English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century Laws in Mourning Andrea Brady March 9, 2006 11:44 MAC/EFE Page-i 0efeprelims Early Modern Literature in History General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, Brighton Advisory Board: Donna Hamilton, University of Maryland; Jean Howard, University of Columbia; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard McCoy, CUNY; Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures. Titles include: Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (editors) TEXTS AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Andrea Brady ENGLISH FUNERARY ELEGY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Laws in Mourning Martin Butler (editor) RE-PRESENTING BEN JONSON Text, History, Performance Jocelyn Catty WRITING RAPE, WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Unbridled Speech Dermot Cavanagh LANGUAGE AND POLITICS IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY PLAY Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (editors) ‘THIS DOUBLE VOICE’ Gendered Writing in Early Modern England James Daybell (editor) EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700 Jerome De Groot ROYALIST IDENTITIES John Dolan POETIC OCCASION FROM MILTON TO WORDSWORTH Sarah M. Dunnigan EROS AND POETRY AT THE COURTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND JAMES VI Andrew Hadfield SHAKESPEARE, SPENSER AND THE MATTER OF BRITAIN March 9, 2006 11:44 MAC/EFE Page-ii 0efeprelims William M. Hamlin TRAGEDY AND SCEPTICISM IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND Elizabeth Heale AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTHORSHIP IN RENAISSANCE VERSE Chronicles of the Self Pauline Kiernan STAGING SHAKESPEARE AT THE NEW GLOBE Ronald Knowles (editor) SHAKESPEARE AND CARNIVAL After Bakhtin Arthur F. Marotti (editor) CATHOLICISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH TEXTS Jennifer Richards (editor) EARLY MODERN CIVIL DISCOURSES Sasha Roberts READING SHAKESPEARE’S POEMS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Rosalind Smith SONNETS AND THE ENGLISH WOMAN WRITER, 1560–1621 The Politics of Absence Mark Thornton Burnett CONSTRUCTING ‘MONSTERS’ IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE MASTERS AND SERVANTS IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA AND CULTURE Authority and Obedience The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the Renaissance Texts Research Centre at the University of Reading. Early Modern Literature in History Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71472–5 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England March 9, 2006 11:44 MAC/EFE Page-iii 0efeprelims English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century Laws in Mourning Andrea Brady Brunel University London March 9, 2006 11:44 MAC/EFE Page-iv 0efeprelims © Andrea Brady 2006 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9781403941053 hardback ISBN-10: 140394105X hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brady, Andrea, 1974 English funerary elegy in the seventeenth century:laws in mourning/Andrea Brady. p. cm. “ (Early modern literature in history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 140394105X (cloth) 1. Elegiac poetry, English“History and criticism. 2. English poetry“Early modern, 15001700“History and criticism. 3. Funeral rites and ceremonies in literature. 4. Mourning customs in literature. 5. Grief in literature. 6. Funeral rites and ceremonies“Great Britain“History“17th century. I. Title. II. Early modern literature in history (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm)) PR549.E45.B73 821 .04093548“dc22 2005056489 10987 654321 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne March 9, 2006 11:44 MAC/EFE Page-v 0efeprelims For my mother, Suzanne Brady This page intentionally left blank March 9, 2006 11:44 MAC/EFE Page-vii 0efeprelims Contents Acknowledgements viii List of Abbreviations ix Note on Transcriptions x Introduction 1 1 The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric 10 2 The Rhetoric of Grief 32 3 The Funerary Elegy in Its Ritual Context 62 4 Spectacular Executions of the 1640s 90 5 Contesting Wills in Critical Elegy 131 6 Grief Without Measure 174 Conclusion 207 Notes 214 Bibliography 242 Index 262 vii March 9, 2006 11:44 MAC/EFE Page-viii 0efeprelims Acknowledgements I am thankful to the librarians and the staff of Gonville and Caius College, the Brotherton Library, the Bodleian Library, the Notting- hamshire Archives and the Centre for Kentish Studies for their assist- ance. The staff of the Cambridge University library, where this project began, and the British Library deserve special recognition. Alison Shell, Marie-Louise Coolahan and Jill Seal Millman furnished me with unpub- lished research. Andrew Lacey and David Norbrook generously took the time to comment on specific chapters, and John Kerrigan, Simon Jarvis, Colin Burrow and Gavin Alexander offered valuable insights and practical help. Cedric Brown and Andrew Hadfield were encouraging and patient series editors, and I appreciate the professionalism of the editors at Palgrave Macmillan. I am immensely grateful in particular for the support of Raphael Lyne and Jonathan Sawday, whose critical interventions saved this project from an unjust execution. I owe my greatest debt to Jessica Martin, whose supervision and friendship saw me through to its first conclusion. Keston Sutherland was the first to read this text; our conversations and collaboration made its insights possible, and continue to shape my thinking. For health and happi- ness in the midst of all this grief work I am also beholden to Lekshmy Balakrishnan, Emily Butterworth, Dom Del Re, Aline Ferrari, Tom Jones, Sam Ladkin, Tim Morris, Lizzie Muller, Dell Olsen, Malcolm Phillips, Natasha Rulyova, James Thraves and Al Usher, and for encouragement over great distances to my sisters Rachel and Alexis, and my mother Suzanne. Matt ffytche got me through the conclusion; with his help, my future projects can turn to joy. viii March 9, 2006 11:44 MAC/EFE Page-ix 0efeprelims List of Abbreviations (Place of publication is London unless specified otherwise.) BF Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies (1647) Carew Thomas Carew, The Poems, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949) Cartwright William Cartwright, Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, With Other Poems (1651) DE John Donne, The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes, ed. W. Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978) Donne John Donne, Poems (London: John Marriott, 1633) JonsVirb Jonsonus Virbius or, the Memorie of Ben: Johnson Revived by the Friends of the Muses, ed. Brian Duppa (1638) King Henry King, The Poems, ed. Margaret Crum (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965) Lewalski Barbara K. Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973) Loxley James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1997) HS Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947–1952) Wilcher Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) ix [...]... orations inspire ‘young men to endure every suffering for the public welfare in the hope of winning the glory that attends on brave men’.34 Keith Hopkins notes that such rituals subordinated individual self-interest to the common good, inspiring young men to heroic action in the hope of bringing glory to the family line’.35 Monumental art, funerals and poetry paid the wages of excellence in glorious... self-fashioning, but also drawing on the tradition of poetic licence for moralising endorsed elsewhere by the dead laureate Jonson The pastoral 22 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century mode singles out Milton’s elegy among the other contributions In addition to being the genre with which Virgil preceded his epic productions, the pastoral emphasises a temporal apotheosis and renewal in literary... examine how such conventions are learned and 1 2 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century enforced in the agonistic context of the early modern school From these shared origins and literary materials, elegists use criticism and satire to distinguish themselves from their peers Their critiques are suited to the agonistic structure of the emerging literary market; but they can also turn against... that the lamenting of deathes was chiefly at the very burialls of the dead, also at monethes mindes and longer times, by custome continued yearely’5 – show how the different elegiac genres commemorated the temporal processes of death and drying of the corpse, and of reconciliation of the bereaved with the community, processes celebrated in the folk and Catholic funerary rituals declining since the Reformation... obligations.18 Similarly, the mortuary ritual was a material reminder of the dead, and of the social and ethical responsibilities incumbent on the living Archival evidence of elegy s role in the funeral is presented in Chapter 3 The ubiquity of writing in the living and working spaces of early modern England has two interesting implications for funerary elegy First, it is crucial to understand elegies not just... the modesty of decorous language Elegists are caught in a double bind, for the greater their poems the more suspicious readers will be of their ambitions Rhetorical decorum requires that they suit their language and topoi to particular occasions through judgements of the needs of occasion; decorum 24 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century prompts the rhetor to attend to the ‘manners of the. .. character The first two were external and accidental, and ‘almost all Renaissance theorists agreed with Cicero and Quintilian that the goods of nature or fortune are not properly objects of praise in themselves, but should be treated chiefly as means of displaying the subject’s virtue in using them rightly’.22 Elegies, like other works of praise, were socially 14 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century. .. motion resolves the agonistic tensions of each half of the poem, and aligns the fatherly god Apollo with the swain now liberated in his pursuit of ‘Pastures new’ As the first person of the poem’s opening lines transforms into this independent speaker, capable of embarking on his own journey into the world, so Milton proclaims his own independence Even the name ‘Lycidas’, which derives from the Greek lykideus,... trends in anthropology, which have investigated rites rather than the experience of loss which they serve and in part produce Rituals and elegies can be understood to express both collective values abstracted from the memory of the dead and the individuality of emotional responses It is easy to undervalue the spontaneity and improvisation implicit in ritual behaviour or in 4 English Funerary Elegy in the. .. environment Posies were inscribed on everyday objects and keepsakes including funeral rings, while householders adorned their walls with moralising lyrics Poems were also posted in communal spaces such as the hall of Westminster School, where scholars customarily hung copies of verses on the King’s birthday.16 Walton records that 6 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century after Donne’s burial, . Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data Brady, Andrea, 1974 English funerary elegy in the seventeenth century: laws in mourning/ Andrea Brady. p. cm. “ (Early modern literature in history) Includes bibliographical. (editors) TEXTS AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Andrea Brady ENGLISH FUNERARY ELEGY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Laws in Mourning Martin Butler (editor) RE-PRESENTING BEN JONSON Text, History,. 11:43 MAC/EFE Page-2 0efeIntro 2 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century enforced in the agonistic context of the early modern school. From these shared origins and literary materials,