Remembering and Dismembering Henry Howard: Blazon and Beheading in Sir John Cheke’s Elegy on the Earl of Surrey

Abstract Sir John Cheke’s poem ‘What natures worke is this’ constitutes the earliest extant elegy to the early Tudor poet and courtier Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. If the renaissance elegy typically sought to praise or blame its subject, Surrey posed a peculiar problem: executed as a traitor and enemy to the Edwardian succession, Surrey was fast becoming revered as the greatest English poet since Chaucer. Unable to reconcile these two positions in the single figure of Surrey, Cheke’s poem produces a fragmented image of its subject, an image foregrounded by the figurative dismemberment of Surrey through anatomical blazons. Yet, Cheke’s poem itself becomes fragmented in this process. From the grammar and versification, to the elegist’s self-representation, the poem succumbs to the loss of structural integrity attributed to its subject. This essay understands this fragmentation as a reflection of Cheke’s own fractured relationship to his subject. Cheke’s divided loyalties of literary admiration and political animosity necessitated the construction of a divided and incomprehensible elegiac subject. Ultimately, the process of remembering Surrey becomes one of re-membering him: creating a version of Surrey from his fragmented remains.