ABSTRACT
Ben Jonson's poems for Philip Sidney's daughter Elizabeth Sidney Manners are a compendium of the available strategies for managing the male poet's gendered anxieties about the Sidneian female heir. In his verse, Elizabeth's praise suggests that her direct descent as Philip's only child makes available to Jonson a set of images about property and inheritance that seem largely unavailable to him when he comes to represent Mary Sidney Wroth's (MSW's) status as Philip's “belated” literary heir, who comes into her status only because those with a more direct blood claim have died. The dedication imagines the Sidney family's grief for William as a vast ocean, and while this representation is hardly unusual in the period's discourses on grief, as people saw in relation to MSH's “To the Angell Spirit,” the ocean invites an additional consideration of the gendered nature of mourning.
