Electronic Reserve Text

From: Ronald Strickland, "Not So Idle Tears: Re- Reading the Renaissance Funeral Elegy"

Reviewing Dennis Kay. Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. vi, 296 pp.

I allude to Tennyson's deeply personal and rather self-indulgent poem in order to emphasize, by contrast, the self-consciously public tone of address characteristic of the funeral poems-- "melodious tears" -- Dennis Kay writes about. Kay himself makes a similar point at the end of the book by relating an anecdote from Wordsworth's memoirs. When Wordsworth was a student at Cambridge, the Master of St. John's College died. Wordsworth's uncle, who was visiting Cambridge at the time, expressed disappointment that his nephew hadn't taken advantage of this "fair opportunity" for distinguishing himself by writing an elegy. Wordsworth, however, had no regrets-"I felt no interest in the deceased person, with whom I had had no intercourse and whom I had never seen but during his walks in the college grounds" (pp. 231-32). As Kay points out, Wordsworth's uncle's sense of the aspiring young poet's public responsibility is opposed by Wordsworth's own sense of poetry as a personal, introspective idiom. The conflict between these two aspects of funeral elegy informs Kay's analysis of the development of the genre during the years bounded by the careers of Spenser and Milton.

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by major poets such as Spenser and Donne, and on the ways in which lesser and later poets borrowed from these master elegists. Spenser's pastoral elegies develop a model of the professional "dirge expert" through which, in the funeral elegy, poets could publicly assert their personal aesthetic aspirations without seeming unduly self-serving. In Donne's hands the funeral elegy becomes less a poem of public praise about the deceased subject than an exploration of the poet's personal response to death. In this vein, bolstering his account with a series of formalist close readings, Kay traces the genre's development from a public discourse of funeral honor into a poetic vehicle through which artists could work out difficult problems of self-expression:

Some elegists ... confined themselves to a role that was essentially heraldic; like the heralds, they saw it as their function to ensure a respectful celebration of the status the deceased had enjoyed when alive. But more sophisticated writers recognized that the elegist faced in an especially well-defined way the problem of fitting words to the special requirements of an occasion and of arguing for uniqueness both for the subject and for the elegy. The parallel with the situation of the sonnet is evident. ... To put it very baldly, just as the sonnet was an aggregative form, in which practitioners defined their individuality against their predecessors, so with the elegist. (p. 4)

Kay's book offers what is basically a "New Critical" theoretical framework, no less aestheticist in its assumptions than earlier books on funeral elegy from an earlier era when that paradigm was dominant.l Kay does depart from traditional New Critical practice in one respect, however. He includes among his readings many poems which previously have been ignored or rejected as sub-literary and not worthy of serious consideration, and he prints several previously unpublished manuscript elegies in appendices at the end of the book. Many of the extra-canonical texts are among the most specifically occasional-the most directly tied to the deaths of particular individuals-of all the elegies. Such poems blur the boundary between formal categories of aesthetic discourse and epideictic or honorific public discourse. Kay acknowledges this tension between aesthetic and epideictic categories, but, since he generally neglects to consider

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the ways in which the genre functions in larger networks of social discourse, he fails to account for some of the interesting, and, I think, important, discursive relationships among the aristocratic elegies of the canonical tradition and the extra-canonical popular elegies.

Perhaps due to the fact that Renaissance funeral elegies are usually tied to specific historic events, scholarship on the genre figured prominently in the historicist resistance to New Criticism during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Nonetheless, historically oriented scholars who wrote on funeral elegy-Ruth Wallerstein, Louis Martz, O. B. Hardison, and Barbara Lewalskifailed to mount a successful challenge to New Criticism because they accepted, by and large, orthodox New Critical definitions of aesthetic value and the New Critical emphasis upon close readings of individual texts. Though these scholars displayed a common dissatisfaction with a "purely literary" literary criticism, the New Critical privileging of literary texts as artifacts of timeless value was too deeply entrenched for them to overcome it.

In this climate, and due to its failure to make an epistemological break with New Criticism, literary historicism was relegated to the function of rehabilitating certain texts that were difficult to appropriate for formalist readings. Donne's Anniversaries furnishes a convenient example of such rehabilitation; here were remarkable poems by a poet of unquestioned genius, yet they seemed to have no formal or organic unity, and they seemed quite unlike other poems of the genre. Under these circumstances, they could only be judged an aesthetic failure. Then they were rescued; Louis Martz, in The Poetry of Meditation, discovered in Jesuit meditation exercises an external context with a pattern that could unify the poems. Soon other readers supplied alternate patterns and interpretations based on other systems of thought. Somewhat predictably, under the pressure of New Critical hegemony the conventional historicist method of seeking for reflections of external contexts in literature was reversed; now critics worked in the opposite direction, beginning with literary forms or aesthetic conventions and then searching for the suitable contextual forms and ideas to match with them. Kay too works from the poems outward, though in his ap-

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proach the historical context is limited almost exclusively to the formal evolution of the genre. Most of what I found lacking in the book stems from Kay's adoption of this relatively narrow theoretical framework. In my view, the interdisciplinary and intertextual approaches of New Historicism and discourse theory have rendered traditional aestheticist approaches to literary history and genre criticism somewhat obsolete. Perhaps it was inevitable, given this aestheticist orientation, that Kay's reading of funeral elegy would be most self-limiting precisely in his consideration of non-canonical texts. Since he tends to read the non-canonical texts through a framework of values and expectations derived from the canon, non-canonical texts can only be read as clumsy prototypes of canonical elegies or awkward attempts to imitate them. Yet Kay begins by tracing the genealogical sources of the canonical funeral elegies to the larger generic context of a popular vernacular tradition. He sketches the outlines of this tradition from the close of the Middle Ages: laments for monarchs such as Geoffrey de Vinsauf's threnody for Richard I, de casibus tragedies like Lydgate's Fall of Princes, political poems including meditations on the human condition under the headings of discussions of particular historical figures, the memento mori warning from the dead, and allegorical dream visions such as the Pearl or Chaucer's Book of the Duchess.The popular tradition emerges in full bloom in the published elegies-or what Kay calls the "Tudor public" mode-of the late sixteenth century. Written by poets either outside of or relatively marginal to court circles, and sold in bookstalls alongside broadside ballads and popular tracts, the public elegy addresses a fairly broad audience of London citizens. The public elegy tends to mourn the deaths of aristocratic subjects in a highly conventional form, heavily laden with sententious aphorisms and phrases, and generally written in a relatively ponderous poulter's measure or fourteeners. Often the poets use standard ballad devices such as having the deceased subject's ghost return from the grave to tell his or her story. The poems typically begin by celebrating their subject's genealogical lineage, and then they go on to praise the subject in more or less specific personalized (though highly conventional) detail. In the elegies for men, wisdom, military skill,

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generosity and piety are often praised. When women are mentioned in the elegies for men, they usually appear as faithful and grieving wives and mothers, and they are frequently mentioned as a way of introducing the deceased subject's extended kinship connections--a key determinant of power in the early modern social formation. In the elegies for women, virtue, marital fidelity, generosity, and constance are celebrated. Some of the elegies for women seem to have been written as much to honor their surviving husbands as to honor the women themselves. There are no female authors listed among the one hundred or so surviving published funeral poems from Elizabeth's reign, though there are several anonymous elegies.

The most prolific writers of public elegies were Thomas Churchyard and George Whetstone. These two writers literally cultivated reputations as professional elegists, advertising previous and forthcoming works in the dedications to their elegies and collections of elegies. Though both Churchyard and Whetstone explicitly represented themselves as defenders of aristocratic standards, they wrote for popular audiences and from a social position somewhat marginal to the Court. Writing from this marginal subject position, their texts are governed by conventions and frameworks of assumptions which differ from those of the elite, belle-lettristic tradition. As Kay remarks, Churchyard viewed his function as that of "apologist for the established order," and supposed that "inadequacies of style and want of invention were to be justified by this function" (p. 17).

For the most part, Kay dismisses Churchyard's funeral poems as dull, sententious, and routine. The two Churchyard poems which Kay likes best, those on Sir Christopher Hatton and on Archbishop Whitgift, are characterized by decasyllabic lines rather than Churchyard's usual fourteeners, by "a more personal, more specifically elegiac, form," and, in Churchyard's elegy on Hatton, "an uncharacteristic metrical variety and flexibility ...a sense of vivid movement. ..of solemn ceremony." For once, in Kay's view, Churchyard had written "a poem of moving richness, almost Spenserian in its sonorous repetition, stately in its rhyme royal" (p. 20). In fact, wherever Kay finds artistic skill in Churchyard's work, he generally attributes it to the influence of

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Spenser and other courtly poets. For instance, Kay observes of Churchyard that "the achievements of Spenser and Daniel seem to have led him to cultivate a new and specifically artistic pride in his role--by the 1590's he writes as a man performing a national duty" (p. 22). Such attributions of aesthetic influence and aspiration are characteristic of Kay's analysis, but they often strike me as unconvincing projections of the author's own aestheticist framework onto the early modern texts. Certainly Churchyard saw his elegy-writing as a "national duty," but he seems to have undertaken this duty primarily as a propagandistic task, rather than as an artistic commission. What Kay often fails to notice, on the other hand, are instances in which elements of the Tudor public mode find their way into the works of more sophisticated artists. I will discuss some particular instances of this phenomenon at the end of this essay.

Turning to the elegies of Spenser and Sidney, Kay finds himself in more congenial territory. Unlike the public elegists, Spenser and Sidney see the funeral elegy as primarily an aesthetic rather than an honorific discourse. In his reading of the "November" eclogue from Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, Kay points to Spenser's combinations of low diction with learned allusion and of homely and primitive verse forms with more sophisticated metrical effects in a way that extends the conventional honorific style of the public elegy into a new aesthetic realm. In the scheme of Spenser's pastoral allegory the "N ovember" eclogue is "the utterance of a professional commissioned to articulate the grief of a patron in terms which conform to the decorums of subject and season and at a level of art comparable to the poet's best in other genres" (p. 29). A key thesis of Melodious Tears is that Spenser paved the way for other poets to use the funeral elegy and the funeral anthology to develop public authorial personae, and to introduce themselves as "professionals"--writers who could put into words the deep, unexpressible feelings of a community of mourners. In effect, Spenser was adapting the established public persona as used by poets like Churchyard and Whetstone and turning it to a much more personal, private use. These adaptations strained under considerable tension between "terms which conform to the decorums of subject and season" and "a level of

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art comparable to the poet's best in other genres." But Kay neglects to consider this tension between the two discursive functions. Consequently, his formalist close readings of the poems fail to illuminate the shadowy borders of public discourse against which the beile-lettristic funeral elegy developed.

The "November" eclogue was somewhat removed from the contingencies of public funeral elegy, since it was not tied to a specific funeral. And Kay follows his analysis of this nonoccasional elegy by reading another text which offers an even more self-reflexive problematization of the epideictic situation, or the relationship of a poem to a specific occasion which it commemorates-- Sidney's elegies on the fictional "death" of Basilius in the Old Arcadia. Though he notes the potential irony in that the elegies are written for Basilius, who turns out not to be dead, he argues that the poems were "probably first read 'straight', as exemplary laments" and that they were emulated by poets such as Donne, Drummond, and Milton. These elegies were important in the history of the elegy, Kay writes,

in that the very complexity and accomplishment of the pieces constituted a major divergence from the orthodoxy of the generation of Whetstone and Churchyard. And, even more important, the technical virtuosity was accomplished by a shift of focus, redirecting the elegy towards the speaker. Where his predecessors saw themselves as heralds, chroniclers, and moralizing historians, Sidney showed in his Arcadian elegies a speaker whose struggles with his art, and with his subject, mimed the grief he professed, both by temperament and commission. Sidney had introduced a new specificity, a particularity, into funeral lament, which made the form, like the contemporary funeral sermon, one whose decorums were (like those of the sonnet sequence) predicated on the unique qualities of the subject, speaker, and situation. (p. 47)

Here Kay overlooks an excellent opportunity to analyze the generic interplay between the Tudor public elegy and the emerging beile-lettristic elegy. Certainly his reading of Sidney's poems as a meta poetic exploration of the relationship between seemingly inexpressible grief and the power of art to mediate that grief is informative and convincing. But one wonders to what

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extent Sidney may be commenting on the larger functions of funeral discourse in Elizabethan society. As Peter Sacks has argued in The English Elegy from Spenser to Yeats, public acts of mourning are always, at some level, bids for social power.(2) This insight is particularly helpful in understanding discourses of mourning in early modern England, a highly stratified society with a rigid primogeniture inheritance system which was under considerable pressure as a result of social and economic developments such as the emergence of early capitalist modes of production and rapid urbanization of the population. Moreover, as Lawrence Stone has documented, the growth of elaborate funeral pageantry and the aristocratic funeral processions carefully staged by the College of Arms were in part a response to the aristocracy's need for ideological support.(3) The public elegies clearly played a significant role in this ideological project, and the beile-lettristic funeral poems also participated, however indirectly. Given this larger social and generic context, I suspect there is an element of parody directed at the heraldic, propagandistic, public funeral poems and other increasingly elaborate rituals of mourning in the overwrought laments of Sidney's fictional poet-character Agelastus for the still-alive Basilius.

From these poems on the deaths of fictional characters, Kay moves to Spenser's Daphnaida, written on the death of Lady Douglas Howard, and to the poems collected in Astrophel, on the
death of Sidney. His main concern here is to show how Spenser struggles to accommodate aesthetic forms to poems commemorating actual deaths: how does the poet make art at such moments of crisis? In relation to the Daphnaida, Kay argues, Spenser turns to Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess as a model both for the content of his poem and for its representation of the relationship between the poet and the surviving spouse (John of Gaunt for Chaucer, Sir Arthur Gorges for Spenser) whose grief is represented. This is particularly important precisely because Daphnaida is a self-consciously aesthetic text mourning a fictionalized (though not a fictional) subject, rather than a heraldic commemoration in verse. There is something presumptuous about the poet's attempt to speak for other mourners and to turn grief into an aesthetic object. This presumptuousness is addressed, per-

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haps, in the refrain of Alcyon's (Gorges's) request for the speaker to "Weepe Shepheard weepe to make my vndersong" in which Kay sees Spenser's defense of the professional poet, whose role is the "exercise of the highest powers of his wit to console his bereaved friend" (p. 52).

In 1595, years after Sidney's death, Spenser's Astrophel appeared, along with several elegies by other writers, in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. The Astrophel poems consist of Spenser's Astrophel, "The Doleful Lay of Clorinda" (which Kay assumes to have been written by the Countess of Pembroke), two pastoral elegies by Lodowick Bryskett, and three poems (which had been published earlier in The Phoenix Nest), written by Mathew Roydon, Sir Walter Ralegh, and an anonymous poet. In Kay's view, this group of poems marks a crucial turning point for the funeral elegy. In combining various forms of pastoral, public, and personal elegy, Spenser produced an exemplary anthology which departed from the stiffiy formal epideictic tone of earlier published elegies and established a precedent for the experiments of later elegists such as those who contributed to collections published on the death of Prince Henry. Kay acknowledges that most of the poets who wrote on Sidney were "unreconstructed practitioners of the Tudor mode"--"drab age" writers, to use C. S. Lewis's term. But, he concludes, Spenser's example had begun to attract followers, and they had effectively, even if on a small scale, inaugurated the fashion for elegy as a form within which praise could coexist with reflections on artistic tradition, on innovation and imitation, and through which issues could be explored that were at root cultural and political. (p. 78)

Regrettably, Kay himself never explores the cultural and political issues which circulated in and around the elegies, though such issues are never far below the surface of his analysis. He never considers, for instance, the traditionally subversive function of pastoral as political discourse in relation to the selfconsciously patriotic tone of the public elegies, though he does remark, at the end of a summary of elegies on Queen Elizabeth, that the model of Spenser, with its "posture of exile, selfquestioning, opposition, and obliquity" was perhaps inappropri-

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ate to use in mourning the Queen (p. 90). The pastoral elegies of the belle-lettristic tradition and the public elegies of the Tudor propagandists belong to quite different spheres of aesthetic and political discourse, but when pastoral elegies are combined with public elegies in a published anthology like Spenser's Astrophel poems, the two forms inevitably affect each other. Indeed, Kay notes the "processional" organization of the poems in the Astrophel collection, and in a footnote he remarks:

The procession is organized on the basis of affection-"in order lov'd him best"-rather than kinship or other relationship. The pastoral fiction involves the establishment of an alternative order to the social procedures of quotidian society; it also carries with it the notion of community. (p. 61n.)

Yet he doesn't reflect upon the ways in which this processional emphasis draws upon and transforms the much more explicitly propagandistic accounts of processions found in many of the public elegies. He is simply reluctant to talk about the subliterary texts; he does not expect to find in them anything more interesting than a debased version of Spenserian poetics.

If Spenser adapts the epideictic funeral elegy as a vehicle for the expression of personal poetic ambition and as a model for serious aesthetic experimentation in a public forum, Donne all but ignores the epideictic function of the poems. This is accomplished, for example, in Donne's Anniversaries on the death of Elizabeth Drury, by the application of a radically "protestant"
poetics:

Donne explicitly translates the Whetstone-Churchyard notion of the elegy as "remembrance" into a new, and altogether more spiritual idiom. The focus is not the subject's fame but her soul, and the speaker is not a herald but a questioning, analyzing intelligence. (p. 101)

Donne, of course, had begun to fashion his innovative elegiac style in his earlier elegies written under the patronage of the Countess of Bedford. In these poems Donne turned away from both the Spenserian pastoral mode and the "heraldic" Tudor public mode of his contemporaries to write in a domestic, argu

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mentative register "appropriate to conversation, satire, and the dramatic expression of inner turmoil" (p. 95). Kay acknowledges that such poems could appear "strange, inexplicable, and monstrous" when, as in the case of the Anniversaries, they were read outside of their immediate "domestic" setting-an elite, aristocratic audience limited to close friends of the author. But here, as throughout the book, he doesn't adequately analyze or account for the ways in which audience response and conditions of production affect the aesthetic shifts he is describing. This reticence becomes particularly noticeable in Kay's chapter on the elegies on the death of Prince Henry.
Since the number of elegies published on the death of Prince Henry, in 1612, was far greater than those upon any other death in the period, it is fitting that Kay, like Wallerstein before him, should give considerable attention to this event. Kay emphasizes the influence of Spenser and, especially, Donne, upon writers from a wide variety of political, religious, and social positions who eulogized Prince Henry. Compilers of anthologies such as Joshua Sylvester's Lachrymae Lachrymarum, which included elegies by Donne, Goodyer, and Sir Edward Herbert, adopt the role of spokesman for a community of mourners after the model of Spenser in the Astrophel poems. Spenser's influence can also be seen in the meta poetic self-reflexiveness of many elegists who questioned the ultimate value of art in the face of death, or the sincerity of highly structured poems of mourning. "Just as Sidney's Astrophil found himself torn between a compulsion to write and a conviction that writing anything other than Stella's name was futile," Kay remarks, "so elegists found themselves confronted with an obligation to write that made the act of composition seem worthless" (p. 143). Finally, the influence of Donne is widely evident. Kay presents examples of the stylistic influence of Donne in a number of poems, including those of Sir John Davies, William Drummond, Cyril Tourneur, John Webster, Thomas Heywood, and Donne's friends Sir Henry Goodyer and Sir Edward Herbert. Other elegists follow Donne's example in making their own response to Prince Henry's death the focus of their elegies at the expense of detailed praise of Henry himself.

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Kay rightly sees the death of Prince Henry as the event which brings the funeral elegy to the point of aesthetic maturity as a genre, and he supplies a convincing array of examples to make this point. Yet I am disappointed, as I mentioned earlier, that he doesn't give more careful attention to the discursive interplay between the sophisticated aesthetic tradition of Spenser and Donne and the quasi-propagandistic, epideictic function which can be traced to the commemorative funeral poems of the earlier Tudor writers such as Churchyard and Whetstone. The outpouring of poetry on the death of Prince Henry is remarkable, among other things, for the number of aristocrats who risked what J. W. Saunders called "the stigma of print," venturing their literary efforts before a broad public audience, in many cases with their names affixed to the pieces.(4) The event arguably represents a turning point in aristocratic attitudes about publishing poetry. Perhaps in anticipation of publication, the poems often display elements characteristic of the Tudor public mode as opposed to either the earlier aristocratic pastoral elegies or the domestic personal elegies which were written for manuscript circulation. Furthermore, when former associates of Henry and other courtier poets allowed their verses to be published, the poems themselves were, in effect, altered simply by the exposure to the different expectations of a popular audience of readers and by the writers' conscious efforts to address the general public audience. A more properly discursive analysis of the tension between the aesthetic and epideictic demands of funeral poetry would yield a more precise historical understanding of the genre, and it might improve our understanding of elegies, such as Donne's Anniversaries and Milton's Lycidas, which have presented somewhat intractable problems for a purely aesthetic analysis.

In any case, Kay generally turns a blind eye to the conjunction of public and courtly (or popular and elite) discourse in the elegies, even as he offers an exhaustive survey which includes poems by writers from relatively low reaches of the middle class as well as the aristocracy. I would like to illustrate this point and to suggest some alternative possibilities for a discursive analysis of the genre by looking briefly at two of the most typical features of the popular (and populist) discourse of the Tudor public elegy

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which often show up in the elegies on Prince Henry. First, the public elegies often draw attention to other forms of funeral pomp, such as the processions, in ways which emphasize, and sometimes subtly challenge, the processions' representations of the existing social hierarchy. This may be done by providing detailed, quasi-journalistic accounts of the death and burial of the subject, or, in other cases, by producing fictionalized scenes of mourning which blur the distinction between fiction and reality. Second, the public elegies frequently include radical Protestant propaganda, sometimes mixed with populist attacks against greedy landowners and other powerful groups.. In John Phillip's commemorative poem The Life and Death of Sir Phillip Sidney, for example, Sidney's ghost returns from the grave to relate a detailed description of Sidney's funeral, describing the appearance of the mourners ranked according to social status as they marched in the procession, and digressing along the way for a diatribe against Catholicism.(5)

Some of the elegies for Prince Henry combine representations of or adaptations of other practices of mourning with more courtly forms. Joshua Sylvester's collection, Lachrymae Lachrymarum, which included, in its third edition, belle-lettristic personal elegies by Donne, Goodyer, Garrard, and Herbert, also includes an allegorical poem entitled "A Pilgrim's sad Obseruation vpon a disastrous Accident, in his Trauaile towards the Holy-Land," written by Henry Burton, who was an officer of the Prince's household. Burton dramatizes a situation in which the narrator, a pilgrim, encounters a sort of funeral procession in which he hears Prince Henry's death lamented by the King, the Queen, Prince Charles, Princess Elizabeth, Elizabeth's betrothed, Frederick, the Elector Palatine, Prince Henry's household, the Church, the Clergy, the Gentry, and "Poets." The order of the speakers in Burton's poem, as in Phillip's poem on Sidney, corresponds and functions as a sort of adjunct to the funeral pageantry staged by the College of Arms with its hierarchical ranking of mourners by social class in the processions.(6)

Another production which crosses the line between poetry and other forms of mourning is Great Brittans Mourning Garment, an anonymous collection of sonnets which was addressed to (and

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possibly commissioned by) the Prince's household.(7) The text apparently was given to mourners at the funeral as a token reminiscent of the free black cloaks traditionally given to all participants in the procession; hence, the title represents an almost postmodern substitution of representation for substance. The published elegies, the free cloaks, and, indeed, the processions themselves, all circulated as "texts" within the highly propagandistic discourse of aristocratic funeral practices, and the belle-lettristic funeral poems of the courtier-poets also participated in this discursive interaction, particularly when the poets crossed the line from manuscript circulation to print.
Yet more clear-cut effects of intertextuality are evident in the instances of Protestant/populist propaganda which sometimes rub shoulders with more elite discursive forms of Spenserian and Donnean pastoral and personal elegy. An early example o fProtestant populism is found in William Baldwin's Funeralles of King Edward the Syxt, where the reader eavesdrops on a conversation between God the Father and Christ in which the death of Edward is attributed to a cold he caught while playing tennis and to God's decision to punish the sinful people of England for failing to heed His warnings. Elaborating upon the theme that King Edward died for England's sins, Baldwin mounts a series of attacks against enclosures, greedy landowners, corrupt magistrates, lawyers, the misappropriation of Church property after the dissolution of the monasteries, and other offenses against the common people. Christ is identified as the champion of the poor and as their fellow-sufferer, while God rails against the leaders of Church and State:

Behold the heades, what else do they deuise,
Saue in our name to cloke their couetise?
Thine herytage they have the whole bereft,
Except thy shurt, let see, what haue they left?
Thy golde, thy plate, thy lodgyng, yea thy landes

That are the poores, are in the richest handes;
They waste, they spoyle, they spill upon their pride

That which was geven the nedy corse to hide:
And thou lyest naked starving at their gates
While they consume thy substaunce with theyr mates.(8)

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When this passage is set alongside Joshua Sylvester's poem from Lachrymae Lachrymarum, Sylvester's clearly Donne-influenced lines also reveal similarities to Baldwin's much earlier poem:

How-e'r it were, Wee were the Moouing Cause
That sweet Prince Henry breath no longer drawes

Wee All (alas!) haue had our hands herein:
And Each of vs hath, by some cord of Sinne,
Hal'd down from Heauen, from Justice awfull Seat,

This heauy judgement (which yet more doth threat.)

Wee Clergy, first who too too oft haue stood
More for the Church-goods, then the Churches good.

Wee Nobles next, whose Title, euer strong
Can hardly offer Right, or suffer Wrong:
Wee Magistrates, who (mostly) weake of sight,
Are rather faine to feele then see the Right:
Wee Officers, whose Price of euery Place
Keeps Vertue out, and bringeth Vice in grace:
Wee Gentles then, who rack, and sack, and sell,
To swimme like Sea-Crabs, in afoure-wheel'd Shell:

Wee Courtiers, next, who French-Jtalianate,
Change (with the Moon) our Fashion, Faith, and Fate. (9)

"For," Sylvester concludes, "for the Peoples Sinnes, for Subiects crymes, / God takes away good Princes oftentimes."(l0)

Since these journalistic and sub-literary features subvert the steady line of aesthetic development of the genre, Kay tends to deemphasize them, or to read them as aesthetic lapses or flaws which may pop up even in the elegies of respected poets. But a number of questions and tentative conclusions might be raised and drawn from the evident conjunction of popular and elite discourse in the poems on the death of Prince Henry. For instance, what effect did the close proximity of the propagandistic public discourse have upon the way early modern readers responded to the elite funeral elegies which began to appear from the presses, first, as a slow trickle, with the Spenserian pastorals of the 1590s, and then, in a veritable flood, with the Prince Henry elegies? It seems likely that the set of conventional expectations formed by the Tudor public elegies had something to do with the initial reaction to Donne's Anniversaries, both positive and nega

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tive. Further, distinctive and sometimes problematic elements such as Milton's digressive attack on the clergy in Lycidas of Donne's extended contemptus mundi theme in The Anniversaries may take on new and arguably richer meanings when seen in an evolving, intertextual context which looks beyond the boundaries of genre.

Melodious Tears does provide a useful and fairly exhaustive survey of Renaissance funeral elegies, and Kay does acknowledge the tension and interaction between the different registers of discourse.I have been discussing. But the nanowly aestheticist theoretical framework he employs enforces a linear, progressive evolution upon the genre which tends to foreclose upon the possibility of influence from lesser poets or from discursive forces outside the confines of the genre itself. When one adds to these issues of aesthetic influence the implications of the funeral elegy's effect on non-aesthetic discourses, it is clear that much significant work remains to be done.

Notes
1. See for instance, Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1950); O. B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument{Chapel Hill: Univ.of North Carolina Press, 1962); Barbara Lewalski, Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973); and Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962).
2. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 36-37.
3. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1965), pp. 572-81.
4. Saunders, "The Stigma of Print," Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951), 139-64. 5. Phillip, The Life and Death of Sir Phillip Sidney (London, 1587).
6. Burton, "A Pilgrim's sad Obseruation vpon a disastrous Accident, in his
Trauaile towards the Holy-Land," in Joshua Sylvester, Lachrymae Lachrymarum
3d ed. (London, 1613),pp. Glr-G3v.
7. Anon., Great Brittans Mourning Garment (London, 1612).
8. Baldwin, The Funeralles of King Edward the Syxt (London, 1560), p. A3r. 9. Sylvester, Lachrymae Lachrymarum 3d ed. (London: 1613), p. B2v.
10. Sylvester, p. B34.