Early-Stuart Funeral Elegies from Manuscript

This document is a collection of English funeral elegies from the years 1603 to 1640, which survive in manuscript but were not published, either in their own time or more recently. It served as the basis for James Doelman, The Daring Muse of the Early Stuart Funeral Elegy (Manchester University Press, 2021)

The daring muse of early Stuart funeral elegies

Funeral elegies of the early Stuart period are often marked by moments of “distraction” prompted by sorrow, and they venture into the realm of detraction as the poet turns against all that which lies beyond the dead figure who is at the heart of the elegy. While the funeral elegy in general was a copious and digressive form, exceptional deaths pressed elegists to stretch the usual rhetoric of grief and commemoration. This study offers a wide-ranging consideration of the period’s funeral elegies, in both manuscript and print, and by poets ranging from the canonical to the anonymous. It stands apart from earlier studies by its greater focus upon the subjects of funeral elegies (rather than the poets), and how the particular circumstances of death and the immediate contexts (political, religious, and social) affected the poetic response. Individual deaths are understood in relation to each other and other prominent events of the time. While the book covers the period 1603 to 1640, the 1620s stand out as a tumultuous decade in which the genre most fully engaged in matters of political controversy and satire. Many genres engage in such contentious matters, but the funeral elegy is exceptional because of the exactness with which it can be dated: nearly all were written within a few weeks of the death

Two Poems on the Death of the Duke of Lennox and Richmond

These two manuscript elegies on the death of the Duke of Richmond and Lenox partake in the widespread convention of the 1620s and 1630s of using an individual's death as an opportunity to comment on the current political situation. The Duke's death, coinciding as it did with the planned opening of the 1624 Parliament, offered an exceptional opportunity for such poetic comment. That Parliament, whose central concern was the turn against Spain following the collapsed Spanish Match, was focussed in particular on the testimony and leadership of England's "other Duke," the better known royal favourite, Buckingham

The Personation of John Suckling, 1635

The letters of Anthony Mingay indicate that in early 1635 Sir John Suckling was satirically personated in an unnamed play. This article considers Richard Brome’s The Sparagus Garden and James Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure as possible candi­dates to be this play. It concludes, however, that the cowardly braggart soldier Sucket in Henry Glapthorne’s The Lady Mother is the most likely personation of Suckling, as the humiliating beating of that character most closely aligns with the attack on Suckling by Sir John Digby as described in Mingay’s letters

Charles Fitz-Geffry and the 'Wars of the Theatres'

A number of Latin epigrams in Charles Fitz-Geffry’s Affaniae (1601) reflect on the ‘Wars of the Theatres’ of the period. As with most epigrams, individuals are masked by fictional names, but identification is possible through the supplementary evidence of the manuscript Latin letters of Fitz-Geffry’s friend, Degory Wheare, and by comparison with other epigrams. In particular, biting epigrams are directed against John Weever, under the name Fabrianus, and Thomas Bastard. A third epigram is directed towards John Marston, and the correspondence of Wheare shows an awareness of the tensions between Marston and Jonson in early 1601. Overall, the epigrams and correspondence manifest the sensitive dynamics of personal attacks within the English literary sphere at this time, and the resultant care (and even self-censorship) as a poet moved toward print

Circulation of the late Elizabethan and Early Stuart Epigram

Alors que l'épigramme en tant que genre littéraire puise à des sources chirographiques, sa brièveté propre à sa pratique à la Renaissance, a souvent entraîné un glissement vers une diffusion orale, manuscrite et imprimée. À cette même époque, l'épigramme était marquée par une tension entre l'inspiration de son origine littéraire classique et ses contenus domestiques et souvent vulgaires. Certains épigrammistes des plus ambitieux, tels que John Harington, John Owen et Ben Jonson, ont tenté de contrôler la circulation de leurs &#339uvres, et de se présenter comme des auteurs du même type que Martial. Ils ont résisté au mode plus libre de la diffusion orale, et ont davantage estimé la plus grande stabilité du livre imprimé comme médium, ce dernier semblant promettre à leurs poèmes, éphémères individuellement, une durable réputation littéraire. Néanmoins, leurs épigrammes font parfois preuve d’une influence de la tradition de la plaisanterie vulgaire. Le mode de diffusion des épigrammes politiques et prophétiques est par ailleurs assez différent. Ils se développent surtout oralement en raison de leur contenu controversé, sans identification d’auteur, et considéré plutôt comme «ce que toute personne dirait»