The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy

By James Doelman

The early Stuart funeral elegy was a copious and digressive genre, and exceptional deaths pressed elegists to stretch beyond the usual rhetoric of grief and commemoration. This book engages in a broad reading of the period’s rich trove of funeral elegies, in both manuscript and print, and by poets ranging from the canonical to the anonymous. The book stands apart from earlier studies by its greater focus upon the subjects of funeral elegies (rather than the poets), and how the particular circumstances of death and the immediate contexts affected the poetic response. Individual deaths are understood in relation to each other and other prominent events of the time. While the book covers the period 1603 to 1640, the 1620s stand out as a tumultuous decade in which the genre most fully engaged in matters of political controversy and satire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Mar 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526144201

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The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy

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The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy

James Doelman

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © James Doelman 2021

The right of James Doelman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4418 8 hardback

First published 2021

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: The dance of death. Oil painting. 72 x 55 cm. Wellcome Library no. 45066i

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of poems in the online appendix

List of abbreviations and conventions

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1Prince Henry

2‘A Prison is in all things like a Grave’: elegies on Arbella Stuart, Sir Thomas Overbury, and Sir Walter Ralegh

3Royal deaths

4Military deaths of the 1620s

5To ‘Silence Slanders toungue’: elegies on George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham

6A defence of suicide: William Douglas’ funeral elegy on the Second Earl of Lothian

7Funeral elegies on elite women

8From robe to winding sheet: funeral elegies on churchmen and scholars

9Distracted into heresy

Afterword

Appendix: terminology, genres, and sub-genres

Select bibliography

Index

Poems in the online appendix

This book discusses a large number of manuscript funeral elegies, which are not readily available to most readers. For this reason, an accompanying online appendix, hosted at Manchester University Press (www.manchesterhive.com/funeral-elegies), provides full transcriptions of all manuscript elegies that are discussed at any length in the book. The elegies are organized chronologically and identified by their first lines.

25 February 1601

Devereux, Robert, Second Earl of Essex

‘Welcome sweete Death the kindest freind I have’

6 November 1612

Prince Henry

‘Ay mee poore earth why am I made receaver’

25 September 1615

Stuart, Arbella

‘Too soon alas into the ears of all’

‘Heere lyes shee whome death befreinded’

6 March 1616

Beaumont, Francis

‘I doe not wonder Beaumont thou art dead’

November 1617

Fisher, Ambrose

‘I am amaz’d to see Theologies’

29 October 1618

Ralegh, Sir Walter

‘Tread softly, passinger, and first advize’

2 March 1619

Queen Anne

‘I chide no Blazing Starr yt did forgoe’

‘Nor can faire Isis hide her cristal streames’

‘Poor souls could not a royal theme, nor yet’

‘Yow men of Brittain, wherefore gaze yow soe’

‘Yow towringe spirits whose art-yrradiate eyne’

18 April 1619

Aylworth, Dr Anthony

‘Wake yet mine eyes though yet scarce slept at all’

26 August 1619

Yale, Thomas

‘Alas poor muse, what wast thou only born’

2 January 1621

Lapworth, Mary

‘Weep on poor fools whilst with your sadder folly’

February 1622

Savile, Sir Henry

‘Adored Ghost, or wt ere doth remaine’

‘Great Tacitus I must lament thy fall’

‘When learned Savill worne wth quotidian paine’

24 January 1624

King, Anne

‘When other poets veines are done’

6 March 1624

Kerr, Robert, Second Earl of Lothian

‘The emptie vessells sound, the full are dumbe’

5 November 1624

Wriothesley, James

and

10 November 1624

Wriothesley, Henry, Third Earl of Southampton

‘I know you love me I would therefore doe’

‘My thinks I see the Ile of wyght to floate’

‘Reader if you have not heard’

27 March 1625

King James VI and I

‘Can Christendomes great champion sinke away’

‘Hast thou binn dead these foure and twentye howers’

‘He who was our life, is dead’

‘Mounte up my muse, yt thinkes of Kings’

‘O troble not the sacred rest’

‘Of late a Serjeant notinge ye reporte’

‘Fames new Wôrthie, Earths late lîght,’

June 1625

de Vere, Henry, Eighteenth Earl of Oxford

‘Shall Cannons roaring rent ye ayre asunder’

‘The moorening bannors that theire blackwinge spred’

‘Thou that wearth arst glorious glaring high’

18 June 1626

Scott, Thomas

‘Keep thy teares reader & that softer sorrow’

23 August 1628

Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham

‘Envy draw nere unto this Marble Stone’

‘Halfe dead with greife on this untimely Herse’

‘If Princes favors could but lengthen breath’

‘Part, foule detraction from thy hellish Denn’

‘Rest noble Duke, and may thy fatall end’

‘The Devill in ffrance many yeares since began’

‘Treade not upon this urne with feete prophane’

‘Yee snarling Satyrs cease your horrid yells’

7 January or 9 January 1628/9

Prince Frederick Henry

‘Canst thou be dead and wee be still the same’

‘What hopes wee had of thee to reobtaine’

13 May 1629

Prince Charles

‘How short a space of life was lent’

‘Snatch from our longing hoping eyes’

20 January 1633

Hastings (nee Stanley), Elizabeth, Countess of Huntingdon

‘Were this an argument wch I could raise’

1635/6

Herbert, Charles

‘Wee that could warble lesser greifes, & play’

1638 [probable date]

Darell, Elizabeth

‘If late acquaintance wth the saints above’

30 June 1640

Saltonstall, Sir Samuel

‘As thick black clouds doe long themselves contayne’

10 March [early 1620s?]

Lower, Antoinetta

‘Lend me thy tongue deere Sorrow, lend thy pen’

[likely early 1620s]

Unidentified churchman

‘What neede I speake or write his praise, whose name’

Abbreviations and conventions

Conventions

Unless otherwise identified, classical texts and translation are quoted from the Loeb Classical Library.

Biblical quotations are from the Authorized Version.

Unless otherwise indicated, all dates are old style.

As the titles of poems vary widely in manuscript, and this study works with numerous anonymous funeral elegies on a single figure, I have generally used the first line as the primary identifier of a poem.

Original spelling and punctuation have been maintained with all quotations from manuscript and printed sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; however, i/j and u/v have been regularized.

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Neo-Latin texts are the author’s.

Acknowledgements

Early work on this project was supported by research and travel grants from Brescia University College of the University of Western Ontario. Later, a multi-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada allowed me to extend the work and bring it to completion. I thank the many libraries and archives that offered access to, or digital copies of, the primary manuscript material that is the basis of this study: the British Library, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, National Library of Wales, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh University Library, National Records of Scotland, the National Archives (UK), Newcastle University Library, University of Nottingham Library, Hampshire Record Office, Leicestershire Record Office, West Yorkshire Archives, Folger Shakespeare Library, Rosenbach Museum and Library, and Yale University Library. I also give particular thanks to the staff of Beryl Ivey Library at Brescia for their years of patient assistance, and the Interlibrary Loan Department of D.B. Weldon Library, who tracked down many books and microfilms on my behalf.

I thank John Mitchell, Donna Rogers, and Lauretta Frederking, all of whom served as Academic Dean at Brescia during this project, for their active support and encouragement. Likewise, within the Dean’s office Marsha Lace was consistently helpful and patient, and Elizabeth Russell-Minda and Jen Pecoski helped steer me through the processes of grant applications and use. I also thank my faculty colleagues, Brian Diemert, Dominick Grace, Monika Lee, Carolyn Weber, and Sara Morrison for their continuing interest in and encouragement of this project.

This study would not have been possible without the excellent work done by my student research assistants over the years: Christina Wiendels, Jacqueline Chateauvert, and Kendall Fisher.

Part of Chapter 8 was published within the article ‘Elegies on the death of Bishop John King (d. 1621)’, in the John Donne Journal, which I thank for permission to republish.

I thank Matthew Frost and Helen Flitton for their guidance through the publishing process, Luke Finley for his careful copy-editing work, and the anonymous readers for Manchester University Press for their helpful responses and suggestions.

Finally, as with all my work, this book could not have been accomplished without the unfailing love and support of my growing family: Nancy, Sarah, Esther, Elizabeth, Elliot, Joel, Andrew, and Jacob. I dedicate it, with thanks, to my parents-in-law, William and Janice Spring.

Introduction

This book began as an exploratory project rather than an argument: I set out to read all English funeral elegies written between 1603 and 1640, whether published at the time or surviving in manuscript. It was intended as a heuristic, experimental approach, with a view to seeing how a broad or distant reading might uncover different elements from those typically discussed by major studies of the genre, with their focus on a limited number of canonical examples. The ‘project’ is still not quite complete, as I continue to find fresh examples in manuscript, but it is sufficient to support a number of central themes in this book. First, I was struck by how often funeral elegies went beyond their core purposes of lamentation, commemoration, and consolation to comment on a wide range of other matters. Secondly, many poems highlight how the emotional turmoil of grief (‘distraction’, in the seventeenth-century sense of mental disturbance approaching madness) leads to a breaking of poetic norms and restraint. A daring unruliness, of both form and matter, often marks the genre. Finally, the discussion of other matters, whether defended as manifestations of distraction or not, often take the form of ‘detraction’, that is, the sharp criticism of individuals, the broader culture, centres of power and other institutions, and even the world itself – in short, all that which lies beyond the dead figure who is at the heart of the elegy. I frequently use the terms ‘distraction’ and ‘detraction’, not merely for the sake of word play, but as ones widely used at the time, and as part of my general commitment to critical description that draws on the terminology within the literary works themselves.¹ ‘Detraction’ is a broader term than ‘satire’, and thus captures instances that lack the bite, irony, or wit of satire. ‘Blame’ might function as well, as the flip-side of ‘praise’ in the poetic project of judgement.

While this focus on poetic moments of bold digression governs much of the book’s discussion, I also sought to avoid a reductionism that ignored other noteworthy elements of the genre that have been relatively neglected by other scholars and critics. Thus, in each chapter, as I focus on the funeral elegies prompted by the death of one person or a group of similarly situated figures, I seek to include all that I have found striking about them. Some of these elements I will highlight in this introduction; others will become evident as the book unfolds. I have sought a balance between exploring the repeated concerns of funeral elegies, which may be understood as part of the generic norms, and considering those elegies that do unusual things, thus setting themselves apart from the conventions of the genre.² In the process of reading widely in the genre, I have noticed recurring tropes not mentioned by other critics, and I at times offer a fuller description of the varieties of elegy in the period than has been hitherto available. This approach also reveals how the circumstances of the death in question challenge poets to adapt the rhetorical resources of the genre to a particular situation. I am especially interested in those cases where the exceptional circumstances challenge the usual approach of ‘Death’s mournfull laws’, as Henry King calls them.³ How does an elegist commemorate the death of a suicide, of political prisoners, of a much-resented royal favourite like the Duke of Buckingham? Overall, my hope is that the project and ensuing discussion will have established a broader understanding of the culture of funeral elegies in the early Stuart period.

The scholarly context

In a funeral elegy a poet articulates his or her grief at the death of another.⁴ This sort of bald summation has tended to guide – and limit – literary critics on the funeral elegies of the early Stuart period: they have most often been concerned with the psychology of grief or the ‘work of mourning’, both artistic and emotional, performed by the poem. G. W. Pigman, for example, traces poetry’s function in ‘mastering’ the turmoil of grief;⁵ however, my interest lies in the rhetorical opportunity before the grief is contained. Other scholarly discussions have highlighted the poet’s self-conscious role as commemorator, engaging in what W. David Shaw has described as the process of a mourner becoming an elegist.⁶ My study strives to shift this focus in three ways: first, by organizing the study around the dead individual and his or her immediate context; secondly, by exploring how elegies, often ‘distracted’ by grief, go beyond the immediate death to reflect poetically upon other political, religious, and social matters; and, finally, by drawing heavily upon the many funeral elegies from the period that were not published but circulated in manuscript. An accompanying online appendix, hosted at Manchester University Press,⁷ provides full transcriptions of those manuscript elegies discussed at any length. To understand the genre, I make only limited reference to such works as Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetices (1561) and George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), as instead I strive to recognize what Gerd Bayer has called the ‘unwritten poetics’ that are manifest in the works of the genre itself.⁸ These are evident sometimes through repeated appearance in funeral elegies, at other times by poets drawing attention to them as they use them.

In his late nineteenth-century edition of Cyril Tourneur, John Churton Collins dismissed all elegies on Prince Henry (including Tourneur’s) as ‘a mass of fatuous balderdash of which [English literature] ought to be heartily ashamed’.⁹ Collins’ savage statement is an extreme example of a critical stance that dominated literary history and criticism from roughly 1800 to 1960: except for ‘Lycidas’ and Thomas Carew’s poem on Donne (‘Can we not force from widdowed Poetry’), early modern funeral elegies were categorically rejected as insincere accumulations of commonplace tropes. The past sixty years have seen a much fuller exploration of the genre, with book-length studies by G. W. Pigman III, Dennis Kay, Andrea Brady, and Peter Sacks (which extended well beyond the period),¹⁰ but this exploration still manifests unfortunate limits. The limits are two-fold: which poems have been considered and what questions have been asked of those elegies. First, while more than ‘Lycidas’ and Carew’s elegy are now discussed, as critics have paid increased attention to the funeral elegies of Donne and Jonson, some ‘second-tier’ poets like Drayton, Beaumont, Richard Corbett, Browne, and William Strode are still relatively neglected, despite their rich use of the genre. The breadth of funeral elegies in the period, including anonymous ones in manuscript, has been largely ignored.

My project is similar, to varying degrees, to other ‘wide reading’ projects of the sort encouraged by Peter Rabinowitz.¹¹ Predecessors in this approach seem particularly prominent in late seventeenth-century studies. Far ahead of his time, in The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (1976) Robert D. Hume sought to re-understand the period’s drama by ‘examining a large number of plays with special attention to chronological sequence’.¹² In the process, Hume read all known plays of the period 1660 to 1710, giving equal attention to the non-canonical.¹³ More recently, Ashley Marshall’s The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770 engages in an extraordinarily wide-ranging exploration (reading over 3000 works) that demonstrates the variety and richness of satire in the period (and that its most famous figures, Dryden, Swift, and Pope are far from representative).¹⁴ And Gerd Bayer’s Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction (2016) has offered a similar reassessment of prose fiction in the period through the process of broad reading. All of these scholars have uncovered the radical variation, both synchronous and diachronous, of what are too often thought of as relatively fixed genres largely defined by a few canonical authors. For example, Hume finds that ‘the drama of this period is vastly varied and complex in type, and further that the different types change and interact on an almost season-by-season basis’.¹⁵ My study is not as concerned with defining the development of the genre over time, as changes in funeral elegies in the early decades of the seventeenth century were much more gradual, since the expectations for funeral elegies were more well fixed. Of greater interest, then, is how these generic expectations engaged with the particularities of individual deaths and with the historical moment.

A similar broad reading approach has been adopted by Margaret Cohen in her study of nineteenth-century French novels.¹⁶ She boldly asserts, ‘Forgotten literature is the portal to the recovery of lost poetics’, but notes that texts can be forgotten in different ways: works/genres revered in their time, but subsequently disregarded; genres that were low in the cultural hierarchy of the time; even well-known works that are ‘rediscovered’ by being read within this new, broader survey that reveals forgotten generic norms. All this, she argues, ‘has the potential to transform our view of works at the heart of the literary canon’.¹⁷ Seventeenth-century funeral elegies manifest an additional, and most significant, type of ‘forgottenness’: those anonymous works that widely circulated in manuscript but then disappeared because of our focus on print publication and author-centred discussion. These poems lie at the heart of my study. Like Cohen I seek the patterns that emerge from a broad canvassing of texts, using the terminology and understanding of genres/norms that were part of these texts or their immediate reception. Cohen rightly identifies the difficulty of then choosing a limited number of texts to focus upon, and urges the adoption of a ‘representative example’, which ‘takes on its importance as the abstraction of a class rather than in its unique specificity’.¹⁸ While the present book as a whole establishes this representativeness, individual chapters at times focus upon those individual poems that radically depart from the norm as they engage with the exceptional circumstances of an individual death. Thus, while my project arises from the wide reading espoused by Rabinowitz, much of the extended discussion still engages in the close or ‘intense reading’ simultaneously suggested by the same author.¹⁹

Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, critics have ignored the wealth of funeral elegies (often anonymous) that circulated in the manuscript culture of the period. Mary Hobbs notes the prominence of funeral elegies in the manuscripts of the time: ‘outnumber[ing] all except song lyrics in early seventeenth-century verse miscellanies’, they were ‘often grouped in a whole section by themselves at the end of the book’.²⁰ Given this, it is surprising that manuscript elegies have received so little scholarly attention. Nancy A. Gutierrez deliberately excluded manuscript poems from her article on the genre in the Tudor period, because they ‘appear to have been written for coterie rather than a print audience … for the poetic purpose seems exclusive, rather than inclusive’.²¹ Scholars have challenged such a view in the last few decades by recognizing the broad audience achieved by many manuscript works.

While Kay’s Melodious Tears and Brady’s English Funerary Elegy stand as partial exceptions to this neglect of non-canonical works, as both consider some elegies from manuscript, neither fully reflects the new understandings of the significance of early seventeenth-century manuscript culture. Such tools and resources as Early Stuart Libels and Folger’s Union First-Line Index have made relevant materials more accessible. This has been reflected in such studies as Joshua Eckhardt’s Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry (2009). In his recent study of manuscript political pamphlets, Noah Millstone effectively describes this shift in focus: ‘Foundational studies by literary critics and book historians have recovered reading circles, reconstructed the work of individual scribes, and provided a technical vocabulary for talking about manuscript publication.’²² This reconstruction has led to a recognition of the wealth of materials, especially political, which circulated only in manuscript. While elegies are not as restricted to manuscript as the pamphlets considered by Millstone, I hope that this study shows how a consideration of them fleshes out our understanding of the literary, social, and political dynamics of the early Stuart funeral elegy. As such, it is taking Kay’s significant work, on the manuscript elegies on Sidney, Queen Elizabeth, and Prince Henry, much further by thoroughly exploring those on both later and more minor figures. The present volume includes at least as much consideration of manuscript poems as printed ones, as I contend that poets found freedom in manuscript circulation to go beyond their print counterparts in ‘distracted’ comment. Anonymity could be more easily preserved and readership possibly limited.²³

Other factors besides political caution, such as the status of the dead and the ambitions of the poet, informed the decision to choose manuscript over print circulation. In the opening of an elegy on the death of Dr Anthony Aylworth (d. 8 April 1619), the poet points back to recent ones on Queen Anne, and then draws this distinction between print and manuscript elegies:

for princes losse we do lament in print

their greif must drop though from a hart of flint

Let me my paper blot in private inck²⁴

Certainly, up until the 1620s most print collections of verse had involved royalty or other illustrious figures of political significance, such as Sidney. The author of this elegy on Aylworth likely had the universities’ commemorative volumes on the Queen’s death in mind. However, in the 1620s and 1630s this dichotomy began to break down, as volumes of printed elegies on relatively insignificant figures appeared: Sir John Stanhope (Elegies on Sir John Stanhope, 1624), Robert, Baron Spencer of Wormleighton (The muses thankfulnesse, 1627), Sir Rowland Cotton (Parentalia, 1635), Edward King (Iusto Eduardo King, 1637), Lady Katherine Paston (Funerall Elegies, 1637, by Ralph Knevet), and Paul, Viscount Bayning (Death Repeal’d, 1638). Overall, these printed collections were generally less daring and politically engaged than manuscript elegies.²⁵ However, a manuscript-based circulation might also seem less publicly ambitious, and might thus avoid the suspicion that the rhetorical tears of public grief were insincere – ‘crafty sorrow’, as one elegy puts it²⁶ – or written for monetary gain. Often quoted in this regard was Martial: ‘ille dolet vere qui sine teste dolet’.²⁷

We must also recognize that the term ‘manuscript funeral elegy’ in fact covers a range of composition and circulation situations. Manuscript elegies that survive only in a single, presentation-quality hand were often ‘gift’ poems offered to the family of the deceased and whose circulation never extended beyond that small circle. Other manuscript elegies found a much broader audience, appearing repeatedly in the manuscript collections that circulated in the period.²⁸ The more intense circulation of a poem might be driven by the prominent reputation of the poet or the deceased. Or the topical comment may have struck a public chord by dwelling on controversial matters. Such was certainly the case with the elegies on Thomas Washington, the page of Prince Charles, who died during the ill-fated trip to Spain in 1623,²⁹ or on Sir John Burroughs, who died during the English assault on the Isle of Rhé in 1627.³⁰

A concern with the particular circumstances of death and the immediate contexts (political, religious, and social) also sets my study apart from previous books on the early Stuart funeral elegy. These have tended to focus on either the challenge of the poetic task or the psychology of grief, both of which have removed the poem from its historical moment and its connection to the particularities of the deceased. Peter Sacks’ The English Elegy largely focused on ‘the connections between language and the pathos of human consciousness’ and pursued what he termed ‘the work of mourning’.³¹ Likewise, Pigman’s Grief and English Renaissance Elegy has explored the psychology of the grieving process as manifest in poetry. Andrea Brady’s English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century, a study rooted in the rituals of mourning, goes furthest in considering non-canonical works, including anonymous elegies in manuscript. However, her book focuses on different groupings of elegies than mine: the critical elegy, those (especially by women) on the death of children, and elegies of the Civil Wars and Interregnum.³² Her approach and that of Kay are closest to mine: the latter is most concerned with tracing generic development, especially as influenced by Spenser and Donne, and the creation of a poetic persona, self-consciously performing his elegiac task. As Ronald Strickland points out, Kay’s concerns are still largely aesthetic rather than historically rooted instances of public discourse.³³

Of the elegies considered by this book, those on Prince Henry have received the most critical comment, but the emphases of other scholars differ from mine. Ruth Wallerstein’s chapter in Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic is largely concerned with identifying the main stylistic and rhetorical traditions in which the various elegies participate. She discusses most of the major poems and categorizes them as Spenserian, metaphysical, humanist, etc.; Donne’s elegy is very much at the centre of the chapter. However, Wallerstein offers almost no comment on the political situation out of which the elegies emerged, and despite all these poems about him, Prince Henry himself rather curiously disappears from the discussion. Dennis Kay’s Melodious Tears ranges much more widely than Wallerstein and helpfully presents a number of elegies from manuscript on Prince Henry. Once again, however, his concern is more with the literary tradition rather than how these poems engage with the specific political moment of the Prince’s death. Barbara Lewalski argues (rightly, I believe) that the Prince Henry elegies constituted a major turning point in the poetic treatment of the dead in English.³⁴ Lewalski is largely concerned with the influence of Donne’s Anniversaries on many of these elegies;³⁵ however, some of the tropes from the Anniversaries that she identifies in later works are commonplace ones that do not necessarily reflect direct influence. Overall, these studies are dominated by the questions of literary lineage, seeing the elegies by more minor figures largely in relation to either the Spenserian or the Donnean tradition.

Most studies of the early modern funeral elegy have been author-focused: thus, we have articles that consider the work of a single poet or books that trace the literary tradition and development of the genre as exemplified by individual poets. My shift from authors to subjects (that is, the dead) is based not upon any ‘death of the author’ position but upon a conviction that this refocusing can help us discover new things about the genre and its place in the broader culture of the time. Such an approach also prevents the marginalizing of the many anonymous funeral elegies that survive in manuscript. As will be fully demonstrated below, funeral elegies were generally composed within a few weeks of the death; hence, not only are they closely connected to the raw experience of grief, but they can be explored as participating in a precise historical moment, and this allows for a more specific historicist approach than is possible with other genres.³⁶ Such an approach also requires that at times I begin with extensive historical and biographical contexts before turning to the elegies themselves. A subject-based exploration also highlights broader public concerns of the period, as topics or themes recur in elegies on the same individual. In other cases, elegies respond to each other or compete, either in grief or poetic craft, or, as Jonson playfully recorded in regard to Donne’s elegy on Prince Henry, ‘to match Sir Ed: Herbert in obscurenesse’.³⁷ Funeral elegists function as the arbiters in what John Davies of Hereford calls the ‘After-game/Of Reputation’;³⁸ ostensibly they are defining the reputation of the deceased, but they also seek to further their own.

Competition was evident not just among poets but also as part of a broader contest over the surviving reputation of the deceased. Different elements in the mourning or commemorative process might compete; elegists sometimes claimed a sincerity that surpassed other rituals: the work of heralds, funeral sermons, and the tomb or monument.³⁹ Considering funeral elegies in relation to their subject, rather than their author, allows for a greater understanding of the place of the genre in the culture of death and commemoration.

Death and sorrow, I emphasize, were the starting points of funeral elegy, but it was a copious and digressive form that allowed a wide variety of material and perspectives. Dennis Kay identifies it as a relatively free and inventive form that took its bearings from the situation: essentially, it is ‘a form without frontiers’.⁴⁰ By extending its concern beyond grief and consolation, the funeral elegy functions as what Heather Dubrow has called a ‘host genre’, which she defines as ‘provid[ing] a hospitable environment for the other form or forms that are regularly incorporated within [it]. In some cases, for example, the host may assume the function of a screen, hiding or countervailing certain less desirable aspects of the genre within it.’⁴¹ As a well-respected form, the funeral elegy perhaps escaped the suspicion that might have attended a ‘satire’ or ‘epigram’. After all, a certain remembrance was owed the dead, but in this practice of commemoration the elegist might include castigation or questioning of the living. Andrea Brady, in English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century (2006), offers some recognition of the political dimension of the genre: ‘Elegies are at once idealistic representations which seek to immortalize their subjects, and critical responses to the decadence of the age.’⁴² Thus, elegies combined the two roles of poetry recognized in the humanist tradition: to praise and to blame.⁴³ Furthermore, elegies of the period manifest the recurring situation where the dead become the passive object of poetic, religious, and political struggle, subject to revision and competing claims. In this variety of ways, the conventional roles of elegy – to lament, praise, and console – make room for other agendas.

Scope and focus

This book sets the years 1603 and 1640 as its parameters; the English funeral elegy came into its own as a widely practised and self-conscious genre in the first decade of James’ reign, with influential funeral elegies by John Donne and Francis Beaumont, and the massive outpouring of poems on the death of Prince Henry in 1612.⁴⁴ The terminal date marks the last year before the conflicts of the 1640s significantly changed the dynamics of such a potentially political form as the elegy. In that decade, many elegies were written about men who had been killed by their own countrymen (rather than by illness, a continental enemy, or Death or Fate); furthermore, greater freedom in printing affected the need for manuscript elegies, and the conflict and social upheaval disrupted the circles within which such manuscript verse circulated. Despite these temporal limits, I will occasionally look back to earlier deaths (Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth) and forward to later ones (Charles I) for the sake of comparison. And the Afterword will offer some reflection on the changes to the funeral elegy brought about, specifically, by the Civil Wars of the 1640s.

Within those four decades, this study especially focuses on elegies of the 1620s. This focus was not adopted by prior design but from a slow recognition that it was in this decade that elegies most strongly pushed into commentary beyond immediate grief. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus have described the 1620s as a decade in which foreign conflicts and domestic turmoil created ‘a sustained pitch of public political discourse equal to that achieved in the 1590s’,⁴⁵ and these years saw a wealth of elegies that turned the form to a decidedly political purpose. Paul Salzman’s Literature and Politics in the 1620s:’Whisper’d Counsells’ recognizes this aspect of the decade and explores the intense treatment of political matters in a wide range of genres – but not the funeral elegy. He argues that in the 1620s literature ‘did not produce monolithic ideological positions so much as a constantly shifting series of responses to what were perceived at the time as acutely significant political moments’.⁴⁶ Within that decade of intense political controversy, the years 1623 to 1628 are the ‘hottest’, as they span the ultimate crisis of the Spanish Match (1623–4), the death of King James in 1625, the heated Parliament of 1626, the disastrous military expedition to the Isle of Rhé in 1627, and the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham in 1628.⁴⁷ This concentration of politically charged elegies coincides with what Noah Millstone has identified as the burgeoning culture of political manuscript material in the decade, which peaked with the 1628–9 Parliament, for which ‘hundreds of scribal texts, in thousands of copies, poured out of the palace of Westminster’.⁴⁸ This intense news culture was the context for many of the funeral elegies to be considered in this book.

The distracted elegy

The immediacy of elegiac grief allowed the poet to claim licence for intense emotions and utterances beyond the norms of other contexts. As Peter Sacks notes, the elegy ‘is characterized by an unusually powerful intertwining of emotion and rhetoric’.⁴⁹ The very composition and circulation of a funeral elegy could be justified by the strong requirement of the occasion. The otherwise hesitant poet steps forth, as Robert Gomersall writes, ‘and dare[s]‌ to greive/With a full sorrowe’.⁵⁰ In a funeral elegy on Martin Peirce (d. 1636) William Sancroft (later Archbishop of Canterbury) writes, ‘Faine would my daring Muse with vent’rous paces/Enter upon the Cat’logue of thy graces’.⁵¹ His ‘daring Muse’ is venturing upon praise of the deceased, but in many cases the strong emotional circumstances of the death led poets to dare more outspoken thoughts, to venture into detraction and even satire. Grief overwhelmed the usual strictures of art and decorum to permit an unruliness of verse and emotion. Reformation theology emphasized restraint in mourning; as the early English Protestant John Bradford put it, ‘we bury the dead in a convenient place, and mourn in measure, as men having hope of the resurrection’.⁵² However, in the funeral elegy some Protestant writers found opportunity for a more unharnessed expression of grief, and justified this by pointing to the tumultuous effects of the news. Ironically, ‘in measure’, that is, verse, they found means to circumvent the ‘measure’ (moderation) normally required of them.⁵³ For Wye Saltonstall his father’s death prompts a blameless ‘Vertuous passion’,⁵⁴ and Francis Atkins argues that ‘Madnes must bee his fury that would write an Elegie’.⁵⁵ Robert Allyne presents such as the natural condition of the grieving:

Mourners keepe no methode in their mones,

But as the passion is conceav’d in thought

Abruptly, so into the world ’tis brought.

Mourning’s a naturall motion in the heart,

And scornes to be reform’d by rules of Art.⁵⁶

Thus, the abandoning of rules could also be used to justify a roughness of poetic meter and lack of polish:

When other poets veines are done

Snt Giles my muse bids me halt on,

and if my verses have some hobs,

thinke I have used not feete, but sobs,

my rougher rimes may sute griefe best

let theirs runne smooth that mourne in Jeast;⁵⁷

An extreme adoption of this trope is found in Henry Chettle’s funeral elegy on Queen Elizabeth: ‘why should I dote, on rimes, on songs, or note, / Confusion can best quote, / sacred Elizaes losse’, Collin, the pastoral elegist asks, and then takes the extreme step of ‘brak[ing] his pipe’ and switching to prose.⁵⁸

The disorder so prompted by death often extended beyond literary style to emotional response, and in this context the term ‘distracted’ (meaning mentally discomposed) was sometimes used by elegists themselves. An anonymous elegy on the Puritan controversialist Thomas Scott identifies itself as a ‘distracted elegy’; William Habington uses the term when he finds that his veneration of the deceased George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, has led him to malign the living: ‘My griefe distracts me. If my zeale hath said, / What checks the living; know I serve the dead.’⁵⁹ Thus is the poet excused. Slightly later (1641), the trope was sufficiently established that a poet writing on the Earl of Strafford’s death felt it necessary to assure the reader ‘nor greife, nor zeale distracts / me from my selfe’.⁶⁰ Based upon this usage in the period itself, I have adopted the term ‘distracted’ as a way of understanding how early Stuart funeral elegy treated the emotional response to death. While the term is used in a limited number of elegies, the concept is widely present and will recur frequently in this study. The elegist on Rev. Ambrose Fisher admits, ‘Greife makes me madd and rave beyond my sense’.⁶¹ Francis Beaumont, after venturing into a diatribe against the failures of doctors, offers a semi-retraction based upon the ‘detraction’ defence: ‘Sorrow and madness make my verses flow / Cross to my understanding’.⁶² In all these cases the distraction or raving, however, is contained within the elegiac process, which often ultimately corrects it by an acceptance of providential design or other consolation. My focus, however, is on the ‘meantime’ of that distraction, what the supposed emotional disruption of the moment frees the poet to utter.⁶³

In particular, I explore how this poetic licence in grief opened up the possibility of the detraction of other people, institutions, and the broader social situation. In the throes of grief and a felt sense of injustice, it becomes ‘difficult not to write satire’.⁶⁴ Thus, William Douglas, the elegist of the Earl of Lothian (d. 1624), explained that his grief has unintentionally led him into another genre:

for whom Intending a mournfull Elegie

I have writ a satire Just rage hath Inspird

Me so.⁶⁵

However, other poets present a conflicted sense of whether such genre-shifting is appropriate:

A Lethargie’s on mee, nor can I write

Whats Poet-like, while I conceive this spite

Of unjust Fortune, yet I cease to brawle:

A Satyre ill becomes a Funerall.⁶⁶

Likewise, in his elegy on Donne, Richard Busby cuts off a line of thought that is straying into the satiric: ‘No more of this, least some should say, that I / Am strai’d to Satyre, meaning Elegie’.⁶⁷ However, at times the language and imagery of satire do intrude into the mourning realm of elegy for extended passages.⁶⁸ The best-known example of this is the St Peter passage in Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, which becomes the vehicle for a vehement satire of the corrupt churchmen/shepherds who neglect ‘the faithful herdsman’s art’ (l. 121). After this jarring satiric digression, the speaker must recall the figures and elements of the pastoral realm as he continues in an elegiac mode. While this passage of ecclesiastical satire is well known and justly celebrated, the extent to which the genre generally functioned as a vehicle of political commentary and satire in the early Stuart period has been neglected. While few do it as well as Milton, the satiric digression, often explicitly linked to the emotional excess of grief, is surprisingly common.⁶⁹

Another approach to elegiac satire involved lambasting those unworthy figures, either in general or specific terms, who had been commemorated by outpourings of undeserved elegies, while the current deceased has passed unremarked. Such is the approach adopted by William Sampson in his elegy on ‘On the right Honorable Jane Countesse of Shrewsbury’ (d. 1626), as he chastises those poets who have adorned ‘misers Herse’ and notes that ‘Court Parasites, Vertues smotherers, / False Sonnes of Phoebus, bastards of the Nine,’ ‘their own worthes sing’.⁷⁰ In combining panegyric with satire or correction, funeral elegy was following a well-established path in the classical poetic tradition, where the role of the poet