Isabella Whitney and George Turberville: Mid-Tudor Heroidean Poetry and Questions of Precedence

Scholarship on Isabella Whitney often positions her in relation to George Turberville. Her Copy of a Letter is habitually juxtaposed with—and oftentimes assumed to derive from—Turberville’s Heroycall Epistles (i.e. the earliest full translation of Ovid’s ancient Latin Heroides to appear in English print). Further similarities have been observed between Whitney’s Copy of a Letter and the Heroidean missives attributed to the fictive “Pyndara” in Turberville’s roughly contemporaneous auto-miscellany Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets. While there are a number of provocative parallels between Whitney’s and Turberville’s early works, the extent of the former’s reliance upon the latter may well be overstated in existing criticism. Reinvestigating various Whitney-Turberville connections, this essay calls renewed attention to the fact that the sequence in which The Copy of a Letter, The Heroycall Epistles, and Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets first reached print in the mid-1560s is hardly conclusive: it is therefore just as plausible that Whitney helped to shape Turberville’s Ovidian aesthetics as it is that Turberville provided the pattern for Whitney’s.