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"Good Ladies be Working": Scenes of Speaking in Female-Voiced Ballads

Thu, March 31, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Park Plaza, Floor: Fourth Floor, Newbury Room

Abstract

In the Elizabeth miscellany, A Handful of Pleasant Delights, is a ballad, ‘The scoffe of a Ladie, as prettie as may be, to a yong man that went a wooing’. One feature marking out this ballad is that it is voiced by a maidservant, interrupted at her needlework for her mistress by her suitor, a fellow servant. The verse mixes the language of work, of courtship, and proverbial lore. Unlike many of the other female-voiced poems in this and other miscellanies, she does not speak from within a mythopoetic landscape, but while at her domestic labours. As such, it shares a vocabulary of women’s work with Isabella Whitney’s servant poem, ‘A Modest meane for Maids’. And like Whitney’s poetry, it identifies the female voice with proverbial lore to craft a popular poetics that claims to speak for the interests of a wider book and ballad-buying public.

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