ABSTRACT

Weeping and wailing and other demonstrations of excessive emotion often function as sources of power for men in early modern English literature. Though medieval and Renaissance women are usually represented as the sex more prone to such emotional outbursts than men, men also express a wide range of powerful emotions-grief, sadness, melancholy, anger, despair, patience, and joy-in early modern poetry, prose, and plays.1 In this study on masculinity and emotion in works by Spenser and Shakespeare and a number of their contemporaries, I focus on literary

1 In keeping with classical precedents, excessive displays of emotion are often gendered as feminine in medieval and early modern discourse. In the late fourth century St John Chroysostom criticizes women’s excessive mourning and lamentation by focusing on their violent, ritualized gestures of “baring their arms, tearing their hair, making scratches down their cheeks”: Commentary on St. John the Apostle and Evangelist, trans. Sister Thomas Aquinas Goggin, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 1960-69), p. 177 as cited by Patricia Phillippy in Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 15. Andreas Hyperius warns his readers that “it is very uncomly and wommanish to lament without measure” and criticizes those who indulge in a “womannish kinde of wayling and shricking”: The Practice of Preaching, Otherwise Called the Pathway to the Pulpit (London: Thomas East, 1577), pp. 171-2, 174. Robert Burton similarly notes the shamefulness of those who “almost goe besides themselves” by lamenting like “those Irish women”: The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Nicolas K. Kiessling, Thomas C. Faulkner, and Rhonda L. Blair, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 176. See Elizabeth M.A. Hodgson, “Prophecy and Gendered Mourning in Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” SEL 43 (2003): 103-4, for a brief discussion of Hyperius and Burton in relation to the early modern cultural concern over the excessive mourning of grieving women.