John Weever - Works

Works

In 1600 Weever published Faunus and Melliflora, which begins as an erotic poem in the style of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and after a thousand lines in this vein abruptly veers toward satire, with a description of the mythological origins of the form and translations of satires by classical authors. It concludes with references to contemporary satirists Joseph Hall and 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 Everard Guilpin, his kinsman John Marston and Ben Jonson. It has been convincingly argued that Weever was the author of this pamphlet, and that as a result he was attacked in his turn and lampooned onstage as the character Asinius Bubo in 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 ... Sir John Oldcastle may have been part of a backlash. In his preface Weever calls it the "first trew Oldcastle," perhaps on account of the fact that Shakespeare's character 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.

As early as his first publication in 1599 Weever had demonstrated an interest in funeral monuments. Developing this, he spent the first three decades of the seventeenth century collecting such inscriptions. He travelled throughout England and to parts of Scotland, France, the Low Countries and Italy. Back in England he made friends among the chief antiquaries of his time, including Sir Robert Cotton and the herald Augustine Vincent. The result of extensive travels in his own country appeared in Ancient Funeral Monuments (1631), now valuable on account of the later obliteration of the inscriptions. This folio volume has a portrait of Weever as its frontispiece, and gives his age as 55. The Society of Antiquaries also holds two notebooks in Weever's own hand which contain an early draft of Ancient Funeral Monuments, as well as other material not published in that work.

The Huth Library contains a unique copy of a thumb-book Agnus Dei (1606), containing a history of Christ. The Mirror of Martyrs has been reprinted for the Roxburghe Club (1872).