ABSTRACT
Representing Regicide: Royal Death and Renaissance Distraction In his elegy to Prince Henry in 1612, John Webster writes that the young prince was “[l]ayd in the earth, we cannot say hee’s dead ....”1 The purpose of this chapter is to take seriously Webster’s response to royal death and to extend our discussion of his attempts to memorialize the prince to public responses to the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649. This chapter represents a shift from readings in the previous chapters that have been thematic in their understanding of early modern acts of historical transmission to a reading that more explicitly links form and content. The first section examines the various elegiac forms and rituals that surrounded the prince’s untimely death, paying special attention to the similarities between his processional effigy-described as “very curiouslie wrought”2-and Webster’s own “distracted” poetic form that mourns his passing. This chapter extends the analysis of how properly to bury royalty by examining the two most famous monuments to Charles I, Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes. Looking closely at the public debate over Eikon Basilike, the chapter claims that the strategy of Milton’s countertext was to establish the king’s book as a theatrical text in order to diffuse its efficacious impact. Countering critics who tend to take at face value Milton’s antitheatrical attack, it insists that Milton was very much invested in establishing and exposing the dramatic structure of the king’s book not because such a structure was morally or ethically unacceptable, but because demonstrating the theatricality at the core of Charles’s text establishes a space between word and deed, thus destabilizing the sovereign status of his hold on the public after his death.3 Where Milton fails, however, Andrew Marvell succeeds. Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” poetically reimagines Milton’s argument. In the process of demonstrating the anamorphic nature of efforts to monumentalize the scene of Charles’s execution, the poet reveals the loss that is always sustained in efforts to overcome the past. Marvell’s “curious frame[s]” (“The Coronet” 23)4 echo the “curioslie wrought” frames of Prince Henry’s effigy, and both memorials remind us that past loss is always present even when artistic mediation distorts history’s pressing claims into a narrative of transcendence.
