Counter-Reformation, marriage, classical, funerary inscriptions, eulogies, Atropos, fate, Penelope, Book of Common Prayer

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excise the anti-Catholic matter from the poem, but he nonetheless appropriates the remaining four stanzas for a nifty bit of resistance to the Counter-Reformation. By using Gray’s poem as a foil to an answer that attributes Gray’s misfortune to his mismanagement of the marriage, he is making available for the reader a light-hearted sermon on marital responsibility in what may well be a mild gesture of defiance against the erasure of such counsel from church services when Mary abandoned the 1552 Book of Common Prayer.

The opening lines of the response (‘An Aunswere’, no. 256) also betray consciousness of the themes of marriage eulogies in classical funerary inscriptions, which not only lauded wives’ modesty (pudici) and cheerful acceptance of domiciled life (domiseda), but also often celebrated their productivity at making wool (lanifica). ³²⁰ Just as the modest Renaissance gentlewoman was supposed to occupy her time with embroidery, her Roman counterpart produced wool. The incredulous lines, “If that thy wicked wife had spon the thred/ And were the weauer of thy wo”, introduce this theme of female virtue and combine it ambiguously with an allusive comparison between Gray’s wife and the Fate, or Weird Sister, Atropos, whose job it was to cut the threads that ended men’s lives. ³²¹ A further allusion to Penelope bridges the gap between these two antithetical models of behaviour, and is suggestive of the poet’s ambivalence towards the moral condition of Gray’s wife. Promising her suitors that she would be receptive to their courtship when her weaving was complete, Penelope worked at it during the day, and unpicked it again at night. In this intertextual reworking of the story the wife represents both the virtuous wife who weaves and the dreaded Fate who kills, thereby planting in the readers’ mind some incredulity

³²⁰ Sandys (1927), pp.64-5. See also Richmond Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (Urbana: Illinois UP, 1942), p.297.
³²¹ Compare the following excerpt from a translation of a Spartan funerary inscription: “Since Moira* so spun his thread that he must leave life”, Lattimore (1942), p.317. See also, pp.159-60.

*Fate.

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