SOURCE: Guy-Bray, Stephen. “‘We Two Boys Together Clinging’: The Earl of Surrey and the Duke of Richmond.” English Studies in Canada 21, no. 2 (June 1995): 138-50.

“So crewell prison” is a useful poem for historians of English poetry: Surrey, always (and now perhaps primarily) associated with technical innovation, is said in this poem and in some others to be beginning the tradition of the English elegy. But this is not the only possible generic description. The classification of “So crewell prison” as an elegy has, practically speaking, ruled out the possibility that the poem could fit into other kinds of poetry, and criticism has tended to concentrate on the poem's connections to the elegy to the exclusion of other poetic and generic considerations. I want to look at these other considerations, to suggest alternative generic contexts for the poem in order to suggest alternative ways to read the poem. Although “So crewell prison” is undeniably an elegy, it is, equally undeniably, not just an elegy; and my emphasis here is on the poem as a love poem and on its relation to other love poems.

The best way into the subject is to examine the different classifications of “So crewell prison” made by Surrey's two most important editors, Frederick Morgan Padelford and Emrys Jones. Critics have tended to follow Jones's lead in discussing the poem; I want to suggest that Padelford's classification is ultimately more helpful. Padelford's edition of the poems of Surrey was originally published in 1920. “So crewell prison,” which Padelford calls “The Poets Lament for His Lost Boyhood,” is classified as an autobiographical poem and, as such, is grouped with the satire on London, the sonnet to Geraldine, “When Windesor walles,” “Good ladies, you that have your pleasure in exyle,” and others. It is not with the “Elegiac Poems,” a group that has the three tributes to Sir Thomas Wyatt and the sonnet to Thomas Clere. In Jones's edition, published in 1964, “So crewell prison” is grouped with the sonnet to Clere, “When Windesor walles,” and several other poems under the heading of “Ethical and Elegiac Poems,” while “Good ladies” and the sonnet to Geraldine are classified as “Amatory Poems.”

This examination of the classification of “So crewell prison” is, of course, more than a bibliographic exercise. The editorial decisions that I have mentioned are prompted by ideological considerations. While Jones wants to draw a distinction between elegy and love poem and to emphasize the elegiac nature of “So crewell prison,” Padelford sees the important distinction among those poems of Surrey's that are not translations as being between poems that tell us about the poet and poems that tell us about other people (“Elegiac Poems”), about (presumably imagined) romantic situations (“Love Poems”), or about how we should live (“Moral and Didactic Poems”). In Padelford's time, literary criticism was, after all, still an enterprise largely based on biography. The autobiographical element in “So crewell prison” has usually been taken to be a reference to Surrey's actual imprisonment in Windsor Castle. This is the political context for the poem; the poetic context has always been assumed to be Surrey's elegies and his sonnet “When Windesor walles.” While acknowledging the importance to “So crewell prison” of these contexts, I want to suggest a larger poetic context, one which includes both Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Surrey's own “O lothsome place.” The advantage to this project of Padelford's grouping is that it suggests a way of looking at “So crewell prison” in which the poem can be read simultaneously as an elegy, a political statement, and as a love poem.

The third classification—“So crewell prison” as a love poem—is the one that has been discussed least often in studies of Surrey. The usual critical assumption is that what Surrey felt for Richmond was friendship rather than romantic love, but it seems to me that this is not a distinction that can be supported from the poem. What Surrey does in “So crewell prison” is to depict his relationship with Richmond as something that transcends other relationships, as a bond that can be compared to the love between Troilus and Criseyde or to love affairs in Surrey's other poems. I think the crucial word in this context is Surrey's reference to Richmond as his “fere,” a word that is fairly common with Surrey and Chaucer but fell out of use within a hundred years of Surrey's death. The Oxford English Dictionary gives three main definitions for this word: companion, comrade, mate, partner; consort, spouse, husband, wife; equal. These seem like very different things to us now, but if we look at Surrey and Chaucer's use of these terms it will become apparent that we draw lines where they did not. Chaucer uses “fere” seven times: once to refer to horses who work together (Troilus and Criseyde I.224); three times to refer to a friend or companion (Legend of Good Women F. 969 and Troilus and Criseyde I.13 and III.1496); and three times to refer to a mate (The Parlement of Foules lines 410 and 416 and Troilus and Criseyde IV.791, where the reference is to Eurydice as the “fere” of Orpheus). Surrey uses the word nine times in his translation of Books II and IV of the Aeneid to refer to Aeneas's followers (II.402, 480, 497, 524, 739, 772, 991, 1057, and IV.801); twice to mean “mate” (“Strive Not With Love” [line 23] and “An Irate Host” [line 1]); once to mean friend (Psalm 55:23); once to refer to people sleeping in each other's arms (Ecclesiastes 4:29); and, of course, once in “So crewell prison” to mean the Duke of Richmond, whom I think we should see as Surrey's companion, consort, and equal.

I have illustrated the use of the word to show that there is, ultimately, no basis on which to rule out any of the possible meanings. When I gave modern equivalents for “fere,” I gave only the most likely meaning: it is obvious that the three meanings provided by the OED are close enough that there is bound to be a certain amount of semantic overlap, and, often, no exact translation is possible. Perhaps no exact translation is desirable, either of the word “fere” into twentieth-century equivalents or of Surrey and Richmond's relationship into its possible twentieth-century equivalents. In his biographical introduction to his edition of Surrey's poems, Padelford, motivated by a desire to defend Surrey against what he sees as a possible accusation of homosexuality, tries to point out the difference between Renaissance ideas of friendship and our own:

[T]he sixteenth century was a period when friendships between men were developed with a peculiar lack of restraint and with an ardency that surprises us today. We get some idea of these emotional friendships in the sonnets of Shakespeare, in the correspondence of Sidney and Languet, in the devotion of Edward II to Gaveston in Marlowe's drama, and in the various episodes of the Legend of Friendship in the Faerie Queene.

(9)

It may well seem that, rather than proving that Surrey and Richmond were “just good friends,” Padelford has merely managed to state the case for a sexual relationship between the two in the most pointed manner. Although his examples are, for his purpose, hopelessly ill-chosen, they do present relationships between men as a continuum that goes from Edward II and Gaveston to the episodes from The Faerie Queene (with the Sonnets and the Languet-Sidney correspondence somewhere in between). Ultimately, the relationship between Surrey and Richmond—as Surrey presents it in “So crewell prison”—seems impossible to restrict to any one point on that continuum: it is better placed in a complex of relationships that includes friendship, companionship, love, and sexuality. For this reason, Padelford's classification of the poem as autobiographical is useful, because that category—in his edition—includes political poems and love poems that talk of love between men and women. If we discuss “So crewell prison” only as an elegy for a friend, we are ignoring much of the poem. If we follow the implications of Padelford's classifications—however little he may have foreseen those implications—and recognize “So crewell prison” as a poem that tells, among other things, of the romantic love between two young men, we shall finally be in a position to appreciate the poem's complexity.

In order to comment on how “So crewell prison” works as an elegy and on what distinguishes it from other elegies it will be necessary to look first at the conventions of the elegy and then at Surrey's arrangement of his memories. In his article on Surrey's elegies, C. W. Jentoft provides a definition that seems to separate “So crewell prison” from Surrey's elegies on the death of Wyatt:

The rhetorical end of praise, whether that praise appears in encomium, epic, or epitaph, is to make men virtuous through the example of the one praised. Lament belongs to tragedy, to the poetry of meditation, or to the pastoral elegy.

(24)

In “So crewell prison,” Surrey is concerned not with men but with one man—Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond—and the aim of the poem is to lament Richmond rather than to encourage other men to be like him. The poem is, in any case, not simply a personal elegy. Eric Smith defines elegy as “a particular sort of pastoral, for elegy is specifically about what is missing and also about what is more certainly known to have been formerly possessed” (2). In this case, what is missing, what was possessed, is not just the Duke of Richmond but also the way of life in which both men were brought up. Ellen Zetzel Lambert sees this double death as an integral feature of the pastoral elegy: “death is not only an event in the pastoral world; it is also something that happens, or may at any time happen, to that world” (28). The two absences—that of the man and that of the way of life—are represented in the poem and in Surrey's biography by Windsor Castle, still, four hundred and fifty years later, a symbol for royalty. In this respect, “So crewell prison” conforms to Lambert's definition of the pastoral elegy:

The pastoral elegy, I would suggest, proposes no one solution to the questions raised by death but rather a setting in which those questions may be posed, or better, “placed”. … [The poem's landscape] remains a concrete, palpable world, a world in which the elegist can place diffuse, intangible feelings of grief and thereby win his release from suffering.

(xiii)

The ways in which “So crewell prison” differs from most pastoral elegies can best be appreciated by looking at the poem's structure and by comparing it to the usual elegiac structure. Peter M. Sacks sees elegies as consisting of procedures or resolutions, each of which

is essentially defensive, requiring a detachment of affection from a prior object followed by a reattachment of the affection elsewhere. At the core of each procedure is the renunciatory experience of loss and the acceptance, not just of a substitute, but of the very means and practice of substitution.

(8)

In “So crewell prison,” then, the prior object is simultaneously the Duke of Richmond and the place where he and Surrey lived, and the business of the poem is to describe this place. Nevertheless, “So crewell prison” depicts a situation in which affection cannot be detached from the prior objects: these objects are listed in order to reaffirm the connection between the poet and the places associated with the dead man, rather than to make any reattachment possible. Sacks, who sees elegy as closely connected to the Oedipal conflict, says that “the elegy clarifies and dramatizes [the] emergence of the true heir” (37), and it is here that the divergence of “So crewell prison” from the elegiac tradition is clearest. In Surrey's poem, there is no heir. The death of Richmond and of the way of life he represents is not a death that leads to a renewal: what lies behind “So crewell prison” is, rather, a replacement, and an inferior one at that.

At this point, I want to follow Padelford's lead and consider the autobiographical aspect of the poem. The Duke of Richmond died in the summer of 1536 and Surrey's mourning for him was both protracted and severe. A year after the death, Surrey's father, the Duke of Norfolk, wrote that “[my] son of Surrey is very weak, his nature running from him abundantly. ‘He was in that case a great part of the last year, [which] … came to him for thought of [the death of] my lord of Richmond’” (qtd. in Casady 57). At about the time of this letter Surrey was imprisoned in Windsor Castle in 1537 for striking Sir Edward Seymour, the queen's brother. Seymour himself is not important to the poem as a person but rather as a representative of the new way of life that replaced the traditional (indeed medieval) life that Surrey and Richmond led at Windsor in the early 1530s. In the poem, Surrey's imprisonment becomes the opportunity for him to consider the changes in his life and in English society. The traditional upbringing shared by Surrey and Richmond at Windsor—which can be seen as the centre of the chivalric tradition that informs so much of the poem—has given way to a society in which someone like Sir Edward Seymour, a man of obscure family brought into prominence by the marriage of his sister to the King, can become the equal of the Earl of Surrey, the heir to a great title, the descendant of several of the most famous noble families of medieval England, and a close relative by blood of the royal family. “So crewell prison,” then, is constructed on two related antitheses: the Duke of Richmond and Sir Edward Seymour, and old Windsor and new Windsor (by extension, the old court and the new court). Surrey's declaration of his friendship with Richmond is a political statement in this context. Consequently, Surrey is able to align Richmond and old Windsor and declare his allegiance to them while contrasting them (implicitly) with Seymour and new Windsor. The relations between all four aspects of the antitheses are mediated through Surrey's perspective as a prisoner, and expressed primarily as a conflict between Surrey's experiences as a prisoner and his expectations of Windsor.

Of course, this sort of conflict is common in Surrey's poetry: “The interrelation of the individual human being with his natural context is of extreme importance to Surrey. Frequently, in fact, that nexus calls into question the identity of the self” (Davis 41-42). In “So crewell prison,” Surrey reveals to what extent his identity has been constructed by and at Windsor, and demonstrates that the change which has overtaken the castle has overtaken him as well. In the first stanza, for example, just after speaking of Windsor as “prowde,” Surrey speaks proudly of his friendship with a king's son and of the fact that the two lived in considerable state, thus introducing the identification between people and places on which so much of the poem depends. By the end of the poem, Surrey's feelings for Richmond can no longer be distinguished from his feelings for Windsor Castle. Surrey structures “So crewell prison” by presenting the structure of identity as something dependent on architecture in its literal sense; in other words, the identification of a person and a place becomes more than a metaphoric equivalence.

The poem moves from a general lament on the fact of imprisonment in a place associated with a happiness that has now vanished to a particularization of that place and then inward to the state of the poet himself. “So crewell prison” and “When Windesor walles” are usually considered together, since this summary could be used for the sonnet also, with the difference that, in the sonnet, what makes the present sorrow incongruous is not so much past happiness as the beauty of spring. Indeed, Surrey does not explicitly state in “When Windesor walles” that he is a prisoner in Windsor nor does he mention his past associations with Windsor, and, although both poems move outward to describe the poet's setting, there is nothing about the description in this part of the sonnet that refers specifically to Windsor. I shall discuss later some thematic connections between “So crewell prison” and “When Windesor walles”; I want now to look at the structural connections. I believe that the two poems are not merely connected by subject matter: they are two versions of the same poem. “So crewell prison” is a more developed version of the sonnet and, in fact, we can see that it is itself based on sonnet form. In “When Windesor walles,” Surrey employs the sonnet form he invented: there are three quatrains rhyming ababcdcdefef, a final couplet rhyming gg and a volta at the beginning of the third quatrain—that is, at line 9. “So crewell prison” has fourteen stanzas, the first thirteen of which are quatrains rhyming abab and so forth, a final rhyming couplet, and a volta in the ninth quatrain. Furthermore, in the sonnet line 9, which provides the volta, begins “Wherwith, alas.” In the longer poem, the volta comes in the second line of the ninth stanza, a line that also begins “Wherwith, alas.” The greater length of “So crewell prison” enables Surrey to turn the conventionally pastoral setting of “When Windesor walles” into a particular time and place, but in both poems the underlying structure is the sonnet, with its self-contained but related quatrains leading to a conclusion with a more general application. The rigour of this structure is partly responsible for preventing “So crewell prison” from being a mere string of images.

I say “partly” responsible because Surrey's first stanza indicates a way to read the poem, a context to which the poem's images can be related:

So crewell prison! howe could betyde, alas!
As prowde Wyndsour, where I, in lust & ioye,
With a Kinges soon my childishe yeres did passe,
In greater feast then Priams sonnes of Troye.

(lines 1-4)

These pleasant associations have been replaced by sorrow and Windsor is a place “Where eche swete place retournes a tast full sowre” (line 5):

Past pleasure, heightened by the epic allusion whereby Surrey and the King's son approach the status of Priam's sons (and perhaps face their fate, as well), instead of lightening present pain, only intensifies it by the very fact of its irretrievability; the resultant attitude is complex, for we have in this moment combined the pain of disgrace, the possible pleasure afforded by “eche swete place” in what would normally be a pleasant enough “prison,” and the denial of that pleasure by the memory of pleasures that are no more.

(Davis 51)

Surrey and Windsor itself connect the past and the present while Richmond, youth, freedom, and happiness are confined to the past, and maturity, imprisonment, and sorrow characterize the present.

After establishing this framework, Surrey examines the happy associations of “eche swete place” until the volta, just as in “When Windesor walles” he describes the beauty of the scene before returning to the implications of the “wearied arme” (line 1) and “restles hedd” (line 2). The poem “moves, not only through an imagined day in time, but spatially away from the ‘voyd walles’ that now form his prison out into the fields and the forest, to end at the end of the day within those walls once more” (Davis 52). After the first stanza, each stanza until the ninth presents a particular activity and place associated with Surrey's life with Richmond. The memories move from the courtyards at the heart of the castle to the rooms around them, the areas around the castle, the grounds beyond, and, ultimately, the walls. These walls are at once those that separate the castle and its grounds from the surrounding countryside and the walls of the castle itself, which separate inside from outside. Although the “statelye sales” (line 9) and the “graveld ground” (line 17), for instance, are only important to Surrey now because of their associations, the walls enclose Surrey in the poem's present, just as they did in the past. The two elements of the poem—the enumeration of past pleasures and the mourning over the fact that they are past—are brought together at the end: the “tast full sowre” finally overwhelms the catalogue of “eche swete place.” As a result, it is at this point of the poem that the two parts of Surrey's life at Windsor unite: “the irony of the first term for Windsor, ‘So crewell prison,’ is such that by the end of the elegy, in a figure of peripeteia, the prison contains a deeper prison, that within the speaker himself” (Sessions 130). Surrey identifies Richmond with the positive aspects of Windsor; we see at the poem's conclusion that Surrey himself, to his peril, is now identified with the prison that Windsor has become.

The catalogue is not, however, merely a list of places and of the activites associated with them: the poem also—in fact, primarily—depicts the nature of the relationship between the two boys. Their life at Windsor is seen to consist largely of competitions: competitions for women, debates, “palme playe” (line 14), jousting, wrestling, and hunting. In order to demonstrate how great their love for each other was, Surrey says several times that he and Richmond turned each competition, each possibility for strife and contention, into an occasion to show love, just as he recalls the “hateles shorte debate” in “When Windesor walles” (line 7). Insofar as they do compete, each boy competes on behalf of the other: “With wordes and lookes, that tygers could but rewe, / Where eche of vs did plead the others right” (lines 11-12). When they joust, for instance, they do so “with swordes and frendlye hertes, / With chere, as thoughe the one should overwhelme” (lines 18-19) and when they play at “palme playe” they cannot even keep their eyes on the ball (lines 14-15). Surrey and Richmond's aim is to demonstrate their mutual love and they do so, in what is still an acceptable way for men to demonstrate love, by engaging in physical activities together. Even their rather generic pursuit of women becomes a means for them to communicate their love.

As Davis notes, the memories are presented in a temporal context as well as in a visual perspective (45). The first reference to time comes in the sixth stanza when Surrey speaks of morning dew: “With sylver dropps the meades yet spredd for rewthe” (line 21). By the time he speaks of the walls (line 33), night has fallen and the last memory recounted in the poem is of what Surrey and Richmond did at night:

The swete accord, such slepes as yet delight,
The pleasaunt dreames, the quyet bedd of rest,
The secret thoughtes imparted with such trust,
The wanton talke, the dyvers chaung of playe,
The frendshipp sworne, eche promyse kept so iust,
Wherewith we past the winter nightes awaye.

(lines 35-40)

The change in the memories as the poem progresses is from diurnal contact, which is always expressed through activities or through other people, to unmediated nocturnal contact. I said earlier that Surrey and Richmond express their love through physical activity; sex, of course, is a physical activity. Whether or not the two boys had sex, their time together at night is clearly the centre of a relationship that is increasingly depicted in the language of love rather than the language of friendship.

The antepenultimate stanza is Surrey's apostrophe to Windsor Castle. This apostrophe, which I consider to be the centre of the poem's meaning, is foregrounded by a marked change in style: “The sudden shift from a language which is styleless in its simplicity, and therefore fresh, to the diction of eloquence is curious” (Peterson 71). Peterson thinks that the shift, which he sees as beginning in the stanza that introduces the apostrophe, is too severe and that the end of the poem is unsatisfactory. Although I do not agree with Peterson's objections—nor with his assessment, which seems to me be complimentary in a peculiarly left-handed way, of the tone of the first part of the poem—I do agree that the shift is curious, and I think Peterson is correct in drawing our attention to it. Surrey's diction changes here because it is at this point that he wishes to make the poetic context of “So crewell prison” explicit. I want to show this in two ways: first by looking at the poetic context of this apostrophe and then by doing a close reading of the three last stanzas of the poem.

William Sessions points out that there are “very Chaucerian subtexts for these two elegies [i.e., “So crewell prison” and “When Windesor walles”]: Palamon's lament in The Knight's Tale and Troilus's at the palace of the lost Criseyde” (128). Surrey's use of Troilus and Criseyde is especially noticeable. In “When Windesor walles,” for example, he speaks of “iolly woes” (line 7). As Alicia Ostriker notes, this “oxymoron comes from Troilus, ii.1099” (396). A. C. Spearing points out that the “easye sighes, such as folke drawe in love” mentioned in “So crewell prison” (line 8), “recall the ‘esy sykes’ of the lover in Troilus and Criseyde” (318). Spearing goes on to suggest that Surrey's use of Chaucer in “So crewell prison” is not limited to the borrowing of expressions:

[I]t is possible that behind the memories of personal experience lies a literary memory of the passage in Book V of Chaucer's poem, in which Troilus, now abandoned, rides round Troy … in order to stir up memories of the events and emotions that occurred at each before Criseyde's departure.

(320)

Perhaps the most famous part of the passage to which Spearing refers is the planctum Troili, in which Troilus apostrophizes the palace in which Criseyde lived:

O paleis, whilom crowne of houses alle,
Enlumyned with sonne of alle blisse!
O ryng, fro which the ruby is outfalle,
O cause of wo, that cause hast ben of lisse!

(V.547-50)

It is this apostrophe which is the main literary model for Surrey's apostrophe in “So crewell prison.” Davis sees the use of the Chaucerian passage as a way for Surrey to indicate the depth of his attachment to Richmond: “[T]he death of a friend with whom one has had such intense pleasure may well be seen by the survivor as a kind of unrequited love” (52-53). Sessions also sees the use of the erotic mode as an attempt on Surrey's part to suggest the strength of his friendship for Richmond (129).

While these comments are useful, they do not go far enough. The correspondence between the two poems is much more extensive than either Davis or Sessions sees. I think that “So crewell prison” begins at this point to resemble a love poem because it has begun to be a love poem. The use of the planctum Troili as a model suggests that “So crewell prison” is not about unrequited love but, rather, about requited love and about the effects of political disturbance on that love. In Chaucer's poem, a man has been separated from his lover because of the exigencies of diplomacy; in Surrey's, it is a man's memories that are threatened by a disagreeable political situation. Another resemblance between this section of Troilus and Criseyde and “So crewell prison” is, of course, the identification between architecture and people. For Troilus, the buildings and the stones of Troy are invested with his love for Criseyde, just as for Surrey, every aspect of Windsor Castle is a reminder of Richmond and of the love they shared. The allusions to a poem set in Troy remind us of the comparison at the beginning of “So crewell prison” between Surrey and Richmond and “Priams sonnes of Troye” (line 4). Surrey's use of the planctum Troili can be seen simultaneously as a way to present “So crewell prison” as a poem about the loss of a lover and as a way to present it as a poem about the loss of a civilization. If we return to the idea of “So crewell prison” as a poem about a double death, Troilus and Criseyde, then, is the obvious precursor.

“So crewell prison” is not the only poem in which Surrey uses this particular Chaucerian model. The poem which Padelford calls “Rueful Associations” also seems to have the planctum Troili as a source: “O lothsome place! where I / Haue sene and herd my dere” (lines 1-2). In this poem, the reason for the lovers' separation is the cruel nature of love itself rather than any external force. Although the speaker addresses a place throughout, rather than love or his lover, the place is never particularized and he ends by deciding to leave. The place is incidental to the love rather than being an essential part of it, as it is in both Troilus and Criseyde (at least in Book V) and “So crewell prison.” Surrey's use of Chaucer in this poem is limited, but “Rueful Associations” is ultimately interesting not so much for its connections to Chaucer as for its connections to “So crewell prison.” With “When Windesor walles,” “Rueful Associations” and the planctum Troili from the poetic context which we shall need to examine the ending of “So crewell prison.”

The ninth, tenth, and eleventh stanzas introduce the apostrophe and help to set it in the context of love poetry. The poem's volta comes in the ninth stanza when the poet's description of Windsor, which has been getting progressively farther and farther away from the room in which he is confined, comes to the walls: “The voyd walles eke, that harbourde vs eche night” (line 33). The thought of these walls reminds Surrey of what he and Richmond did each night, and it is this thought that makes him weep. The progression in “When Windesor walles” is roughly parallel: the poet goes from describing what he can see of the external world to remembering the life he led, a life of “ioily woes” and “hateles shorte debate” (line 7), to weeping. In the sonnet, the equivalent of the “voyd walles” in “So crewell prison” is “the weddyd birdes so late” (line 5); in other words, seeing a traditional image for romantic love reminds the poet of his own love. I say that the birds are equivalent to the walls because these walls are both literal, as stone structures that once harboured Surrey and Richmond and that now prevent Surrey from leaving, and metaphoric, in that they suggest the embrace of lovers. The connection between walls and arms is established at the beginning of the sonnet: “When Windesor walles sustained my wearied arme, / My hand, my chyn, to ease my restles hedd” (lines 1-2). Here, the poet becomes part of the castle. This identification is behind a great deal of “So crewell prison,” in which both the poet and the castle have been deserted by Richmond: both the walls of Windsor Castle and Surrey's arms are “voyd” because they no longer contain Richmond. The memory of former happiness is, inevitably, no consolation:

And with this thought the blood forsakes my face,
The teares berayne my chekes of dedlye hewe;
The which, as sone as sobbing sighes, alas!
Vpsupped have, thus I my playnt renewe.

(lines 41-44)

As G. W. Pigman notes, the word “playnt” is significant: “[H]e points to the connection [between “So crewell prison” and love poetry] by calling his lament ‘my playnt’ only a few lines after writing ‘Of pleasaunt playnt and of our ladyes prayes’” (70). In the stanza after the apostrophe, Surrey says that the only answer he receives is “a hollowe sound of playnt” (line 50). The apostrophe, then, is placed in a context of poems that complain of the hardships of love.

The role of Surrey's apostrophe is not merely to present Windsor as a place associated with a former love (which is how Troilus presents Criseyde's palace in his speech) but also to establish Surrey as Richmond's chief mourner:

“O place of blys! renewer of my woos!
Geve me accompt wher is my noble fere,
Whome in thy walles thow didest eche night enclose,
To other lief, but vnto me most dere”.

(lines 45-48)

Each line of the apostrophe helps to connect Surrey and Richmond and to present that connection as a specifically romantic one. The first line, with its obvious Chaucerian echoes, draws a parallel between Troilus and Surrey. The second line draws a parallel between “So crewell prison” and a similar passage in “Rueful Associations”:

                                                                      sins thou, desert place,
Canst giue me no accompt
Of my desired grace
That I to haue was wont.

(lines 33-36)

Here are the same expression and the same situation in what is undeniably a love poem. In the first two lines of the apostrophe, then, Surrey connects “So crewell prison” to one of his own love poems as well as to what was probably the most famous love poem in English. In the third line, I think Surrey is making the same metaphoric equivalence that is behind the ninth stanza: both the castle walls and Surrey's arms enclosed Richmond “eche night.” It is the fourth line that is crucial, however. Here, Surrey declares his rights: Richmond is “To other lief, but vnto me most dere” (line 48). Surrey's claim to be the chief mourner has a better basis than all other claims, including, of course, those of Richmond's father, the King, and Richmond's widow, Surrey's sister Mary.

Surrey's presentation of himself as Richmond's chief mourner is part of his move from prisoner to grieving lover. The imprisonment, which originally seemed to be the subject of the poem, gives way to the poet's grief for his dead friend, as the final couplet stresses: “And with remembraunce of the greater greif, / To bannishe the lesse, I fynde my chief releif” (lines 53-54). The poem, rather than finding consolation for loss in the way most elegies do, uses the loss as a consolation in itself. In the last few lines of the poem, Surrey asserts his preeminent status as Richmond's chief mourner and Richmond's preeminent status—even after his death—as the main focus of emotion and concern in Surrey's life. Surrey's historical and poetical imprisonment in Windsor Castle (I am referring here to the incarceration itself and to the way in which the poet's perspective ranges farther and farther from the centre of the castle until checked by the walls) is ultimately presented as mere metaphors for the poet's imprisonment in his love.

Works Cited

Casady, Edwin. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. New York: MLA, 1938.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Davis, Walter R. “Contexts in Surrey's Poetry.” ELR [English Literary Renaissance] 4 (1974): 40-55.

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