Abstract
An elegy is as much an effort to reconstruct as to remember. During her lifetime, Queen Elizabeth supervised the construction of her public persona; upon her death, control of her image shifted to the marketplace. Elegies addressed to the Queen mark the beginning of attempts to strip away remnants of her humanity and remake her as a divine figure capable of bearing the weight of history. They also instruct a self-fashioning reading audience in the forms, moods, and shapes of grief. But many of the poems also reveal glimpses of rage at the now-dead Queen; this rage often takes the form of thoroughly unromantic descriptions of the Queen’s decaying corpse, or complaints that she is a cruel mother who has abandoned her needy children. As the Queen and the Privy Councilors were aware, failure to accept James as Elizabeth’s successor would have had dire consequences for the English people including civil war, disruptions to domestic and international trade, and the destruction of the Church of England. Although the councilors could count on many of England’s subjects being present to hear a public reading of the proclamation announcing Elizabeth’s death and James’s succession “by law, by lineall succession, and undoubted right,”2 making such an assertion did not guarantee that English subjects would accept the new King. At this point, the poets came to the rescue.
… and to hear
The people now dissect him now he’s gone,
Makes my ears burn, that lov’d him not: such Libels
Such Elegies and Epigrams they have made,
More odious then he was…1
(Beaumont and Fletcher, Four Plays in One)
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Notes
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, “The Triumph of Love,” in Four Plays in One. In The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, Vol. VIII, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3.2–6.
G.W. Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 43. E.C. Wilson, in England’s Eliza (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), surveys the conventionally literary texts but ignores less skilled writers, a principle guiding most subsequent analyses. In Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) Frances Yates uses scattered lines from the elegies, particularly from the 1603 Cambridge University collection Sorrowes Joy, to argue that Elizabeth’s reputation became conflated with that of the Virgin Mary. Helen Hackett’s Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995) surveys the funeral poems to question Yates’s use of them as “evidence that Elizabethans worshipped their Queen as a new Virgin Mary,” concluding that the poems “provide evidence of a wide range of attitudes to the dead Queen” (221). Katherine Duncan-Jones, in Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), quotes several funeral poems to describe the fraught relationship between poets and the court, and to note Shakespeare’s absence from the mourning poets; in her essay “ ‘Almost Always Smiling’: Elizabeth’s Last Two Years,” in Resurrecting Elizabeth in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Elizabeth Hageman and Katherine Conway, 31–47, Duncan-Jones links the “hyperbolic royal panegyric” (35) to the Essex rebellion. John Watkins, in Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England, makes more extensive use of the funeral poetry to examine efforts to construct a mother/son relationship between Elizabeth and James, but his primary focus is the uses to which images of Elizabeth were put in the later seventeenth century. Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson’s lively and engaging England’s Elizabeth makes a more comprehensive use of surviving narratives about Elizabeth’s death, the funeral poetry, and plays featuring the Queen, but concentrates on the ways in which Elizabeth has been put to use as a cultural icon from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. See also Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 25–49.
Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 8.
Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 67.8. Steven Mullaney, “Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Queen Elizabeth I, 1600–1607,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (Summer 1994): 140. See also Susan Frye’s analysis of images of confinement in Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, i993), 135 ff.
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), Chapter XXIV, 37–38.
John Lane, An Elegie upon the death ofthe high and renowned Princesse, our Late Soveraigne Elizabeth (London, 1603), sig. A3r.
Ben Jonson, B.I. His Panegyre: On the Happie Entrance of James our Soveraigne (London, 1604).
See Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–74.
Similar warnings are found in sermons. See, e.g., Nicholas Bownd, Medicines for the Plague (London, 1604): if the Nobilitie had set up some other of the blood royall further off, there must needs have been great civill warres to the spilling of many thousand English mens blood, and some of them should have died in an ill cause ignorantly or against their wils, as when the two houses of Yorke and Lancaster were a long time divided in this land. (41)
For recent examples, see Pigman; Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995)
Diana E. Henderson, Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender, and Performance (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995)
Nancy Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme,” in Critical Inquiry 8.2 (Winter 1981): 265–279.
Valerie Traub, in Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London and New York: 1992), briefly discusses eroticism in Shakespeare’s sonnets.
James VI, Basilikon Doron (Edinburgh, 1599), 51.
Richard Eedes, Six Learned and Godly Sermons (London, 1604), fol. 1v.
Michael Drayton, “To Master George Sandys,” in The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel, Vol. III (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1932), 206.
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© 2010 Catherine Loomis
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Loomis, C. (2010). “Weepe with Joy”: Elegies for Elizabeth. In: The Death of Elizabeth I. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112131_3
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