Convention and Design in Drayton's Heroicall Epistles

M DRAYTON'S Englands Heroicall Epistles were an immediate success with Elizabethan readers: the collection was registered in October 1597, was published later that year, reissued in 1598, newly edited the same year, in 1599, 1600, and 1602.1 It reappeared at least seven more times before the author's death in 1631; later seventeenthcentury printings were still to come. It has of ten been noted that these twenty-four long verse epistles are imitations of Ovid's Heroides, the first of this kind in English.2 The distinctive character of Drayton's epistles, however, lies more in their Elizabethan than in their Ovidian heritage. The H eroicalt Epistles are an extension of the literary vogue of tragic complaints which attracted Shakespeare, Daniel, Lodge, and Drayton himself. They are also Elizabethan historical poems, and differ from Ovid's epistles in that they are informed by a single controlling purpose: to convey to the reader that same spirit of confident patriotism which characterizes most of the historical poetry and drama of the 1590's. The idea for Drayton's epistles must have come in part from the popular Elizabethan convention of complaint poems, exemplified in Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond (1592) and Shakespeare's Lucrece (1594). These in turn owe their origin to the earlier complaints or "tragedies" of the Mirror for Magistrates; but they are also influenced by Ovid's love-complaints in the Heroides and Metamorphoses. The earliest poems of the Mirror (1559) are quite unlike the complaints of the 1590's: they emphasize political rather than moral teachings; they lack the figured style and literary allusiveness which grace, and often encumber, the later poems; most important, they do not broach the subject of love until Thomas Churchyard's Shore's Wife (1563). Yet even in Churchyard's poem the emphasis is on Jane Shore's "great overthrowe," not her beauty. The same may be said of the next Mirror complaint to deal with illicit love, John Higgins' Elstride (1574). In Thomas Blenerhasset's tragedy of the virtuous abbess ("How Lady Ebbe dyd flea her nose and upper lippe away to save her Virginitie," 1578) the Mirror poet shifts his concern from the political to the moral; however, his work looks back to legends of the virgin-martyrs rather than forward to the