| "Here" on a tombstone, epitaphs should presumably be sincere, true, moving, conclusive, and composed for someone dead. Yet when epitaphs are textually recited outside the putative cemetery, they are often applied in such a way as to undermine these simple presumptions. Moreover, they serve to highlight sociologically problematic tensions inherent in the larger genres in which they are quoted. Thus dramas are ambivalently drawn to the sincerity of epitaphs, histories their veracity, rhetorical treatises their persuasion, elegies their closure, and political speeches their connection to anticipatory death. While the thesis examines a long tradition of epitaphic recitation, from the classical era to the contemporary world, it concentrates primarily on Renaissance England (roughly 1560--1660). It was during this period that a heightened anxiety about remembrance after death, occasioned largely by the reformation of Catholic memorial practices, led to a remarkable upsurge in the discussion and quotation of epitaphs throughout a number of different discourses. Epitaphs are particularly suitable to recitation in other generic contexts on account of their consistent recourse to the deictic declaration 'here,' which oddly encourages their appearance elsewhere. Such epitaphic recitation remains an unexamined rhetorical element in early modern texts, and I apply a number of different approaches---formal, historical, philological, generic, theoretical---in order to begin to account for this strange little gesture. Special attention is paid to the figures of: Queen Elizabeth I; the historians Raphael Holinshed and John Stow; the antiquaries William Camden and John Weever; the theorists of poetry George Puttenham and Sir Philip Sidney; the playwrights Thomas Kyd, Cyril Tourneur, and William Shakespeare; the poet Ben Jonson; and the later essayists Samuel Johnson and William Wordsworth. |
