Posthumous Love review: corpse brides and grave desires

England is a weird nation, its literature a strange body of material that twists and turns in unexpected directions. The Renaissance arrived very late, well after radical transformations had changed the literature of France and Italy. When it reached England, in the early 16th century, new cultural forms became inextricably bound up with the even more radical changes wrought by the Reformation in the wake of Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon.

Ramie Targoff, who has written about John Donne and the Book of Common Prayer, turns her attention to England's idiosyncratic representation of the afterlife in this period. Targoff is specifically interested in posthumous love, how devoted couples imagined their lives beyond death, and whether they thought they might carry on together as before beyond the grave.

Her conclusions are startling, bracing and moving. The great Italian poets Dante and Petrarch were led on to higher revelations through their inspired relationships with two dead young women (Beatrice and Laura). Their English counterparts had a far bleaker understanding of the possibilities of conjugal love after death.

The change began with Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42), a Protestant poet and courtier. Wyatt translated and transformed many of Petrarch’s poems, producing the first sonnets in English, poems that had a major influence on subsequent writers and the course of national literature.

Wyatt may or may not have been the lover of Anne Boleyn, but his poems mutate Petrarch’s visions of the heavens into works that reflect on the frenzied, sexually competitive atmosphere of Henry’s court. While Petrarch has a beautiful deer leading him towards an isolated vision of the divine, Wyatt has a lady who warns him and her other numerous suitors off because she belongs to a more powerful man.

The great Irish critic CS Lewis made little attempt to conceal his dislike of Wyatt. "Poor Wyatt seems to be always in love with women he dislikes," he wrote in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954). "My sympathy deserts my own sex: I feel how very disagreeable it must be for a woman to have a lover like Wyatt."

Heaven sent?

Targoff is equally sharp and funny about Wyatt, whose marriage to Elizabeth Brooke was a well-publicised disaster. (Wyatt advised his son that constant arguing was not a recipe for happiness.) This suggests that Wyatt’s circumstances may have persuaded him that “eternity spent with his beloved” might not be a slice of heaven.

The serious point is that Wyatt, under the influence of a Protestant tradition that took seriously the belief that in the afterlife everyone worshipped Christ, realised that couples would not be reunited after death and so had to make the most of this life. In England, a country with an unusually high rate of remarriage, poets concentrated on the here and now to celebrate conjugal life.

Part of the trauma felt by devoted husbands was that they were forever separated from their dead beloveds. Bishop Henry King, a widower for 45 years, gained rather more from his union than Wyatt. The Exequy, a lament for his late wife, is, Targoff says, moving because it concentrates on the deceased's body in the full recognition that such conjugal joys will never return.

King describes counting down the hours to his death "with but half a Heart", even though he knows that the union of souls will not reunite him with Anne. His poem is a world away from that of Andrew Marvell's horny narrator in To His Coy Mistress, but they both spring from the same source. Marvell's work of carefully orchestrated seduction "is simultaneously the logical culmination and the deepest critique of the love poetry written in English over the course of the previous century", rejecting the "immortality of poetic verse" and "even the possibility of sharing a single tomb".

Posthumous Love is an often moving and tender book that treads a delicate balance between sentiment and deft literary analysis. Still, I was not always persuaded by its readings, notably that of Romeo and Juliet, which Targoff sees pointing towards secularism in its concentration on the urgent, immediate experience of the doomed lovers.

It surprised me rather less that Shakespeare saw fit not to discuss the soul, given the possibly catastrophic consequences for straying into controversial religious territory on the early modern stage.

What I like about the book is that it makes love poetry written in times of traumatic change, under the threat of separation and death, seem uncanny and unsettling, which is surely right.

Andrew Hadfield is professor of English at the University of Sussex and author of Edmund Spenser: A Life