Abstract
In late 1612 Prince Henry, heir to the thrones of England and Scotland, died, probably of typhoid fever. In the capital, outpourings of public grief included a huge state funeral, public sermons (seventeen were published in early 1613), large numbers of individual poems, and a volume of three elegies by the playwrights John Webster, Cyril Tourneur and John Heywood. One of the public sermons on Henry’s death proclaimed Henry as the ideal fusion of protestant and classical manhood:
his body was so faire and strong that a soul might have been pleased to live an age in it … virtue and valor, beauty and chastity, arms and arts, met and kissed in him, and his goodness lent so much mintage to other Princes, that if Xenophon were now to describe a Prince, Prince HENRY had been his Pattern … He is [in heaven] with those Patriarchs that have expected Christ on earth.
(‘Meditations of Consolation in our Lamentations’, Spiritual Odours to the Memory of Prince Henry, 1613)
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© 2013 Kate Aughterson
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Aughterson, K. (2013). Roaring Boys and Weeping Men: Radical Masculinity in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. In: Philips, D., Shaw, K. (eds) Literary Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137270146_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137270146_4
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