English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century Laws in Mourning docx

English Funerary Elegy in
the Seventeenth Century
Laws in Mourning
Andrea Brady
March 9, 2006 11:44 MAC/EFE Page-i 0efeprelims
Early Modern Literature in History
General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty
of Arts and Humanities, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of
English, University of Sussex, Brighton
Advisory Board: Donna Hamilton, University of Maryland; Jean Howard,
University of Columbia; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard
McCoy, CUNY; Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford
Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both
within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different
theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in
seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures.
Titles include:
Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (editors)
TEXTS AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Andrea Brady
ENGLISH FUNERARY ELEGY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Laws in Mourning
Martin Butler (editor)
RE-PRESENTING BEN JONSON
Text, History, Performance
Jocelyn Catty
WRITING RAPE, WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Unbridled Speech
Dermot Cavanagh
LANGUAGE AND POLITICS IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY PLAY
Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (editors)

‘THIS DOUBLE VOICE’
Gendered Writing in Early Modern England
James Daybell (editor)
EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700
Jerome De Groot
ROYALIST IDENTITIES
John Dolan
POETIC OCCASION FROM MILTON TO WORDSWORTH
Sarah M. Dunnigan
EROS AND POETRY AT THE COURTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND
JAMES VI
Andrew Hadfield
SHAKESPEARE, SPENSER AND THE MATTER OF BRITAIN
March 9, 2006 11:44 MAC/EFE Page-ii 0efeprelims
William M. Hamlin
TRAGEDY AND SCEPTICISM IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND
Elizabeth Heale
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTHORSHIP IN RENAISSANCE VERSE
Chronicles of the Self
Pauline Kiernan
STAGING SHAKESPEARE AT THE NEW GLOBE
Ronald Knowles (editor)
SHAKESPEARE AND CARNIVAL
After Bakhtin
Arthur F. Marotti (editor)
CATHOLICISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN EARLY MODERN
ENGLISH TEXTS
Jennifer Richards (editor)
EARLY MODERN CIVIL DISCOURSES
Sasha Roberts

READING SHAKESPEARE’S POEMS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Rosalind Smith
SONNETS AND THE ENGLISH WOMAN WRITER, 1560–1621
The Politics of Absence
Mark Thornton Burnett
CONSTRUCTING ‘MONSTERS’ IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA AND EARLY
MODERN CULTURE
MASTERS AND SERVANTS IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA
AND CULTURE
Authority and Obedience
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March 9, 2006 11:44 MAC/EFE Page-iii 0efeprelims
English Funerary Elegy in
the Seventeenth Century
Laws in Mourning
Andrea Brady
Brunel University
London
March 9, 2006 11:44 MAC/EFE Page-iv 0efeprelims
© Andrea Brady 2006

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Brady, Andrea, 1974
English funerary elegy in the seventeenth century:laws in

mourning/Andrea Brady.
p. cm. “ (Early modern literature in history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 140394105X (cloth)
1. Elegiac poetry, English“History and criticism. 2. English poetry“Early
modern, 15001700“History and criticism. 3. Funeral rites and
ceremonies in literature. 4. Mourning customs in literature. 5. Grief in
literature. 6. Funeral rites and ceremonies“Great Britain“History“17th
century. I. Title. II. Early modern literature in history
(Palgrave Macmillan (Firm))
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March 9, 2006 11:44 MAC/EFE Page-v 0efeprelims
For my mother, Suzanne Brady
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
List of Abbreviations ix
Note on Transcriptions x
Introduction 1
1 The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric 10
2 The Rhetoric of Grief 32
3 The Funerary Elegy in Its Ritual Context 62

4 Spectacular Executions of the 1640s 90
5 Contesting Wills in Critical Elegy 131
6 Grief Without Measure 174
Conclusion 207
Notes 214
Bibliography 242
Index 262
vii
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Acknowledgements
I am thankful to the librarians and the staff of Gonville and Caius
College, the Brotherton Library, the Bodleian Library, the Notting-
hamshire Archives and the Centre for Kentish Studies for their assist-
ance. The staff of the Cambridge University library, where this project
began, and the British Library deserve special recognition. Alison Shell,
Marie-Louise Coolahan and Jill Seal Millman furnished me with unpub-
lished research. Andrew Lacey and David Norbrook generously took
the time to comment on specific chapters, and John Kerrigan, Simon
Jarvis, Colin Burrow and Gavin Alexander offered valuable insights and
practical help. Cedric Brown and Andrew Hadfield were encouraging
and patient series editors, and I appreciate the professionalism of the
editors at Palgrave Macmillan. I am immensely grateful in particular
for the support of Raphael Lyne and Jonathan Sawday, whose critical
interventions saved this project from an unjust execution. I owe my
greatest debt to Jessica Martin, whose supervision and friendship saw
me through to its first conclusion. Keston Sutherland was the first to
read this text; our conversations and collaboration made its insights
possible, and continue to shape my thinking. For health and happi-
ness in the midst of all this grief work I am also beholden to Lekshmy
Balakrishnan, Emily Butterworth, Dom Del Re, Aline Ferrari, Tom Jones,

Sam Ladkin, Tim Morris, Lizzie Muller, Dell Olsen, Malcolm Phillips,
Natasha Rulyova, James Thraves and Al Usher, and for encouragement
over great distances to my sisters Rachel and Alexis, and my mother
Suzanne. Matt ffytche got me through the conclusion; with his help,
my future projects can turn to joy.
viii
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List of Abbreviations
(Place of publication is London unless specified otherwise.)
BF Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Comedies and
Tragedies (1647)
Carew Thomas Carew, The Poems, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1949)
Cartwright William Cartwright, Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, With
Other Poems (1651)
DE John Donne, The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and
Epicedes, ed. W. Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978)
Donne John Donne, Poems (London: John Marriott, 1633)
JonsVirb Jonsonus Virbius or, the Memorie of Ben: Johnson Revived
by the Friends of the Muses, ed. Brian Duppa (1638)
King Henry King, The Poems, ed. Margaret Crum (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1965)
Lewalski Barbara K. Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry
of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1973)
Loxley James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil
Wars: The Drawn Sword (Basingstoke and New York:
Macmillan, 1997)
HS Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn
Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947–1952)

Wilcher Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001)
ix
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Note on Transcriptions
Where modern scholarly editions do not exist, I have referred to the
earliest available printed editions of texts; but for material in Latin
and Greek I have attempted to use seventeenth-century translations.
My transcriptions retain the orthography, punctuation, formatting and
indentation of both printed and manuscript sources, though in some
cases the use of inverted commas has been normalised to improve the
clarity of the extract. In some instances, typefaces have been reversed
from italic to roman for easier reading, and turned letters have been
silently corrected. The letters u and vi and j, and long s have been
regularised. 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
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Introduction
Death is never punctual. Early or late, sudden or protracted, it is
never over in an instant. In early modern Europe, death began before
the last exhalation and ended long after the eyes were closed. From
the sickbed, through the liminal period of watching and preparing the
corpse, to the commemorative ceremonies which might stretch over
months or years, death took its time. Thinking of death as a rite of
passage structured by separation, liminality and reintegration reveals
its protracted temporality. The rite of passage does not only affect the
dying – it also unfolds gradually for the bereaved, who are distinct in
grief, take on mourning vestments and mourning attitudes, and eventu-

ally reintegrate with the community. Rituals punctuate the time it takes
them to grieve. As Victor Turner argues, ritual ‘periodically converts
the obligatory into the desirable’; it makes regenerative possibilities
available to communities weakened by death.
1
For Christian mourners,
mortuary rituals compensate for the obligation of mortality by emphas-
ising its benefits for the living and the dead; but many critics have
suggested that funerals also make the undesirable obligations of social
inequality and patriarchy acceptable, and so conserve the insufficien-
cies of daily life. That view will be challenged by many of the texts
read here.
This book reads funerary elegies as ritualised utterances in order
to understand how they are affected by context, time and expecta-
tions. Chapter 1 considers the rhetorical conventionality of elegy as
a kind of ritual. Rituals prescribe formal behaviour whose predict-
ability can be comforting in moments of uncertainty and transition.
The rhetorical corollary to these repeated formal behaviours is the
topos or commonplace, which offers the reassurance of shared and
repeated language. I examine how such conventions are learned and
1
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2 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century
enforced in the agonistic context of the early modern school. From
these shared origins and literary materials, elegists use criticism and
satire to distinguish themselves from their peers. Their critiques are
suited to the agonistic structure of the emerging literary market; but
they can also turn against more explicitly political targets, as Chapter 4
will show.
The combination of praise and criticism, conformity and distinction

are just two of the many contradictions which can wrench elegies out of
their generic shape. Elegies are at once idealistic representations which
seek 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 makes
them morally suspect even to their own writers. The process of making
the obligatory desirable causes elegies to house other ambivalences as
well. Poets proclaim the temporality of their poems, time spent recov-
ering from grief and labouring over the composition, as well as the
atemporality of these paper monuments that outlast brass or stone. They
wrest their subjects from oblivion, only to impart to them the idealised
attributes common to all worthy ancestors. Elegies which flatten out
personal differences can seem like betrayals of the uniqueness of the
dead. But we can also understand this conventionality through elegy’s
association with ritual.
Like ritual, elegies are sociable, uniting communities disrupted by
death, promoting civic values or negotiating loyalties and allegiances
within 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 of
conventional “kinds” ’.
2
The vitality of conventions and genres depends
on the overreaching of poets who use them. This generic paradox of
conformity and individuation is also characteristic of ritual, I will argue.
Carolyn Miller describes genres as ‘typified rhetorical actions based in
recurrent 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 resources
that members of the culture associate with a situation type’, capable
of determining ‘the roles taken up by the participants, and hence the
kinds of texts they are required to construct’.
4
These recent notions of
genre stretch beyond particular literary types to incorporate social situ-
ations, contexts and ‘roles’. This expanded concept can be compared to
ritual.
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Introduction 3
The idea that rhetoric is a kind of literary ritual is nothing new. In
the Renaissance, theoreticians such as Julius Caesar Scaliger focussed
on the ritual origin of genres.
5
Like rhetoric, the term ‘ritual’ has a
complex history. Emile Durkheim’s classic definition of ‘rites’ as ‘the
rules of conduct which prescribe how a man should comport himself
in the presence of [] sacred objects’ reflects his premise that religious
beliefs classify all things, real and ideal, into two categories, the profane
and the sacred.
6
Elegies themselves depict the passage between the
profane, worldly human life, into the sacred, resurrection. They are also
‘ritualised’ by their attention to rules of (funeral) conduct and comport-
ment. By submitting to a collective determination of ritual and literary
decorum, the poet can access the resources accumulated in generic
forms.
As with ritual, literary historians frequently assume that genre and

rhetoric conserve existing hierarchical social structures.
7
Genre provides
not only rules for the conduct of the poet, but also a ‘horizon of
expectations’ for the reader.
8
The comportment or decorum of a literary
text could be defined as a measure of its effectiveness in matching
its style to generic expectations, its conservation of traditional literary
values (which may include innovation or improvisation). As Ann Imbrie
argues, ‘a decorous work operates through the forms most readily access-
ible to the audience’ and thus ‘assigns the audience a determining
position’.
9
Decorum 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 cannot
itself impart eloquence (indeed, these rules may hinder creativity);
but when they are observed by a writing community, they provide
the means for judging a performance.
11
Generic rules can be under-
stood as a mechanism for conserving and evaluating traditional and
collective practices, rather than a slavish obedience and failure of
originality.
Perceptive critics such as Ruth Wallerstein, O. B. Hardison and Dennis
Kay have focussed on elegy’s generic rules, rather than on the emotional
experience these poems might convey. Thanks to their contributions,

these properties need only be reviewed briefly in Chapter 1. But their
focus could be compared to objectivist trends in anthropology, which
have investigated rites rather than the experience of loss which they
serve and in part produce. Rituals and elegies can be understood to
express both collective values abstracted from the memory of the dead
and the individuality of emotional responses. It is easy to undervalue
the spontaneity and improvisation implicit in ritual behaviour or in
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4 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century
rhetorical conventions. Describing Chinese mourning, Erik Mueggler
helpfully 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 of
profoundly personal states of grief and loss is to rely implicitly on
another version of this same vision, in which a subject’s ultimate
reality is a private, internal core or locus of the self, where all affect
takes place prior to being publicly expressed.
12
To read elegies critically, we must be able to incorporate both of these
perspectives.
Focussing on generic attributes is perhaps safer than trying to excavate
the ‘real feelings’ of early modern writers and ritual participants. The
truth of feeling remains partially inaccessible behind the constraints
of social expectations and language. But its inaccessibility can lead to
critical detachment, the choice to track ritual or generic convention as
the only hard evidence of the management of emotions. Such detach-
ment leads, Pierre Bourdieu warns, to a ‘hermeneutic representation of
practices’, which reduces ‘all social relations to communicative relations
and, more precisely, decoding operations’. Like anthropologists, critics

must beware that the ‘exaltation of the virtues of the distance secured
by externality simply transmutes into an epistemological choice the
anthropologist’s objective situation, that of the “impartial spectator”
[] condemned to see all practice as spectacle’.
13
Our objective situation
as contemporary readers is limiting. In addition to supplying normative
models based on elegiac precedents and religious stricture, critics of elegy
should study the strategies, conformities and divergences that signal
participants’ dispositions, and recognise that those dispositions include
the impulse not only to obedience, but also to self-determination. These
strategies are the subject of Chapter 2. There, I examine early modern
models for mourning and consolation. The behaviour of mourners was
affected not just by ritual roles, but also by texts. Compared to the stern
models advocated by Christian and Stoic texts, accounts of bereavement
reveal 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 to
the 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
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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. But
saintly 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, mortality
transformed 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 them-
selves resist neologisms and innovations which would lock them fast
in their own time. As Chapter 5 will show, many elegists believed
that transcendence of occasionality requires a respect for the wisdom
developed over recurrent occasions. Even the greatest laureates took
enormous risks when they attempted to renovate the elegiac idiom with
idiosyncratic wit.
Transcendence aside, time was often short for poets in demand. Few
elegies reveal the material exigencies of production, namely that they
were composed quickly, and often in hope of a reward. In a book
of ‘Elogie with Epitaphes’ on the death of the Earl of Southampton
and 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 Sir
Thomas 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 smoke
and rough talk. But the manuscript reminds us that writing did not
take place exclusively in classrooms and closets; and text was not just
part of the ritual life of early modern England. It was also part of the

domestic environment. Posies were inscribed on everyday objects and
keepsakes including funeral rings, while householders adorned their
walls with moralising lyrics. Poems were also posted in communal spaces
such as the hall of Westminster School, where scholars customarily
hung copies of verses on the King’s birthday.
16
Walton records that
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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 exist-
ence for poetry which also connects it to the symbolic equipment of
the funeral. Such writing, Juliet Fleming argues, was a mnemonic device
which served to remind readers of their moral obligations.
18
Similarly,
the mortuary ritual was a material reminder of the dead, and of the social
and ethical responsibilities incumbent on the living. Archival evidence
of elegy’s role in the funeral is presented in Chapter 3.
The ubiquity of writing in the living and working spaces of early
modern England has two interesting implications for funerary elegy.
First, it is crucial to understand elegies not just as exemplary texts,
but also as physical goods. Though poetry may outlast brass, it was
connected to mnemonic objects: elegies and epitaphs were inscribed
on portraits, on decorative lozenges at maiden funerals and on monu-
ments. The elegy was one funerary document among many including
sermons, epitaphs, murder pamphlets, guides to and descriptions of holy

dying, mothers’ legacies, wills, confessions and last testaments. These
documents joined other ritual props – such as death masks, escutcheons
and other heraldic instruments, effigies, hearses, monumental sculpture,
domestic funerary architecture and decorations – and other forms of
writing, including musical laments and hymns. Recontextualising elegy
in this material setting reveals a great deal about the conservativism
of conventionality, and how poets can challenge decorum and the
hierarchical structures it serves to maintain.
Second, the production of text was not limited to a few authorit-
ative, professional poets: anyone who was literate could, and often
did, write poetry. Consequently, a study of funerary elegy should look
beyond the laureate and the canonical to popular poems, ballads and
manuscript. While this book does refer to the most famous examples
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. The
material presented in this book, though less familiar to most readers,
could be considered essential generic context for Donne’s or Milton’s
poem. These select texts, mostly from the first half of the seventeenth
century, show accomplished and modest writers responding to deaths
of public figures or family members, in print and manuscript, with grace
and delicacy or in clumsy clichés. While only a small sample of this
enormous range of poems can be given here, it does provide a glimpse
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Introduction 7
of the variety and complexity of elegiac practice in the early modern
period.
The decorum of privileged spaces and contexts could not always
constrain ordinary elegists like the ‘unknown friend’ who wrote his own

epitaph over Donne’s grave. Graffiti on churches and whitewashed walls
is evidence of a willingness to intrude on protected places; likewise,
one elegiac commonplace declares the poet’s compulsion to infiltrate
exclusive funeral rituals out of love for the dead. This common-
place challenges the hierarchy reinforced by heralds who managed
the ceremony. Or rather, elegies both confront hierarchy and commem-
orate it, reject the ritual legislation of feeling and reinforce ritual
conventions. When Richard Corbet resolves in ‘An Elegie upon the
Death 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 enforce
conformity. Though no ritual could promise to deliver emotional unity,
the state certainly used rituals to induce emotional identifications
with the king, justice system, religion and nation. These rituals ranged
from the celebratory to the gloomy, from triumphal entries of the
reigning 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 many
features with the funeral; it is public, spectacular, and tends to reassert
social 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 was
judged for its sincerity and persuasiveness, like elegy. And like any death,
it could generate funereal poems. The executions studied in Chapter 4
also reveal how elegists interpret and affect politics. I offer case studies
of three particularly important victims: Thomas Wentworth, Earl of
Strafford; Archbishop William Laud; and King Charles I. Elegists drew

conspicuously on contemporary accounts of their dying speeches and
on the variety of generic forms and imaginative libels which preceded
their executions. Like all elegies, these mortuary documents contend
over the meanings of civic and personal virtue. But death’s threat to
language and consensus cast a particularly deep shadow over the elegies
on the regicide.
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8 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century
Where Chapter 4 focusses on executions as radical counterparts to the
conservative funeral, Chapter 5 traces the sectarian tensions of the 1640s
in critical elegies, poems for dead poets. As ‘Lycidas’ shows, it is one of
the genre’s most notable tendencies to disrupt timeless idealisations with
timely political complaints. Especially during the interregnum, critical
elegies are infused with topical references. But the connection between
elegies for the condemned and elegies for the laureate is deeper than
a mutual interest in politics. Foucault remarks that ‘Texts, books, and
discourses really began to have authors [] to the extent that authors
became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses
could 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 within
the poetic community following the death of a laureate. Chapter 5
suggests further connections between critical elegists’ defences of their
fellows 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 in
spectacular fashion. A patriarchal verse culture had its own methods
for discouraging intruders. Chapter 6 argues that female elegists used

manuscript as a space to express dissent against Christian restraint and
imputations about biological creativity. This chapter focusses on the
rituals 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 will
not undergo it in any sense, and thereby instituting a lasting difference
between 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’.
21
The gendering of the work of birth and death could result
in the exclusion of both men and women from occasions of tremendous
social and personal significance. The attempt to achieve social cohesion
against the disruptive force of death resulted in rituals which emphasise
separateness, and so enforce a ‘lasting difference’ between the men and
women who participated in them.
Violent grief had long been associated with women, whose restriction
to the domestic sphere was validated by characterising them as irrational
and emotive. When civilised Christian women grieved in public they
were expected to eschew the expressiveness of traditional female lament-
ation. Thomas Fuller, having described a good widow as ‘a woman whose
head hath been quite cut off, and yet she liveth’, commends thrifty
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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 quickly
emptyed, which streameth out at so large a vent; whilest their tears
that drop, will hold running a long time.

22
The husbandry of resources, a skill acquired from organising the house-
hold, helps the good woman to endure the part of a pious widow and
show emotional restraint.
Chapter 6 reflects on these restraints in the light of women’s elegies for
children and other family members. The Neo-Platonic belief that poetry
constitutes an alternate reality becomes a particularly vital consolation
in these tender compositions. Women who miscarried or suffered the
death of an infant often blamed themselves, for early modern obstetrics
taught them that the failure to fetter their imaginations and their sinful
natures could lead to disaster. Composing a poem, they could publicly
proclaim their power to control those destructive powers, harnessing
them 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, derive
their force from this ancient and radical claim.
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1
The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric
The rhetorical work of building a community of shared loss drags against
elegists’ desire to individuate themselves as writers. Elegy holds exem-
plarity and tradition, the consolatory promise of the continuity of the
same, in tension with the poet’s assertions of his or her particularity or
difference. To evaluate the demands of tradition, this chapter will focus
on the meaning of the term ‘elegy’ and its derivation from epideictic and
deliberative rhetoric. Elegy could also be understood as a particular
metre, the elegiac distich. A brief discussion of the perceived faults of
this metre in the early modern period will pave the way for a return to

the subject of prosody in Chapter 6. As a genre, elegy is identified by its
content: praise and lament. The forces shaping lament will be invest-
igated in Chapter 2. Here, elegy’s commonalities of purpose and utility
with epideictic reveal the social nature of praise, discussed in Section 1.2.
Praise was perceived to improve the moral character of both writer and
reader, orator and listener. This contributed to the placement of rhet-
oric at the centre of the early modern humanist curriculum. Section 1.3
scrutinizes a particular locus of elegiac production: the school and the
university. These competitive learning environments also trained writers
to consider occasional poetry as an opportunity for self-fashioning and
display, Section 1.4 contends. Agonistic displays drew upon the open-
ness of epideictic to its opposite, censure, to expand the critique of moral
decadence typical of funeral sermons into a castigation of other poets.
These elegiac criticisms are the subject of Section 1.5, which reveals how
the material conditions of production – in particular, its venality – are
projected by poets onto their competitors, but can end up indicting the
entire genre.
10
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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 early
modern period. Though the two types were distinct in content, they
did retain some stylistic similarities: both could include self-defence or
criticism 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, the
term usefully incorporates a larger range of forms and memorial practices
than the epitaph, an epigram projected as or suited to monumental
inscription, 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 the
funerary genres in a similar way: an epicede is to be spoken over a
body as yet unburied, the ‘epitaphium recens’ is produced for a recently
buried body, and ‘epitaphium anniversarium’ commemorates the dead
at yearly intervals after death, and so omits the lament.
3
But poets
could 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 on
the origin of the term ‘obsequies’ – that ‘the lamenting of deathes
was chiefly at the very burialls of the dead, also at monethes mindes
and longer times, by custome continued yearely’
5
– show how the
different elegiac genres commemorated the temporal processes of death
and drying of the corpse, and of reconciliation of the bereaved with
the community, processes celebrated in the folk and Catholic funerary
rituals declining since the Reformation. Despite the prohibition of inter-

cessory rituals, the seventeenth century still saw the composition of
famous ‘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 now
known to be hexameter verses.
6
The epic connotations of hexameter
made the elegiac distich appropriate for serious topics and ‘passionate
meditations’ (both on love and on death).
7
It could also suggest the
dynamics of public performance, giving the impression ‘that the poet,
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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 elegies
were not conventionally associated with a particular metre; as a genre
they were more frequently identified by their content, as when Philip
Sidney 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. Puttenham
described it as ‘pitious’, ‘placing a limping Pentameter, after a lusty

Exameter, 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 the
elegiac metre, attempted a few Ovidian elegies, but for the most part
avoided the genre. Both in form and in content, the elegy jarred with
his laureate reputation – would Jonson write ‘An elegie? no, muse; yt
askes 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 on
the compositional principles of the prose genres, especially epideictic.
Several excellent monographs on elegy’s historical development and
relation 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’ whose
function 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 ethical

utility of praise, we should first clarify the relationship between elegy
and deliberative rhetoric.
While Aristotle’s resolving of the ‘modes’ into forensic, deliber-
ative and demonstrative kinds continued to influence medieval and
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The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric 13
Renaissance rhetoricians,
16
Aristotle himself recognised the possibility
of these categories overlapping. Quintilian grouped deliberative together
with epideictic as forms of oratory which do not require the audi-
ence to assess the justice or injustice of a legal claim.
17
Elegists use
the strategies of deliberative rhetoric to persuade readers to grieve (or
not 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 funeral
orations, combined persuasions against grief with warnings derived from
the model of the deceased and the necessity of their deaths. The view
represented by Isaiah 57:1 that ‘mercifull men are taken away, and no
man understandeth that the righteous is taken away from the evil to
come’ often provokes sermonists and elegists to use the occasion of a
death to condemn the degeneracy of the age. In an elegy collected by
Herbert Paston, God is said to have intended the ‘death of the Countesse
of Rivers’ to ‘upbrade our masking age’, ‘When vertues self was growne a
crime’.
19

Jeremy 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 in
memory to instruct our piety, or upbraid our wickedness.’
20
In funeral
elegies, 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 the
cruelty of providence, the frailties and iniquities of man, and the tempta-
tions to evil, before concluding with a reminder of heavenly bliss. This
arc is apparent in Ben Jonson’s poem on Venetia Digby, which begins
with an emotional lamentation for her ‘fall’, in which ‘I sum up mine
own 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 wicked-
ness which encouraged listeners to reform. Praise of the dead was
also intended to persuade. Barbara Lewalski observes that since Plato,
rhetoricians seeking to define epideictic had focussed on virtue as
the legitimate object of praise. Menander and 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 all
Renaissance theorists agreed with Cicero and Quintilian that the goods
of nature or fortune are not properly objects of praise in themselves, but
should be treated chiefly as means of displaying the subject’s virtue in
using them rightly’.
22

Elegies, like other works of praise, were socially
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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 for
the composition of ‘hymns to the gods and eulogies to good people’,
24
because such hymns could teach the young to admire and achieve
virtue, justice and nobility. The student who memorises ‘works of good
poets’ finds there ‘numerous exhortations, many passages describing in
glowing terms good men of old, so that the child is inspired to imitate
them and become like them’.
25
Aristotle also promoted the utility of
poetry, for ‘Young and Magnanimous men’ tend to emulate the virtues
praised in others, and thereby to improve society along with their own
characters.
26
Following 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’
27
which teachers must direct towards
the 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 no
imitation is feasible without knowledge of the necessary precepts of
rhetoric.’
28

Hobbes summarises in his notes on Aristotle’s Rhetoric that ‘Prayse,isa
kind of inverted Precept.’
29
Enticing 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 influ-
ence, comments that ‘Aristotle ruled that since poetry is comparable
to that civic institution which leads us to happiness, happiness being
nothing other than perfect action, the poet does not lead us to imitate
character, but action.’
30
Like Scaliger, Lucius Cary, the second Viscount
Falkland, 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 contrib-
uted to the construction of a meritocratic society. Jonson had himself
asserted in his elegiac ode on Henry Morison that ‘love of greatness,
and of good’ ‘knits brave minds and manners, more than blood’.
31
It
is the shared regard for active virtue, not lineage, which joined these
friends 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’.
32
Elevating the goods of
character over fortune, panegyrists like Jonson revealed that even the
most humble subject could become renowned. By distributing praise,

these writers were working to improve society.
33
Praise also ennobled