ABSTRACT
The Jacobean period was a time of advances in the status of women. Comparing it to earlier periods, Retha Warnicke states that it is the one most deserving the label ‘golden.’ 1 Many more women than before were receiving some form of education, and more female precedents had been established in publishing and patronizing books. The theatre was paying more attention to women, and though most dramatists simply exploited the gender issue, some were questioning traditional notions. 2 The court itself was relaxing its restrictions, despite the fact that King James himself was a misogynist. Neither his attitude nor the association of the theatre with loose morals kept James's Queen Consort, Anne of Denmark, from appearing in extravagant court masques and inviting other women of the nobility to do the same. Indeed, the Jacobean court appears to have served as a kind of training ground for at least two outspoken women writers — Aemilia Lanyer and Lady Mary Wroth. Lanyer was the daughter and wife of court musicians, while Wroth was the wife of a courtier and lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne of Denmark. The court was undoubtedly a formative environment for these two women. The confidence in public debate and the manoeuvring skills they display may be largely attributed to it. The court was also a source of powerful friends and acquaintances who were called upon by Lady Wroth to give moral support when scandal broke out and by Aemilia Lanyer to provide literary patronage. In their private lives the two women appear to have been nonconformists: loquacious and active, mothers of illegitimate children. In their published works they are obviously critical of patriarchal attitudes and ideas but, as in the case of other women writers, what they finally say is limited by their aims in writing and by established ideologies.
