A web-based edition of early seventeenth-century political poetry from manuscript sources. It brings into the public domain over 350 poems, many of which have never before been published.
Q7 Its true you need noe trophees to your hearse
Notes. This is the second of two answer-poems responding to—and challenging—the epitaph “I neade noe Trophies, to adorne my hearse”.
“An answere”
Its true you need noe trophees to your hearse
Your life beinge odious farr beneath all verse
Nor wast your wife who came chast to your bedd
which did you horne, your owne hands horn’d your head;1
Twas fitt your head should off then as all conster2
5That you who livde soe, should soe dye a monster.
Source. Rosenbach MS 239/27, pp. 386-87
Other known sources.3 CUL Add. MS 335, fol. 54r; WCRO MS 413, fol. 401
Q7
1 your owne hands horn’d your head: i.e. Castlehaven had cuckolded himself by engineering the rape of his wife by the servant Giles Broadway. <back>
3 Herrup (160) notes that copies of either this or “Blame not thy wife, for what thy selfe hath wrought” accompany the Earl’s “epitaph” (“I neade noe Trophies, to adorne my hearse”) in the following manuscripts: BL MS Lans. 491, fol. 229v; Beinecke MS Osborn b.126; and TCD MS 731. <back>
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