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The concluding chapter focuses on Marvell's satire ‘Tom May's Death’, the allegiance which has long puzzled scholars given its apparently royalist sentiment but date of composition after the ‘Horatian Ode’. It is argued that the poem is written in the cause of wit, rather than royalism or republicanism, and so appropriate for an audience composed of former members of the Stanley circle. May's betrayal is of the muses; Marvell fears the same charge may be levelled at him. The echoes of the poem in the 1650s verse of Lovelace and Alexander Brome, another ‘Cavalier’ poet involved with the Stanley circle, offer suggestions as to how ‘Tom May's Death’ was read by royalist contemporaries, and how they reacted to Marvell's own pro-Cromwellian verse.

Chapter Six is devoted to Thomas May’s engagements with Lucan of the late 1620s, with particular reference to his translation (published 1626 to 1627) and The Tragedy of Cleopatra (published 1639, but first performed in 1626). It begins by situating May’s works in relation to Ben Jonson’s literary circle, detailing his friendship with figures such as John Selden, John Vaughan or Edward Hyde (later Earl of Clarendon). It argues that May chiefly assimilated the demise of the Roman republic to the fears among some members of the English political order that Charles’s increasingly absolutist style would put an end to laws, liberties and Parliaments, but that he was divided about how to react to these developments.

Chapter Seven closes the study by examining the responses of three writers – Samuel Daniel, Thomas May and Abraham Cowley – to the question of Lucan’s ending. It shows that each were concerned as much with the theme of endlessness raised within Lucan’s text, as with the notoriously unfinished state of his narrative. Moving from Daniel’s own unfinished Lucanian text, The Civil Wars, to May’s Continuation of 1630 and later Supplementum of 1640 and then Cowley’s The Civil War (early 1640s), another unfinished work, I argue that a shared concern about how to end their narratives reflected anxieties about the shape and indeed design of history, especially English history, and a recognition of the inadequacy or mendaciousness of the formal structures of literary narrative.

This chapter discusses how the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics, particularly in early sixteenth-century Italy, revived ancient concerns over Lucan’s generic status, and shows how the friction between the categories of ‘poetry’ and ‘history’ - however confusingly defined and understood - continued to affect English responses to the Bellum Ciuile until well into mid-seventeenth century England. Among other engagements it examines in detail the role of the poetry-history debate over Lucan in relation to Samuel Daniel’s complex and unfinished verse history The Civil Wars (ca. 1595 – 1609), Thomas Farnaby’s commentary on Lucan of 1618, and Thomas May’s responses to Lucan of the late 1620s.