Boyd Berry

The essay departs from the figures of Christopher Sly in Taming of the Shrew and of Charissa in the first book of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene to sketch the ventriloquizing of "the poor man" (who was always male) and "abandoned women" in the 1590's. Sly disappears from, rather than framing the action of Taming of the Shrew, and analysis of the work of Robert Crowley (in the 1550's) and of Henry "Silver Tongue" Smith (in the 1590's) shows how the poor man was silenced and marginalized in the late years of Elizabeth's reign. Analysis of the fad, initiated by Samuel Daniel in 1592 with his "Complaint of Rosamond," shows how "character" was, in addition to the sexual adventures and misadventures, a main attraction of the verse laments of these "abandoned" and highly isolated females. All of which finally suggests that what Richard Helgerson has called "the literary system" of that period should include writers who are commonly labelled "non-literary."