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Surrey's Five Elegies: Rhetoric, Structure, and the Poetry of Praise

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

C. W. Jentoft
C. W. Jentoft*
Affiliation:
Kent State University, Kent, Ohio
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Abstract

The Earl of Surrey’s five “personal elegies” demonstrate his sophisticated use of traditional rhetorical patterns, specifically his manipulation of the two types of structure for epideictic praise, that focusing on the subject’s biography, or that delineating his virtues. His sonnet on Thomas Clere follows the first type, and the Excellent Epitaffe on Wyatt adheres closely to the second, but even in these pieces Surrey departs from convention when it suits his larger rhetorical and poetic purposes. Individual modifications are even more apparent in his three less public tributes. The two sonnets on Wyatt serve as sequels to the satiric ending of the Epitaffe, and “So crewell prison” extends personal grief over the death of the Earl of Richmond to the level of an ubi sunt lament for the passing of an age. The elegies illustrate, finally, that the successful manipulation of convention by a good Tudor poet is itself a kind of originality.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 1 , January 1976 , pp. 23 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1976

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References

Notes

1 “The Principal Rhetorical Conventions in the Renaissance Personal Elegy,” Studies in Philology, 51 (1954), 120. Subsequent references will appear in the text.

2 A History of English Poetry, ii (London : Macmillan, 1897), 85.

3 The term “elegy,” of course, has a long history, and did not until relatively recent times denote a funeral poem. For the history of the term, see, in addition to Bennett, John W. Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1929); and Francis W. Weitzmann, “Notes on the Elizabethan Elégie,” PMLA, 50 (1935), 436.

4 My copy text for “So crewell prison,” “Dyvers thy death,” and “In the rude age” is British Museum Add. MS. 36529; for “Norfolk sprang thee” I have used William Camden's Remaines (London, 1605), the earliest known source for the poem; for information on the text of the Excellent Epitaffe, see p. 24 and n. 13 below. After some rather extensive textual investigation, I have found the older MS and printed sources more reliable than the latest Surrey ed., Emrys Jones's Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey : Poems (Oxford : Oxford Univ. Press, 1964); see Kenneth Muir's review of Jones's ed. in Modern Language Review, 60 (1965), 245.

5 I am referring to Herbert J. C. Grierson's ed. of Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford : Clarendon, 1921); T. S. Eliot's famous review of that book, “The Metaphysical Poets,” first published anonymously in Times Literary Supplement (20 Oct. 1921), pp. 669–70; and E. M. W. Tillyard's The Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt: A Selection and a Study (London: Scholartis Press. 1929).

6 Helen Morris, Elizabethan Literature (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), p. 23.

7 The English Renaissance : Fact or Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1952), p. 57.

8 Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London : Routledge, 1959), p. 236.

9 G. H. Mair, ed., Wilson s Arte of Rhétorique, 1560 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909), pp. 12–13.

10 Arte of Rhétorique, p. 31; Cox, The Arte or Crafte of Rhetoryke, ed. Frederic Ives Carpenter (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1899), p. 57.

11 The Enduring Monument (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1962), p. 115. Subsequent references will appear in the text.

12 Frederick Morgan Padelford, ed., The Poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, rev. ed., Univ. of Washington Publications in Language and Literature, 5 (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1928), p. 228.

13 STC 26054; I have examined a photostatic copy of the Surrey poem, which is owned by Ruth Hughey of Ohio State Univ., and also a microfilm of the whole pamphlet, which resides at the Huntington Library.

14 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama, The Oxford History of English Literature, Vol. iii (New York: Clarendon, 1954), pp. 231–32.

15 Sister Miriam Joseph cites the descriptions from The Garden of Eloquence in Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1947), p. 316.

16 For information on the Bonner-Wyatt feud, see Kenneth Muir, Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 56–65.

17 Padelford, p. 227; Jones, p. 125.

18 The Works of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey and of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder (London : printed by T. Bensley for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1815), I, 342.

19 Edmund Casady calls the Clere epitaph “a sincere poetical expression of Surrey's emotion” in Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (New York: MLA, 1938), p. 242; and in Two Tudor Portraits: Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and Lady Katherine Grey (London: J. Cape, 1960), Hester Chapman says that “Surrey's grief was deep and lasting” and that Clere “had been one of Surrey's dearest companions” (p. 90).

20 The personal relationship between Wyatt and Surrey has been debated often. Most contributors, however, doubt the probability of any closeness between the two. Muir's account, in Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (pp. 173–74, 215), is one of the most reliable.

21 Two Tudor Portraits, p. 142.

22 See my article, “Surrey's Four ‘Orations’ and the Influence of Rhetoric on Dramatic Effect,” in Papers on Language and Literature, 9 (1973), 250–62.

23 J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1956), p. 45.