Conclusion

Abstract

On 8 February 1587, Mary was executed. The writers of the inner Jacobean circle, the subject of this book, met the queen’s death with silence. That there are no extant funeral elegies or allusive poetic commemorations is perhaps unsurprising, for Mary’s name could not have been invoked without incurring the anger or unease of the sovereign to whom alone loyalty was owed. Just as Fowler’s poetry refuses the Marian transfiguration of the beloved, so Mary is refused any redemptive incarnation by the Jacobean coterie. By the year of her death, almost all the erotic poetry considered here (with the probable exception of James’s ‘nuptial’ sonnets which persuasively belong to 1589 and after) had been produced. There is no obvious causal connection between the end of the major corpus of Jacobean love poetry and the queen’s own end. But 1587, rather than 1603, more persuasively marks the dissolution of the courtly love poetry resting upon the intimate links between the monarch, the courtly environment and literary culture, which this book has explored.