An edition of the Fugitive Poetry by Mildmay Fane, second Earl of Westmorland : Manuscript fMS Eng 645
Abstract
Mildmay Fane, Second Earl of Westmorland (1601-1666), is viewed as a minor seventeenth-century English poet and dramatist. His corpus of works, predominantly a collection of verses, and also seven extant dramas, is mostly in manuscript and in his hand. Fane's most recognized collection of published poems, Otia Sacra (1648), is traditionally accepted as Cavalier verse. His FUGITIVE POETRY manuscript, its content a randomly arranged compendium of verses composed between 1637 and 1660, however, remains largely unrecognized except for occasional references to isolated pieces from its content in modern critical studies. Fane was of combined lineage from the English nobility and the landed gentry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also of a staunch Puritan background from his maternal and paternal families. Although modern literary and historical references to Fane characterize him as a royalist committed to the noble tradition and to the Stuart throne, the content of FUGITIVE POETRY more than suggests his probable associations with gentry, Puritan gentry, and parliamentarians, as well. Further, Fane's personal religious and political convictions in numerous verses imply Calvinist moral governance with a strong association of church and state. They demonstrate more a loyalty to morally responsible monarchal government than to Stuart royalism; a realm to be governed by crown and parliament as a unified body politic exercising those Puritan moral ideals of Humility and Temperance in response to God's Law of the First Commandment, and exampled by the Old and New Testaments.
Description
Vita.Collections
Citation
Paris, Christopher (1994). An edition of the Fugitive Poetry by Mildmay Fane, second Earl of Westmorland : Manuscript fMS Eng 645. Texas A&M University. Texas A&M University. Libraries. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /DISSERTATIONS -1554658.