“Reader, Stand Still and Look, lo Here I am”: Elizabeth Cary’s Funeral Elegy “On the Duke of Buckingham”

Abstract

Elizabeth Cary’s terse epitaph “Upon the death of the Duke of Buckingham” (1628), attributed to her in two sources—British Library Egerton MS 2725 (“An Epitaph … by the Countesse of Faukland”) and Northamptonshire Record Offi ce (“Epitaph on Buckingham by ye La: Faukland”)—has failed to attract much critical attention until now. Kurt Weber, the biographer of Cary’s son Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland, unequivocally identifi ed the epitaph as hers as early as 1940, but it was never again mentioned until more than five decades later, and then only in a footnote.1 In 1993, Donald W. Foster located a text in the Beinecke Library that connects Cary’s epitaph with a poem of forty-four lines (Osborn Poetry Box VI/28).2 Subsequent critics have continued to refer only to the short epitaph, however, ignoring the likely relationship between these two texts. The fi rst six lines constitute the epitaph attributed to Cary, and the succeed­ing forty-four lines, beginning with “Yet were bidentalls sacred,” con­stitute an elegiac poem.3 This chapter will argue that it is probable that Cary’s epitaph (“Reader stand still”) and the elegy (“Yet were bidentalls sacred”), reproduced as an appendix at the end of this chapter, were both linked and separated in the course of manuscript transmission, and that Cary is the author of both.