ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and Walton’s Life of Dr. John Donne exhibit a number of connections in relation to shifting categories of masculinity and the emotion of grief in the seventeenth century. Both these works include nightmarish visions experienced by grieving fathers or mothers bereft of their children.44 Walton conveys his culture’s increasing tolerance of demonstrative mourning in bereaved men and women by fashioning a saintly figure with a heroic capacity for suffering, enduring, and articulating his grief.45 His linking of Donne’s prophetic vision of his wife, Anne More, with a dead child in her arms to those by St Augustine and Monica reinforces the ideal, saintly image he projects for his subject. In Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum Aemilia Lanyer similarly presents Christ as the epitome of the emotionally expressive saint whose mother sheds an abundance of holy tears in response to his crucifixion. Likewise, in Donne’s own poems and sermons he commonly yokes masculinity to positive displays of emotion. In Walton’s biography his emphasis on Donne’s grief coincides with a lively, literary tradition of the humanist scholar prone to melancholy such as Hamlet. He transforms Donne’s familial grief into a masculine, intellectual virtue. Yet in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, a Stoic closet drama, Herod goes mad as a result of his excessive, immoderate grief in response to his execution of his innocent wife for her supposed infidelity. He is an exemplum of the vice of emotional excess in men. The tragic plot of Cary’s play fulfills Leontes’ worst nightmare. The Winter’s Tale and The Life of Dr. John Donne include not only demonstrative family men subject to such grievous nightmares but also personalized, individualized memorials for the dead. The affective responses these memorials evoke from fictive men and women testify to the notable degree
44 Pafford in his edition of The Winter’s Tale, p. xxv, cites Antigonus’ vision of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale together with Donne’s vision of his wife in Walton’s Life of Dr. John Donne when arguing that those in the seventeenth century believed that it was possible to see the spirit of a living person.
