's College, Oxford. He published three books, but this particular work never saw print. It is similar in tone and content to published tracts of the Woman Controversy, the late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth-century debate about the nature of women. There are three extant manuscript copies of Womans Worth in three different hands, none of them Page's; one is held by the Wigan Borough Archives; another by the Bodleian Library; and a third by the British Library. I have reproduced the orthography of the Wigan version; the line numbering is editorial.