Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture: Shakespeare to Milton.

Margo Swiss and David A. Kent, eds. Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture: Shakespeare to Milton.

Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002. x + 365 pp. index. $60. ISBN: 0-8207-0330-3.

Sir Philip Sidney was by no means alone in seeking "fit words to paint the blackest face of woe." Grief was a ubiquitous poetic and dramatic topic in the English Renaissance, meriting scrutiny not only as a subjective experience, but also in its forms of expression, especially as these were influenced by the gender of the aggrieved. Margo Swiss and David A. Kent have compiled a group of twelve essays (originating in the 1997 MLA panel on "Grief Expression in Seventeenth Century Literary Culture") which, with their introduction and Ralph Houlbrooke's afterword (framing grief within the Christian concepts of fall and redemption), enrich our understanding of the Tudor-Stuart understanding of this emotion.

Eight essays focus on poetry. Robert Evans defends the artistry of Donne's elegy on the death of Lady Markham by noting that it and his other poems of mourning "seek deliberately to master passion by controlling and redirecting thought" (55); he sees Jonson's lyric on the death of Lady Venetia Digby as less intellectualized and more personal, but both works share similarities in purpose and execution. Following Lewalski and others, Louis Martz stresses the Calvinism of George Herbert's later poems and studies the changes Herbert rings on human calamities (including the grief aroused by one's apparent abandonment by God), while John Shawcross's essay on a poetic sequence by William Hammond urges that there is "real grief behind the outpouring" and "the language of the poems provides restorative power" (138). The intricate yet lucid Freudian reading of Marvell's enigmatic "Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun" by Phillip McCaffrey finds that the Nymph, stalled in a "self-destructive grief[,] ... is reduced to an imago of the self that memorializes its own insubstantiality in a monument no one will ever see" (260).

Gendered texts receive the book's broadest emphasis. Reading the female construction of grief in the maternal elegies of Mary Carey, Lucy Hastings, Gertrude Thimelby, and Alice Thornton against the cultural insistence that "public expression of any passionate emotion by a woman was taboo" (154), Donna Long finds each poem an engagement with the loss of a child, the nature of maternal grief, and "anxiety born of a crisis of faith" (169). Writing of An Collins, known to us in only one copy of only one work--Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653)--W. Scott Howard argues that by "establishing a relationship between poetry, private grief expresson, public mourning and politics," Collins establishes a "politics of mourning" (179). Her conjunction of these themes, he contends, stems not from her often-supposed link with the Quakers but from her association with the Particular Baptists and the Fifth Monarchy movement. Richard Crashaw, according to Paul Parrish, seems only too able to adopt a gendered persona of sorrow, his poetic expressions of grief being "most powerful when the occasion is remembered, imagined and filled with feminine presences and responses" (221). Addressing probably the most discussed female poetic character in the English Renaissance, Margo Swiss argues persuasively that Eve's tears in book 5 of Paradise Lost demonstrate Milton's "attention to feminine affect" in a way "that adumbrates modern psychology" (275) as well as prophetically figuring the emotionally "androgynous" condition of God and both primal parents before their fall.

Two essays address grief on the stage. Fred Tromly probes how proffered consolation for grief is often exploited by Shakespearean characters; those in a position to console the bereaved often attempt to control them. Thus the Duke's ostensibly comforting speech to Claudio in Measure for Measure "gains much of its power through rhetorical slight of hand" (31); Tromly also perceptively reveals how strategies of consolation in King Lear prove inadequate. For Michael McClintock, Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness employs the affective impact of tragedy to enable its central women, Anne Frankford and Susan Mountford, to morally transform Sir Francis Acton and Master Frankford. Despite reinforcing "traditional gender relations," Heywood's view of "theatre's affective power put Heywood at odds with the antitheatrical writers, who saw the theater as a disrupter" of masculine, feminine, and social identity (118).

Marjory Lange and P. G. Stanwood address melancholy in the treatise and sermon. That grief was at times seen as temperamental rather than circumstantial in origin is the focus of Lange's "Humourous Grief: Donne and Burton Read Melancholy." She reviews the work of period commentators on melancholy, finding that by the Jacobean era such symptoms were regarded by Burton and others as more mental than physical. Donne's sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions stress melancholy as an illness which may accompany spiritual struggle but whose grief is "neither eternal nor incurable" (94). Stanwood argues that Donne's and Jeremy Taylor's sermons offer consolation by emphasizing death's general impact upon all humanity; despite differences in pulpit artistry, each preacher employed "conventional forms that generalize universal feelings" (211).

While generally eschewing post-structural approaches to its texts in favor of more traditional critical strategies, this volume usefully extends the discussions of grief put forward by such recent commentators as David Cressy, G. W. Pigman III, and Michael MacDonald. One may take issue with particular points raised by the essayists, but only to point to areas of further discussion rather than obvious defects. For example, despite Shawcross's impressively nuanced readings, Hammond's self-consciously intellectual verse seems to inhibit rather than enhance a poetic sense of emotional immediacy; Tromly does not consider Shakespeare's use of revenge as a form of consolation in Titus Andronicus; and Stanwood misses an opportunity to comment more fully on how Donne's sermon on Lady Danvers and Taylor's on Lady Carbery more closely reflect the gender issues raised elsewhere in the book. Yet taken together, the essays engage a rich variety of works within multiple contexts. The quality of scholarship here is high, the prose clearly written, and the critical conclusions judicious.

CHRISTOPHER BAKER

Armstrong Atlantic State University