I began the research for this book in an effort to understand two lines in one of the most famous poems in the language:

This leap from plaintive helplessness to authoritative consolation has troubled many readers of ‘Lycidas’. How can the speaker's voice change so abruptly and dramatically? Infusion of grace? Intervention of Michael the archangel? Neither of these solutions seemed persuasive to me, and although I had no explanation to offer, I remained convinced of the unity of ‘Lycidas’. My own groping for an explanation led me to Milton's allusive criticisms and revisions of pastoral elegy, particularly Virgil's Eclogue 10 and Theocritus' Idyll 1. It occurred to me that what gave the poem its unity was Milton's insistence on the inability of pastoral to console for death; Milton was triumphantly opposing Christian consolation to pagan mourning. I was rather pleased with this interpretation – even though it did not explain the shift of voice – until I asked myself what was Christian about consolation, what was pagan about mourning, and what were the attitudes of Milton and his contemporaries to consolation and mourning?

When I began to investigate these questions, my understanding of mourning in Renaissance England was largely restricted to the lines from Twelfth Night which I have prefixed to the second chapter, and to Jonson's ‘Of Death’.

Funeral elegies represent various aspects of the process of mourning. Obvious as this declaration may seem, it is not generally accepted. Most scholars agree that the major purpose of Renaissance elegy, both in theory and in practice, is to praise the deceased, and that lament and consolation, the other components of elegy, are of secondary importance and often no more than indirect forms of praise. There are two reasons why this view prevails. First, most elegies praise the deceased, and many are little more than excuses for encomium. Second, both classical and Renaissance writers classify funeral orations and elegies as branches of epideictic rhetoric, the traditional functions of which are praise and blame. In this chapter I shall argue that classification of elegy as epideictic does not imply that praise is its primary function and that it is more comprehensive to conceive of elegy as a representation of the process of mourning.

Since O. B. Hardison, Jr., is the most influential interpreter of elegy as the poetry of praise, I shall begin by citing his argument for this position.

The fact that the funeral elegy was always considered an epideictic type has already been mentioned. This resolves the problem by making it clear that praise is the essential element of the form.

Direct expression of sorrow distinguishes King's elegy at its finest, for even though he is writing during the period in which attitudes towards mourning are becoming more sympathetic and anxieties about grieving verse are diminishing, hyperbolic display is still the rule. It is much easier to find passages which attack artificial grief than ones which satisfy the ideal the attacks demand. King can meditate on his grief, look squarely at his loss, and describe his feelings without letting notions of what he should be feeling block them and without sacrificing metaphorical and logical complexity. Milton's elegy is not distinguished by direct expression of sorrow, although a passage in ‘An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’ and some of ‘Lycidas’ are as simple and direct as most elegy other than King's. What distinguishes Milton's elegy, especially ‘Lycidas’ and ‘Epitaphium Damonis’, is the lack of anxiety with which Milton protests against death and bereavement, the freedom with which he indulges the angry outbursts of grief. For with one early exception the Christian visions of heaven which conclude several of his elegies do not lead to a rejection of the sorrow and angry protest which precede them. A brief examination of the way in which Milton handles these visions in particular, and consolation in general, reveals his customary sympathy for mourning and is a good approach to the vexed question of the unity of ‘Lycidas’.

It is a long way from Erasmus' or Wilson's efforts to suppress grief with shame or guilt to the letter of condolence, a long way from Becon's complete condemnation of sorrow to. Cole's sympathy for the process of mourning. It is a long way from Grimald's anxious attempt to justify a grief which he hardly expresses to the intimate sorrow of King's ‘Exequy’ or the angry protests and gentle consolation of ‘Lycidas’. It is even a long way from Spenser's ‘November’, to take a major poem by a major precursor in the same genre, to ‘Lycidas’, once one recalls how Colin's consoling vision of Dido in heaven leads him to reflect on human wretchedness and folly. Nevertheless, the striking differences between Grimald and King or between Spenser and Milton should not be taken to imply that by the time of Milton all English elegists are free from anxiety about grief and pour out heartfelt expressions of sorrow. One need only recall Thomas Farnaby's poem in the collection in which ‘Lycidas’ first appeared.

So stop your empty laments and dirges. Let the impious and foolish weep for those lacking in virtue. It is sacrilege and madness to mourn for the blessed.

Jonson

Spenser may approach rigorism; Jonson subscribes to it. Even if we did not have Selden's assurance that Jonson was well read in the Church fathers and possessed many of their works, Jonson's references to The Sicke mannes Salue indicate an acquaintance with this important source of Renaissance rigorism. His epigram ‘Of Death’ implies its major position: ‘He that feares death, or mournes it, in the just, / Shewes of the resurrection little trust’ (VIII 37). Most significantly, over a period of 30 years Jonson wrote about twenty funeral poems which contain very little mourning. The poems that do mourn exhibit great restraint, never exceed the feeling of loss allowed by such strict fathers as Tertullian and Cyprian, and struggle to overcome even this. The restraint is not merely a matter of genre, for it characterizes all the poems, the two long elegies and the ode on Cary and Morison as well as the epigrams. In fact the elegies, to which Puttenham assigned lamentation, are more severe than some of the epigrams. In addition to avoiding or tempering expressions of grief Jonson exhorts himself and others not to mourn and chides those who do; his poetry continues the tradition of angry consolation which was examined in chapter 1.

In Renaissance England a consoler seeking support from Christianity in the battle against grief has three major options, although they are not equally available throughout the period because the theological discussions of mourning, like the letter-writing formularies, are more sympathetic towards grief by the early seventeenth century. The most common and familiar position is also the most flexible and confusing: grief is permissible but must be moderate. Conceptions of moderation differ dramatically, however, and moderation can be opposed to one of two excesses, immoderate mourning or inhuman insensibility. Some views of moderation are even more severe than total prohibition of grief, and moderate mourning can range from a day, as Wilson suggests, to much longer and more turbulent periods. Unrestricted mourning never finds a theological champion, but some advocates of moderation insist upon mourning as a necessary expression of humanity. This second position is really a matter of emphasis because the necessity of moderation is never lost sight of.

But truly, you deal with me like a physician that, seeing his patient in a pestilent fever, should chide him instead of ministering help, and bid him be sick no more. (Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia)

Consolations for death are as old as anything in literature, and the commonplaces of consolation are remarkably tenacious, as if those who use them are bent on proving there is nothing new under the sun. Nevertheless the modern reader of sixteenth-century literature is likely to be struck by the harsh tone of its consolations. The consoler often sounds angry, chides, and gives reasons why the bereaved should not mourn. By the beginning of the seventeenth century a shift in feeling has occurred, and some of the letter-writing formularies, the foremost repository of precepts for consolation, prescribe a gentler, less domineering type of consolation. The change in attitude is clearest in the different role assigned to expression of sympathy. The letter of consolation is becoming the letter of condolence.

The sixteenth century inherits some important assumptions from ancient consolation. First, man is distinguised from the beasts by his possession of reason, a higher faculty than the ‘passions’; man is most human when most rational. Second, the pain of bereavement stems from mistaken ideas about death, not from the rupture of an emotional bond.

Grimald is not the only sixteenth-century poet who is more concerned with what he is supposed to feel than with what he is actually feeling. His anxieties about the legitimacy of grief are characteristic of elegy throughout the greater part of the century. Setting aside elegies which are primarily panegyric or which indulge in hyperbolic grief, one finds much more defensiveness about mourning than actual expression of sorrow. Anxiety about violating the various cultural norms is often the dominant feeling in the poem. None of the sixteenth-century poets, consolers, or theologians can express grief as simply and unself-consciously as Henry King does in ‘An Exequy’, the moving poem on the death of his wife in 1624.

King is not inhibited about his grief and does not exaggerate it; nor does his poem show a trace of anxiety about moderation or the legitimacy of mourning. He celebrates a private funeral rite and focuses on his memories of his wife and his sense of loss. He does not take refuge in hyperbolic grief, nor does he merely hint at the great depths of his sorrow by means of an inexpressibility topos.

Surrey

Surrey writes with greater ease when he is restraining or hinting at his grief or attacking the enemies of the deceased. Some of his efforts to lament are peculiarly awkward, and his most moving elegy is a poem which disguises the fact that it is an elegy. Suppressed grief is the dominant note instead of anxious reflection on the legitimacy of mourning, even though one of the elegies is a justification of grief for Wyatt.

Some time before 8 August 1537, in the grounds of Windsor, Surrey struck Edward Seymour, presumably for spreading the rumor that Surrey and his father, the Duke of Norfolk, were in sympathy with the Pilgrimage of Grace. Violence within the court was considered a personal threat to the king, and an offender ran the risk of losing his right hand, his goods, his lands, and of imprisonment at the king's pleasure. Norfolk was worried that his son would lose his hand, but Surrey was only confined to the grounds of Windsor. ‘So crewell prison’ is a product of that confinement, perhaps a protest against it. One of Surrey's motives for writing the poem may have been to call attention to his special friendship with his brother-in-law, Henry VIII's illegimate son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, in an effort to persuade the king to release him from Windsor.