Abstract
An anticipatory elegy attributed to Nicholas Oldisworth advises Ben Jonson to hurry up and ‘Die Johnson: crosse not our Religion so/As to bee thought immortall. Lett us know/Thou art a Man.’ Jonson’s ‘great Creations’ make readers ‘idol’ and think him ‘eternall’.1 This morbid expressions of rivalry was not unique; Anne Bradstreet’s father Thomas Dudley, for example, received several elegies on his own death following his contest for the governorship of Massachusetts Bay Colony.2 Elegists also commonly asserted that their subject had died in order to prove the susceptibility of prodigies to death. Katherine Philips ‘left us wrapt in Admiration/That she could dye; as we’re before to see / That such Perfection in her Sex could be’;3 female excellence surprises her elegist as much as her mortality does. Jonson’s admirer, meanwhile, urges the laureate finally to recognise that praise ‘Is shortned meerly by this length of dayes’ he lives. His ‘warm breath’ ‘Casts a thick mist before thy Worth’, so he should ‘stoope, and submitt’ to ‘the Meanesse of our Witt.’
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Notes
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Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter (New York: Routledge, 1997). For an example of elegiac praise for a women’s ‘Oeconomique and Domestique Cares’, see On the Death of Her Illustrious Grace ANNE Dutchess-Dowarger of Albermarle [London, 1669], BL Luttrell Collection 3.
Robert Herrick, ‘An Ode for Him’, The Complete Poetry, ed. J. Max Patrick (New York: New York UP, 1963), p. 381.
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© 2006 Andrea Brady
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Brady, A. (2006). Contesting Wills in Critical Elegy. In: English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554870_6
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