Still, we gain some important insights that allow us to deal more substantially with the content of these poems by attending to the poets’ own ambitious representation of world history, the scholarly gestures of these works that are important components of their literary and intellectual ambition, and how exactly these poets imagined the globe. Acknowledging and appreciating the grand design in women’s history poems as well as the inevitable flaws in those designs can help us move away from attributing faults and expressions of failure to the rhetorical exigencies placed on women writers as well as their insecurities and limited educational opportunities.
“She for Her Potency Must Go Alone”: Anne Bradstreet’s Semiramis
Since the start of the twenty-first century there has been a small surge in scholarship on Bradstreet’s “The Four Monarchies” that better accounts for the context and aims of this long poem by either exploring her vision of the world or situating her poem among other political works by English women writers during the seventeenth century. Jim Egan and Samuel Fallon have developed readings of Bradstreet’s worldmaking that find in her elegies a fulfillment and refinement of ideas explored in the “Monarchies.” Egan uses Bradstreet’s comparison of Alexander the Great and Sir Phillip Sidney in her elegy on Sidney to make the case that her extensive treatment of Alexander in both works was meant to connect New England to the East. Fallon distinguishes between space and time in Bradstreet’s worldmaking, and his reading of the “Monarchies” identifies a tension between the totalizing project of the history and the present time of poetic address evident in her apologies (pp. 107–108). As he explains, “Worldmaking in such moments is not a matter of charting global space, but something more modest: the careful tending of a fragile intimacy” (Fallon, p. 103). For Egan and Fallon, the elegies fulfill what is only begun in the “Monarchies” through the comparisons and identifications that this lyric genre invites. But in stressing the subtlety of Bradstreet’s “rhetorical sleight of hand” (Egan 2011, p. 23) and her modest “tending of fragile intimacy” (Fallon 2018, p. 103), both critics redirect our attention away from the naked ambition of Bradstreet’s longest poem. Scholars who focus on Bradstreet’s poem as an instance of political writing, including Susan Wiseman (2006), Mihoko Suzuki (2009), and Gillian Wright (2013), pay more attention to Bradstreet’s literary ambitions in “The Four Monarchies” as well as her complicated representation of monarchy.
Anne Bradstreet’s treatment of Semiramis in two works, “The Four Monarchies” and the elegy “In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory,” provides an opportunity for thinking about politics, worldbuilding, and genre.5 This notorious queen was known both as an empire builder and as a licentious manipulator. She is rumored to have had her husband Ninus killed in order to gain the throne and then to have had an incestuous relationship with her son, Ninias, or to have dressed as him in order to rule in his place. In the elegy, Bradstreet uses these qualities to raise Queen Elizabeth in comparison:
But time would fail me, so my tongue would to,
To tell of half she did, or she could doe.
Semiramis to her, is but obscure,
More infamy then fame, she did procure.
She built her glory but on Babels walls,
Worlds wonder for a while, but yet it falls.
(Bradstreet 1678, p. 212)
Bradstreet’s use of the inexpressibility topos in this passage builds on Semiramis’ accomplishments as the known quantity, which serves to elevate Elizabeth’s greatness while also striking a warning note about the decline of past empires.
Bradstreet’s treatment of Semiramis in “Monarchies” illuminates the ways in which the aims of her longest poem differ fundamentally from those of her lyric elegies. Following Ralegh, in this poem Bradstreet focuses on the extent and grandeur of her building projects, not their fall, and foregrounds mythmaking and competing interpretations through repeated references to “reports,” “aspersions,” and what “poets feigned.” As a poem, it is both less nationalist and less feminist than the Queen Elizabeth elegy. While in the elegy Bradstreet seeks to underscore both Semiramis’s personal infamy and the inevitable fall of Babylon in the service of demonstrating that Elizabeth I is more virtuous and more powerful, in the “Monarchies” she is far more interested in praising what Semiramis accomplished and more conflicted in treating her rumored licentiousness. For example, while in the elegy Bradstreet sets infamy and fame in opposition in order to draw a distinction between Semiramis and Elizabeth, in the “Monarchies” she frames this kind of opposition as a contradiction that at times is attributed to Semiramis’s character (“She like a brave Virago playd the Rex/And was both shame and glory of her Sex”) and at other times is attributed to the bias of historians (“That undeserv’d, they blur’d her name and fame/By their aspersions, cast upon the same”) (1678, pp. 71–72).
Both Bradstreet and Ralegh refute the charge of Semiramis’s licentiousness, but while Ralegh’s observations about the risks taken by conquerors underscore both his own acumen in judging others and his “labour and hazard” in the service of the crown, Bradstreet dwells more on sexed dichotomies that “blurred [Semiramis’s] name and fame.” For Ralegh, Semiramis’s success stands as evidence that calumnies against her are the work of “envious and lying Grecians” (Ralegh 1652, pp. 183):
For delicacy and ease doe more often accompany licentiousnesse in men and women, than labour and hazard doe. And if the one halfe be true which is reported of this Lady, then there never lived any Prince or Princesse more worthy of fame than Semiramis was, both for the works she did at Babylon and elsewhere, and for the wars she made with glorious successe….
(Ralegh 1652, p. 183)
Bradstreet follows Ralegh in stressing Greek lies and Semiramis’s power, though with subtle differences that speak to how she is exercising judgment and claiming authority:
She flourishing with Ninus long did reign,
Till her Ambition caus’d him to be slain.
That having no Compeer, she might rule all,
Or else she sought revenge for Menon’s fall.
Some think the Greeks this slander on her cast,
As on her life Licentious, and unchast,
That undeservd, they blur’d her name and fame
By their aspersions, cast upon the same:
But were her virtues more or less, or none,
She for her potency must go alone.
(Bradstreet 1678, 72)
Unlike Ralegh, Bradstreet does not argue that voluptuaries are rarely as successful as Semiramis was; rather, she suggests that Semiramis’ “potency” must speak for itself. This is a subtle difference and one that can be attributed in part to the epigrammatic style of Bradstreet’s poem. But while Ralegh takes pains to demonstrate that he has the experience and judgment to evaluate the character of rulers, Bradstreet reports on and then questions several salacious rumors, never fully putting them aside but instead keeping the scholarly debates in play. We might read this as a reflection of her concern with what is said about authoritative women as well as her favorable opinion of female monarchs. However, in her elegy on Queen Elizabeth, Bradstreet takes a stronger, more feminist line: “Let such as say our Sex is
