the discourse of lovers’ COMPLAINT poems by creating
a female complaint.
For women writing outside of the scope of the court
and the print marketplace, the ELEGY was a popular
genre. Elizabeth Cooke Russell, Lady Hoby (1528–
1609), and Anne de Vere, countess of Oxford (1556–
1588), both wrote elegies for family members. Other
women experimented with ways of incorporating
poetry into their religious, domestic, and social worlds
by keeping household books or by interspersing their
own poems along with copies of other authors’ poems
in their domestic papers. Because poetry was often used
as a mnemonic device, new studies of lower-class wom-
en’s writing may reveal that women produced poetry as
a device for remembering (and teaching) rules germane
to agriculture, cooking, or midwifery, among the vari-
ous other domestic tasks taken on by women.
See also MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS.
FURTHER READING
Beilin, Elaine. Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English
Renaissance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1987.
Demers, Patricia. Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern
England. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of
Toronto Press, 2005.
Pacheco, Anita, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s
Writing. Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002.
Emily Smith
“TUNNING OF ELINOR RUMMING,
THE” JOHN SKELTON (ca. 1517) “The Tunning of
Elinour Rumming,” is one of the best known poems by
JOHN SKELTON, poet laureate and former tutor to the
young Prince Henry, later HENRY VIII. Skelton, famous
and infamous in his day for his scandalous satirical
verses, was a cleric and noted scholar who also wrote
allegories, morality plays, and poems celebrating noble
patrons. While the exact date of this poem’s composition
is uncertain, its probable reference to a London alewife
named Alianora Romyng and internal details about the
brewing trade place it somewhere around 1517. Tunning
refers to the pouring of ale into casks for storing.
The poem’s loose structure mirrors the openness of
the women’s bodies it depicts. Composed in SKELTONIC
meter—short lines of two or three stresses ending in
rhyming COUPLETs—the poem gallops through a cata-
logue of lowly women ravaged by drinking Elinor’s
magical brew. The “comely dame” (l. 91) of the title is
in fact quite ugly: “Comely crinkled, / Wondrously
wrinkled, / Like a roast pig’s ear / Bristled with hair” (ll.
18–21). Her lips “slaver, men sain, / Like a ropy rain”
(ll. 23–24). Likewise, her customers come dripping
with tears and snot, “With their heels dagged, / Their
kirtles all to-jagged” and their corsets unlaced (ll. 123–
124). They are a drunken, lusty, and brawling lot,
completely unrestrained by the hierarchical and gen-
der rules of their society.
Critics in the early part of this century followed
Skelton’s contemporaries in regarding the poem as art-
less at best, and disgustingly vulgar at worst, often
terming it a “novelty.” More recently, however, critics
interested in Rabelais and the grotesque have applied
the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of carnival
to reclaim “Elinor Rumming” as a poem that celebrates
female companionship in a society that increasingly
deprived women of the means to make a living. Elinor
and her crew colorfully and gloriously burst through
the boundaries in which their culture tried to contain
them and provide a vivid glimpse of London street life
at the turn of the 16th century.
See also ALLEGORY, PATRONAGE, SATIRE.
FURTHER READING
Herman, Peter C. “Leaky Ladies and Droopy Dames: The
Grotesque Realism of Skelton’s The Tunnynge of Elynor
Rummynge.” Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early
Tudor Texts and Contexts, edited by Peter C. Herman.
Urbana / Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Carol D. Blosser“TWA CORBIES, THE” ANONYMOUS (before
1600) Often considered a parody of “The THREE
RAVENS,” The Twa Corbies is a BORDER BALLAD about
despair. An unnamed narrator overhears two ravens
(“corbies”) discussing their next meal. Their plan is to
feast on the abandoned body of a dead knight, pluck-
ing out his eyes, and then using his hair to make a nest
within his bones.
Most scholarship on this poem compares it to “The
Three Ravens,” pronouncing “The Twa Corbies” shallow,“TWA CORBIES, THE” 445