The Complaint of Rosamond

“The dread of something after death”: Hamlet and the Emotional Afterlif

“…The poem's governing conceit is that Rosamond has chosen Daniel as her confidante so that he might persuade his cruel mistress Delia to sigh for her; but when Rosamond departs to wait eternally at the Styx's shore, Daniel returns to his fruitless sonneteering, "to prosecute the tenor of my woes: / Eternall matter for my Muse to mourne." 23 Rosamond's woe proves contagious, or at the very least, her tale fails to lift the poet out of the romantic miasma in which she found him. 15 There were other female complainants of the 1590s, whose authors included Shakespeare's and Daniel's fellow Warwickshire writer Michael Drayton, who refashioned the Heroides as Englands Heroicall Epistles (1598).…”

“…A particularly popular fictional figure who extends and challenges the de casibus frame that controls the female complaint in the Mirror tradition was fair Rosamond of Samuel Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond (1592), the mistress of Henry II who eventually was poisoned by his wife, Elinor of Aquitaine. In Daniel's version, Rosamond is not only obstreperous-remarking snidely that while she is not able to cross into Elyseum, "Shores wife is grac'd, and passes for a saint" 16 -but also argues quite vociferously with the narrator about the truth of her story.…”

“…That something after death 16 I would like to suggest that the existential dilemma of these female complainants colors Hamlet and Hamlet's experience of the undiscovered country after death. While the literature on Purgatory depicts a graphic world of tortures both physical and psychological, the narrators of female complaints are plagued not only by their continued existence after death, but their acute awareness of time's forward march for the living, which both exacerbates their bad reputation and, even worse, begins to erase them from memory.…”

Metaphors of motherhood: claiming back the female body in the poems of Mary Sidney and Mary Wroth

“…[11] By calling his verses infants, Daniel also uses the metaphor of childbirth in relation to poetic inspiration. Like Sidney, he chooses to give "birth" himself, and draws upon the classics to give his image clarity.…”

“…(50. [11][12][13][14] Sidney's equation of dead babies with crossed out lines of poetry does not sound unnatural or even callous here, as the reader knows that he is a man, and that his metaphors illustrate the cultural separation between "creation and procreation". [12] Sidney here highlights the differences between male and female metaphors of birth; when women use such metaphors, the concepts of "creation and procreation" are inseparable as only women are physically able to give birth and write verses -a topic I want to discuss in the next section.…”