“Lawfull avarice”: rachel speght's mortalities memorandum and the necessity of women's education

Abstract

Rachel Speght, the author ofThe Mouzell for Melastomus(London, 1617) andMortalities Memorandum(London, 1621), can no longer be considered a neglected writer. The latter of these, Speght's only publication in verse, contains two poems. The title work is a conventional Protestantars morienditext; it is tightly structured, learned in its accumulation of scriptural and classical references and authoritative both in matter and tone. “Prefix[ed]” to the “Memorandum” is “The Dreame”. It allegorically represents Speght's personal journey from Ignorance to Knowledge and documents both her exhilarating entrance into the world of learning and her devastating departure from it. As evidenced by her various writings, Speght applied her learning to the development of her vocation as a writer. Because of the distinctive style, tone and stated purpose of Speght's poems, they have generally been discussed as separate and largely unrelated works. Nevertheless, Speght draws the two together, turning the personal meditations of her “Dreame” into the preface for her public oration against Death. By prefacing her publicars moriendioration with her private “Dreame”, Speght provides an uncharacteristic autobiographical perspective on the traditional death-treatise, but the juxtaposition of these two works also allowed Speght to give voice to her increasing anxieties about the loss of her true vocation as a writer. In this way, the presence of the “prefix” significantly affects the reader's reception of the “main” text. Yet, the expressions of anxiety found in Speght'sMortalities Memorandumare more than her own, for by allegorising the experiences of her “Dreame”, Speght universalises them; in effect turning her personal “Dreame” into what Randall Martin hasas called “an Everywoman story”. Like the archetypal Everyman story, the fundamental struggle of Speght'sMortalities Memorandumis not only with humanity's preparations for death, but also with its perceptions of life. As Speght constructs it in her poetry, life is a contemptible prison which denies women the liberating salvation of education for their minds and their souls. A close examination of the poems which comprise herMortalities Memorandumreveals how Speght perceived and expressed these concerns.