English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century Laws in Mourning docx

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 J

English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

Laws in Mourning

Andrea Brady

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

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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

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

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English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

Laws in Mourning

Andrea Brady

Brunel University

London

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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

I am thankful to the librarians and the staff of Gonville and CaiusCollege, 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 projectbegan, 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 tookthe time to comment on specific chapters, and John Kerrigan, SimonJarvis, Colin Burrow and Gavin Alexander offered valuable insights andpractical help Cedric Brown and Andrew Hadfield were encouragingand patient series editors, and I appreciate the professionalism of theeditors at Palgrave Macmillan I am immensely grateful in particularfor the support of Raphael Lyne and Jonathan Sawday, whose criticalinterventions saved this project from an unjust execution I owe mygreatest debt to Jessica Martin, whose supervision and friendship saw

me through to its first conclusion Keston Sutherland was the first toread this text; our conversations and collaboration made its insightspossible, and continue to shape my thinking For health and happi-ness in the midst of all this grief work I am also beholden to LekshmyBalakrishnan, 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 encouragementover great distances to my sisters Rachel and Alexis, and my motherSuzanne Matt ffytche got me through the conclusion; with his help,

my future projects can turn to joy

viii

List of Abbreviations

(Place of publication is London unless specified otherwise.)

BF Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Comedies and

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

Note on Transcriptions

Where modern scholarly editions do not exist, I have referred to theearliest available printed editions of texts; but for material in Latinand Greek I have attempted to use seventeenth-century translations

My transcriptions retain the orthography, punctuation, formatting andindentation of both printed and manuscript sources, though in somecases the use of inverted commas has been normalised to improve theclarity of the extract In some instances, typefaces have been reversedfrom italic to roman for easier reading, and turned letters have beensilently corrected The letters u and v i and j, and long s have beenregularised Abbreviations have been silently expanded Capitalisation

of titles has been normalised Dates are given in old style, but the year

is taken to begin on 1 January

x

Death is never punctual Early or late, sudden or protracted, it isnever over in an instant In early modern Europe, death began beforethe last exhalation and ended long after the eyes were closed Fromthe sickbed, through the liminal period of watching and preparing thecorpse, to the commemorative ceremonies which might stretch overmonths or years, death took its time Thinking of death as a rite ofpassage structured by separation, liminality and reintegration revealsits protracted temporality The rite of passage does not only affect thedying – it also unfolds gradually for the bereaved, who are distinct ingrief, take on mourning vestments and mourning attitudes, and eventu-ally reintegrate with the community Rituals punctuate the time it takesthem to grieve As Victor Turner argues, ritual ‘periodically convertsthe obligatory into the desirable’; it makes regenerative possibilitiesavailable to communities weakened by death.1For Christian mourners,mortuary rituals compensate for the obligation of mortality by emphas-ising its benefits for the living and the dead; but many critics havesuggested that funerals also make the undesirable obligations of socialinequality and patriarchy acceptable, and so conserve the insufficien-cies of daily life That view will be challenged by many of the textsread here

This book reads funerary elegies as ritualised utterances in order

to understand how they are affected by context, time and tions Chapter 1 considers the rhetorical conventionality of elegy as

expecta-a kind of rituexpecta-al Rituexpecta-als prescribe formexpecta-al behexpecta-aviour whose ability can be comforting in moments of uncertainty and transition.The rhetorical corollary to these repeated formal behaviours is thetopos or commonplace, which offers the reassurance of shared andrepeated language I examine how such conventions are learned and

predict-1

2 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

enforced in the agonistic context of the early modern school Fromthese shared origins and literary materials, elegists use criticism andsatire to distinguish themselves from their peers Their critiques aresuited to the agonistic structure of the emerging literary market; butthey can also turn against more explicitly political targets, as Chapter 4will show

The combination of praise and criticism, conformity and distinctionare just two of the many contradictions which can wrench elegies out oftheir generic shape Elegies are at once idealistic representations whichseek to immortalise their subjects, and critical responses to the decad-ence of the age They offer ritualised praise with the declared intention

of improving their readers morally, but display a versatility which makesthem morally suspect even to their own writers The process of makingthe obligatory desirable causes elegies to house other ambivalences aswell Poets proclaim the temporality of their poems, time spent recov-ering from grief and labouring over the composition, as well as theatemporality of these paper monuments that outlast brass or stone Theywrest their subjects from oblivion, only to impart to them the idealisedattributes common to all worthy ancestors Elegies which flatten outpersonal differences can seem like betrayals of the uniqueness of thedead But we can also understand this conventionality through elegy’sassociation with ritual

Like ritual, elegies are sociable, uniting communities disrupted bydeath, promoting civic values or negotiating loyalties and allegianceswithin smaller sodalities Conventions are a feature of that sociab-ility Paul Alpers draws attention to the etymology of ‘convention’ as

a meeting point, but adds that conventions enable poets to express

‘the self-consciousness, individuation, and wit that maintain the life ofconventional “kinds” ’.2The vitality of conventions and genres depends

on the overreaching of poets who use them This generic paradox ofconformity and individuation is also characteristic of ritual, I will argue.Carolyn Miller describes genres as ‘typified rhetorical actions based inrecurrent situations’;3 elegy’s recurrent situation, of course, is death,

an event which prompted repeated rhetorical as well as ritual actions.Genre has also been defined as ‘configurations of semantic resourcesthat members of the culture associate with a situation type’, capable

of determining ‘the roles taken up by the participants, and hence thekinds of texts they are required to construct’.4These recent notions ofgenre stretch beyond particular literary types to incorporate social situ-ations, contexts and ‘roles’ This expanded concept can be compared toritual

in the presence of [  ] sacred objects’ reflects his premise that religiousbeliefs classify all things, real and ideal, into two categories, the profaneand the sacred.6 Elegies themselves depict the passage between theprofane, worldly human life, into the sacred, resurrection They are also

‘ritualised’ by their attention to rules of (funeral) conduct and ment By submitting to a collective determination of ritual and literarydecorum, the poet can access the resources accumulated in genericforms

comport-As with ritual, literary historians frequently assume that genre andrhetoric conserve existing hierarchical social structures.7Genre providesnot only rules for the conduct of the poet, but also a ‘horizon ofexpectations’ for the reader.8The comportment or decorum of a literarytext could be defined as a measure of its effectiveness in matchingits style to generic expectations, its conservation of traditional literaryvalues (which may include innovation or improvisation) As Ann Imbrieargues, ‘a decorous work operates through the forms most readily access-ible to the audience’ and thus ‘assigns the audience a determiningposition’.9Decorum serves as one index of the collective social construc-tion of a work, and allows readers to assess conventional and uncon-ventional writing.10 Cicero advises that the practice of rules cannotitself impart eloquence (indeed, these rules may hinder creativity);but when they are observed by a writing community, they providethe means for judging a performance.11 Generic rules can be under-stood as a mechanism for conserving and evaluating traditional andcollective practices, rather than a slavish obedience and failure oforiginality

Perceptive critics such as Ruth Wallerstein, O B Hardison and DennisKay have focussed on elegy’s generic rules, rather than on the emotionalexperience these poems might convey Thanks to their contributions,these properties need only be reviewed briefly in Chapter 1 But theirfocus could be compared to objectivist trends in anthropology, whichhave investigated rites rather than the experience of loss which theyserve 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 undervaluethe spontaneity and improvisation implicit in ritual behaviour or in

4 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

rhetorical conventions Describing Chinese mourning, Erik Muegglerhelpfully argues that

to treat ritual laments merely as strategic rhetorical positioning is

to slip towards separating individuals into private, autonomous,competitive subjects [  ] Yet to understand laments as expressive ofprofoundly personal states of grief and loss is to rely implicitly onanother version of this same vision, in which a subject’s ultimatereality is a private, internal core or locus of the self, where all affecttakes place prior to being publicly expressed.12

To read elegies critically, we must be able to incorporate both of theseperspectives

Focussing on generic attributes is perhaps safer than trying to excavatethe ‘real feelings’ of early modern writers and ritual participants Thetruth of feeling remains partially inaccessible behind the constraints

of social expectations and language But its inaccessibility can lead tocritical detachment, the choice to track ritual or generic convention asthe only hard evidence of the management of emotions Such detach-ment leads, Pierre Bourdieu warns, to a ‘hermeneutic representation ofpractices’, which reduces ‘all social relations to communicative relationsand, more precisely, decoding operations’ Like anthropologists, criticsmust beware that the ‘exaltation of the virtues of the distance secured

by externality simply transmutes into an epistemological choice theanthropologist’s objective situation, that of the “impartial spectator”[  ] condemned to see all practice as spectacle’.13Our objective situation

as contemporary readers is limiting In addition to supplying normativemodels based on elegiac precedents and religious stricture, critics of elegyshould study the strategies, conformities and divergences that signalparticipants’ dispositions, and recognise that those dispositions includethe impulse not only to obedience, but also to self-determination Thesestrategies are the subject of Chapter 2 There, I examine early modernmodels for mourning and consolation The behaviour of mourners wasaffected not just by ritual roles, but also by texts Compared to the sternmodels advocated by Christian and Stoic texts, accounts of bereavementreveal intense emotional strain and resistance to unconditional hope

or apatheia The condolence provided by letter-writers and by elegists

reflected their sensitivity to this struggle; critics too should be alert tothe generic ambivalences it introduces

If these poems are part of the ritual process, they also unfold in time

John Donne says that his Anniversary poems are infused by the spirit of

Introduction 5

Elizabeth Drury; otherwise, how can ‘these memorials, ragges of paper,give / Life to that name, by which name they must live?’

Sickly, alas, short-liv’d, aborted bee

Those Carkas verses, whose soule is not shee

And can shee, who no longer would be shee,

Being such a Tabernacle, stoope to bee

In paper wrap’t; Or, when she would not lie

In such a house, dwell in an Elegie?14

The decay of the ‘carkas’ can contaminate a poem severed from the

‘soule’ of its subject; elegy is prey to the same decay as the body Butsaintly relics are preserved from corruption and deserve to dwell in

a magnificent paper shroud Elegies like Donne’s offer themselves as

a liminal space, where the news of death can be digested, mortalitytransformed into the desired goods of heaven or artistic perpetuity,and society renewed through the veneration of its virtuous ancestors

In order to preserve the memory of the dead, elegies must selves resist neologisms and innovations which would lock them fast

them-in their own time As Chapter 5 will show, many elegists believedthat transcendence of occasionality requires a respect for the wisdomdeveloped over recurrent occasions Even the greatest laureates tookenormous risks when they attempted to renovate the elegiac idiom withidiosyncratic wit

Transcendence aside, time was often short for poets in demand Fewelegies reveal the material exigencies of production, namely that theywere composed quickly, and often in hope of a reward In a book

of ‘Elogie with Epitaphes’ on the death of the Earl of Southamptonand his son in 1624, a poet complains with unusual frankness that

he had but an ‘hower’ to return a packet of verses to his patron SirThomas Littleton in the Low Countries He scribbled hastily ‘in an

Inn / where Caryers Tapsters ostlers did conspire / with snuffe of Candles

to quench my muses fyer’.15 His elegies are of course free of smokeand rough talk But the manuscript reminds us that writing did nottake place exclusively in classrooms and closets; and text was not justpart of the ritual life of early modern England It was also part of thedomestic environment Posies were inscribed on everyday objects andkeepsakes including funeral rings, while householders adorned theirwalls with moralising lyrics Poems were also posted in communal spacessuch as the hall of Westminster School, where scholars customarilyhung copies of verses on the King’s birthday.16 Walton records that

6 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

after Donne’s burial, ‘some unknown friend, some one, of the many

lovers and admirers of his vertue and learning; writ this Epitaph with a

cole on the wall, over his grave’.17 This story hints at a material ence for poetry which also connects it to the symbolic equipment ofthe funeral Such writing, Juliet Fleming argues, was a mnemonic devicewhich served to remind readers of their moral obligations.18 Similarly,the mortuary ritual was a material reminder of the dead, and of the socialand ethical responsibilities incumbent on the living Archival evidence

exist-of elegy’s role in the funeral is presented in Chapter 3

The ubiquity of writing in the living and working spaces of earlymodern England has two interesting implications for funerary elegy.First, it is crucial to understand elegies not just as exemplary texts,but also as physical goods Though poetry may outlast brass, it wasconnected to mnemonic objects: elegies and epitaphs were inscribed

on portraits, on decorative lozenges at maiden funerals and on ments The elegy was one funerary document among many includingsermons, epitaphs, murder pamphlets, guides to and descriptions of holydying, mothers’ legacies, wills, confessions and last testaments Thesedocuments joined other ritual props – such as death masks, escutcheonsand other heraldic instruments, effigies, hearses, monumental sculpture,domestic funerary architecture and decorations – and other forms ofwriting, including musical laments and hymns Recontextualising elegy

monu-in this material settmonu-ing reveals a great deal about the conservativism

of conventionality, and how poets can challenge decorum and thehierarchical structures it serves to maintain

Second, the production of text was not limited to a few ative, professional poets: anyone who was literate could, and oftendid, write poetry Consequently, a study of funerary elegy should lookbeyond the laureate and the canonical to popular poems, ballads andmanuscript While this book does refer to the most famous examples

authorit-of elegy from the period, I have given Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ and Donne’s

Anniversaries rather less attention than might be expected These laureate

poems have already been the subjects of extensive scholarly discussion,and they are also somewhat exceptional examples of the genre Thematerial presented in this book, though less familiar to most readers,could be considered essential generic context for Donne’s or Milton’spoem These select texts, mostly from the first half of the seventeenthcentury, show accomplished and modest writers responding to deaths

of public figures or family members, in print and manuscript, with graceand delicacy or in clumsy clichés While only a small sample of thisenormous range of poems can be given here, it does provide a glimpse

is evidence of a willingness to intrude on protected places; likewise,one elegiac commonplace declares the poet’s compulsion to infiltrateexclusive funeral rituals out of love for the dead This common-place challenges the hierarchy reinforced by heralds who managedthe ceremony Or rather, elegies both confront hierarchy and commem-orate it, reject the ritual legislation of feeling and reinforce ritualconventions When Richard Corbet resolves in ‘An Elegie upon theDeath of the Lady Haddington’,

No, when thy fate I publish amongst men,

I should have power, and write with the States pen:

I should in naming Thee force publicke teares,19

he wishes that his elegy possessed the state’s power to enforceconformity Though no ritual could promise to deliver emotional unity,the state certainly used rituals to induce emotional identificationswith the king, justice system, religion and nation These rituals rangedfrom the celebratory to the gloomy, from triumphal entries of thereigning monarch to the ghastly journey of the traitor to the scaffold.Chapter 4 discusses literary responses to one of the most spectacular

of mortuary rituals: the public execution The execution shares manyfeatures with the funeral; it is public, spectacular, and tends to reassertsocial stability and hierarchy against the anarchic possibilities and level-ling powers of death It produces rhetorical compositions, by criminals,officials, writers of pamphlets and balladeers The criminal’s rhetoric wasjudged for its sincerity and persuasiveness, like elegy And like any death,

it could generate funereal poems The executions studied in Chapter 4also reveal how elegists interpret and affect politics I offer case studies

of three particularly important victims: Thomas Wentworth, Earl ofStrafford; Archbishop William Laud; and King Charles I Elegists drewconspicuously on contemporary accounts of their dying speeches and

on the variety of generic forms and imaginative libels which precededtheir executions Like all elegies, these mortuary documents contendover the meanings of civic and personal virtue But death’s threat tolanguage and consensus cast a particularly deep shadow over the elegies

on the regicide

8 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

Where Chapter 4 focusses on executions as radical counterparts to theconservative funeral, Chapter 5 traces the sectarian tensions of the 1640s

in critical elegies, poems for dead poets As ‘Lycidas’ shows, it is one ofthe genre’s most notable tendencies to disrupt timeless idealisations withtimely political complaints Especially during the interregnum, criticalelegies are infused with topical references But the connection betweenelegies for the condemned and elegies for the laureate is deeper than

a mutual interest in politics Foucault remarks that ‘Texts, books, anddiscourses really began to have authors [  ] to the extent that authorsbecame subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discoursescould be transgressive.’20 Close readings of the elegies for John Donne,Ben Jonson, and Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher reveal how claims

to sovereignty and law-making charisma can heighten tensions withinthe poetic community following the death of a laureate Chapter 5suggests further connections between critical elegists’ defences of theirfellows against persecution, and the charismatic status accorded to trans-gressors against the laws of poetry or politics

The transgression of the traitor or the criminal was punished inspectacular fashion A patriarchal verse culture had its own methodsfor discouraging intruders Chapter 6 argues that female elegists usedmanuscript as a space to express dissent against Christian restraint andimputations about biological creativity This chapter focusses on therituals of birth and death Bourdieu critiques Van Gennep’s classifica-

tion of rites of passage, preferring to call them rites of institution – for one

essential effect of these rites is to separate ‘those who have undergone it,not from those who have not yet undergone it but from those who willnot undergo it in any sense, and thereby instituting a lasting differencebetween those to whom the rite pertains and those to whom it does not

pertain’ In his view, these rites ‘consescrate or legitimate an arbitrary

boundary’.21The gendering of the work of birth and death could result

in the exclusion of both men and women from occasions of tremendoussocial and personal significance The attempt to achieve social cohesionagainst the disruptive force of death resulted in rituals which emphasiseseparateness, and so enforce a ‘lasting difference’ between the men andwomen who participated in them

Violent grief had long been associated with women, whose restriction

to the domestic sphere was validated by characterising them as irrationaland emotive When civilised Christian women grieved in public theywere expected to eschew the expressiveness of traditional female lament-ation Thomas Fuller, having described a good widow as ‘a woman whosehead hath been quite cut off, and yet she liveth’, commends thrifty

Introduction 9

management of grief Though ‘some foolishly discharge the surplasage

of their passions on themselves, tearing their hair’,

commonly it comes to passe, that such widows grief is quicklyemptyed, which streameth out at so large a vent; whilest their tearsthat drop, will hold running a long time.22

The husbandry of resources, a skill acquired from organising the hold, helps the good woman to endure the part of a pious widow andshow emotional restraint

house-Chapter 6 reflects on these restraints in the light of women’s elegies forchildren and other family members The Neo-Platonic belief that poetryconstitutes an alternate reality becomes a particularly vital consolation

in these tender compositions Women who miscarried or suffered thedeath of an infant often blamed themselves, for early modern obstetricstaught them that the failure to fetter their imaginations and their sinfulnatures could lead to disaster Composing a poem, they could publiclyproclaim their power to control those destructive powers, harnessingthem prosodically to ‘body forth’ the lost person The learned conven-tions of prosody restrain passionate sorrow, and prosody’s connection

to the body provides a kind of liberation A life cannot be sustained,but verse can Perhaps all the forms of elegiac resistance examined here,

to rhetorical, theological, ritual, political or literary authorities, derivetheir force from this ancient and radical claim

The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric

The rhetorical work of building a community of shared loss drags againstelegists’ desire to individuate themselves as writers Elegy holds exem-plarity and tradition, the consolatory promise of the continuity of thesame, in tension with the poet’s assertions of his or her particularity ordifference To evaluate the demands of tradition, this chapter will focus

on the meaning of the term ‘elegy’ and its derivation from epideictic anddeliberative rhetoric Elegy could also be understood as a particularmetre, the elegiac distich A brief discussion of the perceived faults ofthis metre in the early modern period will pave the way for a return tothe subject of prosody in Chapter 6 As a genre, elegy is identified by itscontent: praise and lament The forces shaping lament will be invest-igated in Chapter 2 Here, elegy’s commonalities of purpose and utilitywith epideictic reveal the social nature of praise, discussed in Section 1.2.Praise was perceived to improve the moral character of both writer andreader, orator and listener This contributed to the placement of rhet-oric at the centre of the early modern humanist curriculum Section 1.3scrutinizes a particular locus of elegiac production: the school and theuniversity These competitive learning environments also trained writers

to consider occasional poetry as an opportunity for self-fashioning anddisplay, Section 1.4 contends Agonistic displays drew upon the open-ness of epideictic to its opposite, censure, to expand the critique of moraldecadence typical of funeral sermons into a castigation of other poets.These elegiac criticisms are the subject of Section 1.5, which reveals howthe material conditions of production – in particular, its venality – areprojected by poets onto their competitors, but can end up indicting theentire genre

10

The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric 11

1.1 Elegy: A note on terms

Poems both of lament and love – funerary poetry, and amorous lyrics

in imitation of Ovid and Propertius – were called ‘elegies’ in the earlymodern period Though the two types were distinct in content, theydid retain some stylistic similarities: both could include self-defence orcriticism of contemporaries, critical tendencies which will be particu-larly evident in many of the elegies discussed in this book.1 Elegies are

often thus characterised as genera mixta, poems which cohere from the

blending of several traditions.2

Despite the ambiguities typical of ‘elegy’ as a generic category, theterm usefully incorporates a larger range of forms and memorial practicesthan the epitaph, an epigram projected as or suited to monumentalinscription, or the clearly funerary term ‘epicede’, which in the clas-sical tradition refers specifically to formal songs sung in the presence

of the corpse Julius Caesar Scaliger had distinguished between thefunerary genres in a similar way: an epicede is to be spoken over abody as yet unburied, the ‘epitaphium recens’ is produced for a recentlyburied body, and ‘epitaphium anniversarium’ commemorates the dead

at yearly intervals after death, and so omits the lament.3 But poetscould use the terms interchangeably in the early modern period, as

Henry Peacham acknowledges: ‘The difference between an Epicede and

Epitaph is (as Servius teacheth) that the Epicedium is proper to the

body while it is unburied, the Epitaph otherwise; yet our Poets stick

not to take one for the other.’4 George Puttenham’s reflections onthe origin of the term ‘obsequies’ – that ‘the lamenting of deatheswas chiefly at the very burialls of the dead, also at monethes mindesand longer times, by custome continued yearely’5 – show how thedifferent elegiac genres commemorated the temporal processes of deathand drying of the corpse, and of reconciliation of the bereaved withthe community, processes celebrated in the folk and Catholic funeraryrituals declining since the Reformation Despite the prohibition of inter-cessory rituals, the seventeenth century still saw the composition offamous ‘anniversary’ poems by John Donne and Henry King

In terms of metre, ‘elegiac’ normally refers to distichs consisting of

a dactylic hexameter and a pentameter line This was not the form

of the most ancient funerary inscriptions, however, which are nowknown to be hexameter verses.6 The epic connotations of hexametermade the elegiac distich appropriate for serious topics and ‘passionatemeditations’ (both on love and on death).7 It could also suggest thedynamics of public performance, giving the impression ‘that the poet,

12 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

like the old minstrel, is addressing a circle of listeners’.8 However,

in the early modern period this sociability tended to be produced

by tone, content and context rather than by metre Funerary elegieswere not conventionally associated with a particular metre; as a genrethey were more frequently identified by their content, as when PhilipSidney listed ‘the lamenting Elegiack’ among his eight types of poetry.9

When Sidney himself died, his elegists employed a variety of metres to

honour Sidney’s own versatile prosody in the Arcadia In the seventeenth

century, however, most elegies were written in rhyming couplets.10

The hobbled distich did not translate well to English Puttenhamdescribed it as ‘pitious’, ‘placing a limping Pentameter, after a lustyExameter, which made it go dolourously’;11 Ben Jonson translating

Horace’s ‘versibus impariter iunctis’ called the elegiac couplet ‘Verse

unequall match’d’, in which

first sowre Laments,After, mens Wishes, crown’d in their events,

Were also clos’d.12

Jonson, who identifies ‘sowre Laments’ as the original topic for theelegiac metre, attempted a few Ovidian elegies, but for the most partavoided the genre Both in form and in content, the elegy jarred withhis laureate reputation – would Jonson write ‘An elegie? no, muse; ytaskes a straine / to loose, and Cap’ring, for thy stricter veyne.’13

1.2 The roots of elegy in epideictic

As a genre largely determined by its content, elegy could draw onthe compositional principles of the prose genres, especially epideictic.Several excellent monographs on elegy’s historical development andrelation to classical and humanist rhetoric have already been written,and it is not my intention to repeat them here.14 A few basic character-istics should be established, however As a ‘mode of enunciation’ whosefunction was determined by its pragmatic context, elegy was associ-ated with epideictic in ancient and early modern rhetorical treatises,and especially with funeral sermons and secular funeral orations.15 But

to praise, an orator must also persuade Before discussing the ethicalutility of praise, we should first clarify the relationship between elegyand deliberative rhetoric

While Aristotle’s resolving of the ‘modes’ into forensic, ative and demonstrative kinds continued to influence medieval and

deliber-The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric 13

Renaissance rhetoricians,16 Aristotle himself recognised the possibility

of these categories overlapping Quintilian grouped deliberative togetherwith epideictic as forms of oratory which do not require the audi-ence to assess the justice or injustice of a legal claim.17 Elegists usethe strategies of deliberative rhetoric to persuade readers to grieve (ornot to grieve) Thomas Wilson’s letter to Katherine Brandon consoling

her on the death of her sons Henry and Charles are given in his Arte

of Rhetorique as examples of deliberative address.18 Elegies, like funeralorations, combined persuasions against grief with warnings derived fromthe model of the deceased and the necessity of their deaths The viewrepresented by Isaiah 57:1 that ‘mercifull men are taken away, and noman understandeth that the righteous is taken away from the evil tocome’ often provokes sermonists and elegists to use the occasion of adeath to condemn the degeneracy of the age In an elegy collected byHerbert Paston, God is said to have intended the ‘death of the Countesse

of Rivers’ to ‘upbrade our masking age’, ‘When vertues self was growne acrime’.19Jeremy Taylor declares that Lady Frances, Countess of Carberry,died because ‘The age is very evil and deserved her not; but because

it is so evil, it hath the more need to have such lives preserved inmemory to instruct our piety, or upbraid our wickedness.’20 In funeralelegies, similar critiques encourage readers to reform Hardison observes

that in Protestant funeral sermons laments are followed by a consolatio

which reminds listeners of God’s mercy.21 Elegists also rail against thecruelty of providence, the frailties and iniquities of man, and the tempta-tions to evil, before concluding with a reminder of heavenly bliss Thisarc is apparent in Ben Jonson’s poem on Venetia Digby, which beginswith an emotional lamentation for her ‘fall’, in which ‘I sum up mineown breaking, and wish all’ The poet rebukes his own ‘blasphemy’;persuading himself not to despair, he can laterally exhort her family not

to mourn her through an elaborate ekphrasis on the joys of heaven.

But it was not merely the excoriation of contemporary ness which encouraged listeners to reform Praise of the dead wasalso intended to persuade Barbara Lewalski observes that since Plato,rhetoricians seeking to define epideictic had focussed on virtue as

wicked-the legitimate object of praise Menander and wicked-the Ad Herennium distinguished the three topoi of praise as the goods of nature, fortune

and character The first two were external and accidental, and ‘almost allRenaissance theorists agreed with Cicero and Quintilian that the goods

of nature or fortune are not properly objects of praise in themselves, butshould be treated chiefly as means of displaying the subject’s virtue inusing them rightly’.22 Elegies, like other works of praise, were socially

14 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

useful because they encouraged readers to emulate the praiseworthy.23

Even Plato, despite banishing poetry from his Republic, allowed forthe composition of ‘hymns to the gods and eulogies to good people’,24

because such hymns could teach the young to admire and achievevirtue, justice and nobility The student who memorises ‘works of goodpoets’ finds there ‘numerous exhortations, many passages describing inglowing terms good men of old, so that the child is inspired to imitatethem and become like them’.25 Aristotle also promoted the utility ofpoetry, for ‘Young and Magnanimous men’ tend to emulate the virtuespraised in others, and thereby to improve society along with their owncharacters.26Following Aristotle, Erasmus made imitation the keystone

of his theories of pedagogy, because ‘Nature has given small children as

a special gift the ability to imitate’27which teachers must direct towardsthe good Memorising the rules of rhetoric also helped the young

to understand and imitate ‘good authors’, according to Melanchthon:

‘For no-one can become a successful author without imitating, yet noimitation is feasible without knowledge of the necessary precepts ofrhetoric.’28

Hobbes summarises in his notes on Aristotle’s Rhetoric that ‘Prayse, is a kind of inverted Precept.’29Enticing readers to admire the goods of char-acter, praise encourages ethical development more effectively than laws

or rules can Scaliger, who also recognised poetry’s conservative ence, comments that ‘Aristotle ruled that since poetry is comparable

influ-to that civic institution which leads us influ-to happiness, happiness beingnothing other than perfect action, the poet does not lead us to imitatecharacter, but action.’30Like Scaliger, Lucius Cary, the second ViscountFalkland, associates praise with masculine action in his praise of Ben

Jonson Jonson dispensed ‘the Bayes of Vertue’ and acted as ‘the scourge

of Vice’ His poems did ‘our youth to noble actions raise, / Hoping [to earn] the meed of his immortal praise’ ( JonsVirb 3) Jonson and Falkland

shared the humanist belief that the ennobling effects of praise uted to the construction of a meritocratic society Jonson had himselfasserted in his elegiac ode on Henry Morison that ‘love of greatness,and of good’ ‘knits brave minds and manners, more than blood’.31 It

contrib-is the shared regard for active virtue, not lineage, which joined thesefriends in ‘union’, and which also united the Tribe of Ben As he writes

in his advice to the children of Kenelm and Venetia Digby on the death

of their mother, ‘virtue alone is true nobility’.32Elevating the goods ofcharacter over fortune, panegyrists like Jonson revealed that even themost humble subject could become renowned By distributing praise,these writers were working to improve society.33 Praise also ennobled

The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric 15

the praise-giver In order to be persuasive, the rhetorician must convincehis listeners that he is trustworthy and competent This contributes tothe pedagogical utility of praise, to which we will return shortly

In Falkland’s celebration of ‘noble actions’, we can hear a warlike echo

of a more particular purpose of classical praise This purpose is revealed

by Polybius’ description of the Roman tradition of actors wearing funeralmasks representing famous men He muses that ‘There could not easily

be a more ennobling spectacle for a young man who aspires to fameand virtue.’ Like Jonson’s pen, mask ceremonies and funeral orationsinspire ‘young men   to endure every suffering for the public welfare

in the hope of winning the glory that attends on brave men’.34 KeithHopkins notes that such rituals subordinated individual self-interest tothe common good, inspiring young men to heroic action ‘in the hope

of bringing glory to the family line’.35 Monumental art, funerals andpoetry paid the wages of excellence in glorious immortality They alsoensured that glory should serve the family and the state, not the fallenindividual As Chapter 6 will reveal, elegists not only counselled thebereaved to resist effeminate mourning, but also contributed to themaintenance of a militarised society through the praise of active virtue.When writing on women and children, who rarely had the oppor-tunity to show active virtue, elegists often focus on the goods of fortunesuch as family lineage Comparatively few elegies for children werepublished, and those usually commemorate the child’s unrealised poten-tial as heir to a family title An elegy on the Duke of Cambridge, who

died in his infancy in 1677, claims ‘We did it’s Father’s mighty Genius

spy’ in the child’s gaze.36 Because of the status of the family, the child

is mourned by all, rather than just by his mother; it is the family, ratherthan the individual, which is honoured by the poet The poem focusses

on what the child might have become There is little reflection on hisparticularity, or the impact of his death on his family Similarly, elegiesfor women often focus on their families and on their faithfulness andvirtue, rather than on their more specific qualities

But not all praise was based on general categories of masculine virtue.Dennis Kay has argued that tributes to exemplary virtues in Renais-sance funerary elegy were giving way to ‘the affective communica-tion of a unique loss’.37One unusual example of detailed and affectiveportraiture is the ‘Funerall Eligy’ on Cecilia Ridgeway, the Countess ofLondonderry.38Its author promises ‘a Playne True and Sumary Descrip-tion of Her Life and Death without welt, Gard, or Embrodery’ This homelymetaphor suggests that the anonymous author may be a woman; thepoet identifies himself or herself as someone who wrote ‘not for Publique

16 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

view’ and ‘who knew Her best and longest, and loved Her Best andLongest’ Rather than telling readers what women should be, this poemportrays Lady Cecilia as she was It moves through the topoi of praise,recording that with the death of her brother Henry Macwilliam, LadyCecilia and her four sisters stood to inherit the family estate It describesher breeding and education, noting that Queen Elizabeth taught Cecilia

to play ‘the Bandora and the Lute’ While the care of the monarch (for

a woman named after the patron saint of music) would be significant

to any elegist, this detail reaffirms female social and patronage bondswhich might have assumed special significance for a female poet.Unlike many other elegies for women, this poem presents Cecilia’spersonal characteristics, not all of which render her as the ideal femalefamiliar from funeral sermons We learn that she ‘was most adverse, toany Chainge’; that she refused to dissemble, to the point of seemingwilful; that she was a careful hoarder of all useful things; and thatthe ‘word, obedyence, to be Prest, on Wyves, [ˆ (though merily)], ItPleased Her not mutch’ She liked her children to read to her as she didher domestic work She injured her forehead in a coach accident, andsuffered in crossing the Irish Sea, where her husband Sir Thomas wastreasurer under Sir George Cary Their courtship had been amiable, butperhaps she sought to temper Sir Thomas’ ambitions by asserting thepriority of family life: ‘for Building, Clyming, so much Publycke Servicedoing, as might undo the Private, / She, did oft tymes (besyds advise)with dovelike= private = murumuring somewhat vary.’

The poet shows knowledge of contemporary medicine, listing thehome remedies the Countess kept on hand for the treatment of herfamily and servants:

As Corall, Seed-Perle, Bezar, Musk, Civett, Amber Greeceand Irish Slate

Harts Horne and Unycorne, Crabs Clawes, Crampe curingHares Bones, and

Methridate which being well aply’d, Seldome or never

came to Late

besyds Hadocks Head Bones, Stags Marrow, Lemons,

Pomerytorons, and Pomegranetts

hardly to be had in any Marchants Shops, much less

Contry Marketts  

This level of detail suggests careful observation of the Countess’kitchen cabinet; perhaps the elegist herself shares these medical skills

The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric 17

Likewise, the poet lists the Countess’ domestic chores, which included

‘Tent worke, Turkey Worke, Damasking, Sheets, Blanketts, lets, / Cushions, Coverd Stooles, Chayrs, Testers, Curtens and footeCarpetts  ’ and so on Of these ‘good usefull works of Huswiffry / Shehad a Chiefe quick Hand in the Best, and in the Rest, She gave a SpeciallDirectory.’ Public elegies for women by male poets tend to favourwomen’s categorical virtues over details of their daily activities But thispoem relishes the domestic arcana for their own sake, documenting aspecific life experience in the specialised vocabulary of female domesticlabour

Cover-This elegy instructs the reader in prudent household management, aswell as revealing some of the private tensions experienced by headstrongwomen in the early modern period It conveys public status to private,domestic and gendered labour, mourning the loss of a nuanced andhighly individuated person, rather than exploring the merits associatedwith her vocational or social status It describes a separate institution oflearning (the home) and female forms of knowledge (sewing, medicine,etc.), building a domestic repertoire through material details rather thanabstract qualities Morally engaged and didactic, the poem is nonethe-less distinct in its strategies of persuasion from other male-authoredexamples of epideictic rhetoric in the period

1.3 Training up scholars: Elegiac rhetoric and schools

In this elegy, domestic knowledge is revealed as a kind of learningparticular to women, just as the skills of rhetoric acquired in schoolsand universities are particular to men Tzvetan Todorov argues that ‘in

a society, the recurrence of certain discursive properties is alised, and individual texts are produced and perceived in relation tothe norm constituted by this codification’.39The ‘playne’ elegy without

institution-‘embroidery’ emerges from a particular institution, that of the home Butthe properties of the elegiac genre which we have been discussing arenormally ‘institutionalised’ and ‘codified’ by the early modern school,

an institution from which women like Cecilia were excluded

Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine comment that schools sought ‘toproduce a total routineness of imaginative writing by reducing its varietysystematically’ to types of verbal composition ‘Each type is expected

to become second nature to the student, so that his public utteranceswill be pre-shaped to the requirements of public debate – the lynch-pinskill for social and political life.’40This rather stern Weberian account ofroutinisation highlights the social utility of rhetorical exercises But it

18 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

also undervalues the usefulness to learning of pleasure as well as line, which was so often recognised by early modern pedagogues Poetry,

discip-a cdiscip-ategory which included most fictiondiscip-alisdiscip-ations, could be especidiscip-allypleasurable Scaliger commented that imitation ‘is not the end of poetry’,but an intermediate to the end which is ‘the giving of instruction inpleasurable form, for poetry teaches, and does not simply amuse’.41Thisidea that poetry sugars the pill of moral instruction can be found in

many early modern treatises, from translations of Horace’s Ars Poetica to Sidney’s Defence of Poesie The empathy and sorrow which elegies elicit

could also be regarded as a kind of pleasure This indulgence of sorrow

in the imaginative freedom of poetry will be examined in Chapter 2.Poetry was not just useful because it gave pleasure: it was also morallyeffective According to humanist educators, virtue and decorum were besttaught through examples rather than abstract theories.42 One practicalexercise in rhetoric, for example, was the sketching of Theophrastan ‘char-

acters’ Following Aristotle (Rhetoric ii.12–17), students used characters to

generalise about human nature for rhetorical effect Such exercises directlyinfluenced the production of poetic ‘epitaphs’, with their emphasis onvocations; but characters were also familiar from sermons, where they wereadapted to illustrate ethical premises.43This training in ethical generalisa-tion also contributed to the generality of elegiac portraiture

Students’ ability to generalise about character was also developedthrough the use of commonplace books Under a selection of usually

moral headings, readers compiled and transcribed sententiae which they

could use later to bulk up their occasional poems John Brinsley ated the use of commonplace books ‘for more store and variety ofmatter’ Students could turn ‘of a sodaine to matters of all sorts, in themost exquisite and pure Poets: to have some direction both for matterand imitation; whether for Gratulatory verses, Triumphs, Funerals, orwhatsoever’.44 Writing an elegy does not require research into an indi-vidual’s life so much as a trawl through the commonplaces of consol-ation and virtue retrieved from other poems The commonplace bookepitomises the active and imitative approach to reading encouraged byearly modern educators Writing elegies could also be part of responsivereading: Roger Lowe, a south Lancashire apprentice, wrote an elegy

advoc-upon reading Edward Gee’s A Treatise of Prayer and of Divine Providence,

when ‘in consideracion of the man’s person and gravitie I was posesdwith sadnes’.45While Lowe’s poem commemorates a stranger, ElizabethLyttleton’s commonplace book includes elegies and epitaphs for famousindividuals alongside memorials for her own family Funerary elegies

The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric 19

and epitaphs made up the bulk of the occasional verses recorded in suchnotebooks.46

Students usually began by writing epistles, embarking on imitations ofpoetry in the fifth form or above.47Cicero’s and Seneca’s letters offeredmodels for consolation: they show how to manage the bereaved andapply standardised moral observations Formulary rhetoric like Wilson’s

Arte of Rhetorique supplied further examples Formularies are ‘made up of

compositions drawn to illustrate rhetorical principles and presented asmodels for students to imitate in the process of developing themselvesfor the tasks of communication’.48 But to become effective commu-nicators, students would have to learn more than rhetorical finesse:they must also develop compassion Wilson teaches that the consolershould enter into a ‘felowshippe of sorowe’ with his audience.49 AsAnthony Walker affirms in a funeral sermon, ‘their Authority is greatest

in comforting the calamitous, who bear a deep share in the samecalamity’.50 Through the inventio of sympathy, the speaker claims the

authority of shared pain, and joins a community of loss From there,

he or she submits to an exemplary process of self-consolation whichother mourners can imitate.51 To be an effective orator or writer, thestudent should thus learn to act out the sorrows of condolence As theintroduction suggested, these emotions should be understood as bothengendered and hosted by the ritual of rhetoric

When a member of the community died, students could practiceapplying classical models to contemporary situations In Brinsley’sdialogue on education, his character Philoponus describes poetry ashaving ‘very commendable use’, including ‘in occasions of triumph andrejoicing, more ordinarily at the funerals of some worthy personages’;therefore ‘it is not amisse to traine up schollars even in this kinde also’.Such practice did not ensure that even teachers were capable of produ-cing a good elegy, however: his interlocutor Spondeus condemns ‘suchflash and bodge stuffe as are ordinarily in some schooles’, and includeshimself among

som Masters, who have thought themselves very profound Poets,who would upon an occasion of a Funerall have written you a sheete

or two of verses, as it were of a sydden; yet amongst all those, youshould hardly have found one such a Verse as you speake of, unlesse

it were stolne; and most of them such, as a judicious Poet would beready to laugh at, or loath to reade.52

Nonetheless, adult authors would sometimes publish their schoolboyexercises and academic verses Milton’s headmaster at St Paul’s,

20 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

Alexander Gill included boyish funeral poems with his adult tions; Milton added Latin and English elegies on Cambridge function-

composi-aries to his 1645 Poems.53

Like schools, the universities were regular producers of elegiac poetry,often collected together in tribute volumes But anthologies did notonly emerge in times of mourning When Elizabeth I visited Oxford, thecolleges posted poems on walls and entrances.54 Such physical displays

of text were complemented by printed anthologies drawing tions from all colleges and ranks Contributors were usually arranged inorder of precedence, with the vice chancellor coming first, college pres-idents and university dignitaries followed by fellows and then students,

contribu-in a hierarchical procession which resembled the heraldic funeral Somecolleges dominated the anthological market Christ Church College,Oxford, in particular was a centre for verse production in the seven-teenth century Christ Church men such as Jasper Mayne, RichardCorbet, William Cartwright, Dudley Digges, John Berkenhead, WilliamStrode, Martin Llewellyn and Nicholas Oldisworth were serial contrib-utors to the university volumes Cartwright and Mayne were particularlyeffusive: Cartwright wrote English poems for nine Oxford anthologies,Mayne for eight Mayne was joined by fellow alumni Henry King and

Richard Corbet in contributing an elegy to Donne’s Poems of 1633 Mayne and King also joined ‘Wits generall Tribe’ ( JonsVirb 42) to pay tribute to Ben Jonson in Jonsonus Virbius, the memorial volume

published four years later The volume’s editor was Brian Duppa, theformer vice chancellor of Oxford under whose auspices many of theChrist Church poets prospered These two volumes will be discussed atlength in Chapter 5 A competitor with the Jonson memorial, and with

Jonsonian literary values and political allegiances, was Justa Edovardo

King As David Norbrook has elaborated, this volume – best known for its

inclusion of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, discussed briefly below – was also offered

by Cambridge poets in the spirit of collegiate competition.55The tional context itself could have encouraged contests for self-distinction.Whether in the ‘challenges’ at Westminster School (examinations wherestudents tried to outstrip each other in the precision and fluency of theirLatin grammar) or the tutorial disputations at Oxford and Cambridge,students were taught to exhibit their mastery of rhetoric and thereby

educa-to differentiate themselves from their peers.56The desire for distinctionthrough performance also animated many elegists, and made the dispar-agement of competitors an elegiac commonplace That desire, bred bythe educators themselves, is most famously conspicuous in the youthfulelegies of John Milton.57

The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric 21

1.4 Elegy and self-display

Much has been written about Milton’s posture of ‘unreadiness’ whichculminates in the mature production of ‘Lycidas’.58 The elegy callsattention to the poet’s youthfulness and his academic situation; it ispervaded by maternal images, including the veneration of Edward Kingand Milton’s alma mater, Cambridge, as that ‘self-same hill’ on whichthe young poets were ‘nurst’ Whether or not this maternal imageryconveys Milton’s grief at the loss of his own mother on 3 April 1637, itaffords the young poet, who ‘to manhood am arriv’d so near’, an oppor-tunity to define himself as a liminal writer, emerging from infancy to

the maturity of his epic ambitions The naming of ‘Fame’ as the spur

‘to scorn delights, and live laborious days’ identifies not only Milton’slabours preceding this composition, but also his hopes for the poem.The desire to ‘burst out’ of asceticism and obscurity ‘into sudden blaze’

is a desire to be born to fame, and especially to the ‘perfect witness of

all-judging Jove’ and approval under the law of the Father But just as

Phoebus ‘touch’d my trembling ears’ to correct the misapprehension offame, the ‘uncouth Swain’ ends the poem when he ‘touch’t the tenderstops of various Quills’ and ‘twitch’t his Mantle blue’ This stilling ofhectic, nervous motion resolves the agonistic tensions of each half of thepoem, 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 openinglines transforms into this independent speaker, capable of embarking onhis own journey into the world, so Milton proclaims his own independ-

ence Even the name ‘Lycidas’, which derives from the Greek lykideus, or

wolf cub, signals not only King’s (and Milton’s) youth but also a series

of connections to Apollo, the god of poetry from whom the speakerderives his own authority.59

But the poem’s famous critique of the clergy who ‘Creep and intrudeand climb into the fold’ and fail to feed the ‘hungry Sheep’, embedded

in a pastoral discourse where both the speaker and Lycidas are tified as shepherds, audaciously asserts the poet’s prophetic role incriticising ecclesiastical abuses The transgression against the genericdecorum of pastoral elegy with the violence of St Peter’s speech isconsistent, Norbrook has argued, with Milton’s tendency in many ofthe poems published in 1645 to make political points through modi-fication of genre.60 The elegy’s topical critique also refers backwards

iden-to Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, not only corroborating Miliden-ton’s ambitiousself-fashioning, but also drawing on the tradition of poetic licence formoralising 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 tion to being the genre with which Virgil preceded his epic productions,the pastoral emphasises a temporal apotheosis and renewal in literaryform, rather than relying on the stock consolations of Christian pietyalone Ruth Wallerstein argues that ‘Lycidas’ ‘makes use of the power

addi-of ritual to absorb man into the experience addi-of the race, to detach himfrom the disproportion of the moment and draw him into that largerexperience which he shares with all men’.61For Wallerstein, the secular-isation of ritual lament and the promise of renewal in the pastoral modetransport the reader from the privacy of unique sorrow to a communaland ritually shared loss Though ‘Lycidas’ can be regarded as exceptional

in its violent renewal of pastoral conventions through religious critique,

it shares in the elegiac habit of drawing attention to its writer

Cicero constrained the funeral oration as ‘by no means a suitable

occa-sion for parading one’s distinction in rhetoric’ (De Oratore II.lxxiv.341),

but seventeenth-century elegists conspicuously ignored that advice.Whether to announce his arrival or to make himself more desirable topotential employers, the elegist often dwells on his own virtues Thesecan be magnified rather than diminished by his use of the modestytopos Elias Ashmole interrupts his lament for his mother’s decease torecall the glory days:

When I consulted Men, and happ’ly drew

From their Converse, Learning and Credit too:

When Bookes I Courted, and to Joy posest

Minerva’s Beauty, slept in her kind Brest:

When those faire Mistresses I could behold

And strike their Eyes with lookes, as safe as bold:

When noble Speculacions, fil’d my Braine

With pleas’d Delights; and satisfying Gaine,

When no Ambitious thoughts, had skill or power,

To tempt my humble Fortune  62

Though ostensibly commemorating his lost happiness and payingtribute to the woman who produced him, Ashmole is also advertisinghis virtues as a scholar, conversationalist and lover Juliana Schiesariidentifies this turn from lamentation to self-fashioning as a common-place of Renaissance elegy which makes loss ‘the enabling condition of[the male subject’s] individualistic and otherwise inexplicable genius’.63

Nominating themselves as arbiters of virtue also enabled elegists todeclare their own assets Aristotle recommended that the epideictic

The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric 23

rhetorician, in order to be believed, must present himself as a judiciousand trustworthy judge of virtue Both Cicero and Quintilian confirmedthat only someone with a personal knowledge of virtue – a goodman – could praise goodness.64These well-known principles are reflectedfor example in Owen Feltham’s explanation of why ‘they that dopraise / Desert in others, for themselves plant Bayes’: ‘For he that praisesmerit, loves it: thus / Hee’s good, for goodnesse thats solicitous.’65Elegistsprove their virtue by commending virtue, but with a prosodic and rhet-orical modesty suitable to modest individuals Falkland demands thatepideictic be a modest genre, giving fame rather than taking it

Those shew their Judgement least, who shew their wit:And are suspected, least their subtiller Aime

Be rather to attaine, then to give Fame.66

For Falkland, panegyric should reveal the subject’s virtues, not advertisethe poet’s subtlety This also contributes to the conservativism of thegenre If the elegist does not want to be accused of using a ‘subtle’ wit

to draw attention to himself, his poem should also be generically andformally ordinary

While the ‘custom’ of self-promotion casts suspicion on all praise, it

is also the ground for that individuation which Alpers has said breathesnew life into conventionality Many like W Abington warn fellow poets

that ‘with what veile so’ere you hide, / Your aime, twill not be thought your griefe, but pride’ ( JonsVirb 27) Even veiled criticism through satir-

ical examples drew suspicion As Dolan argues, poets use criticism to

‘praeteritically display their skill in the very sort of attention-gettingdevices they were ostensibly condemning’ (36) One of John Donne’sadmirers complains that

Our commendation is suspected, when

Wee Elegyes compose on sleeping men,

The Manners of the Age prevayling so

That not our conscience wee, but witts doe show.67

The genre is itself debased by self-interest and ‘manners’, by the elegist’sattraction to the improprieties of ‘wit’ over the modesty of decorouslanguage Elegists are caught in a double bind, for the greater theirpoems the more suspicious readers will be of their ambitions Rhetoricaldecorum requires that they suit their language and topoi to partic-ular 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 age’, not to dict them But those manners include a paradoxical performance ofexcellence within modesty, of distinction within similitude

contra-The difficulty of re-establishing convincing elegiac expressions of griefand greatness in such a context was an ancient commonplace.68 AsHenry King acknowledges, achieving a poetic range equal to the range

of emotions inspired by diverse occasions – renewing the rhetoric whichhad been adapted to the situation of death itself, rather than its partic-ular victims – proves increasingly difficult with time

Should we our Sorrows in this Method range,

Oft as Misfortune doth their Subjects change,

And to the sev’rall Losses, which befall,

Pay diff’rent Rites at ev’ry Funeral;

   We must want Tears to wail such various Themes,

And prove defective in Death’s mournfull Laws,

Not having Words proportion’d to each Cause

(King 133–4)

For King, there are finite ways to communicate grief, and death’s ling ‘laws’ reduce human difference to the same dust and air Frequentuse of hyperbole dilutes its effectiveness in depicting intense grief;similarly, frequent idealisation of personal virtues and achievementsleft elegists like Thomas Jordan faltering for new words to establishhuman excellence Denying the powers of inventive language to expresstruth, he attributes to Sir Nathaniel Brent ‘More real merit [  ] Thenany Metaphor can magnifie’.69Jordan accentuates the contrast betweenthe ‘real’ and the ‘metaphoric’, or between the person and his recon-struction in figurative language premised on dissimilitude Conventionswere powerful tools, charged by generations of use, crucial to displays

level-of mastery level-of social and literary decorum They could not be arded, but at the same time, re-energising them could require virtuosodisplays – which must be managed without calling attention to eitherthe virtuosity or the display

disreg-1.5 Base pens for hire

Learning rhetoric, students acquired a moral and literary versatility whichallowed them to adapt general virtues to particular social situations But itwas commonplace to critique versatility as a sign of corruptibility In the

The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric 25

Gorgias, Plato defended rhetoric against the charge that the orator could

be made to serve unjust or unethical ends But the argument did notend there For elegists, an unconvincing poem, failure to satisfy genericexpectations, or expressions of hyperbolic grief might draw attention tothe poet for altogether different reasons: the poet wants his reward As Isuggested in the introduction, many elegists were reluctant to call atten-tion to the material conditions of the poem’s production Like elegies,stone memorials were determined by fashion, expectation and creativeinnovation within the limits of the form.70 But unlike monumentalsculptors, whom Nigel Llewellyn has described as ‘agents in formalisedrituals’, not independent artists, elegists constantly assert their finan-cial independence It is easy to find evidence of the fees charged bymonumental artists Nicholas Stone, who also made Edmund Spenser’smonument, records that in 1629 ‘I made a tomb for my Lady Paston

of Norfolk, and set it up at Paston and was very extraordinarily tained there and paid for it £340.’71 However, no account of funeralexpenses has yet been found to include payment for elegiac composi-tion The poems seem not to have been directly commissioned, even if

enter-a speculenter-ative elegist might hope for some ‘rewenter-ard’ for his gift Stressingtheir affective relationship to the dead and their struggle to scale theirlanguage to match loss, elegists protest against suspicions that they writefrom purely mercenary motives But elegists also reiterate that suspicionthemselves, incriminating their peers as bidding for patronage By thisrisky strategy, elegists advertise their own sincerity

Poets were incredibly sensitive to the charge of insincerity, a charge

to which they were especially susceptible if they had never met thedead person they eulogised Thomas Jordan knew John Steward only ‘byReport’, but nonetheless claimed to love him for his rumoured virtues

‘If a sad Stranger may presume to mourn’, he claims, and

If you’ll conceive Sorrow can keep her Court

In Souls that have the Cause but by Report,

Or if the loss of virtue you believe

Can make its Lover (though a Stranger) grieve:72

then ‘Admit my Wet Oblation’ Cleverly, Jordan argues that if readersbelieve that panegyric in general can induce a love of virtue, then hetoo must be allowed to become enamoured with Steward’s reputation.Corbet also declares his lack of acquaintance with his subject provesthat he does not ‘strive / To winne accesse, or grace, with Lords alive’

He claims to have investigated his subject’s worth by litotes, arriving at

26 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

a recognition of ‘negative goodnesse’.73Corbet’s research produces thetopics of praise By demanding negatively what Haward should haveeschewed – ‘Did he attend the Court for no man’s fall?’ and so on – heexposes the corrupting influences of class, property and court Through

this clever recusatio, Corbet turns his lack of specific knowledge about

the dead into the virtue of negativity: Haward is not famous because he

is not infamous Corbet’s scepticism towards the court promotes him

as an honest broker, the critical conscience of authority Like Corbet,Samuel Daniel portrays himself as honest as well as financially inde-pendent Daniel’s ‘Funeralle Poeme’ on Charles Mountjoy asserts hisfreedom:

But Devonshire I here stand cleere with thee

I have a manumission to be free,

I owe thee nothing, and I may be bold

To speake the certaine truth of what I know.74

Daniel’s love of virtue levels the social distinctions between him andDevonshire, who stands ‘with’ him on an equal footing Poets like Danieldeny not only the patronage relationships which may have producedtheir elegies, but also the terms of gift exchange and friendly mutualitywhich were generally recognised in the mortuary rituals of deathbedpronouncements, bequests, funeral hospitality and the construction ofmemorials But this excessive declaration of indemnity has an unin-tended effect: it also undermines the social relationships which thoseexchanges and rituals sanctioned Lacking a credible relationship to theirsubject, the poets again find themselves suspected

By revealing the rhetorical or material poverty of their competitors,elegists show rhetorical confidence and deny their own needs ThomasPhilipot ridicules his competitors at ‘common Funeralls’, where ‘eachvulgar quill’ falls into ‘some broken rapture’ Their ‘watry tribute of theeye’ becomes ‘some easie Elegie’.75Although he might be judged to haveincriminated all poets by this satire, Philipot distinguishes his own ‘refinedverse’ from what Thomas Carew in his elegy for Anne Hay calls ‘base pens,for hire’ (Carew 67) Sometimes the act of writing did involve payment:Roger Lowe, a Lancashire apprentice and village notary, also collaborated

on elegy with James Woods, who ‘told me of his sadnes for Eles Lealand’sdeath, and he delivered to me a paper of verses that he had made andgave me them to write out’.76Though he was paid for his scribal work,Lowe describes their activity as inspired by grief In other cases, the finan-cial motive is more apparent Nicholas Oldisworth owned in the margins

The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric 27

of a manuscript poem to his patron Sir Edward Hungerford that ‘for theseverses I was largely rewarded with gold’.77He also accounts for his elegiaclines on Thomas Hulbert Hungerford ‘prescribed the mater of them tomee, intending to sett upp this Epitaph at his owne Cost, because ThomasHulbert had diligently waited on him, when hee was high Sheriffe ofWiltshire’.78The content was provided by Hungerford, while Oldisworthdid the versifying Needless to say, his elegy makes no mention of the

financial transaction, grounding its inventio in Hulbert’s virtue alone.

The salt dealer Nicholas Murford prepared an oblique memorial forHenry Ireton to achieve a specific financial outcome: he wanted to bebailed from prison Murford sent a manuscript memorial volume toOliver Cromwell from the Fleet on 25 February 1651, with a note that

‘These worthles papers I present to you, / To cancel th’ Bond of gratitudelong due’ The bonds included the £13,000 lent by his father to Charles I

in 1632 He pays his debt of praise and gratitude to Ireton, encouragingCromwell to pay the government’s own debt in exchange This cheekyrequest for repayment is embedded in an ‘Apology to his Excellency theLord Generall CROMWELL / that these Offertures were not presented (asintended, and sent) at the Funerall’.79 Murford imagines the lying instate, funeral and interment in great detail, on behalf of a reader likehimself (unlike Cromwell) who has no access to these scenes ‘See what

my still searching ey discovers’, he writes, signifying his own imaginedpresence at the obsequies and reminding Cromwell that he is kept aclose prisoner without such freedom to range The elegist’s insertion

of himself into the privileged space of the funeral was a commonplacewhich, Chapter 3 will argue, sought to convince readers that the poetwas not a slavish fee-pen or hanger-on, but a worthy participant in aritual celebration of love and loyalty Here, it might also serve to remindCromwell of the financial dues to a forgotten guest

Such declarations of financial need are rare; more often, poets latch

on to particular occasions as an opportunity to charm employers orpatrons and to achieve a limited fame among readers of anthologies.Jasper Mayne rebukes ‘the small Poets of our Twilight Times’ who ‘Call

in their borrowed Fires, and break in Rimes’ on the slightest tion (Cartwright b4r) Mayne’s criticism sets up an implicit hierarchy,with ‘small poets’ infinitely inferior to the brightest stars of the literaryfirmament Like fashions in mourning wear, elegies are modish; writing

provoca-elegies and fixing ‘a Labell’ to the hearse of an author’s collected works had become, Henry Vaughan admits, ‘all the mode’ (Cartwright sig [*6]r).Similarly, R Mason recognises that ‘ ’Tis the World’s fashion now’ for

28 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

false poets, like comets, to confuse the public after the real suns of poetryhave set Their poetry

so throng’d, so Epidemick grown,

Captains and Poets made up half the Town;

Scribling as madly as the other fight,

As if they try’d how scurvy they could write[.]

The disease and civil disorder engendered by these poets lead, tually, to conflict, rather than the moral edification expected fromepideictic poetry Such criticism of other poets resembles the ‘hatred

even-of literary invention’ in seventeenth-century England which is a focus

of John Dolan’s work on occasional poetics Perhaps unsurprisingly,that hatred rarely touches the poet himself; Mason is unusual in self-consciously reflecting on his own status:

But am I not so too? I raile and curseThis Riming Age, yet help to make it worse:

Can that be Wit in Me that’s Fool in Them?

(Cartwright [4*2]v)

Such criticism of the ‘Riming Age’ is not restricted to elegies, of course.Campion argued that ‘the facilitie and popularitie of Rime’ created ‘asmany Poets as a hot sommer flies’.80Jonson in The Underwood also rails

against the ‘ryming Age’, when ‘Verses swarme / At every stall.’81Whilethe context of these two remarks were defences of different forms ofprosody, it is notable that both poets associate verse production withvermin and the market for cheap commodities Marvell uses the same

imagery in his commendation of Richard Lovelace’s Lucasta, a collection

to which we will return in Chapter 5:

The Ayre’s already tainted with the swarms

Of Insects which against you rise in arms

Word-peckers, Paper-rats, Book-scorpions,

Of wit corrupted, the unfashion’d Sons.82

Lovelace represses the rebellion of verminous newsbook writers, whospread radical contagion John Berkenhead, a royalist, laments that sinceWilliam Cartwright is gone ‘groveling Trifles crawl / About the World’

He associates mercenary poets with libels and nonconformist ministers:

‘Small Under-witts do shoot up from beneath / They spread, and swarm,

The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric 29

as fast as Preachers now’ (Cartwright *8r) Amid the turmoil of the CivilWar, criticism of mercenary production of text was regularly tied to adesire to return to earlier, more restrictive orders of literary productionand of the moral, social and political authority it underpinned

‘Em D.’ agrees that poetry is polluted with commercialism, as he joinsten other writers to laud Thomas Beedome In this ‘riming Age’, Thaliacan be heard ‘whistling at the plow’, and

All trafficke with the Muses, tis well knowne

The Scullers boat can touch at Helicon.

Who quaffs not there? doe we not daily see

Each guarded foot-boy belch out Poetrie?

Who so illiterate now, that will refuse,

For some slight Minion to invoke a muse?83

Surplus traffic, water poets who ‘quaff’ the sacred waters, servants andother lower-class writers pollute Helicon’s pure streams Like those who

‘Mourn for Ribbands, and the sadder Cloths’, and ‘Buy your Grief fromth’ Shop; and desperat lye / For a new Cloak till the next Lord shallDye’, W Towers says, poets ‘Weepe for Gaine’.84The bequests which aresupposedly exchanged for poetic tributes are now the sole inspirationfor them The result is the commercialisation of grief Mayne offers hissarcastic condolences to the ‘Poor soules’, who Cartwright’s death hasmade reluctant

To their torn Black now to return again

Their Verse no longer will their Reckonings pay,

Thin as their stuff Cloaks, and more lean than they,

Who in a meaguer sadness walk the streets,

As when a hard frost with sharp Hunger meets

(Cartwright b4r)

Cartwright has raised the commodity value of the elegy, educating tastesand making low-quality producers redundant Their sorrow results notfrom compunctious grief, but from hunger and cold Cartwright’s versedid not ‘sail / By one Wind, like theirs, who write by Retail’; the need toreturn marketable products did not restrict his artistic and intellectualexplorations, likened here to colonial enterprise Mercenary poets, bycontrast, ‘Rime only for some life-preserving pay’, to feed themselves.Every day they churn out verse as if they were ‘the paper Merchants