Name: Bridget Whearty

Title: "Singing As Women Do: Skelton, Gascoigne, and the Question of Lullaby."

This paper is an examination of two poetic lullabies in the 16th century: John Skelton's "My darling dere" and George Gascoigne's "Lullaby of a Lover." Lullabies, I suggest, are under-examined and under-theorized precisely because they are the site of a near-perfect ventriloquism. The conceit of the lullaby as a lyrical utterance that is female-voiced, intimate, spontaneous, distinctly un-literary allows for poets to toy with the boundaries of art, lyric, and gendered voice. Skelton and Gascoigne's lullabies are particularly useful because they stand at a moment of instability and redefinition in the tradition between medieval lullabies and the proliferation of lullaby lyrics in the 17th century. Ultimately, I argue, that Skelton and Gascoigne shift traditional cradle-song narrative conventions against and upon the physical body of the lulled subject, revealing the lullaby as a richly anxious poetic masquerade in which male-voiced sexual desire culminates in a perverse celebration of failure, abandonment, and linguistic dismemberment.