Pageantry and Poetry as Discourse: The Production of Subjectivity in Sir Philip Sidney's Funeral

Abstract

Although Sir Philip Sidney died on October 17, 1586, he was not buried until the following February 16th. This delay was partly due to the need to have his body returned to England, for burial, from the Netherlands, where he died. But Sidney's corpse was returned to London by November 5, and the funeral was delayed for another two and a half months while Sir Francis Walsingham-Sidney's father-in-law and one of Queen Elizabeth's principal secretariesattempted to raise the money needed to give Sidney an appropriately elaborate ceremony.' The extraordinary trouble that Walsingham took to make Sidney's funeral a grand pageant affair indicates the social and ideological importance of aristocratic funerals in feudal and Renaissance England. In addition to the familiar rituals of bereavement, aristocratic funeral practices served as an important form of propaganda in support of the dominant aristocratic ideology and the existing social hierarchy. The grand pageant funeral processions of aristocrats functioned as symbolic texts which explicitly reinforced the social hierarchy during crucial moments of transition in social leadership. Moreover, aristocratic funeral practices played an important role in the production of modes of subjectivity appropriate to the feudal and proto-capitalist social orders of Renaissance England. Funeral practices, that is, functioned as a state-supported, institutionalized system of ideological interpellation, to use Louis Althusser's termthey helped produce the network of socially prescribed limits and expectations which called individual subjects into particular class positions and defined their relations with other subjects.2 Sidney's funeral offers a well-documented case in which to explore this ideological function. In this essay I will analyze the discursive production and mediation of subjectivity in two specific funeral practices-the pageant procession and the published funeral elegy-by reading Sidney's funeral through two differently-situated textual accounts. In one of these texts-a series of engravings published by Thomas Lant, a