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The Erotic Politics of Grief in Surrey's "So crewell prison"
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 46, Number 1, Winter 2006
- pp. 1-26
- 10.1353/sel.2006.0006
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay argues that Surrey's elegy "So crewell prison," which mourns the death of Henry VIII's illegitimate son the Duke of Richmond, displays intimacy between men as a form of political self-assertion. The poem associates emotional and erotic bonds between noblemen with a literary tradition of chivalry derived particularly from Chaucer's Knight's Tale, and contrasts those chivalric bonds with the (in Surrey's terms) debased intimacy politics of the Henrician privy chamber. By grieving for Richmond, Surrey fashions himself as a surviving representative of a true chivalry, the loss of which would entail political catastrophe.