“Here doth Shee Mourne:” Epitaphic Compulsion in Isabella Whitney’s Lament upon William Gruffith’s Death

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that “The lamentacion of a Gentilwoman vpon the death of her late deceased frend William Gruffith Gent.” in The Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), attributed to Isabella Whitney, is a witty reimagining of one of the most popular Renaissance literary genres: the epitaph. The poet's grief revolves around the personal consequences of her secret lover's death, handling stock phrases and situational irony to strangely moving effect. While the poem's first-person speaker invokes the epitaph only to repudiate it, the three quatrains framing the text (written in the third person and therefore generally attributed to the volume's editor Thomas Proctor), pins down the mourning presence with the epitaphic “here.” This paper suggests single authorship of the doubled text by showing how the poem posits personal lament as the site of interment located by the spatial demonstrative “here,” to fashion a poetics of closure in which the voice of the languishing female poet becomes, through linguistic and textual splitting, a living epitaph for the dead beloved.

KEYWORDS:

• Epitaph
• elegy
• poetics
• lament
• Isabella Whitney
• Thomas Proctor
• Richard Jones

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Michelle O’Callaghan ed. “Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions” in Verse Miscellanies Online, “Introduction”, http://versemiscellaniesonline.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/texts/gorgeous-gallery/ All subsequent citations are from this edition. I use “Lamentation” for the poem and Gallery for the miscellany throughout this essay.

2 Giles Bergel and Ian Gadd, Stationers’ Register Online (CREATe, University of Glasgow), https://stationersregister.online/entry/SRO1527

3 Hyder E. Rollins ed. A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), p. xiv, xxii–iv. See the “Introduction” in Verse Miscellanies Online for a more positive reading of the book’s reception.

4 Bergel and Gadd, Stationers’ Register Online, https://stationersregister.online/entry/SRO1577. The entry reads: “Richard Jones. Licenced vnto him the lamentacon of a gentlewoman vpon the Death of hir late Deceased frende william. Gryffith gent iiijd and a copy”. See also Lindsey Reid’s discussion of broadside ballad culture and the verse miscellanies of the 1550s and 1560s, “Isabella Whitney and George Turberville: Mid-Tudor Ovidiana and Some Questions of Precedence”, this issue, 11–30.

5 R. J. Fehrenbach, “Isabella Whitney (fl. 1565–75) and the Popular Miscellanies of Richard Jones”, Cahiers Elisabethains, 19 (1981): 85–7; Randall Martin, “Isabella Whitney’s ‘Lamentation upon the death of William Gruffith’”, EMLS, 31.1 (1997): 2.1–16, https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/03-1/martwhit.html#.

6 Rollins, A Gorgeous Gallery, “Notes”, p. 204.

7 Ibid. The Verse Miscellanies Online edition notes that Rollins suggests Richard Jones as the writer.

8 Martin, “Isabella Whitney’s ‘Lamentation’”, para. 2.

9 Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 283, n. 2; Michelle O’Callaghan, Crafting Poetry Anthologies in Renaissance England: Early Modern Cultures of Recreation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 109. Most of Proctor’s contributions to the Gallery are attributed with initials and it is curious that this piece does not.

10 O’Callaghan, Crafting Poetry, 109. She calls this piece “an elegy, not a will”, (109). Rollins called it a “peculiar” epitaph “ostensibly the work of a woman who objected to the earlier epitaph that one of Gruffith’s male friends had written”, p. 204.

11 See Douglas Clark, “Isabella Whitney’s Bruised Brain: Taking Care of the Mind in Elizabethan Poetic Posies”, this issue, 49–66.

12 See, among others, Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature; Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear, Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama, (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005), and Elizabeth Hodgson, Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), doi:10.1017/CBO9781139942379.

13 Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature, p. 36

14 Sig. Dii, p. 32.

15 Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature, p. 244.

16 Ibid.

17 As Randall Martin points out in his case for attribution (“Isabella Whitney’s ‘Lamentation’”, para. 2), the “Wyll and Testament” in A Sweet Nosgay finds a similar opportunity for performing a textual death upon alleged abandonment by London, figured as the faithless lover. See A Sweet Nosgay, in Susanne Woods, Betty S. Travitsky and Patrick Cullen eds. The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Series I, Printed Writings, 1500–1640, Part 2, Vol. 10, The Poets I, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), sig. Eii. All subsequent references and quotations from this edition.

18 These are the very attributes that irritated Rollins: “the necessity for alliteration led the unskilled poetess into arrant nonsense” (A Gorgeous Gallery, “Notes”, p. 206).

19 Rosalys Coope, “The Gallery in England: Names and Meanings”, Architectural History, 27 (1984): 446–55, https://doi.org/10.2307/1568486.

20 Rosalys Coope, “The ‘Long Gallery’: Its Origins, Development, Use and Decoration”, Architectural History, 29 (1986): 43–84, https://doi.org/10.2307/1568501. 51.

21 Ibid., p. 45.

22 See, for example, Charles H. Hinnant, “Marvell’s Gallery of Art”, Renaissance Quarterly, 24.1 (1971): 26–37, https://doi.org/10.2307/2859338 and Renée Hannaford Ramsey, “The Poet as Art Critic: Identity and Representation in Marvell’s ‘The Gallery’”, Studies in Iconography, 15 (1993): 215–26, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23923578.

23 Michelle O’Callaghan sees the ekphrastic aspect of the “title-page’s self-reflexive exposition of the spatiality of the book” as bringing “into focus the materiality of literary culture” and displaying “a language of poetic craft that is thoroughly grounded in the artisanal worlds of the sixteenth century” (Crafting Poetry, 1–2).

24 Sig. Air.

25 O’Callaghan, Crafting Poetry, p. 98. See also Patricia Parker, “‘Rude Mechanicals’: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Shakespearean Joinery”, in Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 83–115.

26 O’Callaghan, Crafting Poetry, p. 101.

27 See Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton, “Shakespearean Stanzas? Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and Complaint”, ELH, 88.1 (2021): 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2021.0005 for a discussion of the influence of this stanzaic form. It is interesting to note that Aemilia Lanyer also uses this form in the Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). Thanks to Danielle Clarke for drawing this to my attention.

28 Ibid. Callaghan points out that this piece “Departs from the Style Established Throughout the Rest of the Anthology”, p. 109. Martin, “Isabella Whitney’s ‘Lamentation’”, also notes how this piece and the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe signal their separate provenance from the rest of the miscellany (para 2).

29 Sig Piiv, p. 107. See also Catherine Campbell Rhorer, “Red and White in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Mulberry Tree in the Tale of Pyramus and Thisbe”, Ramus 9.2 (1980): 79–88, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048671X00040029.

30 Compare, in this regard, Reid’s observations in this volume about Whitney’s engagement with Ovidian treatments of classical narrative as emerging out of a rising interest in the Heroides in her literary milieu as mediated by medieval literary traditions (“Mid-Tudor Ovidiana”) and Michelle O’Callaghan, “London and the Book Trade: Isabella Whitney, Jane Anger, and the ‘Maydens of London’” in Danielle Clarke, Sarah C. E. Ross, and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann eds. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 291–304, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198860631.001.0001. Chaucerian rhetorical strategies are also evident in the occultatio she uses in the “Lamentation”, (see next section of this essay and n. 49, 51).

31 Martin, “Foreword”, in Cut These Words into My Stone: Ancient Greek Epitaphs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), pp. 17–18.

32 Isabella Whitney, “An order prescribed by IS. W. to two of her yonger Sisters seruing in London.”, sig. Cviii.

33 Celeste M. Schenck, “Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the Elegy”, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5.1 (1986): 13–27,15, https://doi.org/10.2307/463660. See also Victoria Moul, “English Elegies of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century”, in The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy, ed. Thea Selliaas Thorsen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 306–19; for a discussion of elegiac women and the female voice see pp. 315–18.

34 Schenck, “Feminism and Deconstruction”, p. 24.

35 Ibid, p. 24.

36 Ibid., qtd., p. 16.

37 See, in this connection, Helen Dubrow’s discussion of deictic words in the early English lyric, especially her observations on the epitaph embedded in Song 1 (lines 41–48) of Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) in Deixis in the Early Modern English Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like “Here”, “This”, “Come”(Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Wroth’s poem, although pastoral in setting, strikingly recalls nonetheless some of the features of the “Lamentation:” it is about a shepherdess who “laments her betrayal by a lover, describing the garb that will express her sorrow and its representation on the bark of trees and on her tomb.” Dubrow sees the proximal deictics in “her end heere prov’d” (48, ibid. qtd. 85, emphasis mine) as creating a “dizzying labyrinth of temporalities, spatialities, and textualities” (85). She also draws attention to how the “issues about textuality crystallized by that “here” and “end” (48) also encompass the larger collection” (100).

38 Compare with “An Epytaph vpon the death of Arthur Fletchar of Bangor Gent.” in Gallery (sig. Giiv), which is much more of an elegy.

39 Possibly Jasper Heywood. See Rollins, A Gorgeous Gallery, “Notes”, 205. Her own attempt is characterized as “ragged rymes”, p. 109.

40 In the Elizabethan lyric tradition, the lament is also a complaint, as in the unattributed “The Louer, hauing sustayned ouermuch wrong at his Ladyes hande wisheth speedy death” in the Gallery or in Isabella Whitney’s “Communication” to London in the “Wyll and Testament” (sig. Eii). Whitney’s play with the genre often takes the form of adopting unconventional lovers to complain against: a city, or in this case, death itself.

41 Emily Shortslef, “Acting as an Epitaph: Performing Commemoration in the Shakespearean History Play”, Critical Survey, 22.2 (2010): 11–24, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41556364.

42 “In sixteenth-century England, literature in the graveyard—epitaphs— became literature of the graveyard; that is, writing that began insistently ‘here,’ as inscriptions on tombstones, often appeared as citations within other texts.” Scott L. Newstok, Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs beyond the Tomb, Early Modern Literature in History (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), p. 1.

43 “With Poets pen, I doo not preace to write,/ Mineruaes mate, I doo not boast to bee:,/ Parnassus Mount (I speake it for no spite)/ Can cure my cursed cares, I playnly see:” (13–16, sig. Piiv). This is referenced at 105–10, sig. Piiiir (“as I have said before”).

44 I use praeteritio/occultatio over occupatio (The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 2015, notwithstanding) following H. A. Kelly, “Occupatio as Negative Narration: A Mistake for ‘Occultatio/Praeteritio’”, Modern Philology, 74.3 (1977): 311–15, https://www.jstor.org/stable/437118. Whitney’s attempt may well be read as “sneaking in low blows” (ibid., 315) against her rival poet. See also Ward Farnsworth, Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric (Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine Publisher, 2011), p. 166 ff.

45 For a discussion of Chaucer’s use of the trope in “The Squire’s Tale” see Alan S. Ambrisco, “‘It Lyth Nat in My Tonge’: Occupatio and Otherness in the ‘Squire’s Tale’”, The Chaucer Review, 38.3 (2004): 205–28.

46 See, for instance, Robert Streiter, “Cicero on Stage: Damon and Pithias and the Fate of Classical Friendship in English Renaissance Drama”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 47.4 (2005): 345–65, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40755445. Streiter’s discussion focuses upon Richard Edwards’ play Damon and Pithias (c. 1564), which describes itself as “a rare ensample of Frendship true” (ibid., qtd., 346). Edwards was also the compiler of Richard Jones’ 1576 miscellany, Paradise of Dainty Devices (Rollins, A Gorgeous Gallery, “Notes”, p. 205).

47 Streiter, “Cicero on Stage”, p. 349.

48 Ian D. McFarlane, “The Renaissance Epitaph”, The Modern Language Review, 81.4 (October 1986): xxv–xxxv, xxv, https://doi.org/10.2307/3729692.

49 Newstok, Quoting Death.

50 Michelle O’Callaghan, “‘My Printer Must, Haue Somwhat to His Share’: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books”, Women’s Writing, 26.1 (January 2, 2019): 15–34, doi:10.1080/09699082.2019.1534571.

51 Sig. Eii.

52 Ibid.

53 Eisendrath, “Object Lessons: Reification and Renaissance Epitaphic Poetry”, in The Insistence of Art, ed. Paul A. Kottman, 55–76, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1x76fts.5.

54 “doubt, n.1”, OED Online, (Oxford University Press, June 2022), https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/57076?rskey=P0Y2eE&result=1.

55 Lines 97–114 employ imagery of knights and sailing ships, and invoke both Minerva and Calliope. The generic power play of Ovidian love elegy “of epic dimensions” is discussed in Thea S. Thorsen, “Ovid the love elegist” in The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy, p. 115. It is also not without significance here that Ovid calls himself “the playful poet of tender loves” (ibid.). Victoria Moul, “English Elegies of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century”, p. 306–19, notes how Milton’s Latin elegies push the genre “explicitly towards epic” (312).

56 “Ruth, N.”, OED Online, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/169174?redirectedFrom=ruth.

57 See Deanne Williams, “Isabelle de France, Child Bride”, in French Connections in the English Renaissance, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin and Hassan Melehy (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 27–48. See, especially, 43–7 for a discussion of the figure of Ruth. The idea of women’s friendship in the story also resonates in the lament since, except for Gruffith/Narcissus, Damon-Pythias and I. H., it is full of female presence. It repeatedly addresses a female audience, invokes the female muses, and genders death as feminine.

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Debapriya Basu

Debapriya Basu teaches English at an Indian Technical Institute in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department. Her interests are Renaissance English women's writing and digital textualities. Her digital scholarly edition of the Examinations of the first female English Protestant martyr Anne Askew (www.anne-askew.humanities.uva.nl) in progress, originally funded by an Erasmus Mundus fellowship to the University of Amsterdam and the award of a Moore Institute Fellowship at the University of Galway. She is working on a monograph on spatial poetics in the work of sixteenth century non-aristocratic English women writers.