Introduction: Re-citing

“Epitaph” and “Genre” in

Early Modern England

Here?

Here is what this book is all about.

Or rather, not here, but “here,” “in quotation marks.”
When we hear “here” (“hear, here!”), we have heard a homophonic
anti-pun,1 a foundational one for the English language. Here we find
the declaration of presence in voice as well as location.
The word “here” serves as the common, even the principal declaration
of an epitaph. This study holds that by attending to this epitaphic
“here” in the English Renaissance, by here-ing it back into the presence
for which it yearns, one can discern some crucial patterns, related not
only to the reformation of mortality, but also to the emergence of a
novel, even “reformed” sense of textualized memory.
In sixteenth-century England, literature in the graveyard—epitaphs—
became literature off the graveyard; that is, writing that began insistently
“here,” as inscriptions on tombstones, often appeared as citations within
other texts. Quoted epitaphs, or references to them, increasingly appear in
a number of Tudor and Stuart discourses. Their prevalence arises in part as
a textual response to the dissolution of Catholic memorial practices.
Epitaphs are quoted and replaced—re-cited—in d a striking range of con-
texts, from Elizabeth I’s first speech to parliament (in which she avows her

1 Ricks defines an anti-pun as a moment when “another sense of a word is

called up only to be fended off” (142). See also Pillai, who posits that “the
auditory imperative ‘hear’ and the visual deixis ‘here’ may be seen as the staging
of a hiatus or disjunction between the mediation of representation and the
immediacy of experience, or the sign and its referent” (856n51).

S. L. Newstok, Quoting Death in Early Modern England

© Scott L. Newstok 2009
2 Quoting Death in Early Modern England

virginity with a proleptic tombstone inscription) to Sir Philip Sidney’s

Apologie for Poetrie (whose last word is an epitaph-less curse) to Shakespeare’s
Timon of Athens (where an apparently double epitaph has long been cause
for editorial puzzlement). Contemporary historiographers turn to epitaphs
for material evidence, even as they insert fictionalized ones of their own
composition. A pattern of closing elegies with epitaphs gets established as
a convention. By the early seventeenth century, “epitaph” gets invoked
figuratively, with no correlative text whatsoever.
What’s going on here?

Speaking with the dead

At the apex of its influence, a recent mode of Renaissance literary criticism

announced that it “began with a desire to speak with the dead.” Shortly
thereafter, others modified this announcement (as looking att the dead),
even flattering it by parody (as sleep with the dead).2 Rather than concur
with the apparent consensus that such desires can only be satiated through
increasingly thick descriptions of early modern discourses, what if we
were instead to posit that the desire to speak with the dead became recog-
nizablee to us, in its modern form, in the early modern period?
There is no comprehensive handbook, as it were, for epitaph-
composition in the English Renaissance; such manuals would only
become familiar later in the eighteenth century. Yet the first sustained
evaluations of epitaphic writing—other than passing references since
culled from letters—were produced in the late 1590s, in the discourses
of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries. Indeed, these little-studied
documents reveal some of the first collectively practical criticism of
English poetry—quite literally, criticism of the practice of writing epi-
taphs. It is particularly telling that this practical criticism coincides
with the antiquaries’ general desire to reconstruct English cultural his-
tory. In this context, allowing the dead to speak (whether in epitaphs,
heraldic shields, or coins) marked an emergent historical awareness,
which was, in large part, driven by the desire to recuperate the material

2 The original phrase comes from (it long since goes without saying)
Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations (1); since troped by, among others,
Aebischer (64); and Masten (1). For critiques of this formulation, see Cope
(53–54); Joughin (77); Pieters (2); and Halpern, who hears in it echoes of T. S. Eliot
(43). Gumbrecht recalls Greenblatt when he asserts: “The object of this desire
lying under all historically specific historical cultures would be the presentifica-
tion of the past, that is, the possibility of ‘speaking’ to the dead” (123).