An innovative study of the emergent Renaissance practice of making epitaphic gestures within other English genres. Quoting Death argues that the post-Reformation preoccupation with textual remembrance led to a remarkable proliferation of epitaphic gestures beyond the putative gravestone. A poetics of quotation uncovers the fascinating ways in which writers have recited (or re-sited) these texts within new contexts. This study modifies conventional genre studies by detailing the situatedness of quoted text—a compositional habit that became markedly prevalent with the continued expansion of printing and literacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The compact genre of the epitaph was incorporated in other discourses by major early modern writers: the dramatists Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, and Tourneur; Tudor and Stuarts monarchs and Oliver Cromwell; the historians Holinshed, Stow, Camden, and Weever; the rhetoricians Sidney and Puttenham; and the poets Skelton, More, Jonson, and Donne. By scrutinizing the sophisticated ways in which these authors deployed epitaphs, this book contributes a refined approach to the growing field of historical formalism, as it probes rhetorical elements of genre while remaining attuned to theoretical, historicist, and methodological concerns.
'Quoting Death in Early Modern England is convincing about the significance of epitaphs in early modern texts... Yet the strength of the book is in its thorough and clear treatment of a subject less tangential than a reader may first suspect.'
- Jack Heller, Appositions: Studies in Renaissance/Early Modern Literature & Culture
'This is a stimulating exploration of a neglected genre and Newstok is an adroit commentator on the emergence and circulation of the early modern epitaph.'
- Peter J. Smith, Times Higher Education
'This lively and thought-provoking book...is an ambitious and largely successful study, encouraging us to understand not merely how Renaissance epitaphs transcended their traditional Christian commemorative functions, but how a variety of concerns with "epitaphic closure" were intimately related to an emergent idea of authorship itself.
- Peter Marshall, Times Literary Supplement
'The very last part of the book . . . is liberated from notes, and the reader can clearly follow and appreciate Newstok’s contentions. . . . he eloquently expresses all that one would seek of the nature and purpose of an epitaph. The book is attractively bound and presented, with full references and an extensive bibliography.'
- Rosemary Greentree, Parergon
'This superb study . . . builds towards particularly strong textually analytic chapters on drama and poetry. . . . This is impressively self-aware criticism. . . . The discussion achieves considerable scope, situating the epitaph in broader period debates concerning the veracity of verse, the efficacy and morality of rhetoric, and the early history of antiquarianism. This scrupulously detailed literary history of an increasingly recognised genre, coming in the same series as Andrea Brady's work on funeral elegy, helps gives the lie to Robert Musil's sense that "there is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments.'
- Forum for Modern Language Studies
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Reciting 'Epitaph' and 'Genre' in Early Modern England
"Here lies": Pointing to the "Graue Forme"
"Turn Thy Tombe Into a Throne": Elizabeth I's Death Rehearsal
"In good stead of an epitaph": Verifying History
"Killing rhetorick": The Poetics of Movere
"An theater of mortality": In Sincerity, Onstage
"Lapping-up of Matter": Epitaphic Closure in Elegies
Epilogue: "Epitaph" for Epitaph
Bibliography
Index
SCOTT L. NEWSTOK teaches English at Rhodes College, USA. He has edited Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare, and is co-editor of a collection of essays on Macbeth in African-American culture.
Description
An innovative study of the emergent Renaissance practice of making epitaphic gestures within other English genres. Quoting Death argues that the post-Reformation preoccupation with textual remembrance led to a remarkable proliferation of epitaphic gestures beyond the putative gravestone. A poetics of quotation uncovers the fascinating ways in which writers have recited (or re-sited) these texts within new contexts. This study modifies conventional genre studies by detailing the situatedness of quoted text—a compositional habit that became markedly prevalent with the continued expansion of printing and literacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The compact genre of the epitaph was incorporated in other discourses by major early modern writers: the dramatists Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, and Tourneur; Tudor and Stuarts monarchs and Oliver Cromwell; the historians Holinshed, Stow, Camden, and Weever; the rhetoricians Sidney and Puttenham; and the poets Skelton, More, Jonson, and Donne. By scrutinizing the sophisticated ways in which these authors deployed epitaphs, this book contributes a refined approach to the growing field of historical formalism, as it probes rhetorical elements of genre while remaining attuned to theoretical, historicist, and methodological concerns.
Reviews
'Quoting Death in Early Modern England is convincing about the significance of epitaphs in early modern texts... Yet the strength of the book is in its thorough and clear treatment of a subject less tangential than a reader may first suspect.'
- Jack Heller, Appositions: Studies in Renaissance/Early Modern Literature & Culture
'This is a stimulating exploration of a neglected genre and Newstok is an adroit commentator on the emergence and circulation of the early modern epitaph.'
- Peter J. Smith, Times Higher Education
'This lively and thought-provoking book...is an ambitious and largely successful study, encouraging us to understand not merely how Renaissance epitaphs transcended their traditional Christian commemorative functions, but how a variety of concerns with "epitaphic closure" were intimately related to an emergent idea of authorship itself.
- Peter Marshall, Times Literary Supplement
'The very last part of the book . . . is liberated from notes, and the reader can clearly follow and appreciate Newstok’s contentions. . . . he eloquently expresses all that one would seek of the nature and purpose of an epitaph. The book is attractively bound and presented, with full references and an extensive bibliography.'
- Rosemary Greentree, Parergon
'This superb study . . . builds towards particularly strong textually analytic chapters on drama and poetry. . . . This is impressively self-aware criticism. . . . The discussion achieves considerable scope, situating the epitaph in broader period debates concerning the veracity of verse, the efficacy and morality of rhetoric, and the early history of antiquarianism. This scrupulously detailed literary history of an increasingly recognised genre, coming in the same series as Andrea Brady's work on funeral elegy, helps gives the lie to Robert Musil's sense that "there is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments.'
- Forum for Modern Language Studies
Contents
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Reciting 'Epitaph' and 'Genre' in Early Modern England
"Here lies": Pointing to the "Graue Forme"
"Turn Thy Tombe Into a Throne": Elizabeth I's Death Rehearsal
"In good stead of an epitaph": Verifying History
"Killing rhetorick": The Poetics of Movere
"An theater of mortality": In Sincerity, Onstage
"Lapping-up of Matter": Epitaphic Closure in Elegies
Epilogue: "Epitaph" for Epitaph
Bibliography
Index
Authors
SCOTT L. NEWSTOK teaches English at Rhodes College, USA. He has edited Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare, and is co-editor of a collection of essays on Macbeth in African-American culture.
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