‘More women: more weeping’: the communal lamentation of early modern women in the works of Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Wroth Marion Wynne-Davies University of Surrey (
[email protected]) I. Introduction ‘More women: more weeping’, Thomas Playfere reminded his congregation from the open pulpit outside St Mary’s on Bishopsgate on the Tuesday of Easter week in 1595.1 It would have been a prestigious event; he preached from a newly refurbished podium to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, who were gathered with their families in a recently constructed house, as well as to an assembled throng of teachers and pupils from St Christopher’s dressed in their distinctive blue coats and red hats. The ceremony would hardly have unnerved Playfere, since he was an ambitious man who courted publicity and, through a combination of guile, ingratiating behaviour and populist sermons, would go on to win recognition at court and elevation at the University of Cambridge. Indeed, this particular sermon, which he later entitled The Meane of Mourning, was so successful that it was immediately released in two pirated editions, subsequently being published in an authorized collection of his most famous addresses. The text combines Playfere’s usual populist tone and rhetorical flourishes in order to address the question of mourning and, in particular, to dwell upon women’s communal and excessive grief. When Christ died on the cross, Playfere informed his listeners, it would have been certain, both that more women wept then men, and that the women more wept then the men [since] the womens weeping came rather from weaknes in themselues … Naturally (saith S.