IV.1 - Alexander Barclay, The Ship of Fools (1509)

Summary

To some extent all of the entries in this anthology are, strictly speaking, literary in that they trade in metaphors, allegorical figures, and poetic conceits as well as make use of discernible rhetorical structures and turns of phrase. Part IV therefore offers a survey and closer look at works which, in the broadest generic sense, fall under the heading of ‘literature’ – drama, poetry, and prose fiction. Regarding the latter only (for the purposes of this synoptic view of our representative sampling of literature of the period), the death arts are part and parcel of the adventures found in episodic novels. Accordingly, our three examples of this literary type run the gamut of mimetic verisimilitude from Margaret Tyler’s chivalric romance, to Mary Wroth’s pastoral romance reprising the ethos of the Sidneys’ Arcadia, and Aphra Behn’s captivity narrative reflecting Caroline England’s own ‘here and now’, the slave trade in the New World. What we find in the period is that literature has been not only caught up in and representative of the death arts but also, through its endless strategies to prompt reflection upon mortality, profoundly constitutive of them.