“Farre More Then Himselfe”: Figures of Women’s Friendship in Early Modern England

This dissertation uncovers how women become visible as friends in early modern literature through acts of imaginative invitation and poetic creation. My project intervenes in a critical discourse largely focused on men’s relationships to expand our understanding of friendship as a gendered phenomenon in the period, reading works across the genres of drama, romance, and poetry by both male and female authors. I explore the way that isolated female speakers take ownership of the ethical and performative layers of friendship, analyzing the strategies and figures they use to rework the utopian vision of friendship and define a space for themselves to speak.Historicizing texts by Shakespeare, Spenser, Wroth, and Whitney alongside other early modern sources published in England, I show how early modern women claim participation in the term “friend,” which signifies broadly across a spectrum that runs from the intimate commitments of ideal friendship to the utilitarian economic benefits of patronage. Each of these case studies confronts how the discourse of amicitia falls short for early modern women in its exclusionary masculinity and unrealistic idealism, and provides an amplified set of narratives for how friendship can be made. Rhetorical and literary performances are means for the exemplary female friends of my study to establish themselves as subjects in friendship—once “authors,” so also “friends.” The first part of my dissertation tracks how memory and imagination offer modes of transforming the present: Emilia (The Two Noble Kinsmen) and Celia (As You Like It) shape fresh realizations of friendship by recalling distant pasts, while Britomart and Amoret (The Faerie Queene) imagine an alternate future to transform discord to friendship. The second part examines poetry that acts as a placeholder in friendship’s absence and articulates its authors’ need for real companionship: Urania and Pamphilia (Urania) invoke echoic voices from the natural world, while Isabella Whitney (A sweet Nosgay) invites readers to share her relationship with her garden-text. These case studies illustrate how early modern women might claim the discourse of friendship, revealing dynamic models of female friendship that go beyond the masculine mythologies of amicitia.

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