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(1600-33) Led an Eventful and Notorious Life

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(1600-33) Led an Eventful and Notorious Life “CEASE THY WANTON LUST”: THOMAS RANDOLPH’S ELEGY, THE CULT OF VENETIA, AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF CLASSICAL SEX MARK LLEWELLYN One of the most colourful and infamous characters of the early seventeenth century, Venetia, Lady Digby (1600-33) led an eventful and notorious life. Born Lady Venetia Stanley in 1600, she was the daughter of a Shropshire knight and, through the maternal line, granddaughter of the eighth Earl of Northumberland. As children, she and her future husband, the diplomat, courtier and scientist Kenelm Digby (1603-65) lived in close proximity. If we follow Digby’s own later accounts the two fell in love at an early age. However, with Digby’s mother set firmly against any match to the noble but penniless Venetia, Digby was sent abroad. During his prolonged absence, Venetia, said to have been under the impression Digby was dead, enjoyed a series of rather public liaisons. John Aubrey recounts that so public and so dangerously scandalous were these relationships that someone even went so far as to daub the warning message “Pray come not near, for Venetia Stanley lodgeth here” above the entrance to her London home.1 Upon Digby’s return the couple married in 1625, despite his continued family opposition and his knowledge of her affairs. In fact he appears to have found her past something of a challenge, declaring that “a handsome lusty man that was discreet might make a vertuose wife out of a brothel-house”.2 Both Digby and Venetia became great artistic patrons, with Venetia earning herself the title of Ben Jonson’s muse.3 1 Quoted in Ann Sumner, “Venetia Digby on Her Deathbed”, History Today, XVL/10 (October 1995), 21. 2 John Aubrey quoted in Jackson I. Cope, “Sir Kenelm Digby’s Rewritings of His Life”, in Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England, eds Derek Hirst and Richard Strier, Cambridge, 1999, 56. 3 For the details on Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia, see Digby’s entry in the Dictionary of 90 Mark Llewellyn Yet despite the public nature of their relationship and the scandals which surrounded them, it is largely for her unexpectedly early death in 1663 and his lifetime of mourning that Venetia and Digby are now famous – a death that was captured in the iconic picture by van Dyck, and memorialized in many elegies, mainly penned by Jonson and his circle. Indeed, modern readers might only be familiar with the name of Digby through the poetry of Jonson or Umberto Eco’s 1994 novel The Island of the Day Before, where he makes an appearance in Paris as “Monsieur d’Igby”, creator of the “Powder of Sympathy”. In the novel he is presented as a figure who is generally popular although “his prestige suffered a blow among some gentlewomen to whom he had recommended a beauty cream of his own invention; it caused one lady blisters, and others murmured that his beloved wife, Venetia, had actually died, a few years earlier, victim of a viper wine he had concocted”.4 As this passage from Eco’s novel suggests, it was Venetia’s death that not only haunted Digby for the rest of his life but which also haunts our more general memory of him. Whether this fascination itself stems from sympathy for Digby or from a macabre curiosity about his possible role in Venetia’s death, it is the iconography surrounding the dying Venetia that remains the key issue – an iconography Digby himself initiated. Thomas Randolph’s Elegy on Venetia Digby has long posed a problem for critics.5 In 1822, an anonymous author in The Retrospective Review wrote of how he was “arrested by the Elegy on the Lady Venetia Digby ... for the singularity and beauty of its conceit”,6 a view not shared by Robert Lathrop Sharp, writing some hundred and forty years later, National Biography, and also E.W. Bligh, Sir Kenelm Digby and His Venetia, London, 1932. 4 Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before, London, 1998, 162. 5 Thomas Randolph (1605-35) was educated at Westminster School (1618-23) and Trinity College, Cambridge (1624-28). He became a fellow of Trinity in 1629. Renowned in his day as a university wit, he wrote several successful plays and college entertainments. During the late 1620s and early 1630s he was associated with the “Tribe of Ben” and was adopted by Jonson as one of his “sons”. Viewed by his contemporaries as Jonson’s heir apparent, he died two years before his “father”. As his most recent editor, G. Thorn-Drury, states the “tributes published after his death expressed such a sense of the loss to letters which it involved as I think has never attended the death of any other English poet” (The Poems of Thomas Randolph, ed. G. Thorn-Drury, London, 1929, vii). As Thomas Randolph is now rarely read or studied, the text of “An Elegie upon the Lady Venetia Digby” will be found as an Appendix at the end of this article. 6 The Retrospective Review, VI (1822), 67. .
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