SOURCE: "Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson," in Criticism, Vol. XXXV, No. 3, Summer, 1993, pp. 357-76.

Below, Coiro discusses the significance gender and class in relation to a writer's decision to print his or her works during thte Renaissance. She then compares the Social Commentary in Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum with that in Ben Jonson's The Forrest.

The growing and increasingly central interest in writings by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women is beginning to have some material effects on the literary profession. In the fifth edition of the Norton Anthology (published in 1986), for example, a literature teacher could find a couple of poems by Lady Mary Wroth, one psalm by the Countess of Pembroke, and two poems by Queen Elizabeth. In the just-published sixth edition (1993), the number of texts by women has significantly increased, both in number and...