page_title: Epithalamium
section_title: Development as a literary form
hierarchical_section_title: Epithalamium / Development as a literary form
caption_attribution_description: Polski: Strona tytułowa In Nuptias illustrium Joan. de Zamoscio, R. P. cancellarii et exercituum praefecti, ac Griseldis Bathorrheae Christophori Transilvaniae princips et serenis. Stephani Poloniae regis fratris, filiae, epithalamion Jana Kochanowskiego
context_page_description: An epithalamium is a poem written specifically for the bride on the way to her marital chamber. This form continued in popularity through the history of the classical world; the Roman poet Catullus wrote a famous epithalamium, which was translated from or at least inspired by a now-lost work of Sappho. According to Origen, the Song of Songs might be an epithalamium on the marriage of Solomon with Pharaoh's daughter.
context_section_description: In the hands of the poets the epithalamium was developed into a special literary form, and received considerable cultivation. Sappho, Anacreon, Stesichorus and Pindar are all regarded as masters of the species, but the finest example preserved in Greek literature is the 18th Idyll of Theocritus, which celebrates the marriage of Menelaus and Helen. In Latin, the epithalamium, imitated from Fescennine Greek models, was a base form of literature, when Catullus redeemed it and gave it dignity by modelling his Marriage of Thetis and Peleus on a lost ode of Sappho.
  In later times Statius, Ausonius, Sidonius Apollinaris and Claudian are the authors of the best-known epithalamia in classical Latin; and they have been imitated by Julius Caesar Scaliger, Jacopo Sannazaro, and a whole host of modern Latin poets, with whom, indeed, the form was at one time in great favor.
  In the Italian Renaissance, the per nozze (meaning 'for a wedding'; sometimes simply nozze; also nuptialia) emerged as a form of epithalamium, taking the form of a pamphlet, privately printed in small numbers on the occasion of a wedding. The tradition had declined by the 20th century. Collections of per nozze can be found in the London Library, the Biblioteca Teresiana, the Capretta collection at the National Central Library in Florence, the Casella collection at the State Library of Berlin, and the Mazzoni collection at Duke University.
  The names of Ronsard, Malherbe and Scarron are especially associated with the genre in French literature, and Marino and Metastasio in Italian. Perhaps no poem of this class has been more universally admired than the pastoral Epithalamion of Edmund Spenser (1595), though he also has important rivals—Ben Jonson, Donne and Francis Quarles. Ben Jonson's friend, Sir John Suckling, is known for his epithalamium "A Ballad Upon a Wedding." In his ballad, Suckling playfully demystifies the usual celebration of marriage by detailing comic rustic parallels and identifying sex as the great leveler.
  At the close of In Memoriam A.H.H., Tennyson has appended a poem, on the nuptials of his sister, which is strictly an epithalamium.
  E. E. Cummings also returns to the form in his poem Epithalamion, which appears in his 1923 book Tulips and Chimneys. E.E.Cummings' Epithalamion consists of three seven octave parts, and includes numerous references to ancient Greece.
  The term is occasionally used beyond poetry, for example to describe Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream.
caption: Titlepage of In Nuptias illustrium Joan. de Zamoscio, by Jan Kochanowski, Cracow, 1583
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