Abstract
This chapter takes as its subject the historical poems that were dedicated to Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford in the years between 1594 and 1614: Michael Drayton’s accounts of the barons’ wars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and Arthur Gorges’s 1614 translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, an account of the civil war between Caesar and the forces of the Roman Senate. These “admonitory epics” were not only dedicated to Bedford, but interpellated her name and example at crucial moments in their critiques of monarchical absolutism. I thus argue that these kinds of dedications, based less in material support than in varied practices of invocation, analogy, and allusion, productively expand our understanding of early modern literary collaboration.
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Crawford, J. (2017). “All Fell Not in Pharsalias Field”: Lucy Harington Russell and the Historical Epic. In: Pender, P. (eds) Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration . Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58777-6_9
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