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Death, Inheritance and the Family: A Study of Literary Responses to Inheritance in Seventeenth- Century England by Sarah McKenzie A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English University of Warwick, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies May 2003 ABSTRACT This thesis argues that a study of literary genres from the seventeenth century pertaining to death and inheritance in the family yields evidence about the way in which inheritance was understood and interpreted by early modern society; these genres include parental legacies, women writers’ interpretations of Genesis, Anne Clifford’s personal account of her struggle to gain her inheritance, plays (comedies and tragedies) and elegies on the death of children. A study of literature related to the topics of wills, legacies and lineage imparts insight into early modern concepts of family relations and parental roles, and challenges Lawrence Stone’s views on the late development of the affective family. The textual legacies of Elizabeth Joceline, Elizabeth Grymeston, Dorothy Leigh and Edward Burton, and the elegies of Ben Jonson and Katherine Philips will be used to demonstrate emotive parenting and the extension of parental roles beyond the death of the parent or beyond the death of an heir. Familial texts can be used to study the familial and political environments and attitudes, but as will be proved in the thesis, literature, especially in the form of legacies, elegies and exegeses, also had agency in creating new definitions of inheritance external to the formal patriarchal basis of land and power transference which many historians have considered the prime focus of study in the seventeenth century. In addition Rachel Speght, Alice Sutcliffe, and Amey Hayward produced interpretations of Genesis as literary testaments, asserting women’s role in the creation of a less sinful, less patriarchal lineage. The ‘prodigal’ play structures of Thomas Middleton and Aphra Behn compared with patriarchal political texts, and a comparison of two versions of King Lear by William Shakespeare and Nahum Tate address the temporary interruption of patriarchal succession and highlight post- Restoration changes to the ideological functions of inheritance. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Susan Wiseman for all her patience and much needed care and support throughout the project, above and beyond the call of duty, both at the University of Warwick and after. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the University of Warwick, especially those that started their theses at the same time, and my colleagues at Harlaxton College, especially Dr Nicola Verdon and Dr Chris Whitehead who helped read parts of the thesis, and provided advice and reassurance. I would also like to thank the library staff of the British Library, especially those in the Rare Books reading room, the staff of the university libraries of Warwick, Nottingham and Southampton, and Jan and Diane at Harlaxton. Thank you to all my friends and colleagues who have constantly surprised me with their patience at my almost total neglect of all things social and fun, including Bashir and Lana, Dallal, Jim, Iain, Chris, Andrea, Karen and Judy. Lastly I would like to dedicate this work to my family for their unconditional love, friendship and support: to my parents Daryl and James, and my sister Viki. CONTENTS Introduction Page 1 Chapter One: A Dead Letter to My Page 41 Child: Printed Legacies Chapter Two: ‘This Inheritance of Page 101 Dust’: English Familial Elegy and the Death of a Child Chapter Three: Genesis and Death: Page 140 Biblical and Textual Legacies Chapter Four: The Will of the Father: Page 182 Daughters’ Responses to Wills in The Merchant of Venice and the Writings of Lady Anne Clifford Chapter Five: ‘His Will in a Box’: Page 225 Constructions of Inheritance in Comic Drama Chapter Six: Theatrical Inheritance and Page 275 the Revision of Power: Shakespeare’s and Tate’s King Lear Conclusion Page 312 Bibliography Page 325 INTRODUCTION An examination of inheritance systems in the seventeenth century demonstrates how property, power, and advice are transferred from the dead to the living. The problems and questions that surround inheritance disclose relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives, between wider kinship circles, and between authors and readers, and can highlight the relationship between the familial and political worlds. In the early modern period it has been possible to investigate these relationships through statistical analyses of wills and probate records, but a more comprehensive, and certainly a more thorough and expressive investigation can be achieved through an examination of literature, and through a literary-critical reading of personal accounts, diaries, legacies, poems and plays. These types of literature, according to Jack Goody in Family and Inheritance, can certainly offer greater depth to the studies of social historians or social scientists.1 Close readings of different generic literary treatments of inheritance processes in the family and in the political spheres offer new insight into early modern family roles and attitudes, allowing critical contrasts between gender perspectives and authors’ correlation with the world of print. This thesis argues that literary evidence, including parental legacies, interpretations of Genesis, diaries, plays (comedy and tragedy) and elegies, yields evidence about the way in which inheritance was understood, imagined and interpreted by early modern people. These particular literary genres exposed the points of deficiency in inheritance, the transgressive moments when the ideological mode of patrilineal succession was interrupted. This thesis questions the widely accepted ideology of passing inheritance from father to eldest son; instead it 1 Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E.P. Thompson, eds, Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p.1. 1 highlights what happens when the paths to will-making are barred or obscured. For example this could happen when women were excluded in common law by nature of gender, when the inheritor died before the parent, when the testator deliberately excluded a child from a will, or when children attempted to gain inheritance before the natural death of the testator; these are all cases, fictional or real, which are covered in the chapters of this thesis. In fact, in the development of inheritance amongst the landholding elite, women were doubly disadvantaged by strict settlements on estates, increasingly common towards the end of the century, which often excluded daughters and younger sons from gaining access to any majority share of a family estate. Literature could highlight the anxieties of those members of society who had been marginalised or ignored by inheritance systems, and could open up communication between the family and the public world of print. Exclusion from the formal practices of inheritance provided powerful inducement for the production of textual legacies as alternative documents to wills, and that is why wills themselves, valuable though they are in historical studies of the period, are not central to the thesis; it will be the way wills and patrilineal succession were circumvented, discussed, engaged with and used as dramatic devices that will be the focus of this study. Interruptions to inheritance were played out in text and on the stage. That inheritance was of crucial importance to society is indicated not only by a study of law and statistics but also by the range of genres in which inheritance is conceptually central. The thesis explores these in a series of case studies. Each case study explores a distinct kind of writing, but these are linked by a concern with three main issues: the relationship between early and late seventeenth-century society as represented in literary and other imaginative texts; the contrasts in textual relationships between mothers and children, and between fathers and children, examining in particular the 2 connection between mothers, inheritance and law as it was commonly understood and interpreted; and the way in which literary texts highlighted the boundaries of early modern kinship circles and new ways of viewing familial relationships which challenge historians’ views of the origins of emotive parenting in the seventeenth century. One must begin by addressing the complexities of the current academic definitions of the seventeenth-century family. It is necessary to question how the family’s variable categories and commonly accepted development in the early modern period have shaped modern assumptions and understanding of both literary treatments of family relationships and historical ways of reading documents. Jean Bethke Elshtain has argued that previous to the academic questions that began to be asked in the 1960s about the history of the family, ‘the family remained invisible or was seen as part of that vast consensus-making machinery