Diana Primrose

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Diana Primrose (fl. 1630) would seem to have been a poet active in the first decades of the seventeenth century. There is only one piece of evidence of her existence: the title page of A Chaine of Pearle, Or a Memoriall of the peerles Graces, and Heroick Vertues of Queene Elizabeth of Glorious Memory. Composed by the Noble Lady, Diana Primrose (London, 1630). Some have contended that the poet used an allegorical pseudonym, but the Primrose family were well-established. There is, however, no record of a "Diana." In 1805 John Nichols identified Anne Clifford as the author, but while there is some circumstantial evidence, nothing definitive has come to light. A Chaine of Pearle takes the first part of William Camden's Annals of Queen Elizabeth (1615) as its source, and listing, as it does, the virtues of Elizabeth I — the "pearles" of the title — it is generally considered to have been a pointed criticism of Charles I.

[edit] Works

• A Chaine of Pearle, Or a Memoriall of the peerles Graces, and Heroick Vertues of Queene Elizabeth of Glorious Memory. Composed by the Noble Lady, Diana Primrose | Dat Rosa mel apibus, qua sugit Aranea virus. London: Printed for Thomas Paine, and are to be sold by Philip Waterhouse at his shop at the signe of St. Paul's-head in Canning Street neare London-stone, 1630.

[edit] Resources

• Greer, Germaine, et al., eds. "Diana Primrose." Kissing the Rod: an anthology of seventeenth-century women's verse. Farrar Staus Giroux, 1988. 83-89.