5 - The Female Impersonator

Summary

Nowadays few male poets would dare to adopt a female voice, but in the seventeenth century poets as apparently macho as Ben Jonson, who had killed a man, did not shrink from speaking as women of women's affairs. Marvell could be a nymph upon occasion. Rochester had no hesitation in writing in a female voice; indeed, adopting a female persona seems to have permitted a kind of paradoxicality in his thinking that was not accessible to masculine authority. The classical precedent was to be found in the Heroides, Ovid's impersonation of the most famous heroines of antiquity, although every dramatist of every age has written for heroic female characters.

In 1673 Rochester impersonated a real woman in order to chastise a fellow-courtier. Negotiations for the marriage of Henrietta Maria Price, one of Queen Catherine's Maids of Honour, had been jeopardized by the boasting of Lord Chesterfield, erstwhile Chamberlain to the Queen, that the lady was in love with him. Miss Price could not afford to antagonize so powerful a personage but she had somehow to stop his mouth. Rochester came to the rescue by penning a note for her to include with the rich present of a pair of Italian gloves:

My Lord –

These are the gloves that I did mention

Last night and ‘twas with the intention

That you should give me thanks and wear them,

For I most willingly can spare them.

Having impersonated the embarrassed young woman, it was easy to switch to impersonating the presumptuous grandee himself.

When you this packet first do see,

‘Damn me,’ cry you, ‘she has writ to me;

I'd better be at Bretby still

Than troubled with love against my will.

Besides, this is not all my sorrow:

She's writ today, she'll come tomorrow.’

Chesterfield took the present and the point that it was prompted by

neither love nor passion

But only for your recreation.

(Walker, 61–2, ll. 1–4, 5–10, 15–16)

Miss Price's marriage with his kinsman Alexander Stanhope went ahead. Chesterfield copied the poem into his letter-book and, we may hope, behaved with more circumspection thereafter.