ABSTRACT
Possessive, imperial fantasies accompany John Donne’s and Ben Jonson’s imaginings of land, regardless of poetic kind. In Donne’s playfully erotic Elegy 19, the poet envisions the female beloved as his male speaker’s very own America and anticipates a sexual conquest that will render her his kingdom; similarly, Jonson’s speaker praises Sidney’s estate in “To Penshvrst” by celebrating the generous hospitality that allows him to think the place not just his own, but the object of his kingly reign. While these expansive visions of the regally absolute ownership of real property are well known to scholars of the English Renaissance, the similar fantasies underpinning the poetry of Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson are not as obvious or as easily detected. They become evident, nonetheless, when one thoroughly understands the intense cultural pressure to appear economically disenfranchised sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English women faced and when one attends carefully to the innovative writing strategies poets such as Cavendish and Hutchinson used to negotiate those pressures. In stark contrast to male poets like Donne and Jonson, Cavendish and Hutchinson must resort to encoded means to envision their ambitious desires as subjects of property. Ultimately they find ways to imagine themselves as empresses of vast territories indeed.
