John Weever

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John Weever in 1631

John Weever (1576–1632) was an English

Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other poets of his day, and for his Ancient Funerall Monuments, the first full-length book to be dedicated to the topic of English church monuments and epitaphs
, which was published in 1631, the year before his death.

Life

Weever was a native of Preston, Lancashire. Little is known of his early life, and his parentage is not certain. He may be the son of the John Weever who in 1590 was one of thirteen followers of local landowner Thomas Langton put on trial for murder after a riot which took place at Lea Hall, Lancashire.

He was educated at

Shakespeare
. Another of Weever's tutors was Robert Pearson, whom in later life he mentions with gratitude as a "reverend, learned divine". It is possible that Weever considered a career in the church himself but after receiving his degree on 16 April 1598 he appears to have left Cambridge and travelled to London, where he immersed himself in the literary scene.

He was in

St. James, Clerkenwell
.

Works

In late 1599 Weever published Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut, and Newest Fashion, containing

commendatory verses
by some of Weever's Cambridge friends.

In 1600 he published Faunus and Melliflora, which begins as an erotic poem in the style of Shakespeare's

John Marston, and also to the Bishops' Ban of 1599, which ordered the calling in and destruction of satirical works by Thomas Nashe
and others.

In 1601 an anonymous pamphlet called The Whippinge of the Satyre was published, which attacks three figures referred to as the Epigrammatist, the Satirist and the Humorist. These three are taken to refer to the contemporary writers

Thomas Dekker
's Satiromastix, as Simplicius Faber in Marston's What You Will and as Shift in Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour. All these three characters are represented as being very small in stature and great lovers of tobacco, two characteristics which Weever himself admits to in his later works.

In 1601 Weever also published two more serious works of a religious tone, The Mirror of Martyrs and An Agnus Dei. The Mirror of Martyrs or The Life and Death of ...

Falstaff first appeared as "Sir John Oldcastle". Weever's work is influenced by John Bale's 1544 biography of Oldcastle, which presents him as a proto-Protestant martyr. In the fourth stanza of this long poem, in which Sir John is his own panegyrist, occurs a reminiscence of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar which serves to fix the date of the play. Weever's other work of this year, An Agnus Dei, is the life of Christ
told in verse form. It has little literary merit but went through several editions, perhaps because it was produced as a tiny book less than two inches square.

The Mirror of Martyrs was reprinted in 1872 for the Roxburghe Club.

Ancient Funerall Monuments

As early as his first publication in 1599 Weever had demonstrated an interest in tomb monuments. Developing this, he spent the first three decades of the seventeenth century collecting

folio
volume published in 1631.

The work included a lengthy introductory global overview of his subject, the "Discourse of Funerall Monuments"; and this was followed by a survey of over a thousand inscriptions in the four south-eastern dioceses of England: Canterbury, Rochester, London and Norwich. The book is particularly valuable on account of the subsequent loss of many of these inscriptions. However, Weever viewed the inscriptions primarily as literary survivals, and (unlike some of his contemporaries) took little interest in the genealogical evidence they provided, or in the heraldic elements of many monuments: Graham Parry comments, "[i]t is fair to say that he ignored half the value of a memorial."[2] Nor was he concerned with their sculptural or architectural features, and he made no drawings on his travels. The published volume contains just eighteen illustrative woodcuts, all of which appear to have been added only at the production stage, and to have been based on drawings supplied by antiquarian friends.

The Society of Antiquaries holds two notebooks in Weever's own hand (MSS 127 and 128) which contain a partial early draft of Ancient Funerall Monuments, as well as other material not included in the published volume.[3]

Death and commemoration

Weever died between mid-February and late March 1632, and was buried at

St James, Clerkenwell. He was commemorated by a marble tablet framed with a black border, and inscribed with a lengthy encomium in verse (afterwards published in the 1633 edition of John Stow's Survey of London). The monument was lost when the church was demolished for rebuilding in 1788, despite some ineffectual efforts by the Society of Antiquaries to preserve it.[4]

The engraved frontispiece to Ancient Funerall Monuments includes a portrait of Weever, giving his age as 55; and also the following self-penned doggerel summary of his life:

Lanchashire gave him breath,
And Cambridge education.
His studies are of Death.
Of Heaven his meditation.[5]

Personal life

Weever's wife's first name was Anne, but it is unclear from the surviving records whether she was Anne Edwards, who married a man named John Weaver in

St James Church, Clerkenwell, in 1614; Anne Panting, who married a John Weaver in the same church in 1617; or neither of these.[6] She may have been the Anne Weaver of Clerkenwell who drew up her will in 1647, and whose maiden name may have been Onion.[7]

References

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Weever, John". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 28 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

  1. ^ "Weever, John (WVR594J)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  2. ^ Parry 1995, p. 193.
  3. ISBN 0859915794
    .
  4. ^ Honigmann 1987, pp. 82–85.
  5. ^ Reproduced in Parry 1995, p. 191.
  6. ^ Kathmann 2004
  7. ^ Honigmann 1987, pp. 58–59, 81–82.

Further reading

External links
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