ABSTRACT
In “Thoughe I seem straunge sweete freende be thou not so,” possibly composed by Anne Vavasour, the female speaker uses multiple love tokens to symbolize her relationships with different male suitors.1 As is well known, in the late sixteenth-century, Vavasour conducted an affair-which produced a child out of wedlock-with the Earl of Oxford, and she also maintained a sexual liaison with Sir Henry Lee, the Queen’s Champion. Although all copies of “Thoughe I seem straunge sweete freende be thou not so” are not clearly assigned to Vavasour, two manuscripts subscribe this poem with her name and one associates the poem strongly with her though context. While the female speaker’s frank admission to having multiple suitors and to manipulating perceptions of sexual honor stray from what we might expect from a woman poet, Vavasour’s life, too, strayed from the typical cultural expectations for properly chaste femininity. Even though it is not certain that Vavasour composed “Thoughe I seem straunge sweete freende be thou not so,” there is a reasonable possibility that she did. Anne Vavasour was in many ways an atypical woman; it makes sense that she might write an unconventional poem. And, if she did not write “Thoughe I seem straunge sweete freende be thou not so,” it remains interesting in the context of this study to consider how someone else-possibly a man fascinated with or titillated by her life history-fantasized about the workings of her poetic imagination, since the manuscript history of the poem repeatedly associates it with Anne Vavasour, not just any female speaker.
