Aesthetics of contingency: Writing, politics, and culture in England, 1639–89 9781526127037

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Aesthetics of contingency

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Aesthetics of contingency Writing, politics, and culture in England, 1639–​89 M AT T H E W C. AU G U ST I N E

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Matthew C. Augustine 2018 The right of Matthew C. Augustine to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 0076 4 hardback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Katie

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Contents

Acknowledgements

page viii

A note on texts

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List of abbreviations

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Introduction: remapping early modern literature

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1 ‘He saw a greater Sun appear’: waiting for the apocalypse in Milton’s Poems 1645

2 ‘We goe to heaven against each others wills’: revising Religio Medici in the English Revolution

3 ‘But Iconoclastes drawn in little’: making and unmaking a Whig Marvell

4 ‘It had an odde promiscuous tone’: Lord Rochester and Restoration modernity

5 ‘Transprosing and Transversing’: religion, revolution,

38 79 116 157

and the end of history in Dryden’s late works

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Coda

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Select bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgements

The writing of books, especially first books, is no easy business; so it is both a pleasure and a relief to acknowledge those people and institutions who have sustained the writing of this one. Key periods of teaching release and research support were provided by the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St Louis; by the School of English at the University of St Andrews; and by the Folger Institute in Washington, DC. I am particularly grateful to Kathleen Lynch at the Folger for facilitating my short-​term fellowship there at a crucial late stage. Parts of the book were previously published in scholarly journals, and I would like to thank the editors of those journals for permission to rework that material. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published as ‘The chameleon or the sponge? Marvell, Milton, and the politics of literary history’, Studies in Philology, 111:1 (2014), pp. 132–​62. Part of Chapter 5 was published as ‘Dryden’s “mysterious writ” and the empire of signs’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 74:1 (2011), pp. 1–​22 (© 2011 by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, all rights reserved). There is also some incidental overlap with my essays ‘Borders and transitions in Marvell’s poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 2011), edited by Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker, and ‘Trading places: Lord Rochester, the laureate, and the making of literary reputation’, in Lord Rochester in the Restoration World (Cambridge, 2015), edited by Augustine and Zwicker. I became an early modernist on account of the remarkable group of people I met as a graduate student in St Louis. This book bears the mark of seminars, workshops, and many conversations there with Lara Bovilsky, Joe Loewenstein, Bill McKelvy, Wolfram Schmidgen, and Steve Zwicker, in English; with Daniel Bornstein and Derek Hirst, in History; with Rob Henke, in Comparative Literature; with Bill Wallace, in Art History; and with Jennifer Rust and Jonathan Sawday, down the road at Saint Louis University. Their lessons endure: in particular, the dialogue I have enjoyed

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with Derek and above all with Steve, on and off the page, continues to provide provocation and insight –​and indeed pleasure –​well in excess of the debts recorded in my footnotes. In St Louis I had an equally indispensable education from those friends who helped me imagine myself within the republic letters, and who schooled me in the principle of mutual necessity between learning and fellowship: Brandon Combs, Joe Conway, Tarah Demant, Matt Fluharty, Jon Graas, Olivia Harman, Josh Hoeynck, Peter Monahan, Matt Nicholas, Dina Rudofsky (Hoeynck), Ryan Shirey, Matthew Shipe, Carter Smith, Natalie Spar, Courtney Weiss (Smith), and James Williams. Katie Muth has the distinction of appearing everywhere in these acknowledgements; before she was my partner and co-​parent, she was also my best critic and closest friend. In St Andrews, I have often needed the advice of Alex Davis and Tom Jones; my senior colleagues Lorna Hutson, now the Merton Professor at Oxford, and Neil Rhodes, have spurred my work through their example and their encouragement. Much is owed as well to the sociability of Christina Alt, Clare Gill, Ben Hewitt, Philip Parry, Tony Prave, Anindya Raychaudhuri, and last but not least, Lorna Burns. The Andrew Marvell Society has provided many sustaining bonds. For various kindnesses over the years, I am grateful to Martin Dzelzainis, Alex Garganigo, Tim Raylor, Nigel Smith, and Nicholas von Maltzahn, among others. I would like to thank as well those friends and colleagues –​and in particular the Press’s two anonymous readers –​who valuably commented on portions of the manuscript: its remaining faults are, alas, my own. Closer to home, my parents, Bob and Kathy, have been the foundation of everything. My brothers Mark and David provide the salt and the leavener. But it is to Katie and Julian that this book owes the most. Without Katie, this book could not have been written: I’ve learned more from her than she will ever know. Our shining boy has every day lightened the work of writing, among much else. For him I will write another book; this one is for Katie.

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A note on texts

In quoting from my principle authors, I have used the following standard editions unless otherwise noted. When citing original sources, I have silently modernised long ‘s’ and other special characters; spelling and punctuation is otherwise unchanged. Browne  J.-​J. Denonain (ed.), Religio Medici: Edited from the Manuscript Copies and the Early Editions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). Dryden  (Works) E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg (gen. eds), The Works of John Dryden (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956–​2000). (Letters) C. E. Ward (ed.), The Letters of John Dryden, with Letters Addressed to Him (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1942). Marvell (Poetry) N. Smith (ed.), The Poetry of Andrew Marvell (Harlow: Longman, rev. edn 2007). (Prose) A. Patterson, M. Dzelzainis, N. H. Keeble, and N. von Maltzahn (eds), The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). (Letters) H. M. Margoliouth, with P. Legouis and E. E. Duncan-​Jones (eds), The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, 3rd edn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). Milton  (Shorter poetry) E. Haan and B. K. Lewalski (eds), The Complete Works of John Milton, Vol. 3: The Shorter Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). (Paradise Lost) R. Flanagan (ed.), The Riverside Milton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). (Paradise Regained) L. L. Knoppers (ed.), The Complete Works of John Milton, Vol. 2: The 1671 Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). (Prose) D. M. Wolfe (gen. ed.), Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–​82). Rochester  (Works) H. Love (ed.), The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). (Letters) J. Treglown (ed.), The Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).

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List of abbreviations

ELH ELR HJ HLQ JEGP JMH MLR MP MQ ODNB OED PBA PBSA PMLA P&P RES SEL SP TLS

English Literary History English Literary Renaissance Historical Journal Huntington Library Quarterly Journal of English and Germanic Philology Journal of Modern History Modern Language Review Modern Philology Milton Quarterly Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford English Dictionary Proceedings of the British Academy Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Publications of the Modern Language Association Past & Present Review of English Studies Studies in English Literature 1500–​1900 Studies in Philology Times Literary Supplement

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Introduction: remapping early modern literature This book is about the relation between political instability and imaginative writing in seventeenth-​century England. It centres on the fifty years between the armed invasion of England by Scots forces in 1639 and by the Dutch in 1688–​89, clashes that may be seen as tipping points in the history of what contemporaries referred to as ‘England’s troubles’.1 More broadly, these decades are situated in the context of a ‘long’ seventeenth century, characterised by a fluid set of continuities and discontinuities between the earlier and later Stuart eras, which is to say, between the Renaissance and what we have come to think of as ‘modernity’. My study thus dispenses with the notion of 1660 as historical watershed, in consequence of which the Stuart Restoration and its cultural regimes have been co-​opted, under the pressure of teleology, as the opening act of a ‘long eighteenth century’. A further aim of the book is to loosen the grip of adversary politics on the study of seventeenth-​century writing. The genealogy of this literature’s adversarial image is distinguished indeed: it was none other than John Dryden who observed, addressing readers of Absalom and Achitophel (1681), that ‘he who draws his Pen for one Party, must expect to make Enemies of the other. For Wit and Fool, are Consequents of Whig and Tory: And every man is a Knave or an Ass to the contrary side’ (Works, 2:3). What Dryden’s own career amply illustrates, however, is how labile were the terms of personal identity and allegiance in the face of unstable cultural and political orders. Dryden’s brief service to Oliver Cromwell and the Protectoral government was no unfit apprenticeship, as it turned out, for the role of Stuart laureate; and we do well to remember that only five years before Dryden

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sang hosanna to James II and the Roman faith in The Hind and the Panther (1687), he obligingly celebrated the ‘Supernatural Light’ gracing Charles II’s church. Notwithstanding the self-​contradiction and provisionality patent in such shape-​shifting –​and Dryden was hardly singular in this regard, as the examples of that ‘chameleon’ Andrew Marvell, that ‘serial turncoat’ Marchamont Nedham, or the suave opportunist Edmund Waller readily suggest –​accounts of seventeenth-​century literature continue to be hung (one might say hung up) on oppositional frameworks.2 It is true that whereas our histories once baldly juxtaposed ‘Puritan and Cavalier’, we now possess more modulated studies, for instance, of ‘the writing of the English republic’ and ‘the writing of royalism’.3 Drawing their evidence from broadsides, newsbooks, diaries, and correspondence as well as from more traditional literary sources, such projects clearly entail a radically revised notion of ‘literature’ than was current a generation or two ago. We may wonder though how far they entail a re-​conceived notion of politics or partisanship, to say nothing of literary period. Aesthetics of Contingency thus argues the need for a greater responsiveness to what Lori Anne Ferrell terms ‘seventeenth-​ century England’s culture of “inexactness” ’, in other words, to accident, to unevenness, to contradiction and uncertainty.4 I am also concerned with the relation between aesthetic production and the material circumstances of writing and publishing, of reading and reception. Movement between and across borders is at the centre of my story: eschewing umbrella terms and convenient binaries, this study is drawn instead to the vexed interstices of political formations, spiritual identities, and literary networks. In pursuing its argument, the book moves through a series of case studies, largely focused on major writers of the period: from John Milton and Thomas Browne, who saw their writings of the 1620s and 1630s published amidst the turmoil of civil war; to Andrew Marvell, Lord Rochester, and John Dryden, whose works and careers were variously in dialogue with one another –​and with Milton –​ from the late 1640s down to the turn of the century. The advantage of this approach is that it permits a robust dialectic between sustained attention to literary form on the one hand and to historical and material context on the other. Thus close reading puts pressure on unduly determinist contextual frameworks, while the effort of

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contextualising anew illuminates previously ignored or underexplored aspects of writing and reception. Because I am interested in how the history of seventeenth-​century literature has been written, that is, in questions of literary historiography that date to the seventeenth century itself, this constellation of writers also has the benefit of allowing me to unravel that history over the longue durée. As a result, however, voices which have more recently, and rightly, garnered the attention of early modern scholars are not represented here to the extent they deserve. To be sure, the aesthetics of contingency comprise aspects of gender, of race, and of geography –​both British and trans-​Atlantic –​ which the present study perforce can only glance at: the best success the book can hope for is to set a course for future work that will encompass even more of the century’s heterogeneous richness. My point of departure in these pages is the revolution that has taken place in seventeenth-​century historiography over the last several decades. ‘Revisionism’, as it came to be called, took shape in the early 1970s as ‘a series of negative propositions’ aimed at prevailing assumptions about the nature and causes of the English civil war.5 Perhaps chief among these was the supposition that there were two sides to every division and that change necessarily took place through the clash of opposites.6 In demolishing the familiar polarities of Whig and Marxist historiography, Revisionists suggested a jarringly new conception of the seventeenth century. Rather than assuming the inevitability of conflict between king and Parliament, the new generation of historians ‘stressed the consensual rather than conflictual nature of early modern society, pointing to the contingent rather than determined nature of serial events’.7 The clash of principles and ideals unleashed in the wake of 1642, moreover, could no longer be plotted along the twin axes of conservatives and radicals, as Revisionists showed that political actors both individual and collective behaved in ways far more unpredictable than previously assumed. In the years since its initial assault on traditional historiography, the Revisionist programme has been widely extended and critiqued. If the ‘post-​Revisionist’ landscape –​itself a fluid and contested construct8 –​does not quite amount to the whitewashing of the old canvas anticipated by Kevin Sharpe in 1978, nevertheless much that we once thought we knew about the English past has been called into doubt and considered anew.9 Master narratives of constitutional conflict and class struggle have shattered into a ‘multiplicity of such narratives, the

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relations between which are held to be contingent and not ordered in some pre-​ordained way’, which amounts to nothing less than a full-​ scale reimagining of early modern political culture, and of the panoply of acts, affects, and discourses that culture comprised.10 Nor is it merely the civil war decades that have come in for re-​examination, as historians have begun to recognise that any ‘adequate account’ of what the causes of the English civil war caused, ‘of where they went or led, must … encompass the long seventeenth century’. Just where the goalposts of this ‘long’ seventeenth century are to be set depends on the specific changes over time we wish to measure: from Agincourt to Blenheim, as the editorial team of Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake suggests, if we are interested in the ‘functional breakdown of Stuart government’ and the ‘military revolution’; from Lollardy to Toleration, or from the Reformation to the Convocation Controversy, if we mean to ‘trace the impact of religious pluralism and confessional conflict on a religio-​political culture obsessed with the need for unity and consensus’.11 Post-​ Revisionist historiography thus challenges students of the early modern period to view the seventeenth century no longer in terms of ineluctable, dialectical struggle, but rather as an interlocking series of complex, uneven, and open-​ended historical processes. This is not to forget that the Restoration was brought about in part by Charles’s proclamation from Breda of indemnity and oblivion ‘for all our subjects, how faulty soever’, or celebrated by its poets and propagandists as a new age, a new order.12 Such histories of course served a purpose –​to erase the past and present a clean slate, to assuage the anxiety and insecurity latent in memories of the New Model Army or the king’s bleeding head. As post-​Freudian subjects, it is easy enough to argue that such systematic efforts to shape public memory only confirm the past’s uncomfortable endurance. But we hardly need Freud to understand this. Marvell seems to have grasped perfectly well the return of the repressed in imagining Charles II haunted by the ghosts ‘Of grandsire Harry and of Charles his sire’: Harry sits down, and in his open side The grisly wound reveals of which he died, And ghastly Charles, turning his collar low, The purple thread about his neck does show. (The Last Instructions to a Painter, lines 870–​4)

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To take a different kind of example, we might recall that –​with the public theatres closed by order of Parliament throughout the civil wars and Interregnum –​Restoration theatre impresarios had to rely initially on pre-​war material to stage productions. Indeed, two seasons in, records still show ‘only 4 new plays being performed, as opposed to 54 written before the Interregnum’.13 From the 1667–​68 season, according to Michael Dobson, the ratio of premieres and productions of post-​Restoration drama relative to revivals of pre-​war plays stabilises at roughly one to one. It is perhaps little wonder then that Restoration subjects tended to greet crisis and calamity with cries of ‘Forty-​One is come again’: for theatre-​goers at least, the experience of déjà vu was a deeply familiar one. Such circumstances have prompted Jonathan Scott to comment, ‘It appears to be only historians who remain dramatically separated by the interregnum; and only this can account for the remarkable persistence in Restoration histories of claims to uniqueness for events, structures, and issues which are almost xerox copies of events, structures, and issues of the early Stuart period’.14 In the two decades since Scott was writing, however, a raft of new historical work on the Restoration, and more broadly on the Stuart century, has done much to bridge the previously stark historiographical borders of 1642, 1660, and 1688. Indeed, at the farthest edge of Revisionism, J. C. D. Clark has argued for the persistence of an ‘ancien regime’ in England all the way up to the Reform Act of 1832.15 The historiographical boundaries of Renaissance literature, and indeed of English studies as a whole, by contrast, look much as they did a century or more ago. As Ted Underwood’s recent book underscores: Periodization has endured in a discipline where almost nothing does, and has endured not just in broad outline but in detail … Of course, the content of [English] courses was transformed whenever one methodology gave way to another. Different theoretical schools have defined the purpose of literary study in fundamentally different ways. But this is just what seems remarkable: the persistence of an organizing grid that is able to survive repeated, sweeping transformations of its content.16

This Introduction thus has several connected aims. First, I survey the writing of English cultural and political history from

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the Victorians down to the 1960s. My concern here is to map the overlapping and mutually reinforcing disciplinary orthodoxies that long combined to produce an image of the seventeenth century saturated by high-​definition contrasts: between the earlier and later Stuart periods, but also between factions and ideologies. I then consider more recent manifestations of historicist criticism within the field of Renaissance studies, asking why such criticism should have done so little to alter the received literary historical narrative –​especially at a time when political historiography was being transformed by energies deeply suspicious of tradition. I am especially interested here in the Revisionist challenge to modernisation motifs, to teleological narrative, and, in the words of Sharpe and Lake, ‘what one might term a principle-​centred account of the politics of the period, in which political ideas and groupings fell more or less tidily into various bi-​polar categories’.17 Accordingly, I bring the Introduction to a close by suggesting how the insights of Revisionism might reorient us to the politics and poetics of seventeenth-​century literature, and so allow us to write the history of that literature anew. English politics and culture: from Macaulay to Eliot The natural starting point for a discussion of seventeenth-​century historiography is surely Lord Macaulay, Whig politician, historian, and litterateur, and common ancestor of modern English political and cultural history. Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James II (1849–​61), in the words of Hugh Trevor-​Roper, ‘won an instant and seemingly effortless success’, and so became the standard history of England for the nineteenth century.18 What is more, it installed a triumphalist faith in progress and constitutionalism –​ what Herbert Butterfield identified as ‘the Whig interpretation of history’19 –​at the centre of English historical writing for at least a century to come. Macaulay’s judgements of cultural phenomena were equally shaped by his Whig stance, and received and repeated with equal conviction. Indeed, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Macaulay’s picture of seventeenth-​ century literature and culture persisted more or less intact until the 1960s, and continues to influence our thinking. Macaulay hails 1660 as a new dawn, bringing with it ‘the restoration of the old constitution’, and emancipating ‘thousands of minds

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from a yoke which had become insupportable’.20 The ‘revenge’ of wit upon Puritan austerity and censoriousness, however, Macaulay finds to have been intolerably extreme, giving rise to a polite culture he deems ‘profoundly immoral’: The hostility excited by a grotesque caricature of virtue did not spare virtue herself. Whatever the canting Roundhead had regarded with reverence was insulted. Whatever he had proscribed was favoured. Because he had been scrupulous about trifles, all scruples were treated with derision. Because he had covered his failings with the mask of devotion, men were encouraged to obtrude with Cynic impudence all their most scandalous vices on the public eye. Because he had punished illicit love with barbarous severity, virgin purity and conjugal fidelity were made a jest. To that sanctimonious jargon which was his Shibboleth, was opposed another jargon not less absurd and much more odious. As he never opened his mouth except in scriptural phrase, the new breed of wits and fine gentlemen never opened their mouths without uttering ribaldry of which a porter would now be ashamed, and without calling on their Maker to curse them, sink them, confound them, blast them, and damn them.21

Against the heat and viciousness of poetry and the theatre, Macaulay counterposes the cool element of prose, and the rise of the ‘new philosophy’, destined, under the auspices of the Royal Society, ‘to be a chief agent in a long series of glorious and salutary reforms’.22 With the benefit of Macaulay’s early Edinburgh Review essay on Milton (1825), we can view this set of transactions between the arts and sciences as the inevitable cost of progress: ‘We think’, Macaulay posits, ‘that as civilisation advances, poetry almost necessarily declines’, for language, ‘the machine of the poet, is best fitted for him in its rudest state’. The ‘most wonderful and splendid proof of ’ Milton’s genius is thus, in a pleasing paradox, that he produced his great poem ‘in a civilised age’.23 These, then, are the signs of Victorian and early twentieth-​century historiography: an insistence on 1660 as cultural turning point; a clash of opposites as the mechanism of change; the reprobation of Cavalier license and licentiousness; and the embrace of those elements of the Restoration implicated in the rise of science, rationality, and, broadly speaking, modernity. Thus for Edmund Gosse, the Restoration stands out for the singular sharpness of its division of one age from another: ‘when Monk went down to Dover to welcome the agitated and astonished Charles’,

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we read in his Short History of Modern English Literature (1897), ‘it was not monarchy only that he received into England, but a fresh era in literature and the arts’.24 W. V. Moody and R. M. Lovett’s popular textbook A History of English Literature (1902) tells much the same story. For them, too, ‘The date of 1660 is one of the most significant in English literature, as it is in the history of English politics’. Like Macaulay, they see Restoration literature and culture as a direct reaction –​indeed overreaction –​to what they call the Puritans’ ‘absorption in otherworldliness’.25 R. H. Fletcher’s 1916 A History of English Literature, to take one last example, displays with especial ferocity Macaulay’s moral repugnance for the manners of the restored court, calling the reign of Charles II ‘in almost all respects the most disgraceful period of English history and life’.26 Fletcher reads Restoration literature accordingly, as a direct flight not only from ‘the moral severity of the … Puritan regime’, but indeed from any ‘imaginative treatment of the spiritual life’.27 In this desert of psychological inwardness and cultural elevation, ‘the rationalistic and practical spirit showed itself in the enthroning above everything else of the principles of utility and common sense in substance and straightforward directness in style’.28 What goes missing in this curiously antagonistic survey of the later Stuart period is the compensatory discovery, found in otherwise similar accounts, of signs of modern ‘progress’. Rather, the English Renaissance is, to Fletcher’s mind, something like a paradise lost, and modernity –​notwithstanding the railroad or the Victorian sonnet –​merely the condition of life after the fall. If this sounds reminiscent of the nostalgia for an ‘organic society’ found in the likes of T. S. Eliot and his disciple F. R. Leavis, it is no coincidence. In 1956 the eminent literary historian Rene Wellek called Eliot ‘by far the most important critic of the twentieth century in the English-​speaking world’,29 and it is surely Eliot’s theory of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, more than anything else, that has determined the shape of seventeenth-​century literary history –​indeed of English literary history tout court –​in the modern era. At the same time, as Eliot’s commentators have observed, one of Eliot’s major talents was the ability to give received prejudices an oracular turn, to infuse the commonplace with an aura of vatic insight.30 Indeed, Christopher Benfey, reviewing a volume of Eliot’s letters, teases out a suggestive parallel between a stray remark of Eliot’s about Donne and Eliot’s

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own habit of repurposing what lay near to hand: ‘It seemed as if, at that time, the world was filled with broken fragments of systems’, writes Eliot, ‘and that a man like Donne merely picked up, like a magpie, various shining fragments of ideas as they struck his eye, and stuck them about here and there in his verse’.31 So while it may be the case, as Frank Kermode reflected, that the post-​Eliot generation grew up ‘believing in a pattern, applicable not only to poetry but to intellectual history, formed and codified by the expression “dissociation of sensibility” ’, it is nonetheless possible to see Eliot’s version of literary history as in effect a polemical reinscription of Victorian historiography: it is Whig history produced in the grip of modernist disenchantment.32 The dissociation of sensibility, Eliot wrote, was ‘something which happened to the mind of England’.33 While Eliot is guardedly coy, in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), about the historical forces precipitating this traumatic cleavage of thought and feeling in English poetry, he would later be brought to admit ‘that it had something to do with the Civil War’, or if it were ‘unwise to say it was caused by the Civil War’, then ‘it is a consequence of the same causes which brought about the Civil War’.34 By looking to Eliot’s social and political writings, however, we can discover the name of that rough beast slouching to be born in seventeenth-​century England: it is Liberalism, the religion of ‘progress’, whose slogans of constitutionalism, economic freedom, and toleration are deflated in The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) into a formula for ‘inevitable doom’.35 ‘We have been accustomed to regard “progress” as always integral’, Eliot writes, ‘and have yet to learn that it is only by an effort and a discipline, greater than society has yet seen the need of imposing upon itself, that material knowledge and power is gained without loss of spiritual knowledge and power’.36 Such thinking goes some way toward contextualising Eliot’s wider conservatism –​‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-​catholic in religion’ –​as well as the particular idealisation of late medieval Christendom within his literary historical vision.37 Since, to Eliot’s way of thinking, ‘the culture of a people’ may be regarded ‘as an incarnation of its religion’,38 the supposed homogeneity of Christian society before the schisms of Reformation and Revolution thus provided a perfectly unified interpretive community, as that concept would later be theorised by Stanley Fish: ‘a structure of interests and understood goals, a structure

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whose categories so filled … individual consciousnesses that they were rendered as one, immediately investing phenomena with the significance they must have’.39 Eliot’s myth of cultural decline is a powerful one, all the more so in that it leaves very much intact the basic plot of the story Eliot means to dislodge, the myth of Whig-​Liberal progress: both draw a red line in the mid seventeenth century, and both centre on a dialectic between ‘tradition’ and ‘dissent’, though the passions and implicit teleologies are reversed. Even Macaulay, though, seems doubtful about the fate of literature along the advancing curve of civilisation, for, he supposed, the changing nature of ‘intellectual operations’ in an ‘enlightened society’ is a ‘change by which science wins and poetry loses’.40 In the 1920s and 1930s, Eliot’s views were disseminated in the extraordinarily influential work of Leavis and his Scrutiny circle.41 As Bernard Bergonzi has argued, Revaluation (1936), together with New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), ‘contain a firm redrawing of the map of English poetry along Eliotic lines’.42 Despite Eliot’s ambivalence toward what he called ‘the lemon-​squeezer school of criticism’, he was also seen as a prime mover among the New Critics, whose tastes defined the English curriculum for several generations of American college teachers and their students.43 By mid-​century, the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ had been subject to sufficient scrutiny that Kermode could pronounce it ‘absolutely useless historically’.44 But it had already done its work, insinuating itself into the central nervous system of the emergent literary profession. Indeed, while Eliot’s formula may have assumed the status of a fossil in the history of criticism, its logic is nonetheless pervasive, and may still be detected in the practice and organisation of literary scholarship at every level, from the Norton Anthology to the divisions of the Modern Language Association.45 From Renaissance to early modern The field of literary studies has of course hardly stood still since the middle of the last century. In North America, New Critical formalism eventually gave way to –​or found radical new expression in –​the ‘linguistic turn’ of the 1960s, or what Gabrielle Spiegel referred to as the ‘literary phase in the reception of French theory’.46 This emphasis on semiotics was partly deflected and partly absorbed by the succeeding

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‘historical turn’ of the early 1980s.47 Since then, historicism has remained the dominant paradigm within much of the literary profession, and certainly the Renaissance period, though as Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton note, ‘the term “historicism” is capacious, and many varieties of historicist work are now flourishing’.48 At the root of this ‘turn’, however, are American New Historicism and its British cognate Cultural Materialism, which sought to challenge both ‘the dominant historical scholarship of the past (in Renaissance Studies) and the formalist criticism that partially displaced this scholarship after World War Two’.49 Whereas formalist critics had, it was said, insisted that literary works of art were essentially ‘verbal icons’, transcendent of historical contingency, New Historicism, Louis Montrose explained, asserts ‘the cultural specificity, the social embedment, of all modes of writing’.50 And whereas old historicists had construed history as a monological and homogeneous ‘background’ against which literature could be securely read, New Historicism suspected such practices of misrecognising ‘political commonplaces’ as ‘a stable, coherent, and collective … world picture, a picture discovered to be lucidly reproduced in works of the age’.51 The New Historicism would seem to have been ideally positioned, in that case, to rethink the mythopoeic framework underlying Eliot’s literary history, insofar as we can regard Eliot as a formalist and an old historicist both. In fact, as Aranye Fradenburg argues, ‘it did nothing to disturb the conventional periodization of English history’.52 It is worth trying to understand why this is so, as it may help us take a step ‘beyond’ New Historicism, and toward a reconciliation with Revisionist hypotheses about the shape of the past and in particular the seventeenth century. To be sure, ‘redrawing the boundaries’ of English and American studies, to recall the title of a volume co-​ edited by Stephen Greenblatt, was absolutely thematic to the New Historicism’s disciplinary insurgency.53 Indeed, one of the key battles within the New Historicism’s sphere of origin, Renaissance studies, concerned the very nomenclature and conceptual parameters of that field: in place of a ‘Renaissance’ period, trailing the baggage of a hierarchical agenda and an overt triumphalism, New Historicists urged the use of ‘early modern’, a term whose entailments were arguably more democratic and more wary.54 And with respect to the textual boundaries that had for so long defined Renaissance scholarship, it must be said that the

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New Historicist intervention was a remarkable success. Together with other critical approaches concerned with relations of social power –​ notably feminism and post-​colonialism –​New Historicism helped achieve a lasting change of focus, opening criticism ‘to different kinds of voices and different kinds of texts from those traditionally considered the objects of literary analysis’.55 Reconfiguring the canon in this way drastically transformed what we think of as Renaissance or early modern literature and indeed Renaissance or early modern literary studies.56 But what did New Historicism do for the notion of when we think of as early modern literature? In what has been called the ‘locus classicus’ for use of the term ‘early modern’,57 Leah Marcus suggests that ‘Both Renaissance and early modern are chronologically shifty’.58 ‘While the boundaries of the Renaissance tend to push toward earlier and earlier chronological beginnings’, she writes, ‘early modern tends to creep up on the present’: In the field of history … [early modernity] ends with the close of the eighteenth century; modern history begins roughly with the start of the nineteenth. When adopted by literary scholars, however, the term early modern designates a time period that usually ends in the late seventeenth century or the first half of the eighteenth –​more than a century before the beginnings of literary modernism, in the twentieth century.59

Granted, Marcus is here making a broad, theoretical generalisation. But surely there is a discrepancy between the period Marcus claims ‘early modern’ designates and that defined by the frames of reference in signal works of New Historicism. Surveying the titles published by an informal nucleus of critics associated with the New Historicism and Cultural Materialism between c. 1980 and the turn of the millennium, what we find is that the Interregnum is no less an impassable Rubicon for these scholars than it was for earlier Renaissancists.60 Marcus’s ‘new’ historicists are, first and foremost, Shakespeareans, with interests that widen out into non-​S hakespearean drama, early seventeenth-​century poetry, and the Jacobean masque, subjects that would not be out of place in The Sacred Wood (1920). While the synchronic richness of these books –​their ranging across the strata of high and low culture, the literary and the non-​literary –​is genuinely pathbreaking, their

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diachronic range seems altogether conventional. The new ‘early modern’ period looks rather like the old ‘Renaissance’. There are several reasons we could give for why the New Historicism ultimately reproduces the calendar and divisions of old literary history. For one, it seems clear that New Historicism, as a practice, chimed more strongly with certain authors, and with certain cultural moments, than with others. In Shakespeare, New Historicism found its ideal object of cathexis; as has often been observed, it achieved little purchase with Milton. New Historicism’s Foucauldian understanding of discursive formations as effects of the circulation of social power melded productively with an author like Shakespeare, about whose intentions we know vanishingly little: in place of the familiar image of the Bard as supreme imitator of nature, New Historicists were able to fashion Shakespeare as the avatar of a ‘poetics of culture’.61 Milton, however –​such an outsize and ineradicable presence in his texts, so biographically ample –​proved a different story. Indeed, in the essay that follows Leah Marcus’s in Redrawing the Boundaries, William Kerrigan flatly denies New Historical innovation any lasting significance, characterising the movement’s ‘advances’ from the position of the disinterested Miltonist, loftily above the fray of critical fad and fashion. ‘That new historicism enjoys its greatest prestige in Shakespeare studies, and can claim scant impact on Milton studies’, Kerrigan writes, ‘may reflect longstanding differences between the two disciplines’: Every intellectual fashion of the last 250 years has left its mark on Shakespeare studies. New historicism has been able to absorb some of the more congenial achievements of thriving traditions of psychoanalytic, Marxist, Christian, and feminist interpretation. Yet during my professional lifetime, and no doubt before, the study of Shakespeare has seemed gloriously out of control. The deep and irresolvable uncertainties that beset both the author and his texts turn out to inspire rather than restrain the critical imagination … Milton studies, by contrast, is more disciplined, more unanimous, just as Milton himself, unlike Shakespeare, was so careful to correct his texts and so abidingly conscious of recording his own development.62

Only a few years before, Stanley Fish had said much the same thing, casting Milton as a figure bound to embarrass both ‘high theory’ and ‘the New or Newer Historicism’.63

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But there is more to this story than the outsize effect of the Shakespeare and Milton industries on the literary historical landscape, though that effect is real enough. We can also observe, more generally, a telescoping of historical perspective entailed by the conceptual shift from ‘Renaissance’ to ‘early modern’. As Marcus explains: What is termed early modern seems almost inevitably to take on some of the aura of twentieth-​century modernism to the eclipse of temporal and intellectual categories in between (the Age of Enlightenment, the Romantics, and, in England, the Victorians). To look at the Renaissance through a lens called early modern is to see the concerns of modernism and postmodernism in embryo –​alienation, a disjunction from origins, profound skepticism about the possibility for objectivity (in literary studies or anywhere else), an emphasis on textual indeterminacy as opposed to textual closure and stability, and an interest in intertextuality instead of filiation.64

This passage disarmingly confesses to the implicitly teleological basis of the New Historicism’s vision of history, in acknowledging how the thrust of ‘early modern’ lends itself to marginalising or downplaying those elements of the past which are not conducive to the present. And with this orientation toward the future comes a tendentious apprehension of the ‘temporal and intellectual categories’ constituting the past –​categories which savour of Lyotard as much as they do Shakespeare or Montaigne. Much as Eliot had connected his own modernism to metaphysical poetry, in other words, Marcus’s anatomy of ‘early modern’ connects the postmodern condition of Reagan-​era New Historicists to Renaissance ‘alienation’, ‘disjunction from origins’, and epistemological scepticism. The Restoration and eighteenth century are thus ‘eclipsed’, in this account of New Historicism’s relation to literary period, presumably because the resettling of the monarchy in 1660 represents a counter to the open question of Elizabeth’s succession and the political experiments of mid-​century; the rise of the Royal Society a squaring of the epistemological accounts thrown into disorder by the Reformation and Renaissance; the closed couplets of Dryden and Pope a turning away from Shakespeare’s vertiginous blank verse. We may be struck by the ingenuity of New Historicism’s cracking of the ‘Elizabethan world picture’: but what perhaps astonishes more is the extent to which its ‘counter-​history’ of

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the English Renaissance appears to depend on recirculating other –​ monological, homogenising –​historical clichés. This is too bad, for in the Restoration, Greenblatt & co. might have found much to interest them, might, indeed, have made some ‘new’ history.65 For as much as the problems of Charles II –​insufficient revenues, divisions within the church, a less than compliant Parliament –​in many ways recapitulated those faced by his father, the central crisis of restored Stuart rule, a monarch without heritable issue, surely hewed most closely to an Elizabethan script. And was there ever an age more obsessed by images and representations than the Restoration? Or a cultural moment more illustrative of their potency than that of the ‘horrid Popish plot’?66 Of course, even at the zenith of its disciplinary cachet in the 1980s, New Historicism was not without its challengers; indeed, it was not even the only ‘new’ historicism to be galvanised in that decade. As I have written elsewhere at greater length, rather than taking Foucault and the poststructuralists as their leading lights, a rival network of British and American scholars interested in forging connections between literature and history looked instead to the Cambridge historians John Pocock and Quentin Skinner.67 Themselves much influenced by the speech-​act theory of J. L. Austin –​especially Skinner –​the ‘Cambridge School’ revolutionised the study of intellectual history by emphasising the primacy of contemporary discursive contexts in giving shape and force to political thought.68 More positivist and intentionalist in orientation than Foucauldian discourse analysis, Cambridge historicism provided a powerful methodological tool to critics who were more interested in the ‘efficacy of words’, to borrow a Miltonic phrase, than in the endlessly recursive play of subversion and containment. And indeed it is with Milton studies rather than Shakespeare that this version of historical scholarship has come to be perhaps most powerfully and prestigiously associated, in the work, for instance, of figures like Sharon Achinstein, Thomas Corns, Martin Dzelzainis, David Norbrook, Annabel Patterson, Nigel Smith, and the historian Blair Worden. Important books by these and other critics working in the same milieu not only deploy a highly sophisticated historiographical awareness but seek an audience more or less equally among historians and students of literature. In the Afterword to the 2002 reissue of his Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (1984),

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Norbrook somewhat ruefully remarks that ‘Some literary scholars, indeed, have assumed that I actually am a historian by training’, a perception ‘not always taken as a positive feature’.69 Norbrook’s two major studies, Poetry and Politics and Writing the English Republic, are tours de force of contextual reading, superbly attuned to the ambivalence and multivocality of seventeenth-​century political discourse. Yet his investments as a critic are unmistakably republican and Whiggish, and notwithstanding his celebration in Poetry and Politics of ‘the immense imaginative and political openness of the period’s poetic texts’, Norbrook’s analytic is locked into an agon with Eliot’s royalist version of seventeenth-​century literary history, setting Norbrook’s canon of Spenserian saints against the traditional cast of Donne, Jonson, and Herbert. Smith’s ground-​breaking Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–​1660 (1994) reinvigorated our sense of civil war literature and went beyond Norbrook in giving ‘a cross-​cultural perspective’ of the period.70 At the same time that it countenanced some of the historical claims of Revisionism, however, Literature and Revolution reinstalled the cataclysm of civil war within what Smith called ‘the world of words, which is where’, he argued, ‘the impact of the crisis was most strongly registered’.71 The political historian’s loss was to be the cultural historian’s gain. Indeed, despite giving the appearance at times of being a reviser herself, by the turn of the millennium Annabel Patterson was proclaiming what she called ‘a new Whig interpretation of history’.72 The marginalisation of Revisionism in the context of early modern literary studies –​from the New Historicism to ‘post’-​New-​ Historicism –​has thus had the effect, I would argue, of decoupling literary scholarship from sweeping transformations within the historiography of the very period with which it is concerned. It is to the nature and implications of those transformations for the study of writing, politics, and culture that we now turn. From Whig history to Revisionism and beyond Taking as his lodestones the ‘tendency toward perfection’ observable ‘in every experimental science’, and moreover the wish ‘in every human being to ameliorate his condition’, even ‘great public calamities’ and ‘bad institutions’, Macaulay thought, could little prevent civilisation from being carried rapidly forward.73 What civilisation –​English

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civilisation, anyway –​was rushing toward was, of course, the liberty and prosperity of Macaulay’s own age. Ostensibly more impartial, more dedicated to archival history, more scientific and empirical than Macaulay, S. R. Gardiner was if not the most widely read then surely the most scrupulous of the great Whig historians. Indeed, it was Gardiner who famously said, no doubt with Macaulay in mind, that ‘He who studies the history of the past will be of greater service to the present in proportion as he leaves [the present] out of account’.74 Gardiner was nevertheless unabashed to hold that ‘the Parliament of England was the noblest monument ever reared by mortal man’,75 and he opened his History of the Great Civil War by underlining ‘the inadequacy of the intellectual methods of the day to effect a reconciliation between opposing moral and social forces, which derived their strength from the past development of the nation’.76 For Gardiner little less than for Macaulay, then, both the civil war and its ultimate outcome in favour of ‘free people and free markets’ –​to borrow the parlance of the neoliberal 1980s –​were equally part of early modern English destiny. In the early twentieth century, the Whig interpretation of the English revolution was gradually displaced and absorbed by histories grounded in German sociological and economic thought, namely the theories of Weber and Marx.77 R. H. Tawney’s classic 1926 study Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, for instance, sought to elucidate the connection between Puritan spirituality and what Tawney called ‘the triumph of the economic virtues’, that indispensable step toward ‘political freedom and social progress’.78 Whereas for the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, ‘The Civil War was a class war, in which the despotism of Charles I was defended by the reactionary forces of the established Church and feudal landlords. Parliament beat the King because it could appeal to the enthusiastic support of the trading and industrial classes in town and countryside, to the yeomen and progressive gentry, and to wider masses of the population whenever they were able by free discussion to understand what the struggle was really about’.79 Without supposing Whiggery and Marxism to be the same thing, then, we may say that the dominant perspective in historiography from the 1850s down to the 1960s was one that emphasised the inevitable triumph of liberal modernity over a traditional feudal-​agrarian worldview. The civil war was bound to happen, for Whig and Marxist

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alike, almost as if according to a law of physics, the king’s raising of his banner at Nottingham in August 1642 the direct result of long-​ term friction between king and Parliament; between ‘Court’ and ‘Country’; between the established Church and Puritan zeal; between a declining aristocracy and an ascendant bourgeoisie. Moreover, the deterministic underpinnings of this interpretive model entailed the interrelation of a whole strand of identitary commitments: show me a prosperous bourgeois merchant, Whig-​Marxist thinking tells us, and I’ll show you a Puritan supporter of Parliament; a substantial landowner, and I’ll show you a High Church royalist; the younger son of a master in Chancery, a Cavalier poet. It is perhaps not surprising that with postmodern scepticism toward master narratives should have come an impulse to question and ultimately to explode these totalising constructs of English history. And while no doubt it was in part the intellectual atmosphere created by postmodernism that allowed Revisionism to assert itself as peremptorily as it did, in fact it was the most parochial and conventional sort of English historical research that provided the initial spark. Originally seeking to extend the theoretical Whig-​Marxist view of early Stuart England to granular scale, a clutch of historians in the 1950s and 1960s began closely to examine the phenomenon of civil war allegiance in English county communities. Again and again, however, the expected linkages between socioeconomic status and partisanship eluded these county historians, making ‘nonsense’ of the long-​standing assumption that the English revolution –​if that is still the right word –​necessarily arose through long-​term ideological struggle.80 What emerged most significantly from the study of provincial social groupings was the extent to which local interests overrode the incipient divisions at Westminster and the claims of national politics. As Alan Everitt was among the first to argue, ‘the Civil War was not simply a struggle between gallant Cavaliers and psalm-​singing Roundheads. If one studies the history of any particular county community in this period, particularly if one is fortunate enough to find an extensive corpus of family correspondence, one finds that only a small minority of provincial gentry can be exactly classified in either of these conventional categories’. ‘This does not mean’, he goes on to say, ‘that most English people were indifferent to the political problems of the time, but that their loyalties were polarised around

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different ideals. For them bounded as they so often were by local horizons, a more urgent problem was the conflict between loyalty to nation and loyalty to the county community. This division cuts across the conventional divisions, like a geological fault’.81 If the study of county communities provided a Revisionist challenge from below, as it were, from the contingency of local social bonds, C. S. R. Russell would open the assault on historical orthodoxy from above, focusing his attention on the nature of Parliaments in early Stuart England. Russell’s 1976 essay, ‘Parliamentary history in perspective, 1604–​1629’,82 Kevin Sharpe commented retrospectively, ‘exploded a bomb under the edifice of the English past’. ‘Seventeenth century parliaments were not’, as Russell saw it, ‘seeking more power at the expense of the Crown, the Civil War was not the inevitable outcome of a long constitutional struggle, and the story of English history is not that of the inexorable development of parliamentary sovereignty’.83 Deliberately stressing the point that Parliament in early modern England was not an institution but an event, that it met at the pleasure of the king in order to conduct the king’s business, Russell zeroed in on parliamentary attempts to force its will on the crown by withholding supply, virtually Parliament’s only means of exerting leverage. Rather than a seizing of the initiative, what Russell found in his study of Stuart Parliaments was that the Commons in fact used this power little, and when they did, did so ineffectively. Indeed, far from demonstrating an ability ‘to sustain a constitutional struggle with the Crown, the frustrated efforts of parliamentary leaders to limit the king’s prerogative seemed to contemporaries to cast doubt on Parliament’s very survival’.84 Nor is it accurate, Russell maintained, to see such efforts in ideological terms, that is, as symbolising a unified opposition in Parliament to governmental policy. While there were, of course, disagreements over policy, those disagreements cut across Parliament and Privy Council alike. ‘On none of the great questions of the day’, Russell surmised, ‘did Parliamentary leaders hold any opinions not shared by members of the Council’.85 Moreover, MPs were often caught between their duty to the crown and duty to their provincial constituencies, which would bear the burden of any extraordinary tax or supply voted by Parliament. The Commons’ sporadic intransigence toward the king’s fiscal demands –​and both James and Charles were beset with budgetary shortfalls as a result of inflation, inefficient

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levies, and the rising cost of early modern warfare86 –​likely reflects, above all, considerations of local politics, as opposed to principled resistance to Stuart monarchy. Thus we hear Sir Humphrey May imploring his fellow members in 1628 with respect to supply for the Spanish war: ‘you cannot resolve too soone for ye kinge neyther can you indeede give enough. But lett our harts joyne. Let forrane states knowe wee are united. Wee have here in towne six embassadors and they every day aske after us.’87 Such appeals inform Russell’s contention that consensus politics was the order of the day in early Stuart England, certainly in the 1620s, perhaps even to the brink of civil war. Indeed, ‘the bulk of the evidence’, Russell asserted in introducing an early collection of Revisionist essays, ‘suggests that we are dealing [in 1642] with … an accidental war, growing out of the panic and confusion which followed the failure of the Parliamentary leaders’ plans for a bloodless coup’. ‘If this is so’, he declared, ‘we must be looking, not for explanations of a desire for revolution, but for explanations of a state of chronic misunderstanding, terror and distrust’.88 The gauntlet of Revisionism was thus cast, and scholars on either side of the Atlantic were quick to join the fray. By the early 1980s a number of key arguments had emerged: that the revolutionaries in the first civil war were not the Puritans but in fact the Arminians, the supposedly right-​wing element of the established Church (Tyacke); that adversary politics and religious and social radicalism were products of an unlooked-​for clash between king and Parliament in 1642, not its antecedent cause (Kishlansky); that the crisis of Stuart government was a crisis of counsel and as such the crisis of Parliaments (Sharpe).89 While, like New Historicism, more a stance than a methodological creed, ‘all versions of revisionism’, Russell lightly joked, ‘like all brands of whisky, enjoyed certain broad similarities’.90 Chief among these was ‘a rejection of a dialectical framework for history’ and of historical determinism, and a corresponding commitment to viewing the seventeenth century through the eyes of contemporaries, without the distorting bias of hindsight. Revisionist narratives of the origins of the civil war thus tended to privilege short-​term and contingent factors over more long-​term explanations. Revisionists also restored to view and to significance the so-​called ‘losers’ of the civil war –​the royalist absolutists, the High Church Laudians, the Cavalier elites –​ doomed to obsolescence in Whig-​Marxist teleologies.

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If the initial phase of Revisionism was essentially sceptical and negative, more concerned with knocking down Whig-​ Marxist analytics than with what to put in their place, its second phase (‘post-​ Revisionism’, for lack of a better term) has been more constructive. For as Derek Hirst early observed, in a sympathetic critique of first-​ wave Revisionist work, ‘historians who ignore what comes before and after can fall victim to a myopia as damaging as that suffered by the most teleological Whigs’.91 Subsequent research has thus been more committed to developing new long-​term explanatory frameworks for the problem of the civil wars, while continuing to militate against reductive dichotomies and oppositions. For the later Russell, these long-​term causes included ‘the problem of multiple kingdoms’, that is, the tendency for political remedies in one of the Stuart kingdoms to create unrest in another; ‘the problem of religious division’, which of course also had a ‘British’ dimension; ‘and the breakdown of a financial and political system in the face of inflation and the rising cost of war’.92 In the same article cited above, Hirst also re-​emphasised the ‘place of principle’ in the troubles of the early Stuarts, a corrective that has been widely heeded in the ongoing Revisionist debate.93 Moreover, as the scholarship of recent decades has made clear, the Restoration settlement did little to heal the conflicts made manifest by civil war. Constitutionally, the Restoration erased the parliamentary reforms forced on the king or imposed after the civil war had begun, thus resetting the institutions of government to the conditions of 1641. Through a series of bills passed by the Cavalier Parliament in the early 1660s, the Anglican Church was re-​established on a footing deeply antagonistic toward Presbyterians and non-​ conformists, ensuring the perpetuation of religious strife. If Jonathan Scott perhaps overstates the case in seeing the Restoration’s crises as ‘xerox copies of events, structures, and issues of the early Stuart period’, surely the fears over popery and arbitrary government that fuelled the Exclusion Crisis may remind us of the disastrous last years of Charles I’s rule.94 Thus to the question –​‘What did the Restoration settle?’ –​as Tim Harris wrote in reviewing a tranche of new work at the turn of the millennium, we may answer: ‘not very much’.95 From a previously cloistered narrowness, the perspective of civil war historiography has in this way expanded to take in the sweep of the Stuart century. Indeed, it has become possible to imagine the causes and consequences of the civil wars as occupying an historical frame

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stretching from the Reformation to the Reform Bill –​a long seventeenth century to be sure! Contingency however has retained its place in most post-​Revisionist paradigms.96 While long-​term structural issues may account for the Stuart crisis of government, ‘it can only be regarded as a coincidence’, as Russell put it, ‘that the crisis took the form that it did’. ‘The history of the 1650’s and of 1688’, he observed, ‘show that High Anglicanism, as well as Puritanism, was capable of becoming a revolutionary force when the weight of authority was turned against it. [Nor could one foresee] … Charles I [choosing] to make a personal commitment to the doctrines of Arminianism’, and in so doing binding himself to cast out ‘most of the people in the Church of England who had done anything to capture the popular imagination’.97 In other words, the arrow of history was not necessarily on the side of one or another faction or party; the putative struggle between ‘conservatives’ and ‘radicals’ belies the lability of principle and interest in revolutionary England. We are reminded as well of the uncertain and frequently unpredictable interaction between private conscience and the public sphere, and of the violent contradictions that often organise both subjectivity and the social imaginary. Thus do we discover, for instance, that scourge of Stuart absolutism, John Milton, to have been a secret sharer in Charles I’s conversion to Arminianism. Thus indeed do we find that most notorious of republicans implacably sceptical of ‘the people’, whom he called ‘an inconstant, irrational, and Image-​doting rabble’, ‘a credulous and hapless herd, begott’n to servility’. Toward a Revisionist approach to literary history What, then, are the implications of Revisionism for studying the literature and culture of seventeenth-​century England? First, surely, is the need to situate the Restoration within a broader Stuart and civil war matrix, what I have called, following Scott, ‘England’s troubles’. While 1639 and 1689 are themselves arbitrary and indeterminate boundaries, the invasion of England by Scots forces at the start of the Bishops’ Wars may be seen as inaugurating a period of political and cultural instability that only begins to abate with the Glorious Revolution and the establishment of a new constitution. By removing the artificial barrier of the Interregnum, by discarding the notion of a magical start date for modernity, we better position ourselves to

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discern the genuine continuities and discontinuities between earlier and later Stuart England; to assess the impact of the civil wars on literary discourse and aesthetic production; and to judge accurately the course of seventeenth-​century literary careers. ‘Aesthetics of contingency’ thus takes on a dual sense in this book. It signals at once a detuning of hindsight and determinism in the construing of seventeenth-​century texts and the responsiveness of those texts to conditions of political lability and uncertainty. The figure of Andrew Marvell brings several of these issues sharply into focus. Aptly termed ‘the chameleon’, Marvell seems at once to fit everywhere and nowhere in taxonomies of seventeenth-​ century literature, by turns a Cavalier poet, one of the sons of Ben, a belated metaphysical, and a proto-​Augustan. Indeed, the problematic of labels makes itself felt in the very texture of Marvell’s lyrics –​lyrics which tease with topical hints and innuendoes. In poems like The Nymph Complaining and The Unfortunate Lover, critics have pulled at such threads in hopes of uncovering a coherent political allegory, of harmonising the text’s floating chain of signifiers into a story of identity and allegiance. A number of critics, for instance, have tried to read The Nymph Complaining as a coded statement about the fate of the church and its titular head, King Charles, in the context of the English civil wars. Thus Douglas Bush, following the suggestion of Muriel Bradbrook and M. G. Lloyd Thomas, thought the poem most likely expressed ‘an Anglican’s grief for the stricken Church’.98 As Edward Le Comte was to argue, however, ‘there is much, too much, in the poem that mocks any attempt at a theological reading’, or at any such through-​interpretation.99 Indeed, the hallmark of Marvell’s politically resonant lyrics is rather their refusal of closure, their resistance to narrativisation. If there is any allegory to be uncovered in these poems, it seems to be one about the difficulty of making meaning out of these late ‘storms and wars’.100 Following the Restoration, as we know, Marvell turned his talent for verse writing to the purposes of satire and abuse, a continuation of politics by other means for the poet, now a backbench MP, and something of a segue to his late turn as prose controversialist. Few contemporary students of Marvell would agree with Patrick Cruttwell, writing in 1954, that ‘No poet’s career provides a more striking, or more depressing, contrast than … his real poetry and the Satires which were apparently his only work in verse written after the

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Restoration’, and yet the problem of the ‘two Marvells’, the lyric poet and the Restoration politician, continues to define Marvell scholarship.101 Which is to say that the upsurge of interest in Marvell’s politics and political writings –​which began with John Wallace in the late 1960s and came into its own with the publication of the Yale prose in 2003 –​has increasingly cast in the shade that body of lyric verse for which Marvell is justly celebrated. Our understanding of Marvell and of how he adapted as a writer in the face of revolution and restoration predictably suffers from this zero-​sum logic, whereby sustained attention to those self-​encircling verses written during the Nun Appleton period so often entails the neglect of Marvell’s Restoration poetry and prose, and vice versa. For surely it is a mistake to imagine the Restoration as a kind of literary historical razor, dividing not just one period from another but indeed bisecting the poet’s subjectivity, such that the author of The Last Instructions can be discussed almost as if philosophically distinct from the intelligence and sensibility that created, say, The Nymph Complaining. ‘Authorial wholeness and integrity of imagination may be Enlightenment idealisms’,102 yet if we are able to set aside assumptions of opposition and division –​between the early poet and the late, between Caroline innocence and Restoration experience –​we can see that Marvell’s preoccupation with external encroachments on ‘the ethical subject’ animates the lyrics Eyes and Tears and On a Drop of Dew no less than it does the pamphlets he wrote in the 1670s in support of religious toleration. Nor should we suppose that the sublime ‘metaphysical’ Marvell disappears in the context of his allegedly ‘coarse’, ‘virulent’ satires.103 Rather, we find the whole moral and aesthetic plan of The Last Instructions to be held together by a scene of incandescent pastoral intruded amidst the poem’s catalogue of vice and folly. As the slack and unprepared English fleet is being set ablaze by ‘the ravisher De Ruyter’, the youthful captain Archibald Douglas stoically refuses to abandon his post: Like a glad lover, the fierce flames he meets, And tries his first embraces in their sheets. His shape exact, which the bright flame enfold, Like the sun’s statue stands of burnished gold. Round the transparent fire about him flows, As the clear amber on the bee does close,

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And, as on angels’ heads their glories shine, His burning locks adorn his face divine. (lines 677–​84)

Even in the apparently remote element of ecclesiastical controversy, some of Marvell’s most memorable passages prove to be nothing other than the metaphysical conceit ‘transpros’d’. Comparing the cottage industry of libels written against him by anti-​tolerationist divines to the manufacture of glass, Marvell writes, ‘The Furnace was so hot of it self, that there needed no coals, much less anyone to blow them. One burnt the Weed, another calcined the Flint, and a third melted down that mixture; but he himself [Marvell’s adversary, Samuel Parker] fashion’d all with his breath, and polished with his stile, till out of a meer jelly of Sand and Ashes, he had furnish’d a whole Cupboard of things so brittle and incoherent, that the least touch would break them again in pieces, so transparent that every man might see thorow them’ (PW, 1:249–​50). One would be hard pressed to think of an argument by images more worthy of Dr Donne. Marvell’s is of course far from the only career better grasped within the arc of a long seventeenth century. A number of leading Caroline poets –​Davenant, Waller, and Cowley spring chiefly to mind –​survived into the Restoration and remained influential. Waller, like Marvell, was pliable enough to turn Protectoral servant and Cromwellian panegyrist, and like Marvell and Dryden he was canny enough to shrug off such dalliances as mere expedients following the return of Stuart rule. In answer to the king’s surmise that Waller’s verses in praise of Cromwell were superior to his own panegyric, Waller is said to have replied, ‘Sir, we poets never succeed so well in writing truth as in fiction’.104 Cowley’s The Mistress (1647, 1656) was one of the most popular books of the age, and ‘he received the tributes of both imitation and avowed admiration from such important poets as the earl of Rochester, John Oldham, and John Dryden, to say nothing of minor period figures whose verse is permeated by Cowley’s influence’.105 While Davenant’s experiments of the 1650s –​his incomplete epic Gondibert (1651), his opera The Siege of Rhodes (1656) –​prefigured the heroic drama that would conquer the stage in the 1660s and early 1670s, to say nothing of Davenant’s contribution to the development of Restoration drama as theatre manager.

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But it is perhaps Milton’s writings and reputation that stand to be revised most suggestively in light of changing perspectives on seventeenth-​ century England. It was Milton himself, of course, who first tutored us to read his early verse prophetically, through paratextual interventions like the headnote to the poet’s paraphrase of Psalm 114, ‘This and the following Psalm were don by the Author at fifteen years old’, or that which prefaces Lycidas, indicating that the poem ‘by occasion fortels the ruine of our corrupted Clergy then in their height’. Tempering the habit of Miltonists to take their poet at face value, however, a less certain revolutionary trajectory for Milton’s poetics emerges. Recent scholars have paused, for instance, over Milton’s eagerness to tout his connections to the court on the very title page of Poems of Mr. John Milton. ‘At the very least’, Steven Zwicker argues, the 1645 Poems ‘must have seemed a collection of verse suspended between or among contradictory gestures –​some pointing towards spiritual orthodoxy, others touched by a more militant spirit’.106 Study of the great poetry, in particular Paradise Lost, is equally subject to the distortions of teleology and hindsight. From one perspective, Milton’s epic stands as the apotheosis of both Renaissance humanism and Milton’s radical politics; from another, as the opening move of Romanticism.107 What Paradise Lost has until recently seemed least to be is an artefact of the Restoration, despite Aubrey’s testimony that Milton ‘began about 2 yeares before the K. came in, and finished about 3 yeares after the K’s Restauracion’, the indelible fact of the poem’s publication in 1667, and Milton’s evident engagement with contemporary politics and poetry in explaining ‘why the poem rhymes not’ and indeed throughout Paradise Lost.108 There are signs that this is changing. Peter Herman, ringleader of the ‘New Milton Criticism’, has urged that ‘in the aftermath of the Revolution Milton engaged in a wholesale questioning of just about everything he had argued for in his prose works’. It is thus ‘out of the turmoil of not knowing what to affirm in the wake of the Revolution’s failure’, Herman believes, ‘that Milton creates his finest poetry’.109 Working within the more orthodox camp of Miltonists, scholars like Nicholas von Maltzahn have done much to improve our understanding of the immediate contexts in which Paradise Lost was first published and read, uncovering correspondence between John Beale, FRS, and the diarist John Evelyn,

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royalists both, concerning whether Milton might be gotten to write some pindarics in praise of the Royal Society –​not exactly evidence of Milton’s ‘internal exile’, wholly beyond the pale of Restoration letters or sociability.110 The protocols and assumptions of more than three centuries of scholarship, however, are not lightly reversed, and much work remains to be done resituating Milton and his works within the indeterminate horizons of his own lived history. As has been variously suggested in the course of this Introduction, revising our picture of the causes and consequences of the English civil wars also means complicating received narratives about the onset of Enlightenment and modernity. Under the influence of Elizabeth Eisenstein, we have long viewed the seventeenth century as the triumphal scene in the history of the printing press and the printed book as agents of change.111 More recently, however, scholars have emphasised the influence and endurance of scribal culture throughout the Stuart era, and revealed the ways in which ideas and information flowed back and forth between print and manuscript, as well as between a literate and official discursive sphere and the vernacular margin.112 In the work of Adrian Johns, the institution of print itself has been drawn into the realm of instability and incertitude, forcefully reminding us of the social and material contingencies to which early modern printing was subject, and of the fact that printed texts were by no means universally regarded as trustworthy or transparent.113 Lord Rochester –​a figure of almost ubiquitous fascination in the Restoration and early eighteenth century –​embodies the force of both these corrective arguments. ‘[T]‌he last poet in English whose natural medium of publication was manuscript’, his canon presents a morass of attribution problems and of irresolvable textual complexity and multiplicity.114 Rochester’s commodification by eighteenth-​century print culture if anything only ramified the fundamental uncertainty that has historically attended reading this poet: amidst a crowded field of spurious and expurgated editions, a surreptitiously printed 1761 edition of Rochester’s Poetical Works stands out for the audacity of its fraudulence, offering for the reader’s pleasure some one hundred poems, ninety-​nine of which are not by Rochester.115 Johns’s work follows on from that of historians of science like Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer who have questioned, in Shapin’s words, whether ‘there was any single coherent cultural entity called

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“science” in the seventeenth century’, and thus the idea ‘that there was any singular and discrete event, localized in time and space, that can be pointed to as “the” Scientific Revolution’.116 Rather, Shapin suggests, ‘There was … a diverse array of cultural practices aimed at understanding, explaining, and controlling the natural world, each with different characteristics and each experiencing different modes of change’.117 As a result, scholars have been forced to grapple with suppositions like Boyle’s –​though it could just as well be Thomas Browne’s –​‘that by being addicted to experimental philosophy a man is rather assisted than indisposed to be a good Christian’,118 to give just due to the apparently anti-​modernising, anti-​secularising elements in Enlightenment thought, to Boyle’s obsession with the philosopher’s stone, to Newton’s occultism, and so on.119 As in the proverbial arcade game, however, Whiggish myths of sudden modernity seem to pop up just as quickly as they are knocked down. The new historians of affect, for instance, have suggested 1660 as the climacteric dividing medieval and Renaissance subjectivities conditioned by ‘psychological materialism’ –​the theory of the humours –​from those of modern Cartesian dualists.120 Charles II was often suspected of collusion with Louis XIV, of sharing a taste for popery and arbitrary government; but how many English subjects could have thought that he meant to replace their blood, bile, and phlegm with a pineal gland. It is the argument of this book that the seventeenth-​century body politic, and with it the republic of letters, can be more comprehensively understood in terms of the same vital spirits, and indeed the same diseases. Notes 1 See J. Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-​Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 20–​7. 2 Marvell was deliberately figured in amphibious terms by contemporary polemicists, a facet of his identity given new currency by his latest biographer; see N. Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). ‘Serial turncoat’ is Blair Worden’s phrase for Nedham in Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). I am endebted to Timothy Raylor for this characterisation of Waller.

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3 These are of course the titles of important studies by David Norbrook and Robert Wilcher, respectively: Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–​1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University 1660 (Cambridge: Press, 1999); The Writing of Royalism 1628–​ Cambridge University Press, 2001). 4 L. A. Ferrell, ‘Introduction: revisiting Revisionism’, HLQ special issue, 78:4 (2015), p. 573. 5 C. S. R. Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603–​ 1642 (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), p. ix. The capitalisation of ‘Revisionism’ is meant to distinguish the historiographical movement in Stuart history from revision in its more generic forms. It should be remembered nonetheless that Revisionism and its legacies are notoriously plural and contested. 6 Closely paraphrasing T. Cogswell, R. Cust, and P. Lake, ‘Revisionism and its legacies: the work of Conrad Russell’, in Cogswell, Cust and Lake (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 1. 7 Ferrell, ‘Revisiting Revisionism’, p. 572. 8 Derek Hirst (in ‘Revisiting Revisionism’) warns how the term ‘post-​ Revisionist’ tends to blur ‘the situational and the substantive’. What would an ‘age’ of ‘post-​Revisionism’ be like, he asks. ‘[E]‌ternal dialogue with some shapeless predecessor?’, p. 596. 9 K. Sharpe (ed.), Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), p. v. 10 P. Lake, ‘Retrospective: Wentworth’s political world in revisionist and post-​revisionist perspective’, in J. F. Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–​41 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 278. For the idea of political culture within seventeenth-​ century historiography, see K. Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-​ Century Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 11 Cogswell et al., ‘Revisionism and its legacies’, pp. 14–​15. 12 King Charls II. His Declaration To all his Loving Subjects of the Kingdome of England. Dated from his Court at Breda in Holland (London, 1660), p. 4. 13 M. Dobson, ‘Adaptations and revivals’, in D. P. Fiske (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 41. 14 J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–​ 1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 6. 15 See J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–​1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 1985); together with his Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 16 T. Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 2. 17 K. Sharpe and P. Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 1. Discussions of Revisionism’s origins and impact are of course legion. To the studies and syntheses cited elsewhere in this Introduction, we might add: G. Burgess, ‘On revisionism: an analysis of early Stuart historiography in the 1970s and 1980s’, HJ, 33 (1990), pp. 609–​27; T. Cogswell, ‘Coping with revisionism in early Stuart history’, JMH, 62 (1990), pp. 538–​51; J. P. Kenyon, ‘Revisionism and post-​revisionism in early Stuart history’, JMH, 64 (1991), pp. 689–​ 99; P. Lake, review of The Causes of the English Civil War, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–​1642, and Unrevolutionary England, by C. S. R. Russell, HLQ, 57 (1994), pp. 167–​97. 18 See H. R. Trevor-​Roper, ‘Lord Macaulay: introduction’, in Trevor-​ Roper (ed.), The History of England (London: Penguin Classics, 1979), p. 7. 19 H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931). In a brief preface, Butterfield writes, trenchantly, ‘What is discussed is the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present. This whig version of the course of history is associated with certain methods of historical organisation and inference –​certain fallacies to which all history is liable, unless it be historical research. The examination of these raises problems concerning the relations between historical research and what is known as general history; concerning the nature of a historical transition and of what might be called the historical process; and also concerning the limits of history as a study, and particularly the attempt of the whig writers to gain from it a finality that it cannot give’, pp. v–​vi. 20 Macaulay’s History is quoted here and throughout from the edition prepared by C. H. Firth, 6 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1913–​15), 1:398, 388. 21 Macaulay, History, p. 390. 22 Macaulay, History, p. 388. 23 [T. B. Macaulay], ‘Milton’, Edinburgh Review, 42:84 (1825), p. 306. 24 E. Gosse, A Short History of Modern English Literature (New York: D. Appleman, 1897), p. 161. The ‘dissociative’ thrust of these histories is

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compassed in S. N. Zwicker, ‘Is there such a thing as Restoration literature?’, HLQ, 69:3 (2006), pp. 425–​50. 25 W. V. Moody and R. M. Lovett, A History of English Literature (New York: Scribner’s, 1902), pp. 174–​5. A popular textbook, the Moody and Lovett History was reprinted some fifteen times between 1906 and 1964. 26 R. H. Fletcher, A History of English Literature (Boston: R. G. Badger, new and rev. edn, 1919), p. 217. 27 Fletcher, A History, pp. 216, 218. 28 Fletcher, A History, p. 218. 29 R. Wellek, ‘The criticism of T. S. Eliot’, Sewanee Review, 64:3 (1956), p. 398. 30 On Eliot’s literary criticism, see L. Menand, ‘T. S. Eliot’, in A. W. Litz, L. Menand, and L. Rainey (eds), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism Volume VII: Modernism and the New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 15–​56. 31 C. Benfey, ‘Becoming T. S. Eliot, for better and for worse’, New Republic, 4 March 2013, Web. 32 F. Kermode, ‘Dissociation of sensibility’, Kenyon Review, 19 (1957), p. 169. 33 T. S. Eliot, ‘The metaphysical poets’, in The Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. F. Kermode (New York: Harcourt, 1975), p. 64. 34 Eliot, ‘Milton II’, in Selected Prose, p. 266. 35 Eliot, ‘from The Idea of a Christian Society’, in Selected Prose, p. 290. 36 Eliot, ‘from The Idea of a Christian Society’, p. 291. 37 Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928), p. 11. 38 Eliot, ‘Idea of a Christian Society’, p. 299. 39 S. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 333. Donne and the metaphysicals stand, for Eliot, at the last brink of this ‘undissociated’ Christian culture, just before the ‘new philosophy’, in Donne’s familiar phrase, ‘calls all in doubt’. 40 [Macaulay], ‘Milton’, p. 307. 41 See, e.g., F. R. Leavis, ‘English poetry in the seventeenth century’, Scrutiny 4:4 (1935), pp. 236–​55, republished as the opening chapter of Revaluation: Tradition & Development in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1936). 42 B. Bergonzi, ‘Leavis and Eliot: the long road to rejection’, Critical Quarterly, 26:1–​2 (1984), p. 22. 43 T. S. Eliot, ‘The frontiers of criticism’, Sewanee Review, 64:4 (1956), p. 537. For nuanced discussion, see Menand, ‘T. S. Eliot’, in the Cambridge History

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of Literary Criticism. For the influence of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in particular, see e.g. J. Bennett, Four Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934). Kermode, ‘Dissociation of sensibility’, p. 185. For the purposes of both study and marketing, Norton, ‘the world’s most widely used anthology of English literature’, divides the Restoration and eighteenth century into a separate volume from the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The MLA likewise amalgamates the Restoration into an eighteenth century distinct from the division of Renaissance and early modern literature. G. Spiegel (ed.), Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 4. On the relation of New Historicism to literary theory, see S. J. Greenblatt, ‘Towards a poetics of culture’, in H. A. Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1–​14. More wide-​ rangingly, see S. Lotringer and S. Cohen (eds), French Theory in America (New York: Routledge, 2001). A. B. Coiro and T. Fulton, ‘Introduction: old, new, now’, in Coiro and Fulton (eds), Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 1. S. J. Greenblatt, ‘Introduction’ to The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance, special issue Genre, 15 (1982), pp. 1–​2. L. Montrose, ‘Professing the Renaissance: the poetics and politics of culture’, in Veeser, The New Historicism, p. 20. Montrose, ‘Professing the Renaissance’, p. 18. A. Fradenburg, ‘(Dis)Continuity: a history of dreaming’, in E. Scala and S. Federico (eds), The Post-​Historical Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 88. S. J. Greenblatt and G. B. Gunn (eds), Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Studies (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992). See L. S. Marcus, ‘Renaissance/​early modern studies’, in Greenblatt and Gunn, Redrawing the Boundaries, pp. 41–​63. E. Pollak, ‘Feminism and the New Historicism: a tale of difference or the same old story?’, Eighteenth Century, 29:3 (1988), p. 282. Thus Edward Said (1991): ‘the ferment in minority, subaltern, feminist, and postcolonial consciousness has resulted in so many salutary achievements in the curricular and theoretical approach to the study of the humanities as quite literally to have produced a Copernican revolution in all traditional fields of inquiry.’ See his ‘The politics of knowledge’, Raritan, 11:1 (1991), p. 25. At the same time, it must be said, New Historicism only reinforced Shakespeare’s status as the unquestioned centre of English literature.

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57 P. Berry and M. Tudeau-​Clayton, ‘Introduction’, in Berry and Tudeau-​ Clayton (eds), Textures of Renaissance Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 14, n. 6. 58 Marcus, ‘Renaissance/​early modern studies’, p. 42. 59 Marcus, ‘Renaissance/​early modern studies’, pp. 42–​3. 60 Together with Greenblatt, Montrose, and Marcus, I am thinking here of scholars like Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Dollimore, Jonathan Goldberg, Jean Howard, Stephen Orgel, and Alan Sinfield. 61 I am endebted here to the observations of J. A. Miller; see his review of Coiro and Fulton, Rethinking Historicism, in MQ, 49:2 (2015), p. 142. 62 W. Kerrigan, ‘Seventeenth-​century studies’, in Greenblatt and Gunn, Redrawing the Boundaries, p. 73. 63 S. Fish, ‘Milton’s career and the career of theory’, in There’s No Such Thing as Freeh Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 264. 64 Marcus, ‘Renaissance/​early modern studies’, p. 43. 65 New Historicism’s claim to being historical was of course famously queried by Greenblatt’s Berkeley colleague Carolyn Porter, ‘Are we being historical yet?’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 87 (1988), pp. 743–​86. See also C. Porter, ‘After the new historicism’, New Literary History, 21:2 (1990), pp. 253–​72; A. Liu, ‘The power of formalism: the new historicism’, ELH, 56:4 (1989), pp. 721–​71. 66 There is a sense in which the masterpiece of the New Historicism is actually the historian Kevin Sharpe’s trilogy of late works: Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-​Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–​1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); and Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–​1714 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 67 See M. C. Augustine, ‘Beyond politics: Marvell and the fortunes of context’, Literature Compass, 11:4 (2014), pp. 235–​45. 68 See Q. Skinner, Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. J. Tully (Cambridge: Polity, 1988). 69 D. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, rev. edn 2002), p. 270 (originally published by Routledge in 1984). 70 N. Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–​1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. xii. 71 Smith, Literature and Revolution, p. 362. Cf. S. Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 3: ‘The English Revolution was a revolution in reading’. 72 For an example of Patterson as reviser, see ‘ “Forced fingers”: Milton’s early poems and ideological constraint’, in C. J. Summers and

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T.-​L. Pebworth (eds), ‘The Muses Commonweale’: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), pp. 9–​22. For her turn to ‘evangelical historicism’, see Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) (from which that phrase derives, p. 2), and Nobody’s Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 73 Macaulay, History of England, 1:270. 74 S. R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War 1603–​1642, 10 vols. (London: Longmans, 1891–​93), 1:viii. 75 Gardiner, History of England, 1:2. 76 Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, 1642–​1649, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, 1886–​91), 1:1. 77 See J. A. Adamson, ‘Introduction: the civil war and its historiography’, in Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–​ 49 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), p. 7. 78 R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Harcourt, rpt. 1954), p. 225. The ‘classic’ status of Tawney’s thesis can be gauged by the numerous reprintings of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: since 1926 it has been issued some thirty times by various publishing houses, including Harcourt, Penguin, and the New American Library, most recently by Verso, in 2013. 79 C. Hill, The English Revolution, 1640: Three Essays (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940), p. 9. 80 Adamson, ‘The civil war and its historiography’, p. 18. 81 A. Everitt, The Local Community and the Great Rebellion (London: Historical Association, 1969), p. 8. To take but one example, in Leicestershire, county loyalties were almost evenly split between two leading Puritan families, the Greys and the Hastings. Both delayed taking sides and sought to keep the shire clear of the war; when push came to shove, however, Lord Hastings broke for the king, Lord Grey for Parliament, with their local partisans following suit. The situation in Leicestershire is discussed in Everitt, Local Community, pp. 14–​17, and in J. Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–​1650 (London: Longman, rpt. 1980), p. 43. 82 C. S. R. Rusell, ‘Parliamentary history in perspective, 1604–​ 1629’, History, 61:201 (1976), pp. 1–​27; rpt. in Unrevolutionary England, pp. 31–​58, from which I quote below. 83 K. Sharpe, review of Unrevolutionary England, 1603–​1642; The Causes of the English Civil War; & The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–​42, by C. S. R. Russell, History Today (1991), Web. 84 Russell, Unrevolutionary England, pp. 33, 42.

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85 Russell, Unrevolutionary England, p. 48. 86 See Russell, ‘The nature of a Parliament in early Stuart England’ (1984), rpt. in Unrevolutionary England, pp. 22–​3. 87 Qtd. in Russell, Unrevolutionary England, p. 47. 88 C. S. R. Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 1. 89 N. Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism, and counter-​ revolution’, in Russell, The Origins of the English Civil War, pp. 119–​ 43; M. Kishlansky, ‘The emergence of adversary politics in the Long Parliament’, JMH, 49:4 (1977), pp. 617–​40, and The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); K. Sharpe (ed.), Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 90 Russell, Unrevolutionary England, p. ix, pp. ix–​x following. 91 D. Hirst, ‘Revisionism revised: the place of principle’, P&P, 92:1 (1981), p. 80. 92 C. S. R. Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 213. See also Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–​1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 93 Hirst, ‘Revisionism revised’, p. 99. See also J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–​1640 (London: Longman, 1986); R. Cust and A. Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–​1642 (London: Longman, 1989). 94 Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, p. 6; England’s Troubles, p. 164. 95 T. Harris, ‘What’s new about the Restoration’, Albion, 29:2 (1997), p. 195. See also T. Harris, ‘Introduction: revising the Restoration’, in T. Harris, P. Seaward, and M. Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 1–​28. Harris notes: ‘The aim of this introduction is to stress that there was much greater continuity with the previous period than is normally thought, that religion did continue as a dominant theme in Restoration politics, and that in order to understand the tensions of this period we need to look more closely at local politics and at the concerns and aspirations of people below the level of the ruling elite’, p. 2. 96 On contingency and the problem of narrative in Revisionist historiography, see D. Hirst, ‘Of labels and situations: revisionisms and early Stuart studies’, HLQ, 78:4 (2015), pp. 596–​7; also Lake, ‘Retrospective’, p. 278. 97 Russell, Origins of the English Civil War, p. 23. 98 See D. Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century: 1600–​1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), p. 161; M. C. Bradbrook

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and M. G. Lloyd Thomas, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), pp. 46–​50. E. Le Comte, ‘Marvell’s “The nymph complaining for the death of her fawn” ’, MP, 50:2 (1952), p. 100. For extended consideration of the poem and its historical reception, see M. C. Augustine, ‘ “Lillies without, roses within”: Marvell’s poetics of indeterminacy and “The nymph complaining” ’, Criticism, 50:2 (2008), pp. 255–​78. P. Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954), p. 199. D. Hirst and S. N. Zwicker, ‘Eros and abuse: imagining Andrew Marvell’, ELH, 74:2 (2007), p. 371. W. Hazlitt, in E. S. Donno (ed.), Andrew Marvell: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), p. 134. The Poems of Edmund Waller, ed. G. Thorn-​Drury, 2 vols. (London: Bullen, 1901), 1:lxii. A. Lindsay, ‘Cowley, Abraham (1618–​ 1677), poet’, ODNB (2004; online edn 2008), accessed 9 June 2017. S. N. Zwicker, ‘The day George Thomason collected his copy of the Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, Compos’d at Several Times’, RES, 64:264 (2013), p. 239. For apotheoses of these traditions, see J. H. Hanford, ‘Milton and the return to humanism’, SP, 16:2 (1916), pp. 126–​47; and D. Loewenstein, ‘The radical religious politics of Paradise Lost’, in T. Corns (ed.), A Companion to Milton (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 348–​62. Of Milton and the Romantics, Joseph Wittreich writes: ‘If they did not invent the question, “Why Milton?” the Romantics lent fashion to it, empowering Milton by making him whole again and, simultaneously, giving force to his poetry by reading it as if it were a true history; but also by reading it in the future tense so that poems emerging from one moment of crisis could reflect upon, and explain, another crisis in history when, once again, tyranny and terror ruled’; Why Milton Matters: A New Preface to His Works (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), p. 22. J. Aubrey, ‘Minutes of the life of Mr. John Milton’, in H. Darbishire (ed.), Milton’s Early Lives (London: Constable, 1932), p. 13. Recent treatments of Milton’s materialism have made more of his Restoration milieu: see e.g. J. Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), and J. Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Now see as well B. Hoxby and A. B. Coiro (eds), Milton in the Long Restoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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109 P. C. Herman, ‘Paradise Lost, the Miltonic “or,” and the poetics of incertitude’, SEL, 43:1 (2003), p. 183. 110 N. von Maltzahn, ‘The first reception of Paradise Lost’, RES, 47:188 (1996), pp. 479–​99. 111 E. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-​ Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 112 See H. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-​ Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); English Clandestine Satire, 1660–​1702 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 113 See A. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 114 P. Davis, ‘From script to print: marketing Rochester’, in M. C. Augustine and S. N. Zwicker (eds), Lord Rochester in the Restoration World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 40. 115 See D. N. Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester’s Poems of 1680 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 15. 116 See S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-​Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); S. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 4. 117 Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, p. 4. 118 R. Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso (London, 1690), t. p. 119 See C. Weiss Smith, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-​Century England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016). 120 G. K. Paster, K. Rowe, and M. Floyd-​ Wilson (eds) situate the ‘Cartesian divide’ in historical subjectivity ‘about 1660’, Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 2 and passim. See also G. K. Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). The phrase ‘regimes of feeling’, commonly used in work on the embodied emotions, thus takes on a suggestively political colouring.

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1 ‘He saw a greater Sun appear’: waiting for the apocalypse in Milton’s Poems 1645 Amidst any number of intensely felt preoccupations –​the proper uses of poetry, the character of the true poet, the beauty of traditional forms and the felt imperative to innovate, or indeed to renovate –​the Milton we meet in his debut collection is concerned perhaps above all with time. Themes of unreadiness and delay animate some of the 1645 volume’s most affecting verses. ‘How soon hath Time the suttle theef of youth, /​Stoln on his wing my three and twentith yeer!’, begins Milton’s famous seventh sonnet: ‘My hasting dayes flie on with full career, /​But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th’ (lines 1–​4). Much of the power of Lycidas derives from the angst awoken in Milton by the death of Edward King ‘ere his prime’ (line 8), out of season and before his youthful promise could bear mature fruit –​an especially anxious prospect for the twenty-​nine-​year-​old poet, still living under his father’s roof. Moreover, this sense of belatedness not only provides a potent topos for Milton, it informs his strategies of self-​presentation throughout the book.1 Indeed, this poet can hardly wait to disperse his writing into the past, indicating in the very title of the Nativity Ode that it was ‘Compos’d 1629’, while Milton’s pair of psalmic paraphrases are said to have been ‘don by the Author at fifteen yeers old’ (p. 14). Where the aborted poem on the Passion trails off, Milton tells of finding the subject ‘to be above the yeers he had, when he wrote it’ (p. 19). Such intimations of precocity no doubt compensate for Milton’s disquiet over the untimely development of his great project of writing a national epic, something he had begun to contemplate as early as his Cambridge days. Other textual additions, like the headnote to Lycidas, endow the poet with the gift of prophecy, and illuminate a latent teleology of the self –​that of the ‘reformist poetic

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bard’ –​over against other possible selves glimpsed within the Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, Compos’d at several Times.2 To the theme of chance arrival we shall return, but not before absorbing something of Milton’s anxiousness into the work of criticism it here occasions: for it has already been twenty years since Barbara Lewalski declared the moment ripe for ‘revising the revisionists’, in an essay confidently reaffirming that ‘from the outset [Milton] began to construct himself as a new kind of author, one who commands all the resources of learning and art but links them to radical politics, reformist poetics, and the inherently revolutionary power of prophecy’.3 In ‘revising revisionism’, Lewalski hoped to counter representations, especially of the young Milton, as ‘inconsistent and even something of a Cavalier, given that at times he used genres, imagery, publication modes, and stances associated with the court, the Laudian church, the Cavalier poets, and even with Roman Catholicism’. Since then, however, further challenges to the orthodox view of Milton have proliferated under the influence of developments in Stuart historiography and of the ‘new Milton criticism’. Perhaps most polemically, Peter Herman has taken issue with protocols that require the critic (as he sees it) to make Milton and above all Paradise Lost cohere, insisting by contrast that the failure of the English revolution prompted Milton to engage ‘in a wholesale questioning of just about everything he had argued for in his earlier prose works, and he does not come to a conclusion’ (his emphasis).4 Thus ‘it is out of the turmoil of not knowing what to affirm’, Herman contends, ‘that Milton creates some of his finest poetry’.5 As more than one commentator has noted, however, Herman’s ‘argument for the poet’s deliberate cultivation of a “poetics of incertitude” might also be construed at times to argue for a new, almost monolithic, Miltonic absolute’, merely inverting the regime of ‘unqualified certainty’ Herman so strenuously controverts.6 There is a similar single-​mindedness to Catherine Gimelli Martin’s re-​ examination of Milton ‘in light of the new historiography of the English civil wars’: despite being framed along Revisionist lines, the story she tells in Milton among the Puritans (2010) is perfectly orthodox in its celebration of a Milton who is ‘radically reformist’ in his attitudes toward politics, education, and science.7 Here Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns seem more even-​ handed guides, no less deeply read in the historiography and willing to show us a

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Milton who is ‘flawed, self-​ contradictory, self-​ serving, arrogant, passionate, ruthless, ambitious, and cunning’, as well as one of ‘the most accomplished writers of the Caroline period, the most eloquent polemicist of the mid-​century, and the author of the finest and most influential narrative poem in English’.8 But theirs is nonetheless ‘a hero’s life’, and on the horizon of their biography, much though Campbell and Corns eschew an Athena-​like birth, looms Milton the radical poet-​prophet, the stages of whose development ‘are the spine that runs through our study’.9 Neither biography nor yet another fine-​ tuned recalibration of Milton’s politics, this chapter is concerned rather with the process of history itself, insofar as such processes are represented in Milton’s poetry, and as Milton’s poetry figures in traditional historical narratives.10 My approach is guided by a pair of responses to Milton, one from the early nineteenth century, the other from the turn of the twenty-​first, and in no little part by the unlikely chance of their convergence. Writing for the London Magazine in October 1820, Charles Lamb recounts with mock-​horror the day he was shown the original copy of Lycidas in Milton’s poetical notebook, whereupon the monumentality, the historical given-​ness of Milton’s achievement seemed to shatter into a thousand lived contingencies: ‘How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore!’, Lamb exclaims, ‘interlined! corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good! as if inspirations were made up of parts, and those fluctuating, successive, indifferent!’11 Without giving any sign that he is thinking of Lamb, Jonathan Goldberg’s superb essay of 1990, ‘Dating Milton’, rather more deliberately proposes a like decomposition of the poet. Instructively reading scenes of autobiography in Milton’s writing with a lively suspicion of the self-​presence of the moment, Goldberg would trouble narratives which imagine ‘a Milton who was always the same, always himself ’, offering in their place ‘one that refuses self-​sameness either to “Milton” or to the supposed regularities of temporal progression’, resolutely open ‘to chance, contingency, and revision’.12 ‘Yet by chance’, Goldberg later explains, ‘I do not mean to reduce history to mere randomness. It is Milton’s chance I am talking about, the chance delivery of the retrospectively recognizable Miltonic “I,” the chance, in short, that lets itself be called Milton’s chance; a story that only retrospectively, if then, could be called a story’.13

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My focus in the following chapter is thus the problematic of becoming at the heart of Milton’s 1645 Poems. Students of Lycidas have long remarked the notorious device whereby ‘out of nowhere a third-​person voice announces that the poem has, apparently all along, been sung by the “uncouth swain” (186)’, and so appears to transcend its uncertain beginning: ‘At last he rose, and twitch’d his Mantle blew: /​To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new’ (lines 192–​3).14 In republishing Lycidas, Milton also expressly links the poem to the fall of Laud and the regeneration of the English Church: ‘And by occasion fortels the ruine of our corrupted Clergy then in their height’ (p. 50). But if notes of apocalyptic and rebirth sound throughout the volume –​epitomised in the rout of the pagan gods, the supersession of Apollo by some ‘greater Sun’ –​the staging and re-​staging of this theme ultimately folds millenarian rupture back into the fabric of secular time, in which, as Goldberg argues in a more recent essay, ‘the meaning of time remains provisional; we await a promised end that has never come’.15 The poems Milton collected and published in 1645 thus bear witness, as I read them, to the indeterminate matrix of messianic time –​the time between the birth of Christ and the Second Coming –​and to the fluctuating, successive, indifferent progress of grace, both in Milton and in Milton’s England. In uncovering this temporal and thematic paradigm, it is the aim of this chapter to unfetter Milton from history’s telos, forgetting the historical discourses in and through which we have come to recognise Milton as himself, those stories that, only retrospectively, can be called a story. No apocalypse, not now It is of course the great Nativity Ode that opens Milton’s Poems, in 1645 and in the second edition of 1673, and much has been made of its primacy as ‘prologue to the rising poet’s achievement’.16 The care Milton has taken in dating its composition, together with the occasional nature of the poem itself, have perhaps led inevitably to the Ode’s being read in terms of a ‘single and determinate moment of composition’ and ‘for the presumed presence of Milton writing at that very moment’, as Goldberg puts it.17 In his recent discussion of the Ode, for instance, Gordon Teskey sets the scene of the poem’s writing on the upper floor of Milton’s family house, on Bread Street,

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near St Paul’s Cathedral. It is 25 December 1629. ‘At that hour, and on that particular morning’, Teskey avers, ‘there would have been very few lights and very few sounds … the stars would have been visible and bright, especially from the hill’. Indeed, so powerful is the critic’s sense of Milton’s presence, he actually enters the scene of writing himself, assuming a perspective over the poet’s shoulder: ‘He was waiting for dawn’, Teskey writes, ‘which seemed, as it always does when we are watching for it, to hesitate before it arrives. The stars seemed reluctant to leave and the first light of dawn hadn’t touched the horizon to the east or the dark overhead. Perhaps he began at the beginning, and said to himself, “This is the month, and this the happy morn” ’.18 Notwithstanding the evocative intensity of the prose, what seems most arresting here is the critical erasure of any trace of historical mediation: perhaps half recalling the proem to Book IX of Paradise Lost, where Milton tells of his muse’s ‘nightly visitation[s]‌’, inspiring ‘Easie my unpremeditated Verse’ (lines 21–​4), Teskey pictures the composition of the Nativity Ode as a moment of pure immanence, and moreover his reading holds out the possibility of witnessing the ‘poetic birth’ as it happens, an untrammelled act of recognition.19 Beginning at the beginning of Poems 1645, we are in the presence of ‘John Milton’. In suturing the announcement of Milton as ‘true poet’ together with the good news of Christian revelation, of course, the poem also makes a bid to confirm Milton as touched by holy fire, and critics have been similarly eager to verify its millenarian promise and prophetic force. Highlighting the apocalyptic conviction of the Nativity Ode and Lycidas, for example, Michael Wilding insists that Milton the ‘poet-​prophet’ must have sensed the ‘political pressures about to erupt in the revolution’, while for Stella Revard ‘The Nativity ode’s apostrophe to the Age of Gold is the first blast on the trumpet of prophecy’.20 Thus not only does the inaugural poem of Milton’s career reveal the poet to be already himself; it also plunges us into the providential workings of a Puritan revolution. What this cluster of responses to the Ode elides however –​even or perhaps especially where ‘historicism’ is the objective –​are the material circumstances surrounding the poem’s composition, publication, and reception, circumstances that were neither unitary nor pointed in a single direction but rather heterogeneous and uncertain. In 1645, never mind 1629, ‘Milton did not know he was going to

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write the greatest long poem in the language, and neither did his readers’, as Colin Burrow reminds us.21 With the benefit of hindsight Milton could in the early 1640s refer in Sonnet X to Charles’s dissolution of Parliament in 1629 as that ‘sad breaking’ (line 5). In real time, however, Milton shows little regard for the inception of the Personal Rule, and given the expectation by some as late as 1640 that the Long Parliament would be ‘a happy parliament where the subject may have a total redress of all his grievances’, surely few in 1629 could have been certain of the storms and wars that lay ahead.22 To those who did buy Milton’s Poems when the volume appeared in booksellers’ stalls in January 1646, the Nativity Ode’s apocalyptic tenor and aura of spiritual election may have seemed to align it with godly reform and opposition politics. However, by virtue of celebrating the holy-​ day of Christmas at a time when the Westminster Assembly had but recently ordered the discontinuation of such festival observances, it may just as well have situated its author within the ambit of a more traditional, even reactionary cultural politics.23 Insofar as Milton the ‘reformist prophetic bard’ does materialise in the 1645 Poems, it is almost always through retrospective narrativisation, and other Miltons were capable of being gleaned from the volume, with no less good claim to being ‘Miltonic’. Indeed, while it is Milton’s friend Andrew Marvell who has a reputation for ‘manyness’, John K. Hale has justly observed how Milton’s ostentatiously polyglot collection entails ‘the freedom to express a multiple self, one that varies with the language-​roles adopted for each occasion’.24 That students of the early verse have too obligingly taken their cues from Milton’s more overt self-​editorialising –​from the deliberate architecture of the volume, from its tendentious dates and headnotes –​has been thought before, though it still bears repeating. But I begin with the Nativity Ode because I want to suggest something more. Indeed, I want to suggest that in our critical haste to draw history out of the poem, to make Milton’s text perform within an overarching temporal and literary-​historical progression, we have imperfectly grasped the point of the Ode itself: for despite its fantasies of time running backward, of the imminence of a golden age, the Nativity Ode is ultimately an un-​apocalyptic poem, self-​implicated within a secular pattern. And despite all that it would confirm about Milton’s genius, the shape of his career, and the direction of English history, the most that it can do is resolve upon an indeterminate waiting.

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Laying aside the fact that we don’t know whether Milton indeed wrote the Nativity Ode on Christmas Day 1629, much less the hour or the minute, the conceit of its composition at a precisely determinate moment may strike us as peculiarly mis-​aligned with the poem’s conspicuous temporal gyrations, whereby the writing of the poem is staged at once on the day and year specified by Milton’s title, on the day of Christ’s nativity, and on the threshold of the millennium. Indeed, fantasies about time drive and structure the poem, for in mastering time the poet seeks to escape time altogether, to join his voice to the eternal choir. ‘Say heavenly muse’, Milton’s speaker implores, ‘shall not thy sacred vein /​Afford a present to the infant God? /​Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain, /​To welcome him to his new abode’ (lines 15–​18)? As if in answer to his prayer, the poem thus snaps out of the mazy historical tenses of the first two stanzas (‘did bring’, ‘did sing’, ‘should release’) and into the Biblical present, siting the reader along the road to Bethlehem: ‘See how far upon the eastern road /​The star-​led wizards haste with odours sweet, /​O run, prevent them with thy humble ode, /​And lay it lowly at his blessed feet’ (lines 22–​6). ‘Prevent’ no doubt plays on the Latin root praevenīre, to anticipate, literally to come first, but the edge of schoolboy competitiveness, the desire to block or frustrate the arrival of the Magi with their gifts, may be heard as well. I say ‘schoolboy competitiveness’ advisedly, for as we know, the year previous Milton did have ‘the honour first’ in being chosen to deliver an oration to his Cambridge college as part of the ritual festivities of the academic year.25 Conducted partly in Latin, partly in the vernacular, the English half of Milton’s performance on this occasion comes down to us as the verses At a Vacation Exercise, among the pieces added by Milton to the second edition of his Poems. The centre of interest in those lines is of course the young Milton’s articulation of the desire to pursue in his native tongue things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme, Such where the deep transported mind may soar Above the wheeling poles, and at heaven’s door Look in, and see each blissful deity How he before the thunderous throne doth lie, Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings To the touch of golden wires … (lines  33–​8)

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We might note that Milton’s view to a literary career here takes the form of listening in to Apollo’s heavenly music, of tuning his future poem to the classical god’s golden lyre. In the Nativity Ode, of course, the entry of Christ into the world augurs the dispersal of the pagan gods, the supersession of the light of Apollo by the light of Christian revelation: thus while the child lay in the manger, the sun, we are told, … hid his head for shame, As his inferior flame, The new-​enlighten’d world no more should need; He saw a greater Sun appear Than his bright Throne, or burning Axletree could bear. (lines  80–​4)

It is thus possible to read the Ode as pointing to a higher ambition than that voiced in At a Vacation Exercise, and as collateral on that ambition’s fulfilment –​in other words, as a self-​revisionary gesture whose end is Paradise Lost. But ‘O run, prevent them’, ‘Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet’, as it turns out, is mere schoolboy delusion, the first of a series of false poetic and temporal surmises made by the speaker of the Ode. Moreover, the worshipping and the rout of Apollo is not a straightforwardly linear or supersessional narrative, but rather a recursive drama that repeats itself throughout the 1645 Poems, not a sign of the apocalypse, but the pattern of history itself. The desire to be present at the birth of Christ, to have ‘the honour first thy Lord to greet’, may seem to run in a direction counter to the speaker’s millenarian hopefulness, but in fact these visions are deeply connected within the poem. In counterpoint to the decay of time experienced in the fallen world, Milton at several points invokes an eternal, cosmic music identified at once with the angelic choir and with the music of the spheres: ‘Such Musick (as ‘tis said)’ was made ‘But when of old the sons of morning sung’ (lines 117–​22), such music as did greet ‘The Shepherds on the Lawn’ on the morning of Christ’s nativity (lines 85–​100). Not content merely to apostrophise these divine harmonies, however, in stanza XIII Milton seems to hope of catching their strain in his own hymn, much as he had fantasised tuning his voice to the golden lyre of Apollo in the lines At a Vacation Exercise: ‘For if such holy Song /​Enwrap our fancy long, /​Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold’ (lines 133–​5). Here the various temporalities of the poem threaten to collapse completely,

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as the now-​time of the poet’s utterance verges on a moment of apocalypse from which time will run backwards to the birth of Christ and even to the happy morn of Creation. Moreover, Milton conceives his Nativity Ode not only as heralding this universal redemption but indeed as performative, as making the apocalypse happen now.26 It is thus that Milton entertains the possibility of preventing the Magi with his ‘humble ode’: for if time runs in reverse, Milton really can overtake them on the road to Bethlehem; and even Virgil –​on whose Fourth Eclogue the Nativity Ode is partly modelled –​cannot be said to rival the speaker’s enrapt fancy, channelling the music of the spheres. What could be worthier of ‘the honour first’ than such an apocalyptic hymn? Much hangs I would argue on the sense of the word ‘fancy’, balanced as it is between vatic grandeur and inspiration on the one hand and its more trifling and self-​deluding senses on the other, the difference between ‘The flaming dartes, That Fancie quickly burne with quenchlesse fyre’, as in Thomas Howell’s Deuises (1581), and ‘Forrests, where are sometimes heard great illusions, and phancies’, as the word is used in a History of 1656.27 The poem deliberately prolongs our deciding which it shall be, prolongs its fancy, so that we may glimpse ‘leprous sin’ melting from the earth (line 138) and ‘Truth and Justice’ down returning (lines 141–​2), until heaven itself should ‘open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall’ (line 147). But wisest fate says no (line 149): stanza XVI, the very hinge and midpoint of the poem, undoes Milton’s ‘fantasy of an early access to heavenly bliss’.28 Under the sway of Stanley Fish, we have come to think of Paradise Lost as anticipating and correcting the wayward responses of the fallen reader.29 Here, as is more characteristic of the 1645 Poems, it is the speaker himself who is corrected.30 And he has gone wrong in at least two ways: eschatalogically, insofar as the poem has mistaken the Incarnation for the Atonement, the first Advent for the Second Coming; while from the point of view of Christian ethics, Milton’s speaker has surely failed the test of humility in pretending to usurp Christ’s apocalyptic agency –​sharpening with retrospective irony the wish to lay his poem ‘lowly at his blessed feet’. What occurs in stanzas XVI through XVIII is a restoration of time to its proper horizons, a disentangling of Christ’s nativity from his death on the cross, the poet’s moment from the moment of apocalypse, ‘When at the worlds last session /​The dreadfull Judge in middle Air shall spread his throne’ (lines 163–​4). And it is within

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the space opened between these Christian eschatological terminuses that Milton stages the rout of the pagan gods which occupies stanzas XIX through XXV of the hymn, ‘Apollo from his shrine’ (line 176), the wood-​nymphs ‘With flowre-​inwov’n tresses torn’ (line 187), the Latin lars and lemurs (line 191), Peor and Baalim (line 198), ‘sullen Moloch’ (line 205), and ‘the brutish gods of Nile’ (line 211). Despite the fact that the poem’s most surprising turn consists in the deflating of Milton’s premature apocalyptic vision, critics have nevertheless insisted on the sense of foreshortening time in the dispersal of the false gods, and thus also on the topical point and prescience of this section. According to Revard, ‘the very mention of the imminence of the golden age creates a sense of double time. In the present tense, in the ode’s own time, the millennium seems far closer for the young Protestant poet’.31 Having teased out a web of associations between Apollo and the seventeenth-​century papacy and between the sun god and Stuart monarchy, ‘Milton’, she concludes, ‘proclaims the commencement of a “new and great period” –​an Age of Gold, directly opposed to that which Vatican poets and Stuart kings had once proclaimed’.32 We need not doubt the whiff of contemporary religious politics Revard and other critics have discerned in the Ode; certainly in 1645, the purification of worship would have resonated for some readers as a glance at the Laudian church. But then the poem was written not in 1645 but in 1629, and we need to take seriously, first, that the whole design of the poem is to upstage the fantasy of imminent apocalypse, and to consider as well the dynamics of recursion at work in Milton’s conception of Christian history. ‘However unprecedented the sacred event it describes’, writes David Quint in a magisterial essay on the Ode, ‘Milton’s version is modeled closely on an earlier classical poem which tells a nearly identical story’, namely Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris, itself a retelling of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, wherein we hear of Apollo’s birth at Delos and of his slaying of the Python at Delphi and the institution of the oracle. At a somewhat more oblique angle, Quint supposes Milton also to be recalling Julian the Apostate’s Hymn to King Helios, written to celebrate the birth of the sun at the winter solstice, a pagan reclamation of the old gods –​and in particular the sun god Apollo –​against the backdrop of Julian’s renounced Christianity. At one level, of course, this may be understood as a way of intertextually encoding Milton’s familiar desire to outgo his classical predecessors,

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and it obviously deepens as well the supersessional narrative of the poem, the overcoming of false oracles and shadowy gods by the one true light of Christ. As Quint recognises, however, these models and analogues also pose a ‘double problem’ to Milton’s poem, in that ‘its celebration of the birth of the true God repeats the pattern of a pagan nativity hymn, [and] that pagan error has the potential to return after it has supposedly been definitively banished’.33 Within this problematic, Quint wants to explore what he calls Milton’s deeply felt fantasy of a regressive ‘infancy’, a fantasy tied ‘to the … idea of a poetry of pure music and transcendence’.34 And it is in the dispelling of such hopes and expectations that Quint compellingly locates the drama of the poem. In the end though this wonderful reading of the Ode cannot resist the temptation to compensate for Milton’s bitter loss of his dream by resituating the poet within a reassuring teleology of becoming: ‘Like the birth of Christ, the poem is a pledge of greater things to come: a poetic career. The shape of that career must still reveal itself to the waiting Milton –​“but now begins” (line 167). A star is born.’35 ‘But now begins’ is of course the phrase that has most encouraged critics to invest the Ode with a prophetic fullness of meaning; and with ‘A star is born’ Quint, no less than Teskey, hails the poet’s self-​realisation as ‘John Milton’ in the conclusion of the Ode. I want to resist this temptation. Rather, I want to suggest that the Ode’s problematic of Apollonian supersession and regression is deliberately repeated throughout the collection of verse Milton assembled in 1645, the theme of which is not the miraculous birth of ‘John Milton’ but instead his failure decisively to appear. The Delian himself is coming Apollo, it may be recalled, stands at the head of the family of gods Milton associates in Elegia Sexta with what he calls ‘light Elegy’ (Elegía levis, VI.49). Writing to Charles Diodati –​who had apparently apologised in a previous letter for the ineptness of his verse, pleading the distraction of holiday festivities –​Milton playfully rebukes his friend, ‘Why do you complain that poetry is a fugitive from wining and feasting? Song loves Bacchus; Bacchus loves song. And Phoebus was not ashamed to wear green clusters of ivy-​berries, and even to prefer the ivy to his own laurel’ (VI.13–​16).36 The sixth elegy is of course exactly contemporary with the Ode, as we know

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from Milton’s mentioning the composition of the nativity poem in his letter to his friend (VI.79–​90). It thus seems entirely apt to observe the parallel in the Poemata –​a parallel centred in Elegy 6 –​with the staggering Apollonian successions of the Ode. For in Elegy 5, composed in spring 1629, we find the young poet flush with confidence in his gifts, and wondering whether he has been touched by the grace of Apollo: ‘Am I mistaken’, Milton writes, ‘or do poetic powers return to me too and is inspiration present within me as a gift from the spring? … The Delian himself is coming, I behold his hair entwined with the laurel of Peneus; the Delian himself is coming’ (V.5–​6, 13–​14).37 The daring conceit of the elegy is thus to analogise the poet’s awakening to the touch of Apollo with the Earth’s sensual quickening at springtime, a performance the most recent translator of the Latin poems, Estelle Haan, calls ‘lavishly descriptive and highly rhetorical’, ‘pulsat[ing] with youthful energy’.38 The next poem in the sequence is of course the letter to Diodati, another poem about the turning of the year and the kind of poetry thereby occasioned and inspired. As we have seen, Elegia Sexta begins with that instructive exposition of the offices of the Muses, set against Diodati’s complaint ‘that poetry is a fugitive from wining and feasting’ (VI.13). The second half of the composition, however, pivots away from the lighter gods and ‘light Elegy’, as Milton contemplates the higher vocation of the divine poet, to which he seemingly aspires: let him possess a ‘youthfulness that is free of villainy and is chaste, and strict morals, and a hand without stains’, Milton writes, ‘just like you, seer, when in sacred vestment and gleaming with the waters of purification, you rise to face the furious deities’ (VI.63–​6).39 ‘For indeed’, says the poet, ‘the bard is sacred to the gods; is priest of the gods. His concealed heart and lips express the essence of Jove’ (VI.77–​8).40 Elegia Sexta thus seems to stage, and in a very exact way, the same rout of Apollo we observed in the Nativity Ode, linking the two poems in its final verse paragraph, which conveys to Diodati the outline of Milton’s nativity poem. ‘Indeed’, writes Anthony Low, ‘just as the infant Christ was shown banishing the pagan gods in the Nativity Hymn, so Milton, describing the theme, in effect gently banishes them at the end of Elegia Sexta and thus completes his abandonment of typological indirection by disowning the figures on which that method rests’.41 Not surprisingly then has the Elegy been read in much the same terms as the Ode, as ‘possessing great autobiographical

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significance’, as a ‘landmark’ in Milton’s spiritual development.42 No less than its companion piece, Milton’s sixth elegy is to be understood as a fully self-​present utterance, whose aim is to narrate a significant break or turn, from light elegy to sacred verse, from serving Apollo to serving some ‘greater Sun’. Characteristically, Barbara Lewalski further detects a shared reformist purpose, the ‘catalogue of pagan gods expelled from their shrines’ registering ‘Puritan anxiety in 1629 about the “papist idolatry” fostered by Laud’.43 But given how much interpretive weight is thus placed on relations of parallelism, symmetry, and sequence, how should we read Elegy 7, or apprehend the overall plan of development laid out in the Elegiarum Liber? For the seventh elegy, composed before the fifth and sixth but placed after them, shows us a Milton engaging freely with an Ovidian erotic mode: here it is May again, and Milton drinks not ‘moderate draughts from a pure spring’ (Sobriaque è puro pocula fonte bibat, VI.62) but is rather intoxicated with beauty, he is Apollo in love with Daphne, pierced by Cupid’s arrows (VII.31–​4, 65–​74). And indeed, his sense of decorum is at once classical and Cavalier, Milton here recalling Herrick’s suggestive focusings of attention as he describes how Cupid ‘clung now to the maiden’s eyelids, now to her face; on this side he leaps onto her lips, on that he rests upon her cheeks: and over whatever areas the nimble archer hovers, woe is me, he strikes my unarmed breast in a thousand places’ (VII.69–​ 72).44 It was just such high spirits and teasing indirection that Lord Rochester would so superbly mimic as he came to re-​invent Cavalier poetry under a new Stuart regime: ‘A touch from any part of her had done’t: /​Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt’ (The Imperfect Enjoyment, lines 17–​18). The poet of Elegy 7, by virtue of Milton’s titling of the poem in 1645, is said to be a portrait of the artist ‘In the nineteenth year of his life’, and so junior to the poet of the fifth elegy, composed ‘at the Age of 20’, and to the Milton of the Nativity Ode and Elegia Sexta, both written shortly after the poet’s twenty-​ first birthday on 9 December 1629. Within the sequence of the elegies, however, the poet of Elegy 7 is also paradoxically senior and successor to these poetic speakers, and the Christian triumph staged in Elegy 6 thus followed by a jolting Apollonian return: for at the close of his Ovidian verses, Milton avers to Cupid, ‘your altars will smoke with my offerings and to me you alone will be supreme among the gods’ (VII.97–​8).45

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Appended to Elegia septima in the 1645 volume, separated by a printer’s rule, is a postscript that ostensibly divides the formal elegies from the Latin epigrams which follow, Haec ego mente. And here Milton yet once more seems to disown or turn away from the lighter verse he has just been showcasing; indeed, the positioning of these lines after Elegy 7 leaves it ambiguous as to whether the postscript refers to the poem immediately previous or to the sequence as a whole. ‘In the past with foolish mind and languid intellect’, admits the poet, ‘I set up these trophies of my wantonness. Thus without doubt did mischievous error carry me away and drive me on … until the shady Academy offered me Socratic streams, and caused me to discard the yoke I had incurred’ (lines 1–​6). Milton’s rhetoric, however, savours for Haan of the mock-​heroic, and surely there is an aura of conventionality about this farewell to youthful folly, which Milton echoes in his poem to the Bodleian librarian John Rous, verses which covered a replacement copy of Milton’s Poems. Edmund Waller, for instance, whose Poems were published the same year as Milton’s, and by the same bookseller, Humphrey Moseley, affects a similar attitude when he writes in a dedicatory epistle to the Lady Sophia Murray, ‘here your ladyship hath not only all I have done, but all I ever mean to do of this kind … these nightingales sung only in the spring; it was the diversion of their youth’.46 Waller, of course, was hardly done writing verse in 1645; and it may be recalled that Paradise Regained (1671) opens by echoing some Virgilian lines looking back on his georgics and eclogues, and so frames Milton’s earlier epic itself as something of a pastoral trifle.47 The politics of Mirth and Melancholy To be sure, Milton is deeply interested in questions of vocation, and absorbed in and by Renaissance debates about the virtues of different kinds of poetry, debates that go back to Plato and Aristotle. But we need to understand Milton’s rehearsal of these themes in his early verse as conventional and provisional, and not necessarily as fully or self-​ presently constitutive of the self writing, another case in point being L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, that remarkable pair of poems in which Milton contemplates the rival gifts of Mirth and Melancholy, and indeed perhaps more searchingly, explores what Teskey calls ‘opposite possibilities in the self ’.48 These pendant pieces have of course more

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often been read in terms of the same narrative of the rising poet that colours interpretations of the Ode and of the 1645 Poems as a whole. Thus for Louis Martz, while they are companion poems, ‘they are not of equal strength and stature. Their relation is rather that of Younger Brother to Elder Brother. The parallels between them, so familiar to everyone, should not lead us to read the poems in parallel, as though they were two sides of a coin, or two sides of an academic debate. For the poems develop a linear, sequential effect, moving from youthful hedonism toward the philosophic, contemplative mind’.49 Insofar as the movement Martz describes also entails a turning away from Cavalier verse and from the Caroline politics of mirth and toward ‘something like prophetic strain’, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso thus describe yet another pattern of replacing false lights with true, and of Milton’s star rising through an act of poetic purification.50 Each poem begins by ritually dispelling its opposite, so that in L’Allegro ‘loathèd Melancholy /​Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born’ (lines 1–​2) is bid hence, while ‘heart-​easing Mirth’ is welcomed as the daughter of Venus and Bacchus and sister to the graces of brightness and youthful bloom (lines 11–​16). Mirth’s parentage thus places her within that family of Apollonian deities said to attend the enjoyment of wine, roses, and song in Elegy 6. Appropriately, then, L’Allegro dallies with the ploughman and the milkmaid in the meadows of pastoral, and only when the gay country folk have crept to bed does the poem look in on the ‘pomp, and feast, and revelry’ (line 127) of the urban throng, and finally closes with a hymn to Shakespeare and the invocation of a higher music ‘married to immortal verse’ (line 137). If, as Campbell and Corns wryly note, ‘These are not the pleasures of a radical-​in-​waiting, but of one who loves cake and ale’, we might think that the anticipated transcendence of those pleasures in Il Penseroso serves here to license Milton’s L’Allegrian gambol, and indeed he makes something of a show of echoing soft Elizabethan pastoral and the carpe diem themes of the Cavaliers.51 Singing ‘The frolic wind that breathes the spring, /​Zephyr with Aurora playing, /​As he met her once a-​Maying’ (lines 18–​20), sounds pure Herrick, and we hear as well snatches of Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd to his Love’, or overhear stories of Shakespeare’s Queen Mab and Robin Goodfellow. The notion that Milton might appropriate the dominant forms and idioms of Caroline culture with the aim of making them his own, that is, with the prerogative of a reformer, is of course a familiar

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one: how else are we to understand Milton’s setting his hand to a masque, that signature genre of Stuart cultural politics.52 And even as L’Allegro rises to its climax, reaching toward the highest expression of Mirth, Milton’s language seems to cast in doubt the sublime music it evokes: ‘Lap me in soft Lydian airs’, the speaker commands, Married to immortal verse Such as the meeting soul may pierce In notes, with many a winding bout Of linkèd sweetness long drawn out, With wanton heed, and giddy cunning, The melting voice through mazes running; Untwisting all the chains that tie The hidden soul of harmony. (lines 136–​44)

‘Lydian airs’, editors often note, were associated by Plato with effeminacy and moral slackness, and virtually all of Milton’s terms of praise carry within them similar connotations of moral defect or danger: in Paradise Lost Eve’s hair will be described as waved ‘in wanton ringlets’ (4.306), while the Satan of Paradise Regained is compared to a man ‘matchless held /​In cunning’ (4.10–​11). Even ‘sweetness’ –​exalted in that Horatian formula of dulce et utile –​is compromised by the puritanical suspicion ‘that whatsoeuer [the devil] would haue sticke fast to our soules, might slippe downe in suger’, as Stephen Gosson inveighed in an Elizabethan attack on stage plays.53 The delights of Mirth thus seem ambivalent indeed, and point to their own supersession by ‘divinest Melancholy’ (Il Penseroso, line 12). But we may wonder whether the dialectical overcoming of L’Allegro by Il Penseroso is achieved as resolutely as critics have imagined. The hellish genealogy of Melancholy asserted in the former poem is of course here corrected by a counter-​myth of Milton’s invention, so as to emphasise her ancientness and spotless purity: ‘Thee bright-​haired Vesta long of yore, /​To solitary Saturn bore’ (lines 23–​4). Vesta is the Roman goddess of hearth and home, served by that holy order of vestal virgins, while a Saturnine paternity reaches back into the time before the gods of Olympus, ‘making [Melancholy] fundamental to the metaphysical order of the world’.54 The contrast with Venus and Bacchus is carefully prepared, so carefully in fact that Milton anxiously introduces that which his myth seeks to expel, an origin caught up in

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the throes of lust (and of an incestuous lust no less): ‘His daughter she (in Saturn’s reign, /​Such mixture was not held a stain)’ (lines 25–​6). And in the shadows there curl the darker lineaments of this mythography, the prospect of a cycle of violent patricidal rebellions: ‘Oft in glimmering bowers, and glades /​… in secret shades /​Of woody Ida’s inmost grove’ would Saturn meet Melancholy’s mother, ‘While yet there was no fear of Jove’ (lines 27–​30).55 Attending Melancholy is a train of personified attributes, Peace, Quiet, Fasting, Leisure, Contemplation, and finally Silence. ‘But first, and chiefest’ of these, says the poet, is ‘Him that yon soars on golden wing, /​Guiding the fiery-​wheelèd throne, /​The cherub Contemplation’ (lines 51–​4). Commentators have typically glossed this image by way of Ezekiel’s inspired vision of a chariot with a sapphire throne and flaming coals between its wheels (Ezek. 10:1–​7), but we should also register the expectation aroused by Milton’s poetic language in the mythic context in which it functions: at the end of the period surely it is the golden god Apollo we look for rather than the cherub Contemplation, the Apollo whom Milton emblazons in the Nativity Ode amidst his ‘bright Throne’ and ‘burning Axletree’ (line 84). There is in this moment then something like a return of the repressed, in the form of a new ruling deity (‘first and chiefest’) who inescapably recalls the Apollonian patron of ‘light elegy’ even as Il Penseroso stages his over-​going. Martz’s reading of the poems’ relation as one of little brother to elder brother thus has purchase here only as a bit of comic inversion, where the cherub, Phaeton-​like, presumes to drive the flaming chariot, to take precedence over Apollo, to come first. As to the genealogy of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso themselves, their date of composition is teasingly uncertain, and they may or may not have been written at the same time, or in birth order. Campbell and Corns suggest the summer of 1631, the last summer of Milton’s Cambridge years, as perhaps ‘less unlikely than the alternatives’, and it may well be that behind or beneath the poems’ allegorical scaffolding lies the simpler contrast between the pleasures of life in the college and the quiet and contemplation of a summer in the country.56 It bears noting however that the dual perspectives of ‘The Happy Man’ and ‘The Melancholy Man’ are equally conditioned by the social and material conditions of Milton’s writing, by the opportunities for study and leisure afforded the son of a prosperous cosmopolitan bourgeois.

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Mention of Milton senior prompts some further doubts about the poet’s presumed course of development, these biographical rather than representational. The Milton household has long been thought the breeding ground of Milton’s Puritanism. Christopher Hill for instance emphasises the elder Milton’s being ‘turned out of his Oxfordshire home by his yeoman father, who adhered to the old religion while his son became a Bible-​reading Protestant’; he tells us that John junior ‘must have absorbed the “protestant ethic” with the air he breathed’; and he stresses the influence on the young Milton of Richard Stock, the rector of his parish and a ‘natural’ Puritan, and of Thomas Young, Milton’s home tutor from the ages of nine to twelve, whom Aubrey recalls as ‘a puritan in Essex, who cutt his haire short’.57 More recent research, however, has challenged the evidentiary basis for Milton’s having had an actively Puritan upbringing. As Corns observes in an important essay, Milton senior ‘would seem to have been a churchwarden of the chapel at ease of Hammersmith, a congregation and a foundation which has been described as distinctly Laudian and ceremonial in flavour’.58 Following the taking of his MA from Cambridge in July 1632, the poet was continuously in residence at Hammersmith until his father removed the family to the village of Horton in 1636; it was during this period of studious retirement at Hammersmith that Milton composed Arcades and the Bridgewater Mask, as well as a number of other poems, including, possibly, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso.59 The poet’s father was also a trustee of the Blackfriars Playhouse and a composer in his own right, deeply devoted to ‘the complex musical traditions of the mediaeval church’, which even Hill admits seems a ‘paradoxical combination’ with the elder Milton’s Puritan spirit –​and indeed we might ask then whether the label does not beg the question.60 On David Norbrook’s view, Milton’s ‘brief phase of responsiveness to Caroline aestheticized politics gave way to an increasingly emphatic politicization of aesthetics’.61 But if we expect the sensually and spiritually suspect airs of L’Allegro to find their corrective in the ideals of Il Penseroso, that is, to find here a neat allegory of Milton’s self-​unfolding as reformist poetic bard, we must think again. For here we have another instance of a turning away that is also a falling back, another incompleting Apollonian succession, and another disappointed watching and waiting for ‘John Milton’ to appear. The circuit of imagination travelled in Il Penseroso takes us from the

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monastery to the cathedral –​hardly what we would expect from an anti-​Laudian radical. Melancholy is figured as a ‘pensive Nun, devout and pure, /​Sober, stedfast, and demure’ (lines 31–​2), described paradoxically as embodying holy stillness and ecstatic rapture: ‘Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes /​There held in holy passion still’ (lines 40–​1). At the end of the poem, the controlled strain of this collocation is ratcheted past the breaking point, as the speaker exhorts Melancholy to pour the beauty of holiness in at his eyes and ears, until he shatters into delirious visions: ‘But let my due feet never fail’, he enjoins the goddess, To walk the studious Cloysters pale, And love the high embowed Roof, With antick Pillars massy proof, And storied Windows richly dight, Casting a dimm religious light There let the pealing Organ blow, To the full voic’d Quire below, In Service high, and Anthems cleer, As may with sweetnes, through mine ear, Dissolve me into extasies, And bring all Heav’n before my eyes. (lines 155–​66)

Here are gothic arches and stained glass, here is the polyphonic choral music beloved by John Milton junior and senior, here is ‘linkèd sweetness’, here is melting and self-​undoing. Here at the close of Il Penseroso, in other words, we find ourselves within the compass of its rejected and excluded other. To begin with Herrick-​like song and end in Crashaw-​like rapture: can we say that the sequence of movements traced by L’Allegro and Il Penseroso maps onto a linear course ‘from youthful hedonism toward the philosophic, contemplative mind’, or that it convincingly discloses the succession of a taste for ‘Caroline aestheticized politics’ by an emphatically politicised Puritan aesthetics? To be sure, these twin poems, like the Nativity Ode, are imbued with Milton’s hopes for himself and his career, and indeed with ‘prophetic strain’, presaging a new light, a new age. Like the ‘greater Sun’ who overcomes Apollo, ‘divinest Melancholy’ rises over L’Allegro. But inscribed within these supersessional narratives is a problematic of recursion,

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and an emphasis, in David Loewenstein’s words, ‘upon process rather than static completion’.62 The model for such a vision of history is not apocalyptic rupture but rather, we might say, a reformation always reforming: ‘For when God shakes a Kingdome with strong and healthfull commotions to a generall reforming, ‘tis not untrue that many sectaries and false teachers are then busiest in seducing; but yet more true it is’, says the Milton of Areopagitica (1644), ‘that God then raises to his own work men of rare abilities, and more then common industry not only to look back and revise what hath bin taught heretofore, but to gain furder and goe on, some new enlighten’d steps in the discovery of truth’ (CPW, 2:566). It is under the sign of perpetual re-​vision that reformation is to be written: ‘For when God shakes a Kingdome’ signifies not a single, determinate action or moment but rather describes events or situations that exist, as the grammarian would say, ‘always, usually, habitually; they exist now, have existed in the past, and probably will in the future’.63 ‘But now begins’ thus takes on a complex, iterative force: the new, the now, the ‘Miltonic’ begins not at one time in The Poems of Mr. John Milton, but ‘at several times’, as his title page deliberately tells us, begins again and again. Turn, turn, turn Further attempts to identify a decisive turning point in the spiritual or autobiographical arc of the volume tend similarly to fall apart under the weight of their collective incoherence and in the face of other evidence readily available to the reader of Milton’s Poems. Thus for A. S. P. Woodhouse, ‘Vastly important as is the experience recorded in the Nativity, it is not final. It does not turn Milton into the religious poet whom we know. It requires for its completion another experience, recorded just three years later in the sonnet How soon hath Time’, an experience which for Woodhouse ‘stands in place of what the Puritans called conversion’.64 In Teskey’s magisterial new study of Milton’s verse, from the Nativity Ode to Samson Agonistes, it is not the sonnet but rather the Mask (composed 1634) that provides the volta in the form of Sabrina, who ‘rises from the stream as a new and unexpected act of thinking’, ‘the kind of thinking that would lead, in the second phase of Milton’s career, to engagement with the world and to fighting

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for liberty’.65 While for Campbell and Corns, ‘The most important year of Milton’s Horton period is 1637, which in many ways marks a turning point in his life’, 1637 being the year, of course, that saw the writing of Lycidas.66 More than any salient feature of the Miltonic text, what these claims illuminate is the interpretive desire that shapes commentary on the Poems, the will to suffuse Milton’s utterances –​and they are unambiguously Milton’s –​with a plenitude of meaning and to discern within the poems a consistent teleology of the self.67 As I argue in the Introduction to this book, such desires are consonant with a wider historiographical investment in the inexorable rise of principled opposition to Stuart monarchy among the godly bourgeoisie –​ consonant, in other words, with the self-​ unfolding of a Puritan revolution, for which the emergence of a radical Milton stands as synecdoche. As William Walker observes, ‘Milton the proto-​liberal is a significant figure in the history of a progression and advance towards a particular kind of socio-​political organisation, one that is best embodied in contemporary liberal democratic nations such as the United States’.68 In the rest of this chapter, I show to the contrary how each of these ‘pivotal’ texts –​Sonnet VII, Lycidas, and the Mask –​participates in the same dynamic of frustrated or ambiguous fulfilment we have been tracing, extending the analysis from formal and thematic elements into the material conditions that bear, in particular, on our understanding of the Ludlow play. For it is the ‘Work Not Called Comus’, as Teskey wryly terms it, that marks –​in point of bibliographical if not biographical fact –​the endpoint of Milton’s early English poetry. In troubling the tendentious search for an origin that has characterised so much study of the young Milton, I thus hew to the homespun truth of Conrad Russell –​memorably expressed in the essay that launched a thousand revisionist ships –​that ‘historians who describe the years before revolutions’ are like ‘a man who sits down to read a detective story after beginning with the last chapter’. For, Russell remarked, ‘Those who write the story remembering the ultimate conclusion may miss many of the twists and turns which gave it suspense along the way. They may even forget that the result was ever in suspense’.69 Sonnet VII would seem on its face unlikely to comprise the denouement of Milton’s self-​becoming, insofar as it presents a mini-​drama also limned both in the poem that leads off the collection and in that

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which (almost) concludes it. In Milton’s sonnet (c. December 1632), the octave anxiously testifies to the fruitlessness of the poet’s studious labours, and to the swift passage of time, misgivings evidently allayed in the sestet by the application of a Scriptural parallel, in this case the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1–​16). In the Ode, of course, Milton begins by imploring the Heavenly Muse to inspire him with holy song so that he might not be caught empty-​ handed on the morning of Christ’s nativity. He ends less by applying Scripture than by inserting himself into the New Testament tableau, soothing his as-​yet-​unfulfilled ambitions through identification with the ‘Bright-​harnest Angels’ who ‘sit in order serviceable’ (line 244).70 Replaying the tropes of Sonnet VII more closely still, the fraught opening of Lycidas (‘Yet once more, O ye Laurels’) alludes not only to Milton’s earlier memorial poems but surely also to his sonnet and its lament, ‘My hasting dayes flie on with full career, /​But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th’ (lines 3–​4).71 And yet once more, Milton here finds recompense in the lineaments of Scripture, the drowned Lycidas ‘sunk low, but mounted high, /​Through the dear might of him that walk’d the waves’ (lines 172–​3), and with him the poet, too, dropping and rising: ‘And now the Sun had stretch’d out all the hills, /​And now was dropt into the Western bay; /​At last he rose’ (lines 190–​2). The ‘conversion experience’ supposedly witnessed by the sonnet is also more problematic than Woodhouse would have it. ‘How soon hath Time’ opens, he says, ‘on the uncharacteristic note of self-​distrust’ (though what, we may wonder, is uncharacteristic about it in the context of Milton’s early poetry): ‘How little he has so far accomplished; how immature he seems; how dubious the promise of future achievement, on which he has staked everything! Yes, but he is in God’s hand. Much or little, soon or late, it will be as God has determined. All that is in the poet’s power, and all that matters, is that by grace he may use his talent in God’s service and with submission to his will.’72 For … be it less or more, or soon or slow,   It shall be still in strictest measure eev’n,   To that same lot, however mean, or high, Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav’n;   All is, if I have grace to use it so,   As ever in my great task Masters eye. (lines  9–​16)

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Woodhouse’s confidence in Milton’s newfound resolve seems to be predicated on the poet’s recourse to the parable from Matthew, in which day labourers hired at the eleventh hour are paid at the same rate as those hired at dawn. When the workers who have ‘borne the burden and heat of the day’ murmur against the householder (20:12), he reproves them, saying, ‘Take that which is thine own, and go thy way; I will give unto this last, as much as to thee’ (20:14). On this reading, the parable acts as a tonic to Milton’s sense of belatedness, melting away the agony arising from Milton’s conviction in being called to a poetic vocation but not yet inspired to write something aftertimes should not willingly let die. Such confidence, however, is belied by the thorny commentary tradition surrounding this Biblical crux: how comforting indeed could Milton have found Calvin’s gloss on the text, that ‘men are created for activity’, and that ‘each has his divinely appointed station, so that he shall not sink into laziness’.73 That Milton’s application of the parable of the labourers in Sonnet VII may be attended by a certain degree of ambivalence can be felt in the irresoluble syntax of the poem’s last two lines –​‘All is, if I have grace to use it so, /​As ever in my great task Masters eye’ –​the uncertain interruption of the main clause by the conditional ‘if ’ clause, the ambiguous antecedents of ‘it’ and ‘so’, puzzles which have invited the persistent efforts of editors and commentators but which permit little consensus.74 It is possible to argue that the poem’s felt truth thus exceeds or transcends the frailty of linguistic particularity, but that is no more than to call an incomplete pass a touchdown.75 Surely what matters is the perceptible blurring of Milton’s language, the halo of indeterminacy that encircles the sonnet’s clinching turn. Of course Lycidas, too, has its mysteries, not least that enigmatic ‘two-​handed engine at the door’, which ‘Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more’ (lines 129–​30). No fewer than twenty pages of commentary in the Milton Variorum are devoted to this single figure, what the ‘engine’ looks like, who might wield it, and when –​with answers ranging from the two-​edged sword of Revelation (1:16) to the two houses of Parliament to the printing press.76 More puzzling still are the recurrent interruptions of the pastoral singer’s ‘monody’, the lability of the poem’s narrative voice. If the river god Cam and the Pilot of the Galilean Lake may be understood as integral to the poem’s fiction, forming part of an imaginary procession of mourners

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who come to weep for Lycidas (notwithstanding the jarring tonalities of St Peter’s speech), the same cannot be said for Phoebus Apollo, who does not ‘process’ but rather breaks into the poem from the outside, cracking its narrative frame: Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of Noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious days; But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th’ abhorred shears, And slits the thin-​spun life. But not the praise, Phoebus repli’d, and touch’d my trembling ears … (lines  70–​7)

Indeed, for the space of half a line we are not even aware another voice has begun speaking, until we are pulled up short by the retrospective attribution of ‘But not the praise’ to the god of poetry. Moreover, Phoebus Apollo’s intervention –​which is lifted of course from Virgil’s sixth eclogue –​threatens to destabilise the poem’s topoi, for the reproof speaks not to the uncouth swain’s grief for Lycidas but to his poetic ambitions, a sign that the poet’s discourse has strayed from his original theme. More perturbing even than these discontinuities, however, is the revelation in the last eight lines of the poem of a narrative frame that we did not know existed or that did not exist until Milton asserts it in line 186, ‘Thus sang the uncouth Swain’, abruptly transforming the mode of the poem, as J. Martin Evans observes, from drama to narrative. But just who is this newly revealed poetic speaker, and who is the uncouth swain, whose discourse has so far overwhelmingly led us to identify him with Milton? As in the case of the syntactically baffling close of ‘How soon hath Time’, scholars have variously leapt into the breach to repair any sense of dissonance here, have indeed construed this moment in the poem as performative in the strongest possible sense, arguing that these last eight lines constitute, in their utterance, a new self. Thus Evans: ‘Like a snake sloughing its skin, the singer withdraws from his song and in the final lines begins what is essentially a new song which contains the old one. It is as if the self of a dream had suddenly awakened into the self of everyday reality. The elegy and the swain who sang it recede into the distance, and we are

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left with the sense that we have witnessed a rebirth. In Pauline terms, Milton has cast off the old man.’77 But just here, where the ‘false surmise’ (line 153) of pastoral elegy might seem to be superseded by something like St Peter’s prophetic authority, the ‘uncouth swain’ by the reformist bard, the poet rising as if from baptism also rises as a new Apollo –​indeed, the poem utterly conflates the symbolic logics of the Christian and the classical. Just as Phoebus touches the trembling ears of the callow shepherd earlier in the poem, the poet who steps out of the frame in the final stanza now touches the tender stops of various quills (line 188). As if to reinforce this parallel, the lines And now the Sun had stretch’d out all the hills, And now was dropt into the Western bay; At last he rose, and twitch’d his Mantle blew: To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new … (lines  190–​3)

engender what seems a deliberate confusion as to the subject of ‘At last he rose’, the Sun dropping, the poet rising in his place: no longer ‘uncouth’, the shepherd who pipes at the end of Lycidas, so John Rogers teaches us, ‘can no longer be chided or criticized by Phoebus because he’s become Phoebus’.78 As we noted earlier, however, the movement described in this stanza also corresponds, and in a no less exact way, to the fate of Lycidas, ‘sunk low, but mounted high’ through the saving power of Christ. Here the pun which Milton had exploited in the Nativity Ode –​the Sun hiding his head when he sees a greater Sun appear –​ceases to be functional: we can no longer hear the difference. But if we are inclined to cling to sacred truths, could we not still maintain –​whatever its figural niceties –​that Lycidas nonetheless confirms two features of the essential narrative: in conjuring the ‘dread voice’ of St Peter, with his massy keys and apocalyptic engines, an unmistakably Puritan, reformist agenda. And in turning at the close from canzone structure to ottava rima –​the stanza form of Tasso and Ariosto and of their English translations –​the self-​ crowned laureate’s epic ambitions: ‘To morrow to fresh woods, and Pastures new.’79 Not, I would argue, unless we are content to read the poem without regard for either of the material contexts in which Milton’s early readers might have encountered it, the multi-​handed

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Cambridge volume in which Lycidas first appeared, Justa Edouardo King naufrago (1638), or the Poems of 1645, both of which present different, and differently complicating, socio-​bibliographical determinants. Lacking of course the headnote Milton would supply in 1645, and indeed the historical ground to which it refers –​the fall of Laud, the outbreak of civil war between king and Parliament, the writing of Milton’s anti-​prelatical tracts –​the key hermeneutic for Lycidas in the Justa is supplied not by its author but by the identity of its dedicatee and by the chorus of writers to which Milton here joins his voice. There was nothing of the radical about King, who held his fellowship at Trinity by virtue of crown mandate and expended the better part of his poetic efforts in writing panegyrics to the royal family. Moreover, among those who wept for Lycidas ‘are plenty who were currently enjoying considerable preferment in the university and church and would continue to do so, at least until ejection, from fellowships or livings, in the mid-​1640s, in some cases followed by significant reward at the Restoration’.80 Milton’s own collection of verse presents a rather different set of coordinates. The last written of Milton’s 1645 poems, critics have tended to view Lycidas as the volume’s natural terminus: ‘No longer content to sing his numbers languishing in the shades of Horton’, Evans writes, ‘Milton is about to abandon that part of himself represented by the swain, with his devotion to retirement, chastity, and poetry, in order to pursue an open-​ended future of heroic and sexual engagement. For the fact is that, with the exception of a few sonnets, Lycidas is the last poem Milton wrote in English for the next twenty years. Not until the dying days of the Commonwealth when he was almost sixty would Milton reassume that part of his identity which he had discarded at the end of Lycidas and take up the mantle of the shepherd-​poet “yet once more” ’.81 Likewise, Colin Burrow –​ in a telling slip, for he is as much as anyone impatient of Milton myth-​making –​refers to Lycidas in a recent review of the new Oxford Shorter Poems as ‘in almost every … respect the climactic poem in the 1645 volume, where it appears last in the sequence of English poems –​a sequence the Oxford editors, quite rightly, follow’.82 I call this a slip, for where else does the ‘Work Not Called Comus’ belong if not among the sequence of English poems? The uncouth swain of Lycidas thus does not step out of that poem and into Milton’s

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Protestant epic: rather, as we turn the pages of Milton’s book, he steps from pastoral elegy into pastoral masque.

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Whose masque is it anyway? Since the 1980s, as Comus has come increasingly to be read through the lens of politics, critical consensus has moulded itself around the idea that Milton’s Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, ‘In all its stages, but most emphatically in its final forms (1637/​1645) … is a reformed masque’,83 that Milton ‘makes that genre carry a fierce critique of court politics and aesthetics’.84 At the same time, we have been learning from historians of the book and of reading to reconstruct the ‘sociology of texts’ so that we might better appreciate the complex network of acts and intentions in and through which texts are produced and read.85 Under this stimulus, it has been difficult to ignore the buzz of aristocratic and royalist associations encoded in the Mask’s 1645 paratexts: the separate title page, testifying to its performance in 1634 before the Earl of Bridgewater, then President of Wales; the epistle dedicatory from Henry Lawes, gentleman of the king’s chapel and one of his majesty’s private music, to Bridgewater’s son and heir apparent, the Right Honourable John Lord Viscount Brackley; and the amiably chatty letter commending the masque from Sir Henry Wotton, erstwhile Provost of Eton. For Thomas Corns, such advertisements form part of Milton’s ‘quest for respectability’ in publishing the 1645 Poems, a quest borne out of the controversy over Milton’s notorious divorce pamphlets and which jars (in Corns’s view) with the evident Puritanism of the collection’s ‘maturer pieces’.86 More challengingly, Steven Zwicker has asked whether there is ‘any reason to suppose that readers in 1645 –​prompted by their experience of masques (if they had any) would have thought that Milton was aiming to reform its cultural politics rather than to associate himself with its achievements and authority, its compliment to hierarchy and social exclusivity’.87 Indeed, I want to explore for a moment whether we might view the textual signals which preface the 1645 Mask not simply as a kind of elevating cultural shorthand but as a key to understanding what we might call its social authorship. One consequence of treating Comus as if it were more or less an autonomous product of Milton’s imagination –​capable of being read like any other of Milton’s texts, of revealing his own preoccupations

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and course of development –​is of course an elision of the masque’s fundamental multimodality and of the possible meanings constituted in its ephemeral staging at Ludlow Castle on Michaelmas night, 1634. Beyond this, however, we also fail to consider adequately the ways in which the text may be shaped by other intending agents, despite how visible such agents are made by the published text.88 Lawes is sometimes referred to as Milton’s ‘collaborator’ in connection with Comus, yet the masque’s values are almost always identified with Milton’s values, as if Lawes’s role were wholly disinterested or incidental, when surely Lawes understood himself to be performing the duties of a royal servant in carrying out the Bridgewater masque, for as Lord President in Wales, the earl represented an extension of the crown’s authority (and thereby of Charles’s personal rule) in the region. Lawes not only wrote the music for the songs, he edited the script for the occasion, acted as stage manager both within and without the fiction of the masque, and, let us not forget, also served as the text’s scribal publisher before seeing it into print. Even less have critics thought of Bridgewater himself as sharing some part in the authorship of Comus, though there is good reason to believe that he took a more than passing interest in the shape of this most unusual theatrical entertainment, specially commissioned to mark his installation as governor, and to which a number of other civic officials and local grandees were invited. In testing the argument that ‘Milton’s … is a reformed masque’, then, we might well begin by asking, on whose behalf was it to be reformed? To take Bridgewater first, it has become commonplace to assert the Puritan character of the masque’s patron as a way of harmonising Milton’s supposed reforming zeal with a genre and occasion deeply associated with the maintenance of state power and traditional hierarchies. But a review of the available evidence readily exposes the tentative basis on which the earl’s oppositional identity has been established. A number of recent studies, for instance, authorise their glosses of Bridgewater’s Puritan ideological stance via Leah Marcus in The Politics of Mirth.89 On consulting Marcus’s discussion, however, we find that she opens by confessing that we actually know ‘remarkably little’ about Bridgewater’s conduct in public affairs, ‘and what we do know leads to conflicting interpretations’.90 The conclusion of William Riley Parker, that Bridgewater was a moderate Puritan or Puritan sympathiser, is here balanced against that of the greatest of

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civil war historians, S. R. Gardiner, who saw Bridgewater as a follower of royal policy.91 Two of the earl’s daughters, Frances and Katherine, Marcus notes, were to be celebrated after the Restoration for their Puritan virtue, however his son John –​that ‘sweet Lord’ to whom the masque is dedicated in the edition of 1637 as well as that of 1645, amidst the smoke and controversy of civil war –​was a staunch royalist who remembered his father as ‘a dutiful son to his Mother the Church of England in her persecution as well as in her great splendour; a loyal subject to his sovereign in those worst times, when it was accounted treason not to be a Traytor’.92 To these contradictions, Marcus adds that Bridgewater ‘ended up taking the parliamentary side in the Civil War’, but ‘not without considerable anguish over the break with Charles’.93 Bridgewater though did not lend his support to the parliamentary war effort so much as he withheld it from the crown: as late as 1640 he backed the king on the granting of supply before redress of the Commons’ grievances, and according to the historian who has most closely studied the earl’s civil war allegiances, his ‘neutral stance’ is best understood not in terms of political or religious principle but as the result of disgust with the government’s ‘ineptitude and pusillanimity’ combined with ‘the apparent fact that Bridgewater was treated with less than respect by the royal administration’.94 How likely can it be that Bridgewater thus thought to commemorate the inception of his vicegerent rule in the Marches by commissioning a masque fiercely critical of court politics and aesthetics? Moreover, how likely a vehicle for such a critique is a masque meant to star the earl’s children, Thomas age eight, John age eleven, and Alice age fifteen. For as John Creaser reminds us: The Court had only recently come to terms with aristocrats taking speaking parts in theatricals, and performances in plays by Queen Henrietta Maria had initially scandalised a good deal of English opinion. Few aristocrats other than Bridgewater’s patron Buckingham had taken speaking parts in masques by 1634. It was rather daring that the children should have had such roles, and it was certainly part of the up-​to-​date courtliness of the occasion.95

Indeed, as is well known, Lady Alice and Lord John had both performed in the court masque Tempe Restored of 1632, and John G. Demaray conjectured long ago that Lawes, who appeared in Tempe and was in the employ of the earl as music teacher to the Egerton children, may have

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engaged Milton ‘precisely to write a sequel to Townshend’s masque’.96 Notably, Tempe Restored seems to have marked the first appearance of a female singer in the history of the English stage,97 a piece of novelty recapitulated in Comus, which features the Lady as a soloist in the Song to Echo. The song is important, for it evidently required a good deal of vocal discipline, which in the semi-​allegorical world of the masque clearly figures as an expression of moral virtue: ‘Can any mortal mixture of Earths mould /​Breath such Divine inchanting ravishment?’, the magician Comus marvels. ‘Sure something holy lodges in that brest, /​And with these raptures moves the vocal air /​To testifie his hidd’n residence’ (lines 244–​8).98 More broadly, we can see that the masque Bridgewater commissioned from Lawes required a fictive circumstance appropriate to displaying the ‘fair Hopes, and rare Endowments’ of the Egerton children, and that this is the end toward which script and performance alike were directed. This is not to deny the political force of the masque or to insist that it was ‘essentially a children’s party’, ‘a children’s entertainment, requested by children and acted by children’.99 But it is to try to reimagine the politics of the masque through the circuits of authorship that might have presented themselves to those in attendance at Ludlow Castle on the night of its first performance. Much has of course been made of Milton’s choice to praise the virtue of chastity, and so to fashion and mobilise the Lady as ‘an independent subject and moral agent, the inviolably private, conscience-​governed self of Puritan culture’, eschewing the generic imperative to present goodness as an emanation of royal (or vice-​royal) authority.100 But is not the function of the masque’s final song exactly to suture the Lady and her brothers into a genealogy of virtue, to recognise their place within the body politic headed by their noble parents, ensconced in chairs of state: Noble Lord, and Lady bright, I have brought ye new delight, Here behold so goodly grown Three fair branches of your own, Heav’n hath timely tri’d their youth, And sent them here through hard assays With a crown of deathless Praise,     To triumph in victorious dance O’re sensual Folly, and Intemperance. (lines 966–​75)

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Lawes, as the Attendant Spirit, here sings as the children dance before their parents. The song ended, the performers no doubt bow to applause. Who, in that moment, ‘with the Earl of Bridgewater beaming with paternal pride, and all his assembled guests beaming too’, who would have seemed the author of this scene or of the entertainment it culminates?101 Lawes, the famous court composer and singer, shepherd and tutor to these well-​rehearsed wards? Bridgewater, the masque’s patron, the oak from which these ‘three fair branches’ spring? Or the uninvited John Milton, a writer hired for the occasion, with no literary reputation to speak of? Who in the audience, as they vigorously beat their hands together, adulating the earl and his family, would have thought this ‘the work of a Protestant radical’?102 Who, remembering John and Alice’s former masque roles, would have considered what they had just seen and heard a ‘reformation’ of the genre? Or might they well have thought it a domestic sequel to Tempe Restored, indeed perhaps the work of the same poet? The story of Comus after 29 September 1634 is thus one of Milton endeavouring to reassert ownership and control over the text and its meanings. Or rather we should say trying to assert ownership, for in the days, months, and years following its first performance, few could have been aware of the masque presented at Ludlow Castle, and fewer still of its being authored by John Milton. We do have evidence that the libretto, untethered from the material circumstances of its acting, began to attract an audience, presumably one centred in the court, as we may judge from Lawes’s prefatory remarks in the edition of 1637: ‘Although not openly acknowledg’d by the Author, yet it is a legitimate off-​spring’, Lawes writes to Brackley, ‘so lovely, and so much desired, that the often Copying of it hath tired my Pen to give my severall friends satisfaction, and brought me to a necessity of producing it to the publike view’ (A2r–​A2v). Milton’s motives for remaining anonymous in this edition are open to interpretation, yet the ‘sense of vulnerability’, as Ann Coiro writes, ‘of almost sexual danger for the masque, as it wanders the world unclaimed except as an aristocratic tribute, is striking’.103 Yet we can detect Milton at work here: comparison with the Trinity manuscript, in which Milton initially drafted and revised the Mask, and with the presumed acting text (the Bridgewater Ms), shows that 1637 not only restores those

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passages tactfully excised for performance –​including that speech of Comus, ‘List, Lady, be not coy, and be not cozened’, on fecundity and the uses of beauty (lines 737–​44) –​but also makes new additions ‘less scrupulous of the delights of occasion’.104 These are, principally, an amplification of the debate between Comus and the Lady, heightening Comus’s moral challenge (lines 679–​88) and endowing the Lady with a more potent rhetoric of reproach and with that ‘sage /​ And serious doctrine of Virginitie’ (lines 779–​99); and an opening out of the ‘heavenward’ topos of the epilogue. With a complete knowledge of Milton’s writings, we can see in the Lady, here armed with the ‘Sun-​clad power of Chastity’ (line 782), an image of the poet as he had imagined himself in Elegia Sexta, ‘in sacred vestment and gleaming with the waters of purification’, rising ‘to face the furious deities’. In 1645, when Milton came to publish his Poems, the Mask finally found an author, or rather found as its author John Milton, for surely the masque’s authorship had been conceived in some way or other before that point, perhaps as I have been imagining, as well perhaps in ways we could not imagine but which, as we shall see, were nonetheless possible. On its own the separate title page for the work in 1645 would be enough to suggest Milton’s eagerness to advertise his propriety in the Mask. Little inference is needed however where the title page revises that of 1637, ‘A MASKE /​PRESENTED /​At Ludlow Castle, /​1634’, to read ‘A /​MASK /​Of the same /​AUTHOR /​ PRESENTED /​AT LUDLOW-​Castle, /​1634’ (bold emphasis mine). Indeed, in the context of a single-​authored collection of verse, we might wonder why the poet should insist in quite this way on the authorship of a particular piece –​why the form of words used on the volume’s title page, ‘The Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, Compos’d at Several Times’, should not be thought sufficient to make clear the provenance of Comus. The answer to this puzzle is to be found in the letter from Henry Wotton, inserted in 1645 between the reprinted 1637 epistle dedicatory and the text of the masque. In that letter, dated 13 April 1638, the old diplomat and courtier thanks Milton for sending him a copy of the poem, ‘Wherin’, he says, ‘I should much commend the Tragical part, if the Lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Dorique delicacy in your Songs and Odes, wherunto I must plainly confess to have

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seen yet nothing parallel in our Language: Ipsa mollities’. ‘But I must not omit to tell you’, Wotton continues, That I now onely owe you thanks for intimating unto me (how modestly soever) the true Artificer. For the work it self, I had view’d som good while before, with singular delight, having receiv’d it from our common Friend Mr. R. in the very close of the late R’s Poems, Printed at Oxford, wherunto it was added (as I now suppose) that the Accessory might help out the Principal, according to the Art of Stationers, and to leave the Reader Con la bocca dolce.

What Wotton tells us in this somewhat coded account is that he had already read Milton’s masque: only he first read it as the work of someone else, for a copy of the anonymous 1637 Maske had evidently been bound together with a volume of plays and poems by the ‘late R’, Thomas Randolph, a Cambridge poet and favourite of the court –​maybe, as Wotton surmises, because the bookseller wanted to plump sales of the Randolph volume, but more likely, as Coiro argues, ‘because [Milton’s masque] seemed so strikingly similar, and the two together made a nice package’.105 We can thus grasp something of the particular force of that titular phrase, ‘Of the same /​AUTHOR’, yoking as it does the Mask to the poem that precedes it, to Lycidas, with its intimations of prophecy and apocalyptic, and at the same time warding off the possibility of misapprehension or misrecognition –​the conflation, as chance would have it, of Apollo with some greater Sun. Though we hardly associate Milton with middle ways or half measures, this chapter nonetheless charts a path between more extreme nodes of ‘revision’, one that would reformulate Milton as ‘antiformalist, unrevolutionary, and illiberal’, and another that would rewrite his radicalism in essentially secular terms –​a strenuously Baconian Milton, an ‘atheist’ Milton.106 The poet’s godliness and his commitment to some form of virtue politics that might be called ‘republican’ cannot be altogether erased –​and why should they invite erasure? At the same time, the story of Milton’s political and religious development might be better told with a principled regard for the hermeneutic uncertainty of those ‘strong and healthfull commotions’ Milton experienced and imagined in the context of revolutionary England. As we have seen, radical becoming, radical alteration is at once the hope and theme of Milton’s 1645 Poems, but it is a hope

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that again and again proves illusory. And indeed, as providential, as epoch-​shifting as the swing of the executioner’s axe on 30 January 1649 must have seemed, Charles I would spring back to life but ten days later in the pages of Eikon Basilike –​thus transforming the regicide from the end and telos of Milton’s polemicising into but another episode in the wayfaring Christian’s struggle for reformation. We might then recall as well secretary Milton’s extraordinary personal investment in the figure and government of Oliver Cromwell –​he had given, as he wrote in the sonnet to Cyriack Skinner, his very eyes ‘In libertyes defence, my noble task’ (line 11) –​only for Milton to write off the whole of the Protectorate, following Cromwell’s death, as ‘a short but scandalous night of interruption’ (CPW, 7:274).107 Not for nothing, then, does Milton’s sequence of epic poetry end with an apocalyptic vision of the Son’s final defeat of Satan, only to render that vision agonisingly premature: in the final lines of Paradise Regained (1671), Jesus ‘unobserv’d /​Home to his Mothers house private’ returns (4.638–​9), the shape of Christian history yet waiting to reveal itself. Notes 1 My discussion of Milton’s writing of the self in Poems 1645 is broadly endebted to Stephen Fallon’s invaluable study, Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-​ Representation and Authority (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). 2 B. K. Lewalski, ‘How radical was the young Milton?’, in S. Dobranski and J. Rumrich (eds), Milton and Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 66. 3 Lewalski, ‘How radical was the young Milton?’, p. 49, and following below. 4 P. Herman, Destabilizing Milton: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Poetics of Incertitude (New York: Palgrave, 2005), p. 21. According to Herman, ‘The paradigm that has largely governed Milton studies until very recently, and which continues to hold great sway, consists of three propositions: Milton is a poet of absolute, unqualified certainty; Paradise Lost coheres; The critic’s task is to make the poem cohere’, p. 7. 5 Herman, Destabilizing Milton, p. 21. 6 J. Rogers, ‘The political theology of Milton’s heaven’, in P. Herman and E. Sauer (eds), The New Milton Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 70. See also W. Poole, review of The New Milton Criticism, MQ, 47:3 (2013), p. 189.

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7 C. G. Martin, Milton among the Puritans: The Case for Revisionism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 3, 6. Cf. G. F. Sensabaugh on Milton’s pursuit of ‘a revolutionary program for man and society’ in That Grand Whig, Milton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1952). For the denial altogether of Milton’s radicalism, see W. Walker, Antiformalist, Unrevolutionary, Illiberal Milton: Political Prose, 1644–​1660 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 8 G. Campbell and T. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 3. See also Corns’s pithy treatment of ‘the plurality of Miltonic ideology’, in T. Healy and J. Sawday (eds), Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 110–​26. 9 Campbell and Corns, John Milton, pp. 3, 4. 10 On Milton’s possibly reactionary, possibly progressive views before, during, and after the English revolution, see the essays collected by Dobranski and Rumrich in Milton and Heresy (1998); by G. Parry and J. Raymond (eds) in Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002); by S. Achinstein and E. Sauer (eds) in Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and by E. Jones (ed.) in Young Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 11 C. Lamb, Oxford in the Vacation, in The London Magazine, July to December 1820, vol. 2 (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy), p. 367n. 12 J. Goldberg, ‘Dating Milton’, in E. D. Harvey and K. E. Maus (eds), Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-​ Century English Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 200. 13 Goldberg, ‘Dating Milton’, p. 207. 14 C. Warley, Reading Class through Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 121. 15 J. Goldberg, ‘What dost thou in this world?’, in C. Gray and E. Murphy (eds), Milton Now: Alternative Approaches and Contexts (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), p. 60. 16 L. Martz, Poet of Exile: A Study of Milton’s Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 51. Cf. R. Halpern, ‘The Great Instauration: imaginary narratives in Milton’s “Nativity Ode” ’, in M. Ferguson and M. Nyquist (eds), Re-​Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 6: ‘Milton’s career is nothing if not a narrative of anticipation; there was nothing random, therefore, about his decision to open the 1645 Poems, his first published volume of verse, with the “Nativity Ode.” By so doing he appropriates the occasion of Christ’s birth to announce his own poetic nativity and to anticipate the maturation of his own powers.’ For all the Lacanian ingenuity of Halpern’s reading, the song remains the same.

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17 Goldberg, ‘Dating Milton’, p. 199. 18 G. Teskey, ‘Milton’s early English poems: the Nativity Ode, L’Allegro, and Il Penseroso’, in N. McDowell and N. Smith (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 66. 19 The phrase belongs to C. W. R. D. Moseley, The Poetic Birth: Milton’s Poems of 1645 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1991). 20 M. Wilding, Dragon’s Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 12; S. Revard, Milton and the Tangles of Neaera’s Hair: The Making of the 1645 Poems (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), p. 83. 21 C. Burrow, ‘Poems 1645: the future poet’, in D. Danielson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Milton, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 56–​7. 22 The Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby, ed. D. Parsons (London, 1836), p. 64. 23 See Burrows, ‘Poems 1645’, pp. 59–​60; S. N. Zwicker, ‘The day that George Thomason collected his copy of the Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, Compos’d at Several Times’, RES, 64 (2012), pp. 235–​6. 24 J. K. Hale, ‘Milton’s self-​presentation in Poems … 1645’, MQ, 25:2 (1991), p. 38. For the Marvell reference, see D. Hall, ‘The manyness of Andrew Marvell’, Sewanee Review, 97:3 (1989), pp. 431–​9. 25 Campbell and Corns have argued that the conventional dating of this prolusion to July 1628 is mistaken, suggesting 1631 instead; John Milton, pp. 58–​9. Lewalski however gives the traditional date of 1628 in the Oxford Milton (2012), 3:502. 26 I have benefited from Ryan Netzley’s analysis of ‘transformative time’ in Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 27 See OED, ‘fancy’, n.4a and n.2. 28 Teskey, ‘Milton’s early English poems’, p. 73. 29 This is of course the central argument of Surprised by Sin: The Reader in ‘Paradise Lost’ (New York: St Martin’s, 1967). 30 Cf. the intrusive chiding of Apollo in Lycidas, lines 76–​84, ‘But not the praise, /​ Phoebus repli’d, and touch’d my trembling ears’. 31 Revard, Milton and the Tangles of Neaera’s Hair, pp. 82–​3. 32 Revard, Milton and the Tangles of Neaera’s Hair, p. 83. 33 D. Quint, ‘Expectation and prematurity in Milton’s Nativity Ode’, MP, 97:2 (1999), p. 200. 34 Quint, ‘Expectation’, pp. 207, 210. 35 Quint, ‘Expectation’, p. 216. 36 ‘Quid quereris refugam vino dapibusque poesin? /​Carmen amat Bacchum, Carmina Bacchus amat. /​Nec puduit Phoebum virides gestasse corymbos, /​Atque hederam lauro praeposuisse suae.’

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37 ‘Fallor? an & nobis redeunt in carmina vires, /​Ingeniumque mihi munere veris adest? […] Delius ipse venit, video Penëide lauro /​ Implicitos crines, Delius ipse venit.’ 38 E. Haan, in E. Haan and B. K. Lewalski (eds), The Complete Works of John Milton, Vol. 3: The Shorter Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. cix. 39 ‘Additur huic scelerisque vacans, & casta Juventus, /​Et rigidi mores, & sine labe manus. /​Qualis veste nitens sacra, & lustralibus undis /​Surgis ad infensos augur itur Deos.’ 40 ‘Diis etenim sacer est vates, divûmque sacerdos, /​Spirat & occultam pectus, & ora Jovem.’ 41 A. Low, ‘The unity of Milton’s Elegia Sexta’, ELR, 11:2 (1981), p. 220. 42 On the elegy’s ‘great autobiographical significance’, see W. MacKellar (ed.), The Latin Poems of John Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), p. 32. Low (‘The unity of Milton’s Elegia Sexta’) is summarising the critical tradition in describing it as an apparent ‘landmark’ of spiritual development, p. 213. 43 B. K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 38. 44 ‘Nec mora, nunc cilis haesit, nunc virginis ori, /​Insilit hinc labiis, insidet inde genis: /​Et quascunque agilis partes jaculator oberrat /​Hei mihi, mille locis pectus inerme ferit.’ 45 ‘Et tua fumabunt nostris altaria donis, /​Solus & in superis tu mihi summus eris.’ 46 The Poems of Edmund Waller, ed. G. Thorn-​Drury, 2 vols. (London: Bullen, 1901), 1:viii. 47 See B. Weller, ‘Milton, Marvell, and the plurality of genre’, New Literary History, 30:1 (1999), p. 143. 48 Teskey, ‘Milton’s early English poems’, p. 75. 49 Martz, Poet of Exile, p. 46. 50 For the influential argument that Milton was concerned ‘to win arts and pastimes back from the domination of the court and the Laudian wing of the church’, see L. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 20 and passim. 51 Campbell and Corns, John Milton, p. 61. 52 See B. K. Lewalski, ‘Milton’s Comus and the politics of masquing’, in D. Bevington and P. Holbrook (eds), The Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 296–​320; also D. Norbrook, ‘The reformation of the masque’, in D. Lindley (ed.), The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 94–​110. 53 S. Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), D8v.

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54 Teskey, ‘Milton’s early English poems’, p. 82. 55 I am endebted here to P. Herman, ‘Milton and the muse-​haters: Ad Patrem, L’Allegro/​Il Penseroso, and the ambivalences of poetry’, Criticism, 37:1 (1995), p. 48. 56 Campbell and Corns, John Milton, p. 61. 57 C. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), pp. 22, 23, 25–​6. Some of the same anecdotes feature in Lewalski’s account of Milton’s childhood; see The Life of John Milton, p. 5. 58 T. Corns, ‘Milton before Lycidas’, in Parry and Raymond, Milton and the Terms of Liberty, p. 27. 59 See E. Jones, ‘Milton’s archival remains, 1620–​1640’, in Jones, Young Milton, p. 15. 60 Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, p. 26. See Martin, Milton among the Puritans, p. 1: ‘My primary argument in what follows is that … only by simplifying and liberalizing the nature of Puritanism have literary scholars so seriously misconstrued Milton’s relationship to the movement.’ 61 D. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, rev. edn 2002), p. 227. 62 D. Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 46. 63 B. S. Azar, Understanding and Using English Grammar, 3rd edn (White Plains: Pearson Education, 1999), p. 2. 64 A. S. P. Woodhouse, The Heavenly Muse: A Preface to Milton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), pp. 34, 38. Woodhouse is augmenting Arthur Barker, who argued in 1941 that the Nativity Ode represents an experience which for Milton ‘corresponds to the conversion of his Puritan associates’, ‘The pattern of Milton’s Nativity Ode’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 10 (1941), p. 170. 65 G. Teskey, The Poetry of John Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 145–​6. 66 Campbell and Corns, John Milton, p. 92. 67 Though Donne is the subject of Ben Saunders’s study of ‘interpretive desire’, surely Milton represents a site of equal if not greater critical cathexis; see Saunders, Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 68 Walker, Antiformalist, Unrevolutionary, Illiberal Milton, p. 107. 69 C. S. R. Russell, ‘Parliamentary history in perspective, 1604–​1629’, History, 61 (1976), p. 1. 70 Though in the concluding stanza (‘Heav’ns youngest-​teemed Star, /​ Hath fixt her polisht Car’) Milton’s editors catch the strains of Matt. 2:9 (‘the star … came and stood over where the young child was’).

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71 Cf. Woodhouse, The Heavenly Muse, p. 48: ‘For after the sonnet there is no evidence that Milton ever again wavered in his resolve; all the evidence is that he did not.’ I have benefited here from consulting M. Lieb’s ‘ “ Yet Once More”: the formulaic opening of Lycidas’, MQ, 12:1 (1978), pp. 23–​8. 72 Woodhouse, The Heavenly Muse, p. 52. 73 J. Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels, trans. T. H. L. Parker (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1972), pp. 265–​6. For a synoptic view of the commentary tradition, see D. L. Jeffrey (gen. ed.), A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1992), pp. 430–​1; I have found useful as well B. B. Scott’s Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989). 74 See S. Booth and J. Flyer, ‘Milton’s “How Soon Hath Time”: a colossus in a cherrystone’, ELH, 49:2 (1982), pp. 449–​67. 75 See Booth and Flyer, ‘Colossus’, p. 453. 76 See A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, vol. 2, part 2, ed. D. Bush and A. S. P. Woodhouse (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 686–​ 706. For the recent argument that ‘Milton’s dynamic image bears the impression of the printing press’, see J. Kelly and C. Bray, ‘The keys to Milton’s “Two-​Handed Engine” in Lycidas (1637)’, MQ, 44:2 (2010), pp. 122–​42. 77 J. M. Evans, ‘Lycidas’, in Danielson, The Cambridge Companion to Milton, p. 52. In a subsequent essay, written for a different audience, Evans’s argument about Lycidas runs altogether differently, and lends support to my own: ‘Far from painting a coherent “portrait of the artist” as [Leah] Marcus suggests, or telling the story of a “rising poet” steadily advancing towards maturity, as Martz has argued, the constantly shifting forms of poetic selfhood we encounter in the poems of the 1645 volume call into question the very possibility of a unified and fully realized poetic consciousness’; ‘The birth of the author: Milton’s poetic self-​construction’, Milton Studies, 38 (2000), pp. 58–​9. 78 J. Rogers, ‘Lecture 7 –​Lycidas (cont.) [September 26, 2007]’, Milton (Yale University: Open Yale Courses), http://​oyc.yale.edu/​transcript/​ 212/​engl-​220 (accessed 4 November 2016). 79 On the verse form of Lycidas, see F. T. Prince, The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), pp. 72–​3, 120. For Richard Helgerson, the ‘self-​crowned laureates’ were those early modern poets –​ namely Spenser, Jonson, and Milton –​who announced ‘the ambition not only to write great poems but also to fill the role of the great poet’, an ambition which ‘shaped everything these men wrote in the remainder of their active and productive literary lives’. ‘As well as presenting poems,

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masques, plays, and pamphlets’, Helgerson writes, ‘they were always presenting themselves’. See his Self-​Crowned Laureates (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 1–​2. 80 Campbell and Corns, John Milton, p. 99. 81 Evans, ‘Lycidas’, pp. 52–​3. 82 C. Burrow, ‘Shall I go on?’, TLS, 35:5 (March 2013), p. 7. Lewalski and Campbell and Corns, in their respective ‘Lives’ of Milton, also discuss Lycidas as the culminating poem of the 1645 volume, which makes sense within a biographical narrative, but is of course not the experience readers would have had. 83 Lewalski, ‘Milton’s Comus’, p. 315. 84 Lewalski, ‘How radical was the young Milton?’, p. 56. 85 See D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 86 T. Corns, ‘Milton’s quest for respectability’, MLR, 77:4 (1982), pp. 778–​9. 87 Zwicker, ‘The day that George Thomason collected his copy of the Poems of Mr. John Milton’, p. 241. 88 Milton’s biographer W. R. Parker sees this perfectly clearly: ‘nothing else [Milton] ever wrote was so thoroughly influenced by the wishes of others and by external circumstances’. Milton: A Biography, rev. edn, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 1:128. For the influential argument that Bridgewater commissioned the masque to ameliorate the scandal surrounding his wife’s ‘tainted relatives’, see B. Breasted, ‘Comus and the Castlehaven scandal’, Milton Studies, 3 (1971), pp. 201–​24. 89 See, e.g., A. Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 160; Lewalski, ‘How radical was the young Milton?’, p. 56. 90 Marcus, Politics of Mirth, p. 172. 91 Marcus, Politics of Mirth, p. 172. 92 Marcus, Politics of Mirth, p. 173. See also J. Creaser, ‘The setting of Comus’, in Lindley, The Stuart Court Masque, pp. 116–​17. For the second earl’s remembrance of his father, see A. Egerton, Milton’s ‘Comus’, Being the Bridgewater Mss. with Notes, and a Short Family Memoir (London: Dent, 1910), p. 12. 93 Marcus, Politics of Mirth, p. 173. 94 See C. L. Hamilton, ‘The Earl of Bridgewater and the English civil war’, Canadian Journal of History, 15 (1980), pp. 362, 364–​5. Also Hamilton, ‘The Shropshire Muster-​Master’s Fee’, Albion, 2 (1970), pp. 26–​34. 95 Creaser, ‘The setting of Comus’, p. 113. 96 J. G. Demaray, Milton and the Masque Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 83.

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97 Creaser, ‘The setting of Comus’, p. 117. 98 See Creaser, ‘The setting of Comus’, p. 112. 99 Parker, Milton, pp. 132, 142. 100 W. Shullenberger, Lady in the Labyrinth: Milton’s ‘Comus’ as Initiation (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), p. 111. 101 Parker, Milton, p. 130. 102 M. C. McGuire, Milton’s Puritan Masque (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), p. 76. 103 A. B. Coiro, ‘Anonymous Milton, or, A Maske masked’, ELH, 71:3 (2004), p. 611. 104 C. Brown, John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 141. 105 Coiro, ‘Anonymous Milton’, p. 613. 106 For ‘antiformalist, unrevolutionary, illiberal Milton’, see Walker’s study of that name; for the Baconian Milton, see Martin, Milton among the Puritans; for the ‘atheist’ Milton, M. Bryson, The Atheist Milton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 107 See A. Woolrych, ‘Milton and Cromwell: “A Short but Scandalous Night of Interruption”?’, in M. Lieb and J. T. Shawcross (eds), Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), pp. 185–​218.

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2 ‘We goe to heaven against each others wills’: revising Religio Medici in the English Revolution Only a generation ago, the writings of Thomas Browne, the Norwich physician and polymath most famous for his Religio Medici (1642/​3), seemed to be of little more than antiquarian interest, potshards of the Renaissance baroque stuck up in the nascent soil of the English civil war and of the modernity that conflict heralded. In the early 1970s, Cecil A. Sloane could blandly observe that ‘despite the religious and political upheavals of seventeenth-​century England, Browne makes no reference to contemporary social events in his formal writings’,1 a view echoed in the Penguin edition of Browne from later that decade, which framed the Religio as giving ‘the impression that its author was so detached from the upheavals of his age as to display less a disinterest than a lack of interest’.2 While the eloquent physician’s loyalty to church and crown were widely noted, such allegiance was generally thought to be circumscribed by the spirit of peaceableness and Erasmian toleration suffusing the doctor’s religion: ‘Browne’s dislike of controversy’, wrote Joan Webber in an oft-​cited book, ‘is typical of the self-​conscious Anglican’.3 Michael Wilding’s essay ‘Religio Medici in the English revolution’ –​ first published in 1982 and subsequently reprinted in Wilding’s influential monograph Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (1987) –​stridently attacked both these views, Browne’s distance from current events and his tolerationist stance, construing the Religio not as apolitical and irenic but rather as ‘deeply, committedly, and indeed polemically conservative’.4 Crucial to Wilding’s argument are the revisions and additions Browne made between the text’s surreptitious printing in 1642 and the authorised version of 1643.5 According to the doctor’s 1643 epistle ‘To the Reader’, Religio Medici

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was composed ‘about seven yeares past’ –​that is, in the mid-​1630s –​‘for my private exercise and satisfaction … which being communicated unto one, it became common unto many, and was by transcription successively corrupted untill it arrived in a most depraved copy at the presse’ (p. 3). It was only the appearance of this private ‘memoriall unto me’ in public (and haphazard) dress that forced Browne, he says, into issuing a corrected copy under his own name (p. 3). But Browne’s revisionary strategies, Wilding maintains, are consistently responsive to events of the 1640s, and thus authorise reading Religio Medici ‘in the context of the pamphlet war at the time of its publication’, on the basis of which it is judged to be inexorably reactionary and elitist, ‘hostile to the politics of mass action’, abhorrent of ‘the multitude’, and indeed persecutory in its embrace of ‘Laudian ceremony and of the hierarchical, authoritarian, social meanings of that policy’.6 Interpreting the Religio as both text and event –​as something ‘happening’ in the midst of the early 1640s, carrying a certain illocutionary force7 –​was inarguably a methodological breakthrough, opening up a whole new set of questions and contexts for the essay, and endowing it with a life in the world which it had rarely been seen to possess. So it is only natural that Wilding’s account thus became a touchstone for those interested in thinking about how Browne’s text functioned within a field of controversy and animadversion, shifting the paradigm away from inert appreciations of Browne’s prose style. ‘Indeed Sir Thomas Browne will never look quite the same again’, Mary Ann Radzinowicz opined in a contemporary review.8 What was perhaps less apparent at the time, and which now demands to be historicised itself, is how Wilding’s reading of the Religio constitutes an action within the divisive historiography of the English civil wars, a marxisant literary intervention at the height of the Revisionist moment (it is significant that Dragons Teeth also includes a key essay on ‘Milton’s early radicalism’). Wilding signals his allegiances –​and more than this, the conceptual underpinning of his interpretive programme –​where he insists that he has reconstructed Browne’s civil war contexts ‘from the standard historians of the period –​Haller, Hill, Manning, Morrill, Stone, Zagorin’.9 These are (or were), to be sure, leading historians of seventeenth-​century England and of the English civil wars; with the exception of John Morrill, however, they also represent the rear guard of the ‘traditionalist’ Whig-​Marxist historiography then under Revisionist assault.

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Indeed, Morrill’s The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–​1650 (1976) was a signal text of early Revisionism, with its stunning claim that ‘Side-​taking for the great majority [in the first civil war] was largely arbitrary. Men delayed declaring themselves until forced to do so by the appearance of activist groups on one or both sides. Polarisation then usually followed the lines of purely local groupings and although many families were divided, and many friends parted, the prior sub-​political divisions within each shire or borough were reflected in the line-​up of forces by early 1643’ (my emphasis).10 This could hardly be further from Christopher Hill’s thesis, articulated as early as 1940 and elaborated in myriad books and articles to follow, that the ‘Civil War was a class war, in which the despotism of Charles I was defended by the reactionary forces of the established Church and feudal landlords. Parliament beat the King because it could appeal to the enthusiastic support of the trading and industrial classes in town and countryside, to the yeomen and progressive gentry, and to wider masses of the population whenever they were able by free discussion to understand what the struggle was really about’.11 Latterly, Morrill has characterised his work of the 1970s and 1980s –​along with that of other leading Revisionists –​as an ‘allergic reaction’ to Hill and more acutely still to Lawrence Stone’s Causes of the English Revolution (1972), demolition of which, he writes, ‘can be seen as the mission statement of Revisionism’.12 Such thematic antagonisms have appeared more clearly in retrospect, but the review culture of these decades discloses ample evidence of a discipline in conflict. Notably, Morrill had aspersed another of Wilding’s ‘standard historians’, Brian Manning, in a review article of 1977. ‘By ignoring the local sources’, Morrill inveighed, ‘by ignoring the facts and figures about who did what which are plentifully available in local studies, and by relying on what some men wanted other men to believe, and what old men later believed with the wisdom of hindsight and to satisfy later objects’, Manning’s The English People and the English Revolution (1976), Morrill concluded, ‘has not shown, and on the basis of printed sources alone cannot show, that the various isolated groups had come together, seized the initiative, and established a revolutionary programme based on class interests’.13 In appealing to the ‘standard historians of the period’, Wilding thus appears to be taking a cue from seventeenth-​century polemicists

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in asserting moderation and even-​handedness when engaged in partisan work, but his curious collocation of authorities cannot help but situate ‘Religio Medici in the English revolution’ on the fault line between traditionalist historiography and the Revisionist turn. The success of Wilding’s essay –​so positive about the social determinants of Browne’s side-​taking, and about the politics of his aesthetics –​ reveals, then, something of the cleavage that obtains between politics and literature even in the era of interdisciplinarity: for if it is the case, as Morrill states, that by the mid-​1980s, ‘writers of monographs and learned articles ceased to take Hill or Stone as a point of reference or compass bearing for their own positions’, literary scholarship sponsored by Hill, in particular Milton and the English Revolution (1977), has long persisted in the face of an overwhelming body of research suggesting the complexities and confusions of seventeenth-​ century politics and identity.14 The new Browne studies has gone some way toward reconfiguring the writer and his works within a more varied and uncertain climate of cultural conflict and historical change.15 The impact of such reassessments has so far been registered most fully within the burgeoning discipline of science studies. In situating Browne’s ‘Masterpeece’ in relation to the aesthetics of contingency, this chapter builds on recent work while also claiming a place for Browne within the ambit of a wider literary history. I begin by re-​ examining the relations between and among writing, politics, and class in revolutionary England, emphasising the lability of the ideological context in which Religio Medici was first published and read, admired and animadverted. While we are right to think of the text’s publication as an ‘event’, in order to gauge its import, we need to avoid reductionist accounts of civil war allegiance, and to appreciate the text’s processual character, that is, the multiplicity of material forms and circumstances in which Browne’s meditation might have been encountered, and the various interlocutions that soon attached themselves to it and mediated its meanings. Much has been made, for instance, of Browne’s contempt for ‘the multitude; that numerous piece of monstrosity’ (2.1) as a coded expression of right-​ wing, law-​and-​order political values. As I show, however, fear and distrust of the multitude and mass politics was equally the signature of classical republicanism –​which Thomas Hobbes, for one, saw as the root of the English rebellion16 –​as it was that of authoritarian

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Laudianism, a conjuncture that belies the rigid antitheses of progressive narrative. In the latter part of the chapter, I move toward a more circumscribed analysis of the essay in terms of its discursive and hermeneutic strategies, seeking to discern the religious subject and spiritual politics so constituted. My aim in this discussion is to counter readings which have seen Browne’s famous rhetoricity as a cloak for an implicit faith and orthodox quietism, charges which have been too little answered by recent historicist treatments. ‘What is required of the reader of Religio Medici’, Stanley Fish wrote in a seminal attack on Browne, ‘is admiration. In the prose of Donne and Milton, and the poetry of Herbert, the stylistic effects –​the dislocations, ambiguities, confusions of tenses –​are in the service of the commonplaces of Christian belief. In the Religio Medici, the commonplaces of Christian belief are in the service of a succession of stylistic effects, and our attention is continually being diverted from the implications (personal and cosmic) of Browne’s statements to the skill he displays in making them’.17 Rather, I argue that the experience of Religio Medici is deeply tethered to Browne’s tolerationist stance, and that ‘Style’, as Fish says in another context, quoting the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, ‘is the deference that action pays to uncertainty’.18 Stepping out provisionally, with a sense of limitation, with a sense of style, Religio Medici brilliantly addresses itself to the heresy of certainty under which he saw the Stuart church beginning to buckle. The world turned upside down? The English revolution and the politics of ‘multitude’ Let us begin by conceding that within its first few sentences, Browne’s 1643 epistle ‘To the Reader’ seems both to situate the text’s publication firmly within the topical and political, and to evince dismay and more than dismay over the course of recent events. With characteristic self-​consciousness, Browne starts out by addressing the circumstance of the book’s having appeared the previous winter, in what he calls ‘a most depraved copy’, and without his will or consent: ‘Had not almost every man suffered by the presse; or were not the tyranny thereof become universall; I had not wanted reason for complaint’, he reasons: ‘but in times wherein I have lived to behold the highest perversion of that excellent invention; the name of his Majesty defamed, the honour

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of Parliament depraved, the writings of both depravedly, anticipatively, counterfeitly imprinted; complaints may seeme ridiculous in private persons, and men of my condition may be as incapable of affronts, as hopelesse of their reparations’ (p. 3). As Wilding rightly notes, the breakdown of state censorship after the calling of the Long Parliament, the abolition of Star Chamber, and the impeachment of Strafford and Laud, had opened the way for an outpouring of Puritan writing and millenarian prophecy in the early 1640s. Seen in this light, Browne’s tone of remonstrance and regret, coupled with his reference to the ‘tyranny’ of the press –​its autonomous operation, irrespective of any authority –​takes on a plausibly partisan cast.19 Browne’s conformist impulse may be further illustrated in Part One of the Religio, where he confides of his divinity, ‘I love to keepe the road, and though not in an implicite, yet an humble faith, follow the great wheele of the Church, by which I move, not reserving any proper poles or motion from the epicycle of my own braine; by this meanes I leave no gap for Heresies, Schismes, or Errors, of which at present I hope I shall not injure Truth to say, I have no taint or tincture’ (1.6). Even here, we can begin to sense Browne’s profession of orthodoxy unravelling as the period repeatedly defers the closure of a full stop and continues to admit doubt and uncertainty; and we might note that Browne’s faith is neither unquestioning nor evidently authoritarian. Indeed, others have admired this passage for its equanimity in the face of sectarian and political strife. Nonetheless, Wilding argues, ‘in the context of the book’s publication, it is a tendentious peacefulness. The implication is that all would be well if heretics and schismatics and dissenters would stop being troublesome and disturbing the peace’. He goes on: ‘Browne’s peaceableness is the peaceableness of the conservative who is satisfied with the arrangement of society –​an arrangement suiting his own class. All other opinions that disturb this peace are heretical, schismatic, dissident.’20 That Browne’s politics and religion reflect or are determined by social position is a claim that runs like a bright thread through Wilding’s argument. But it is a claim, as I shall argue, borne out of the historiography in which Wilding’s essay is steeped, one that does not bear scrutiny, and moreover, one that distorts our sense of the historical and ideological matrix in which Religio Medici first found wide readership.

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Given how much weight this point bears in his account, Wilding is remarkably evasive as to what he thinks Browne’s class position might be, and it often seems as if he is identifying the physician with landed rather than bourgeois interest, though this is of course not the case; indeed, even on its own terms, the argument starts to fall apart as soon as we recognise this. As is well known, ‘Sir’ Thomas is an honorific dating only to the end of Browne’s life: he was knighted in 1671 on a visit of the royal court to Norwich as the town’s most famous citizen, ‘at the same time’ that the mayor, according to one account, declined the honour.21 Browne’s father had been a prosperous mercer or cloth merchant, though not as prosperous as the physician’s eighteenth-​ century biographers imagined. According to Dr Johnson, in the ‘Life’ of Browne he contributed to an edition of the Christian Morals, Browne senior (d. 1613) left his son a substantial patrimony of some £6,000. Frank L. Huntley, however, has shown that the sum was actually more like £600.22 Most of this would have gone to support the younger Browne’s education: he studied first at Oxford, then undertook medical training on the continent at Montpellier and Padua, before matriculating finally at Leiden. As an adult, he depended on his medical practice in Norwich to support himself, his wife, and their eleven children, six of whom lived into adulthood. It has been well noted with regard to other natural philosophers and scientists of this era, for instance Robert Boyle, how far independent wealth underwrote a scientific career.23 Browne, by contrast, never became a member of the Royal Society, presumably because ‘financial need … made the obligatory attendance at meetings impracticable and the expense of subscriptions pointless’.24 As we pursue the matter of class further into Browne’s biography, uncertainty about the social dimension of Browne’s politics blossoms into contradiction, for far from a Cavalier or grandee, we find that Browne seems to have been the very emblem of Protestant modesty, thrift, and hard work. According to John Whitefoot, who knew the doctor for over thirty years, ‘In his Habit of Cloathing, he had an Aversion to all Finery, and affected Plainness, both in the Fashion and Ornaments’, a description that might befit any lay Puritan.25 In the letters Browne wrote to his son Thomas, who went abroad to be educated, like his father and siblings, costs and economy are recurrent themes. Indeed, Browne recounts money changing in almost novelistic detail: ‘I was yesterday at Yarmouth’, he tells Tom, in a letter of

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22 December 1660, ‘where I spoke with yr Uncle Charles Mileham, who told me Mr Dade would accommodate you with what moneys were fitting for defray of yr Charges in any kind and therefore would not have mee at Present send you any bill to receive any Perticuler sum, but however when I hear from you I will take care for such a bill to be sent to Mr Dade, to whom in the mean time present my true respects and service and be sure to be observant of what he shall advice you; be as good a husband as Possible and enter not upon any cours of superfluous expences’.26 The latter phrase, ‘be as good a husband as possible’, is a common refrain throughout this prudent correspondence. Upon his death, Browne left to his wife a property in Norwich, and to his son Edward a not inconsiderable collection of books and manuscripts, of which Whitefoot drolly remarks that the hardworking physician ‘might have made good the Old Saying of Dat Galenus opes [Galen brings riches], had he lived in a Place that could have afforded it’.27 Browne, in other words, was one of the ‘industrious sort of people’ who figure so largely in Christopher Hill’s account of the English civil war as a bourgeois revolution.28 Indeed, Sir Kenelm Digby, one of Browne’s early respondents, sharply raises the issue of Browne’s class and profession where he insinuates that someone of ‘his course of life’ may be constitutionally unfit for the pursuit of metaphysics or speculative divinity: little ‘can it be expected’, writes Digby, ‘that an excellent Physitian whose fancy is always fraught with the materiall drugs that hee prescribeth his Apothecary to compound his Medicines of; and whose hands are inured to the cutting up, & eies to the inspection of anatomised bodies; should easily, and with success, flye his thoughts at so towring a Game, as a pure intellect, a Separated and unbodyed Soule’.29 It is but a step in Digby’s mind from the physician to the apothecary to the barber-​surgeon and gravedigger. But what then are we to think about Browne’s denunciation of the multitude, that famous breach of charity in Part Two of the essay, and an apparent eruption of class politics. There Browne memorably asserts, ‘I have no antipathy, or rather Idio-​syncrasie, in dyet, humour, ayre, any thing; I wonder not at the French, for their dishes of frogges, snailes, and toadstooles, nor at the Jews for Locusts and Grasse-​hoppers, but being amongst them, make them my common viands’; ‘national repugnances doe not touch me’, he says, any more than he is put off by ‘the presence of a Serpent, Scorpion, Lizard or

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Salamander’. ‘In brief ’, he concludes, ‘I am averse from nothing’ (2.1). Only he hastens to add this proviso: ‘If there by any among those common objects of hatred [which I can safely say] I do contemne and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, vertue and religion, the multitude; that numerous piece of monstrosity, which taken asunder seeme men, and the reasonable creatures of God; but confused together, make one great beast, & a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra’ (2.1). That this exception to Browne’s charitable nature comprises an ideological stance is clear enough; yet we should be precise about historicising these remarks. For as part of the text original to its composition ‘about seven yeares past’, Browne’s anathematising of the crowd does not (or did not) have as its object what Clarendon called the ‘insurrection (for it was no better) and frenzy of the people’ at the Long Parliament’s release in November 1640 of the opposition leaders Bastwick, Burton, and Prynne, nor the crowds who carried the ‘root and branch’ petition to the Commons that same month, or who harassed Laud as he was being taken to the Tower in March 1641, or demonstrated for the execution of Strafford that April.30 As we are reminded by the famous 1601 revival of Shakespeare’s Richard II at the behest of supporters of the Earl of Essex (‘I am Richard II know ye not that’, Elizabeth tartly asked her Master of Rolls), to re-​perform (or re-​publish) is always to authorise or enact new meanings, something Milton well understood in preparing his Poems. The example of Milton however also serves to underscore the illusoriness of what may appear politically potent or indeed prophetic gestures: in weighing Browne’s words, we do well to bear in mind the contingency of the Religio’s arrival within a field of events its author could not have anticipated. We had better ask, then, after the nature of those events, how far the civil war was a class war, wherein ‘the gentry were made slaves to the commonalty’, and ‘lived in slavery and submission to the unruly, base multitude’, as one contemporary remembered it.31 We had better ask how far the 1640s were a time, as the historian Philip Baker writes, ‘when institutions and values were called into question; when groups of Levellers, Diggers and Ranters roamed the land; when utopian visions and extremist beliefs threatened the very foundations of society’.32 To be sure, the threat of social inversion and ‘the world turned upside down’ was real enough to many English men and women in these years, as the testimony of Sir John Oglander above

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suggests. Both sides, royalist and parliamentarian, played on such fears in rallying support at the local level.33 Wilding, for his part, is of course inclined to see Browne’s attitudinising as evidence of his ‘anti-​ populist stance’, and moreover, his fear of ‘the propertyless’ acquiring ‘what was denied them’.34 But it bears remembering that the English civil war was not one but two revolutions, each inspired by different energies and aims, the first ‘symbolised in the execution of Strafford, the legislation of the long Parliament, the Militia Ordinance, and the outbreak of Civil War in 1642’, the second, ‘in the creation of the New Model, Pride’s Purge, and the execution of Charles I’. On the influential view of Conrad Russell, the first of these revolutions ‘was not a social revolution’ at all, but a split in the governing class: a movement by a large number of peers and gentlemen to force a change of policy and a change of ministers on Charles I. The second revolution was a revolution in the full sense of the term: it was an assault on the existing social structure, and particularly on the position of the gentry. Unlike the first rebellion, the revolution of 1647–​9 was supplied by the Levellers and the Fifth Monarchists with truly revolutionary ideologies. In the face of this second revolution, the vast majority of the leaders of the original rebellion against King Charles grew so frightened of their own followers that their sympathies returned to the King.35

Nor even was it the will of Cromwell or the Rump, which had executed the king and declared England a commonwealth, to establish English political life on a democratic basis, much less to level social distinctions.36 Indeed, popular politics was perhaps the biggest threat to the survival of the early republic, a radical constitutional experiment brought about by a minority of Independent hardliners with the backing of the military.37 For the valence of popular politics, especially in the climate of nostalgia aroused by the regicide and by Charles’s posthumous self-​fashioning as royal martyr in the ubiquitous Eikon Basilike, was hardly guaranteed to point in favour of the new regime, as its apologists were keenly aware, and as the events of 1659–​60 would resolutely demonstrate. Marchamont Nedham, for instance, from May 1650 editor of the Commonwealth newsbook Mercurius Politicus, was careful to distinguish the principles of the present government from those of the ‘leveling party’, that is, John Lilburne and his army agitators, as well as

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political activists like Richard Overton, William Walwyn, and their followers.38 Having been walked out of Newgate prison by no less than Speaker William Lenthall and President Bradshaw in November 1649, the turncoat journalist Nedham soon took the Engagement and was commissioned to write a treatise in defence of the Commonwealth and Independent rule, published in May 1650 as The Case for the Commonwealth of England, Stated.39 Among the discontent factions there controverted were the Levellers, who in their manifesto An Agreement of the Free People of England (1649) –​an extended version of like proposals dating to 1647 –​had urged a new constitution guaranteeing popular sovereignty, near-​universal (male) suffrage, equal protection before the law, the abolition of tithes, and proportional taxation. Addressing himself to ‘all Persons of Credit and Fortune’, Nedham insists, first, that ‘Such a Democratick, or Popular Forme, that puts the whole multitude into an equall exercise of the Supreme Authority, under pretence of maintaining Liberty, is in the Judgment of all Statesmen the greatest enemy of Liberty’. For ‘so Brutish’ is the multitude, says Nedham, ‘that … they are * ever in the extreames of kindness or Cruelty; being void of Reason, and hurried on with an unbridled violence in their Actions, trampling down all respects of things Sacred and Civill, to make way for that their Liberty’, but that it ‘soon causes a change of it into the Form of a regall Tyranny; according to that Maxim of Politicians, Facilis est transitus à regimine Democratico ad Monarchicum, The passage is quick and easie from a meer Popularity to Monarchy’.40 Nedham’s account is buttressed throughout by citations to the ancients, and indeed he might have had this out of Livy, that great historian of the Roman republic, for whom ‘This is the nature of the mass [Ea natura multitudinis], either it is a humble slave or a haughty master. As for freedom, which is the mean, they know no moderation either in assuming or keeping it’.41 Such a view is by no means incompatible with what has been called Milton’s ‘early modern liberalism’.42 Milton has of course been much celebrated for his tireless defence of consensual government and the rights of the English people: in a slap at Browne, for instance, Wilding quotes a passage from the Apology, in which Milton praises the Long Parliament’s hearing of petitions from ‘the meanest artizans and labours, at other times also women, and often the younger sort of servants’ (CPW, 1:926–​7), thus prompting the comment: ‘The acceptance of the “meanest” is a mark of “divine commission”. How

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unlike Browne’s “charity”.’43 In fact, however, Milton tends to view ‘the people’ as unregenerate backsliders, ill-​prepared for the task of liberty, incapable of discerning what is in their or the nation’s best interests, an estimate vehemently expressed in his polemics and reflected in his political theory.44 Notwithstanding his contention in Areopagitica (1644) that ‘the people’ be not condemned ‘for an untaught and irreligious gadding rout’, he writes in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) –​in despite of those then recoiling from the extra-​legal measures by which Charles I had been tried and executed in January 1649 –​‘If God and a good cause give them Victory, the prosecution wherof for the most part, inevitably draws after it the alteration of Lawes, change of Goverment, downfal of Princes with thir families; then comes the task to those Worthies which are the soule of that enterprize, to be swett and labour’d out amidst the throng and noises of Vulgar and irrational men. Some contesting for privileges, customs, forms, and that old entanglement of Iniquity, thir gibrish Lawes, though the badge of thir ancient slavery’ (3:192–​3).45 That same year, in his explosive pamphlet against the King’s Book and the growth of popular royalist sentiment, Milton vituperates, ‘Nay after such a faire deliverance as this, with so much fortitude and valour shown against a Tyrant, that people should seek a King, claiming what this Man claimes, would shew themselves to be by nature slaves, and arrant beasts; not fitt for that liberty which they cri’d out and bellow’d for, but fitter to be led back again into thir old [servitude], like a sort of clamouring & fighting brutes, broke loos [from thir copyholds], that know not how to use or posses the liberty which they fought for’ (3:581). Perhaps most severely, writing in the shadow of an imminent Stuart restoration in February and March 1660, the Milton of The Ready and Easy Way figures the people as a ‘rude multitude’, an ‘inconsiderate multitude’, a ‘misguided and abused multitude’, their political will ‘a torrent’, ‘an epidemic madness’. In its utopian aspect, the tract can compass a future in which expanded suffrage might be desirable or achievable. But until such time –​and The Ready and Easy Way is being composed, let us recall, as elections are being held for the first full and free Parliament in eleven years –​the choice of magistrates in Milton’s ideal commonwealth is not to be entrusted to ‘the noise and shouting of a rude multitude’, but must remain in the hands of ‘them who are rightly qualifi’d’, those, indeed, ‘of a better

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breeding’ (7:442–​3). And if it come to force, he adds, ‘More just it is doubtless … that a less number compell a greater to retain … thir libertie, then that a greater number for the pleasure of thir baseness, compell a less most injuriously to be thir fellow slaves’ (7:455). Placing Browne’s ‘Hydra’ in the context of ‘facts and figures about who did what’ rather than ‘what some men wanted other men to believe’ (or what ‘standard historians’ once believed) prompts our acknowledgement that crowd behaviour in the early 1640s tended to reflect either ‘a continuation, or reopening, of traditional forms of collective unrest –​such as attacks on unpopular landlords, and enclosure, grain and tax riots –​in which there is very little evidence for the influence of radical ideologies’, or popular iconoclasm directed against the ‘Popish’ innovations of the 1630s and the policies of Archbishop Laud.46 The ‘revolution within the revolution’, as John Walter refers to the various programmes for radical social reform borne out of the pressures of civil war, was a phenomenon of the later 1640s, and it was suppressed by the very regime which had brought about the trial and execution of the king, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the sweeping away of episcopacy47 –​the regime for which John Milton was the official spokesman and theorist.48 Browne is indeed thinking about the unruly energies surging within the early Stuart church, and the latter part of this chapter will explore in some detail how Browne internalises such conflicts in his personal theology. What can be asserted here however is that Browne’s condemnation of the multitude does not mark his opposition to social revolution, insofar as there was no such revolution in the mid-​1630s, when the Religio was first written, nor in the early 1640s, when it was first published. In a culture in which the language of excess and the mean was the common currency of political and religious controversy, as Joshua Scodel has demonstrated, the proverbial extremity of the multitude figures in the arguments of royalist and parliamentarian, conformist and Puritan, alike.49 The many-​headed text Here I want to turn from a reassessment of the Religio’s civil war context to reassessing the text itself, that is, the material text, which has much to tell us about the ideological plasticity of both Browne and his world in the 1640s and 1650s. For Religio Medici was never

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one text but several, and moreover, it was a discourse whose reception was mediated almost from the beginning by other texts, with which it was literally and irretrievably bound up. Eight manuscript copies of the Religio are extant, two from an early stage of composition, and six representing a middle phase of revision between those early drafts and the published versions of 1642–​43.50 Though it is impossible to say how many copies of the work were in circulation prior to 1642, Reid Barbour contends that in ‘Browne’s early Norwich years, Religio Medici was making a wider circuit, both spatially and culturally, than previous scholarship has allowed, and Browne appears to have known something about this transmission’, as we may judge from his surmise about the provenance of the unauthorised edition: ‘being communicated unto one, it became common unto many, and was by transcription successively corrupted untill it arrived in a most depraved copy at the presse’ (p. 3).51 Frequently transcribed without title or attribution –​ a copy in the Norwich Record Office mistakenly lays the work at the feet of a Scottish physician called Dr Reid or Read –​the identity of Religio Medici in manuscript was distinctly fluid and multiple: as the owner of what is now Bodleian MS Rawl. B. 162 retrospectively noted, ‘This copy of the Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne, Kt, is very different from all printed’, though the same was true, to varying degrees, of all the scribal copies we know of.52 Nor indeed was such fluidity arrested by the text’s appearance in print in November or December 1642, for its publication proceeded on an adventitious basis, in the course of which ‘the famous Dr Browne’s Religio Medici’ rapidly constituted a matrix within which other texts as events began to unfold. The first (unauthorised) edition issued by the stationer Andrew Crooke was an octavo of 190 pages, evidently hastily typeset. An overnight success, a second edition soon followed, which, using a slightly larger type-​page, comprised 159 pages and corrected any number of misreadings from the first edition. It was this surreptitious copy of the book which came to the attention of the Earl of Dorset, who in turn recommended it to his client Digby. His Observations upon ‘Religio Medici’, first composed as an epistle to Dorset, were evidently written shortly thereafter, for by early 1643 Browne had gotten wind of a book ‘at present in the Press, intituled (as I am informed) Animadversions upon a Treatise lately printed under the name of Religio Medici’, of which Digby was rumoured to be the author.53 This is clear from Browne’s letter to Digby dated 3 March

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1643, in which the physician asserts his authorship of the work in question, insisting that it ‘was pen’d many yeares past’, ‘in my private study, and as an exercise unto my self’, and informing Digby that ‘within a few weeks I shall, God willing, deliver unto the Press the true and intended Originall (whereof in the mean time your worthy self may command a view)’.54 As promised, the authorised text of 1643 –​printed by the same enterprising stationer and indeed retaining the famous frontispiece Crooke had commissioned from the engraver William Marshall –​ significantly revised the pirated version of the previous year, emending ‘more than six hundred and fifty items’, cancelling a number of passages and phrases, as well as adding four new sections, either drawn from Browne’s commonplace books or freshly composed.55 Digby’s Observations, however, were never revised (as Browne had implored) in light of the authorised text, and remained keyed to the corrupt copy he had perused with such apparent rapture that ‘there was not twenty four houres between my receiving my Lord of Dorsets letter that occasioned what I said, and the finishing my answer to him’.56 The spectre of Digby’s Observations –​and here we may wish to recall John Aubrey’s testimony that Digby ‘was held to be the most accomplished Cavalier of his time … the Mirandula of his age’57  –​ helps account for the multiple impressions of the authorised version (three in total) issued by Crooke in the course of 1643, as Browne and his publisher sought to deflect or defuse Digby’s criticisms and to delimit the context in which Browne’s ‘soft and flexible’ discourse was to be read through the introduction of various prefatory material.58 This included Browne’s note ‘To the Reader’; an advertisement, ‘To such as have, or shall peruse the Observations upon a former corrupt Copy of this Booke’, signed ‘A. B.’ (but probably written by Crooke); an errata sheet; a copy of Browne’s letter to Digby; and of Digby’s unctuously dissimulating response. Welded together as the Religio and Digby’s Observations were –​the practice of binding them in the same volume was so common that Crooke began to do it himself from 1659 –​it is well worth asking how contemporaries might have viewed the relation between Browne and Digby, especially if we are trying to gauge the illocutionary force Religio Medici had upon its first readers.59 At a time when Laudians were rumoured to be ‘going, nay making haste, to Rome’,60 and when, as Clarendon later recalled, ‘The imputation raised by Parliament

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upon the King of an intention to bring in, or … of conniving at and tolerating Popery, did make a deep impression on the people generally’,61 the appearance of synergy between Browne and the Catholic Digby would surely go a long way toward clinching Browne’s alignment with the forces of Laudianism. Writing from Winchester House, where he was being held by the parliamentary Committee for Recusants Convict, Digby extravagantly praised Browne’s book as a ‘Masterpeece’, suggestively figuring its author as one whom he could well be persuaded to have as ‘my Bedfellow, and to wake with mee as long as I had any edge to entertaine my selfe with the delights I sucked from so noble a conversation’, a metaphor that almost seems to wink at the polemical association of popery and buggery in the writing of English Puritans, and perhaps at a conspiratorial intimacy between the two writers and their respective faiths.62 Nor is Digby’s embrace evidently one-​sided, for in some of the earliest sections of the Religio, Browne seems to go out of his way to accommodate differences between Catholic and Protestant –​‘there is between us one common name and appellation, one faith, and necessary body of principles common to us both’ (1.3), Browne writes –​and to remonstrate with reformed believers who ‘fall upon those popular scurrilities and opprobrious scoffes of the Bishop of Rome’ (1.5), eschewing the anti-​popery by which, as Debora Shugar observes, ‘one told a Calvinist conformist from a Laudian’ in Caroline England.63 But this is hardly the only way to collocate these texts, and they can be seen very differently within the same matrix of contemporary discourse. The defensiveness of Browne and his publisher over Digby’s Observations –​overtly signalled by both Browne and Crooke in referring to Digby’s treatise as ‘animadversions’, that distinctive seventeenth-​century genre of censure and abuse –​argues a relation of antagonism, not one of sympathy or identity. Digby’s own reputation provides a further spur here, for he was as well-​ known as a braggart and blowhard as he was a virtuoso and man of parts: following the recollection that Digby was held to be ‘the Mirandula of his age’, Aubrey notes that ‘he had also this vertue, that no man knew better how to abound and to be abased, and either was indifferent to him’,64 and we do not have to read very far into Digby’s Observations in order to grasp the archness of his ‘pompous professions of reverence, meek acknowledgments of inability, and anxious apologies for the hastiness of his remarks’, in Dr Johnson’s

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words.65 Digby’s smack at Browne’s profession –​that shiver at ‘the cutting up, & … the inspection of anatomised bodies’ –​is but the most strident of a series of unflattering imputations Digby makes about Browne’s education and breeding, by virtue of which the witty physician is said to err on various points of metaphysical divinity.66 Digby’s social condescension may be instinctive, but in persistently highlighting Browne’s ‘wilde fansie’ or ‘[ayrie] fancy’ his rebuttal nonetheless speaks the common language of anti-​Puritan abuse, which equated spiritual enthusiasm with rustics and mechanicals, and indeed, ‘if I mistake not’, Digby writes, ‘this author approveth the Church of England not absolutely, but comparatively with other reformed Churches’.67 In Digby’s account, Browne often seems little different from those ‘Plebeian heads’ whose follies animate Browne’s ‘multitude’. Such contrasts and inversions –​now Catholic bedfellow, now intractable solecist –​are mirrored in another contemporary response to Browne, the militant Calvinist conformist Alexander Ross’s Medicus Medicatus (1645), which in one place querulously posits, ‘if our faith be all one with that of Rome: this may be indeed religio Medici, the religion of the House of Medicis, not of the Church of England’, while at the same time unstintingly chastising Browne’s vertiginous heterodoxies (‘It seemes here by your owne confession, you love to humour your fancie’, Ross exults, a form of words that echoes Digby).68 In his more intemperate moments, Ross would have Browne an idolater and a friend of heretics, if not indeed an unbeliever and a heretic himself: ‘This is the Religion of the Turkes at this day, if you will beleeve Busbequius: but I did not think it had been the Religion of a Christian Physician till now’, Ross crows over Browne’s doctrine of sin.69 Ross’s censoriousness was legendary: a controverter of Descartes, Galileo, Harvey, Ramus, and Spinoza, he is referred to in Hobbes’s Of libertie and necessitie (1654) as ‘one who may be said to have had so much Learning as to have been perpetually barking at the works of the most learned’.70 However, his reproof of Browne’s Anglicanism has its positive corollary in the embrace of Browne’s ‘sound assertions’ by the Norwich Quaker Samuel Duncon, who solicited Browne’s friendship and patronage in a letter of c. 1659, signing himself ‘a lover of mankind in generall, and thyselfe in particuler’.71 That Digby and Ross were both clients of Laud –​Digby even referred to the archbishop as his ‘best friend’ –​surely complicates our sense of the term ‘Laudian’,

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reminding us that royalist and Anglican culture could be just as fissiparous as the shifting Puritan and parliamentary opposition.72 Browne has frequently been read in parallel with his elite commentators, but the cultural signature of the Religio was surely no less ambivalent within the more demotic sphere of religious culture, as we may glean from ephemeral traces of use, ownership, and reading such as are revealed in Duncon’s letter. Especially suggestive in this regard is Kathleen Lynch’s study of two copies of the sixth edition of George Herbert’s The Temple (1641), a brilliant piece of book history in which Lynch works her way out from alum-​tawed thongs and mitred corners to the nexus of book binders, stationers, and readers in and through which early modern technologies of the book assumed social meaning.73 The first copy she examines is a beautiful example of seventeenth-​century fine binding. It may or may not be the work of Nicholas Ferrar’s circle at Little Gidding, an informal religious community devoted to High Anglican practice. Whatever the provenance of the text, ‘It is’, Lynch writes, ‘an aesthetic treatment that complements, indeed highlights, a ritualistic and reverential approach to the word. It is an assertive appropriation, with the craftsmanship a redoing, an emphasis of, a laying claim to the acts of devotion within’.74 Lynch’s second exemplar, by contrast, is a trade binding by the stationer Philemon Stephens, who specialised in works of Puritan divinity and anti-​Catholic polemic, and who would take over publication of The Temple from 1647. ‘As such’, Lynch argues, ‘Stephens’s sponsorship of Herbert assumes the role of an imprimatur in the process of claiming and repackaging him for a wider, more puritanically tinged audience of readers’.75 The wrinkle in this story is Stephens’s pairing of The Temple with another work of devotional poetry, Christopher Harvey’s The Synagogue, a ‘distinctly uncertain performance’, in the words of C. A. Patrides,76 and one riven by Harvey’s divided loyalties, to ‘father’ Herbert, on the one hand, and to the more austere Presbyterian influence of his mother, father, stepfather, and publisher, on the other.77 Contemplating this ambivalent knot of poetry and confessional identity prompts Lynch to ask, ‘Does commerce trump ideology? Or does devotion transcend sectarian divides?’ ‘Whatever these lines of transmission and traditions of conformity and dissent’, she concludes, ‘they are far too elastic to suit the ecclesiastic tradition we have constructed today’, emphasising

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‘the fluid boundaries of individual experience’ within the compass of seventeenth-​century devotion, even under the mounting pressure of civil conflict.78 Such an emphasis is borne out –​albeit the evidence here considered comprises a fuzzier temporal arc –​in the cluster of early editions of Religio Medici held in the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.79 Of these, three are special or fine bindings, while the other two are trade bindings, a judgement based on the quality of materials used and the presence or absence of gold tooling, gilding, and lettering. Unfortunately, none of the fine bindings appears to be contemporary, definitively so in the case of copy 2 (1643), which is signed by the prominent nineteenth-​century book binders Riviere & Son, while copy 5 (1659) is a handsome modern restoration. Copy 1 (1642b) however looks to be of relatively early provenance and is the finest example of workmanship, especially in its gold leaf tooling, showcased here on black Moroccan leather –​on the front and back cover an ornamental box frame composed of horticultural dingbats, the spine likewise embossed and decorated. The choice of such a binding obviously does honour to the text, while also making of it a beautiful object (not to say an idol): though it does not speak directly to the Laudian moment, it nevertheless has about it a High Church stamp. Narrow gutter margins also point to the fact that this is probably a rebinding, hence literally a redoing of and a laying claim to the anonymous text –​whose previous binding had either worn out or been deemed unsuitable by the new owner –​ under the auspices of gold leaf and gilt. Because we cannot date this later binding precisely, we can only site it ambiguously along a spectrum that may be thought to include high holiness as well as ever-​increasing literary esteem. But we are also thus reminded of the cultural mobility of texts as they pass through the circuits of readership and book collecting, as this copy of Religio Medici evidently did. A rather different story can be told from the more plainly bound copies of Browne’s book, which testify to contemporary or near-​ contemporary ownership. Copy 3 (1645), my focal text here, has been finished in dark calf ’s leather with blind tooling. It is inscribed in a confident hand, ‘Francis Vaughan. A: Domini 1649’, and underscored with a rotund flourish. Between its boards, two other texts have been gathered with Browne’s, Digby’s Observations but also the famous treatise of Descartes, A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding

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of Reason and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences, here in its first English translation of 1649. The collecting of these authors in one volume reveals a reader well versed in seventeenth-​ century theology, natural philosophy, and metaphysics. Though Religio Medici was composed before Descartes’s writings began to appear on the Continent, Browne refers to him several times in the notes to his Vulgar Errors (1646).80 Digby was even more closely associated with the philosopher: indeed, Marjorie Nicholson cites a 1637 letter of Digby’s to Hobbes –​evidently enclosed with a copy of the Discourse, of which Digby says ‘I shall be very glad to heare your opinion’ –​as ‘the real introduction of the works of Descartes into England’, noting as well the influence of Descartes on Digby’s Two Treatises: Of Bodies and of Man’s Soul (1644), a linkage since widely acknowledged.81 Thus configured within this network of writings, Browne’s Religio ceases to be a monument to Anglican eloquence, becoming instead a lively document of the new philosophy, his doctor’s faith ironically rewired as Cartesian doubt. Nor should the competing and contradictory acts of ideological appropriation disclosed by these several copies of Browne’s meditation in any way surprise us, notwithstanding political interpretations which have sought to bind Browne to one side of an intractable cultural antimony, and which continue to exert sway in more moderate treatments of Browne’s tract.82 Indeed, in unfurling the very first sentence of the Religio, the physician may be seen as duly inaugurating a discourse, a readership, and a history of reading marked by the pervasive decussation (to use a favourite Brownean word) of orthodoxy and heterodoxy: ‘For my Religion, though there be severall circumstances that might perswade the world I have none at all, as the generall scandall of my profession, the naturall course of my studies, the indifferency of my behaviour, and discourse in matters of Religion, neither violently defending one, nor with that common ardour and contention opposing another’, Browne writes; ‘yet in despight hereof I dare, without usurpation, assume the honorable stile of a Christian’ (1.1). A soft and flexible discourse ‘It is impossible’, says Browne, ‘that either in the discourse of man, or in the infallible voyce of God, to the weaknesse of our apprehension, there should not appeare irregularities, contradictions, and antinomies’

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(1.21). Browne’s remark is at once an assessment of his text (‘a catalogue of doubts’), an anticipation of its contradictory reception, and a historical surmise. The essayist of the Religio has most often been seen, and for good reason, as an interpreter of his own habits and affections, his own sinfulness or saintliness. But whereas this has usually been regarded as a kind of meditative solipsism, we might instead see Browne’s profession of faith as internalising something of the religious tensions and debates bubbling under the surface of the Personal Rule. Laurence Stapleton is thus I think right in seeing the Religio as ‘unlike the sermon or the pamphlet or oration’ but wrong to imagine that ‘it is not addressed to an audience, does not seek to convince, persuade, or change commitment’.83 Its characteristic plasticity of argument and figure are deeply connected to Browne’s uneasiness over the splintering of the body spiritual under the pressure of a dogmatism and a positivism he attributes not just to sectaries but the Laudian church as well: ‘Tis true we all hold there is a number of Elect and many to be saved, yet, take our opinions together, and from the confusion thereof there will be no such thing as salvation, nor shall any one be saved; for first the Church of Rome condemneth us, wee likewise them, the Sub-​ reformists and Sectaries sentence the Doctrine of our Church as damnable, the Atomist, or Familist reprobates all these, and all these them againe. Thus, whilst the mercies of God do promise us heaven, our conceits and opinions exclude us from that place. There must be therefore more than one Saint Peter, particular Churches and Sects usurpe the gates of heaven, and turne the key against each other, and thus we goe to heaven against each others wills, conceits and opinions, and with as much uncharity as ignorance, doe erre I feare in points, not onely of our own, but on anothers salvation. (1.54)

Browne’s witty figure of particular churches and sects usurping the gates of heaven gauges the distance between the mid 1630s and the early 1640s, when godly citizens were turning not keys and opinions against each other but muskets and pikes. It is significant in this respect that Browne identifies the true church with Calvinist predestinarian teaching (‘we all hold there is a number of Elect and many to be saved’). The Church of England, since at least the early 1580s, had been Calvinist in doctrine: at the turn of the seventeenth century, ‘conformists and nonconformists,

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episcopalians and presbyterians all had in common Calvinist predestinarian ideas’.84 This shared theology helped hold together a church and a nation divided on questions of ceremony and on the appropriate form of church government. The Arminian revolution of the 1620s and 1630s, led by the efforts of several powerful bishops patronised by Charles I, as Nicholas Tyacke argued in a climacteric essay, destroyed this common bond. Under Laud’s governance, the Arminian doctrine of free grace was installed as the new orthodoxy of the church, predestinarian teaching outlawed, Puritan preaching constrained and policed, and Calvinist publications censored. ‘As a result of this destruction’, Tyacke writes, ‘during the 1620s, Puritanism came to be redefined in terms which included the very Calvinism that previously had linked nonconformists to the leaders of the established church, and the non-​conformist element in the former Calvinist partnership was driven into an unprecedented radicalism’.85 Thus while Browne may have eschewed the ‘popular scurrilities and opprobrious scoffes’ of anti-​popery (1.5), and loved to use ‘the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand’ when at his devotion (1.3), his outward conformity belies his substitution of the Jacobean church for that of Charles and Laud. Elsewhere Browne’s protestations of conformability are put in even closer touch with the heresies of the sects. Indeed, the limning of such paradoxes is one of the central tropes of Religio Medici, the text a mosaic of code-​switching between orthodox and dissenting registers. For a case in point, we might return to Browne’s professed aim of keeping to the road, ‘and though not in an implicite, yet an humble faith’, following ‘the great wheele of the Church’, thus leaving ‘no gap for Heresies, Schismes, or Errors’ (1.6). So to represent the sum of Browne’s religion, however, requires considerable injury to the rhetorical period in which this statement appears, a 228-​word discursus which sees the via media of Browne’s more mature belief meander into the byways of the physician’s ‘greener studies’, and the figure of the wheel transformed from one of orthodoxy into one of perennial heterodoxy: ‘one generall Councell is not able to extirpate one single Heresie, it may be canceld for the present, but revolution of time, and the like aspects from Heaven, will restore it, when it will flourish till it be condemned againe’ (1.6). In the following section, Browne thus turns heresiographer, cataloguing those youthful errors he claims to have scoured out of himself: ‘That the soules of men perished with their bodies, but should yet bee raised againe at the

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last day’ (the mortalist heresy); ‘that God would not persist in his vengeance for ever, but after a definite time of his wrath hee would release the damned soules from torture’ (Origen’s heresy); that ‘charitable’ belief in the efficacy of prayer for the dead (thus promiscuously mixing Catholic and reformed heterodoxies) (1.7). These were, he tells his reader, ‘single Lapses of my understanding’, and flamed up in him ‘without a joynt depravity of my will’, and yet at the same time, borne out of a deliberative process (1.7). The mortalist conception that the soul would sleep until the resurrection arose in him, says Browne, through a ‘serious reflex upon my own unworthiness’ (1.7). Entertaining God’s ultimate mercy on the souls of the damned is, likewise, the result of ‘serious contemplation’, while he has ‘often wished’ that prayer for the dead ‘had been consonant to Truth, and not offensive to my Religion’ –​the present perfect tense leaving ambiguous whether Browne has abandoned this wish, and perhaps opening a space for the exercise of tender conscience (1.7). The open-​endedness of Browne’s heresies, the scope of his willingness to swerve from orthodoxy according to the urgings of his reason, is apparent at later moments in the text as those errors, seemingly cancelled for the present, are restored and flourish again: most prominently, the nature and fate of the soul are contemplated in distinctly mortalist terms at 1.21, 1.35–​6, 1.38, and 1.45–​7; the condemnation of ‘Worthies and Philosophers’ who lived before the Incarnation scrupled over at 1.52; and the innocuousness of prayer for the dead or for one’s own salvation argued at 1.18, 1.41, 2.6, and 2.14. Perhaps the most telling of these returns of the repressed comes in a passage where Browne appears explicitly to undo the division he had made between ‘Philosophy where truth seemes double-​faced’, and ‘there is no man more paradoxicall then myself ’, and Divinity, wherein ‘I love to keepe the road’ (1.6): The smattering I have of the Philosophers stone (which is something more then the perfect exaltation of gold) hath taught me a great deale of Divinity, and instructed my beliefe, how that immortall spirit and incorruptible substance of my soule may lye obscure, and sleepe a while within this house of flesh. Those strange and mysticall transmigrations that I have observed in Silkewormes, turn’d my Philosophy into Divinity. There is in these workes of nature, which seeme to puzle reason, something Divine, and hath more in it then the eye of a common spectator doth discover. (1.38)

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The sense that Browne here collapses the distance between past error and present doctrine is confirmed by Alexander Ross, who at this point in his animadversions on Religio Medici excoriated the physician: ‘Christ did not tell the penitent Thiefe, that his soul should sleep in his house of flesh, but that it should be with him in Paradise. The soule of Lazarus was not left to sleep in that putrefied house of his flesh, but was carried by the Angels into Abrahams bosome. Saint Paul desired to be dissolved, not to sleep in the grave, but to be with Christ.’86 It is of course in the radical milieu of Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters that scholars following Christopher Hill have ardently set Milton’s intellectual development.87 Yet we might compass the suggestion of George Williamson, in an article of 1935, that Milton’s mortalism, arguably the eschatological key to the great poetry of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes,88 may have had its seed ‘from one who confessed the taint of mortalism in a book which attained extraordinary popularity, and from one whose intellectuall impact on his own time we are liable to underestimate’, that is, Thomas Browne and his Religio Medici.89 For we forget, says Williamson, turning to an observation made by the deist Charles Blount at the close of the seventeenth century, ‘how Dr. Browne (so justly admired as well by Foreigners as his own Country men, upon the Account of his Knowledge in all Gentile sorts of Literature) does both in his Religio Medici & Vulgar Errors, betray his many Doubts and Scruples’.90 Such doubts and scruples become capable of utterance and are at the same time circumscribed by what we have begun to apprehend as a series of temporal slippages. The rhetorical gesture Browne makes in the section we know as 1.6, distancing his present self –​that is, the self writing Religio Medici in the mid-​1630s –​from the younger self of his ‘greener studies’, for instance, is mirrored almost exactly in the prefatory epistle ‘To the Reader’ of 1643, where Browne, now seven years older and wiser, warns ‘there might be many things therein plausible unto my passed apprehension, which are not agreeable unto my present selfe’ (p. 4).91 (The authorised text also purports to be a ‘full and intended copy of that Peece which was most imperfectly and surreptitiously published before’, but as Jonathan Post has noted, the authorised version ‘continued to reproduce a significant number of errors and also introduced new solecisms and misprints of its own’).92 Moreover,

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the fluidity of the self is something Browne observes not merely year on year, in the incremental alterations of increasing maturity, but far more radically, in the quotidian flux of everyday life: ‘I could never divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion’, he writes, ‘or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with mee in that, from which perhaps within a few dayes I should dissent my selfe’ (1.6). Nor even can we count on maturity to renovate our apprehensions, to the contrary, ‘age doth not rectifie, but incurvate our natures, turning bad dispositions into worser habits, and (like diseases,) brings on incurable vices; for every day as we grow weaker in age, we grow stronger in sinne, and the number of our dayes doth but make our sinnes innumerable’ (1.42). Heresies revive and flourish; the weeds of our greener studies only grow faster and more grievously in considered age. In this way Browne’s text produces a set of labile epistemic divisions, between past and present, between error and orthodoxy, philosophy and divinity, indeed between one ‘Thomas Brovvne’ and another. Thus can Browne write, ‘Let mee be nothing, if within the compasse of my selfe, I doe not find the battell of Lepanto, passion against reason, reason against faith, faith against the Devill, and my Conscience against all’ (2.7). This overriding sense –​troped in the form of the essay –​of an insecure ontology of the self, with all the epistemological baggage thereby entailed, helps account for the doctor’s credulous attitude toward metempsychosis, his belief in witchcraft and demonic possession, and his suggestively Freudian notion that in sleep and dreaming ‘we are somewhat more than our selves’ (2.11). It is no surprise, then, that predication itself comes to be seen within the same framework of contingency and difference. Contemplating the wondrous variety of nature, for instance, Browne observes, ‘It is the common wonder of all men, how among so many millions of faces, there shold be none alike’. ‘Now contrary’, he continues, moving along a typically similitudinous track, ‘I wonder as much how there should be any’, for he that shall consider how many thousand severall words have been carelessly and without study composed out of 24 Letters; withall how many hundred lines there are to be drawn in the fabrick of one man; shall easily finde that this variety is necessary: And it will bee very

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hard that they should so concur as to make one portract like another. Let a Painter carelessly limbe out a Million of faces, and you shall finde them all different, yea let him have his copy before him, yet after all his art there will remaine a sensible distinction; for the patterne or example of every thing is the perfectest in that kind, whereof wee still come short, though wee transcend and goe beyond it, because herein it is wide and agrees not in all points unto its copy. (2.2)

The hinge of the comparison between visual and verbal art is surely Aristotle’s discussion in the Poetics of imitation as the root of poesis or ‘making’, but Browne’s emphasis is on the oblique or figural relation of language –​broadly construed –​to that which it imitates.93 Renaissance reformers of rhetoric had harped upon the decorum of res et verba, words and things, for which they found a classical locus in Cato, ‘Rem tene, verbe sequentur’ (take hold of things and words will naturally follow, or will take care of themselves). Or in the advice of Quintilian, ‘Curam ergo verborum rerum volo esse sollicitudinem. Nam plurumque optima rebus cohaeret et cernuntur suo lumine’ (Let care in words be solicitude for things. For generally the best words are inseparable from their things and are discovered by their light).94 Browne implicitly challenges such dicta in asserting the inexorable swerve of verba from res: ‘for the patterne or example of every thing is the perfectest in that kind, whereof wee still come short, though wee transcend or goe beyond it, because herein it is wide and agrees not in all points unto its copy.’ Signification is always already deficient in one regard (‘come[s]‌short’) and superfluous in another (‘goe[s] beyond’). The functional node in Browne’s associative logic is that between portraiture and ‘word pictures’. But if we follow the similitude strictly, the painter’s copying of a pattern or exemplar might instead be compared to the copying of a manuscript. Of course, the scribal copyist does not necessarily aim to reproduce the exact character of the exemplar, in the sense of its orthographic particularity, but rather its verba, its form of words. We get the sense, however, that even in doing so, however scrupulously, the copyist would nonetheless produce a different work. ‘There is never any thing so like another’, Browne concludes this paragraph and section, ‘as in all points to concurre; there will ever some reserved difference slip in, to prevent the Identity, without which, two severall things would not be alike, but the same, which is impossible’ (2.2). We thus find

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ourselves in the territory of Borges and Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote, whose ‘ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided –​word for word and line for line –​with those of Miguel de Cervantes’, fragments which Menard’s learned annotator deems far more subtle and richly allusive than the original.95 Browne of course could not anticipate this nexus of significance, the alignment of his own text with Borges’s; but it is just such temporal slippages, just such unanticipated swerves of meaning Religio Medici simultaneously ponders and enacts. As Browne well understood, though it had been word for word, line for line the same, the essay he had composed c. 1635 would not have been the same work when it was published seven years later, and it has never been the same work since. No less was this true of Scripture. Thus may we hear a new emphasis in an utterance previously heard: ‘It is impossible that either in the discourse of man, or in the infallible voyce of God, to the weakenesse of our apprehensions, there should not appeare irregularities, contradictions, and antinomies’ (2.1). Browne’s hermeneutic diffidence and oh altitudos –​‘As for those wingy mysteries in Divinity, and ayery subtilties in Religion, which have unhindg’d the braines of better heads, they never stretched the Pia Mater of mine’, he avows in the early going of Religio Medici (1.9) –​have of course been noted by critics suspicious of the essay’s religious politics. Astonishingly, perversely original as it seemed after so many appreciations of Browne’s ‘baroque style’, Stanley Fish’s essay on the Religio in Self-​Consuming Artifacts (1972) famously reproached Browne for ‘the devaluing of rational thought and … exaltation of knowledge through faith’, for preferring ease to pain, self-​contentment to ‘the painful and exhausting process of self-​examination and self-​criticism’.96 Reading Fish on Browne is to be reminded of Browne’s maxim that ‘opinions doe find, after certain revolutions, men and minds like those that first begat them’ (1.6), so far does Fish resemble Digby in imagining that ‘If he had applyed himselfe with earnest study, and upon right grounds, to search out the nature of pure intellects: I doubt not but his great parts would have argued more efficaciously’.97 Indeed, if anything Fish outgoes his seventeenth-​century precursor in suturing Browne’s aesthetic to his critical and ultimately moral and spiritual laxity. Through an often brilliant exposition of Browne’s rhetorical patterns and stylistic effects, Fish builds the case that Religio

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Medici ‘does not say to us, “awake, remember, change,” but “take it easy, don’t let it bother you, let it be” ’.98 From there it is but a small step to Michael Wilding’s political decoding of the essay as reactionary and elitist; in Wilding’s hands, ‘Let it be’ is transformed into conservative cant. In places, it is true, we can find Browne washing his hands of such ‘wingy mysteries’ as ‘Whether Eve was framed out of the left side of Adam’, or whether ‘Adam was an Hermaphrodite, as the Rabbines contend upon the Letter of the Text’, or ‘the world was created in Autumn, Summer, or Spring’, dismissing such controversies as ‘Pieces onely fit to be placed in Pantagruels* Library, or bound up with Tartaretus de modo Cacandi’ (1.21), or as he puts it more tactfully in a different context, but ‘conclusions and fallible discourses of man upon the word of God’ (1.23). As we have seen, however, the Religio is nonetheless a discursive space which gives wide latitude to heterodox ideas, a space, as Milton might have put it, of much writing and many opinions.99 It is perforce a space of error, insofar as Browne understands both language and discursive reasoning to be inherently contingent, and thus of experiment, in which heresies perish and revive, and similitudes between the phenomenal world and the divine are pursued to an o altitudo.100 As Victoria Silver writes, ‘Browne represents no implicit belief, but predicates the necessary yet imperfect role of reason in religion: he refuses to decide its superfluous dilemmas one way or another, choosing instead either to forego judgment and reside in uncertainty, or self-​consciously to endorse certain arguments without instituting them as dogmas’.101 It is thus in view of the essay’s heterodox speculations and experiments of belief, its ‘soft and flexible sense’, that Browne prevails upon the forbearance of ‘every ingenuous Reader’; appeals, that is, to principles of toleration and charity. That he found such charity lacking on all sides is clear from that image of the English Church and the Church of Rome, the Sub-​ reformists and Sectaries, turning the key of heaven against one another. Browne’s condemnation of ‘the multitude, that numerous piece of monstrosity’ should be read in light of this earlier image. ‘Those have not only depraved understandings but diseased affections, which cannot enjoy a singularity without a Heresie, or be the author of an opinion, without they be of a Sect also’ (1.7),

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Browne writes, such that ‘heresy’ signifies not heterodox religious belief but rather the divisive spirit attaching to it, and the apostatising of all other beliefs. Authoritarian Laudianism is in this sense, according to the logic of Browne’s critique, no different from sectarian heresy: under its Arminian aegis Calvinist predestinarians like Browne  –​ Praedestinatiani, a new coinage in the standard English-​ Latin Dictionary published in 1633 and dedicated to Laud –​came to be defined as ‘a kind of heretics’, their opinions suppressed, their souls extirpate, and the great wheel broken.102 Under it broke the body politic. Toward the beginning of this chapter, I noted that the rewriting of Browne’s Religio Medici in the early 1980s as the product of royalism, Laudianism, and class interest reveals ‘something of the cleavage that obtains between politics and literature even in the era of interdisciplinarity’ –​for it was the very alignment of those forces in the English civil war that was then being called into question by political historians. Yet we can also look at this as a case of local history being overwritten by grand narrative. Scholars of Browne have long been aware of the various and contradictory reception of Religio Medici in the decades following its first publication. Yet this little prevented Browne from being enlisted as a foil for the likes of a ‘radical’ Milton; indeed, we might think of such thematic juxtapositions as the symbolic fruit of conventional literary history. As we have seen, however, dissent and diversity of opinion –​both in himself and external to himself –​are brilliantly illuminated in and by Browne’s meditation. Insofar as it belongs to a ‘history of polemics’, Religio Medici derides not so much the politics of mass action as the parsimony of spirit in later Caroline England: ‘Thus, whilst the mercies of God do promise us heaven, our conceits and opinions exclude us from that place’ (1.54). To speak of the spirit is also to be reminded that toleration is an affect (from Latin affectus ‘disposition’, from afficere ‘to influence’) as well as an argument. And if we were to shift our judgements from the realm of doctrine to that of the affections –​of which the history of reading provides ample evidence –​how would Religio Medici compare with any of the radical Milton’s religious writings as a vector of humility and brotherly forbearance?

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Notes 1 C. A. Sloane, ‘Imagery of conflict in Religio Medici’, English Language Notes, 8:4 (1971), p. 260. 2 C. A. Patrides (ed.), Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 24. 3 J. Webber, The Eloquent ‘I’: Style and Self in Seventeenth-​Century Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. 173. The source of modern appreciation for Browne as a ‘master of prose style’ is M. Croll, ‘The baroque style in prose’ (1929), rpt. in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, ed. J. M. Patrick and R. O. Evans, with J. M. Wallace and R. J. Schoeck (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 207–​36. 4 M. Wilding, ‘Religio Medici in the English revolution’, first published in C. A. Patrides (ed.), Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), pp. 100–​14; rpt. in Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), from which all citations of the text are taken (here p. 89). 5 For the print life of Religio Medici, see G. Keynes, A Bibliography of Sir Thomas Browne (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), pp. 3–​51; on the revisions between 1642 and 1643, and for an early answer to Wilding, see J. F. S. Post, ‘Browne’s revisions of Religio Medici’, SEL, 25:1 (1985), pp. 145–​63. 6 Wilding, Dragons Teeth, pp. 90, 93, 100, 108. 7 See J. Pocock, ‘Texts as events: reflections on the history of political thought’, in K. Sharpe and S. N. Zwicker (eds), Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-​Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), p. 24. 8 M. A. Radzinowicz, review of Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution, by M. Wilding, MP, 87:2 (1989), p. 174. 9 Wilding, Dragons Teeth, p. 113. 10 J. Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–​1650 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976), p. 46. In the revised second edition, Morrill amends ‘arbitrary’ to ‘contingent’. 11 C. Hill, The English Revolution, 1640: Three Essays (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940), p. 9. 12 J. Morrill, ‘Revisionism’s wounded legacies’, HLQ, 78:4 (2015), p. 579. 13 J. Morrill, ‘Provincial squires and “middling sorts” in the Great Rebellion’, HJ, 20:1 (1977), p. 230. 14 Morrill, ‘Revisionism’s wounded legacies’, p. 592. 15 Important reconsiderations of Browne may now be found in A. Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion,

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and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-​ Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); C. Preston, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); K. Murphy and R. Todd (eds), ‘A man very well studyed’: New Contexts for Thomas Browne (Leiden: Brill, 2008); C. Preston and R. Barbour (eds), Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); K. Killeen, Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); and R. Barbour, Sir Thomas Browne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 16 See M. Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s classical republicanism’, in D. Armitage, A. Himy, and Q. Skinner (eds), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3–​24. 17 S. Fish, Self-​Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-​Century Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), p. 365. 18 S. Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, And It’s a Good Thing, Too (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 272. 19 Though it was of course Presbyterians in Parliament who sought to restore press controls like those formerly exercised by Star Chamber with the Licensing Act of 1643. 20 Wilding, Dragons Teeth, p. 95. 21 Barbour, Sir Thomas Browne, p. 404. 22 Christian Morals: by Sir Thomas Browne … With a life of the author, by Samuel Johnson; and explanatory notes (London, 1756), pp. ii–​iii. Browne’s is the only ‘Life’ Johnson wrote for a non-​poet. Cf. F. L. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), pp. 4–​7. 23 See M. Hunter, Robert Boyle (1627–​ 91): Scrupulosity and Science (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), pp. 15–​50. 24 R. H. Robbins, ‘Browne, Sir Thomas (1605–​82), physician and author’, ODNB (2004; online edn 2008), accessed 8 December 2016. 25 J. Whitefoot, ‘The life of Sir Thomas Browne, Kt’, in Posthumous Works of the Learned Sir Thomas Browne, Kt. M.D. (London, 1712), p. xxviii. 26 The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. G. Keynes, 6 vols. (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), 6:3. 27 Whitefoot, ‘Life of Sir Thomas Browne’, p. xxxvi. 28 See the chapter ‘The industrious sort of people’, pp. 124–​44, in Hill’s Society and Puritanism in Pre-​Revolutionary England (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964); also B. Manning, ‘Religion and politics: the godly people’, in Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion, and the English Civil War (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), pp. 83–​123.

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29 Sir K. Digby, Observations upon ‘Religio medici’ (London, 1643), p. 76, pp. 9–​10. 30 E. Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888), 1:269. 31 A Royalist’s Notebook: The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander, Kt of Nunwell, ed. F. Bamford (London: Constable, 1936), pp. 104, 106. 32 P. Baker, ‘Rhetoric, reality, and the varieties of civil war radicalism’, in J. A. Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–​49 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), p. 202. See, e.g., C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972); B. Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1976), Chs. 1–​7. In controversion of these, see J. Morrill and J. Walter, ‘Order and disorder in the English revolution’, rpt. in The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays by John Morrill (Harlow: Longman, 1993), pp. 359–​ 91; also J. Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 33 Baker, ‘Rhetoric, reality, and the varieties of civil war radicalism’, p. 206. 34 Wilding, Dragons Teeth, pp. 100, 106. 35 C. S. R. Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 2. Though cf. D. Wootton, ‘From rebellion to revolution: the crisis of the winter of 1642–​3 and the origins of civil war radicalism’, English Historical Review, 105 (1990), pp. 654–​69, which contends that ‘Radicalism appeared almost as soon as the war began’ (p. 654). 36 See, e.g., the 1647 Declaration by leading Baptist and Independent ministers controverting the claims of the Levellers: ‘[S]‌ince every man is not a like qualified for the same action, nor hath that discretion and propension of his owne accord to fall into that place which is most proper for him … it cannot but be very prejudiciall to humane society, and the promotion of the good of Commonwealths, Cities, Armies, or families, to admit of a parity, or all to be equall in power. Because there being (in this case) a Liberty for every man to follow the dictates of his own understanding, and to act as he pleaseth in reference to the Publique, what can be expected but disorders, confusions, jealousies, sactions, yea Civill warres themselves? […] And therfore we cannot but conclude, that the ranging of men into severall and subordinate ranks and degrees, is a thing necessary for the common good of men, as being the onely meanes to remove obstructions, and to preserve order, and agreement in all agitations tending thereunto.’ A Declaration by Congregational Societies in and about London (London, 1647), p. 9 (misprinted as 7).

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37 ‘We should be careful not to conflate the radical with the popular’, warns a leading historian of popular political culture in the English revolution. ‘The radicals were a minority, an important one, but a minority still. It was only in certain types of physical and social space within the revolution that people were able to organize and act on radical ideas: the New Model Army; areas of forest and pasture with the absence of a resident gentry, the presence of the cloth industry and an earlier tradition of radicalism; and, above all, London (though even here work in progress suggests that the structures of local government presented an obstacle to the more radical type of reform.’ See J. Walter, ‘The impact of the English civil war on society: the world turned upside down?’ (1991), rpt. in Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England, p. 192. 38 Thus Russell: ‘Cromwell’s apparent leadership of the army revolution then is an optical illusion: his real achievement was the defeat of army radicalism, and the restoration of the supremacy of the gentry in English political life. We have then a political rebellion which was to a limited extent successful, and a social revolution, which, largely as a result of the gentry’s unbroken control of local government, was almost totally unsuccessful’, Origins, p. 3. Cf. R. Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 2: ‘The Levellers were placed in an uncomfortable position between the first revolution and the second, the bourgeois revolution which ultimately protected property and entrenched the new authority of the propertied classes, and the radical revolution which might have overturned them.’ 39 See P. Knachel (ed.), The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated (Charlottesville: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1969), p. xxiv. Nedham worked by turns on the parliamentary newsbook Mercurius Britannicus, on the royalist periodical Mercurius Pragmaticus (for which he was jailed in June 1649), and finally on Politicus. See Joad Raymond’s entry for Nedham in the ODNB. 40 M. Nedham, The Case of the Common-​ Wealth of England, Stated (London, 1650), pp. 71, 73. We might also observe, with Vickie B. Sullivan, that ‘In the October edition of his treatise, Nedham appends quotations from Hobbes’s Elements of the Law, newly published in English and in England, to further his case for the necessity of obedience to the new regime’. While Sullivan thus sees Nedham as taunting royalists with their own arguments, they are, it bears noting, the same arguments. See V. B. Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 116–​21.

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41 Ab Urbe Condita [From the Founding of the City], trans. F. G. Moore, Loeb Classical Library, 14 vols. (London: W. Heinemann, 1919–​59), 6:257. 42 See A. Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 43 Wilding, Dragons Teeth, p. 106. 44 On this aspect of Milton’s political thought, see P. Hammond, Milton and the People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 45 As Christopher D’Addario observes, ‘The jeremiadic tendencies of the early prose, which have largely gone unrecognized by advocates of Milton as consistent defender of liberty, become clearer in 1649 in Eikonoklastes and again in 1660 in The Readie and Easie Way, when Milton seems to accept fully the inability of the English people generally to fulfill God’s call to revolution’. See D’Addario, ‘Against fescues and ferulas: personal affront and the path to individual liberty in Milton’s early prose’, in P. Herman and E. Sauer (eds), The New Milton Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 139–​55, at 142. 46 Baker, ‘Rhetoric, reality, and varieties of radicalism’, p. 206. 47 Walter, ‘A world turned upside down?’, p. 182. 48 See M. Dzelzainis, ‘History and ideology: Milton, the Levellers, and the Council of State in 1649’, HLQ, 68 (2005), pp. 269–​87. 49 J. Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 6. 50 See Keynes, Bibliography, pp. 3–​4. I rely on Keynes for descriptions of the state of MS copies, below. 51 Barbour, Sir Thomas Browne, p. 275. See also Huntley, ‘The publication and immediate reception of Religio Medici’, The Library Quarterly, 25:3 (1955), pp. 203–​18. 52 Keynes, Bibliography, p. 4. 1642 appears to descend from a MS copy which has not survived. 53 Browne to Digby, 3 March 1642 [1643], A true and full coppy of that which was most imperfectly and surreptitiously printed before under the name of Religio Medici (London, 1645), A3r. 54 A true and full coppy, A3v. 55 See J.-​J. Denonain (ed.), Religio Medici: Edited from the Manuscript Copies and the Early Editions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. xxvii–​xxviii. 56 A true and full coppy, A5v. 57 Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. O. Lawson Dick ( Jaffrey: Nonpareil, 1996), p. 97. 58 There were at least three different impressions of 1643: one without any preliminary leaves; one with two leaves inserted, carrying the notice ‘To

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such as have’ and the Errata; and one with six leaves inserted, carrying the Browne and Digby letters, ‘To such as have’, and the Errata. See Keynes, Bibliography, p. 5. 59 Browne has often been read in comparison with his early respondents. See J. N. Wise, Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘Religio Medici’ and Two Seventeenth-​ Century Critics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973). Wise’s primary aim however is to assert ‘Browne’s significant, if ambivalent, position in the history of ideas in seventeenth-​century Europe’ (p. 1); he is less interested in the political geometry of the quarrel surrounding Religio Medici. More illuminating in this regard is Debora Shugar’s treatment of responses to Browne (‘The Laudian idiot’, in Preston and Barbour, The World Proposed, pp. 36–​62), from which I have benefited. See also D. Havenstein, Democratizing Sir Thomas Browne: ‘Religio Medici’ and Its Imitators (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), a stylometric analysis of Browne and his imitators. 60 W. Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants, 2nd edn (London, 1638), C1r. 61 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, 2:276. The literature of and on papist conspiracy in Stuart England is vast: see R. Clifton, ‘Fear of popery’, in Russell, Origins, pp. 144–​67; P. Lake, ‘Anti-​popery: the structure of a prejudice’, in R. Cust and A. Hughes (eds), Conflict in Stuart England (London: Longman, 1989), pp. 72–​106; A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–​1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 62 Digby, Observations, pp. 3–​4. 63 Shugar, ‘The Laudian idiot’, p. 39. 64 Aubrey’s Brief Lives, p. 98. 65 Johnson, ‘Life’ of Browne, in Christian Morals, p. ix. 66 Thus Digby with regard to Browne’s discussion of first matter: ‘But I am sure hee learned in no good Schoole, nor sucked from any good Philosophy to give an actuall subsistence and being to first matter without a forme’ (p. 21). Or on the question of angelic intelligence: ‘If he had applyed himselfe with earnest study, and upon right grounds, to search out the nature of pure intellects: I doubt not but his great parts would have argued more efficaciously, then he doth against those that between men and Angells put onely Porphyries difference of Mortality and immortality’ (p. 39). Or the resurrection of the body: ‘There, I doe not at all wonder hee should tread a little awry, and goe astray in the darke; for I conceive his course of life hath not permitted him to allow much time unto the unwinding of such entangled and abstracted subtilties’ (p. 76).

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67 Digby, Observations, pp. 7, 37, 38. 68 A. Ross, Medicus medicatus, or, The physicians religion cured by a lenitive or gentle potion with some animadversions upon Sir Kenelme Digbie’s observations on Religio medici (London, 1645), p. 2, 17. 69 Ross, Medicus medicatus, p. 35. 70 T. Hobbes, Of libertie and necessitie (London, 1654), A8r. 71 The brief letter is reproduced in its entirety in Barbour, Sir Thomas Browne, pp. 393–​4. See also Barbour, ‘Thomas Browne, the Quakers, and a letter from a judicious friend’, in A. Duncan-​Page and C. Prunier (eds), Debating the Faith: Religion and Letter Writing in Great Britain, 1550–​1800 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), pp. 37–​48. 72 See Shugar, ‘The Laudian idiot’, esp. pp. 61–​2. 73 See K. Lynch, ‘Devotion bound: a social history of The Temple’, in J. Anderson and E. Sauder (eds), Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 177–​98. 74 Lynch, ‘Devotion bound’, p. 185. 75 Lynch, ‘Devotion bound’, p. 191. 76 C. A. Patrides (ed.), George Herbert: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 63. 77 See Lynch, ‘Devotion bound’, p. 191; also J. Maltby, ‘From Temple to Synagogue: “old” conformity in the 1640s–​1650s and the case of Christopher Harvey’, in P. Lake and M. Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, C. 1560–​1660 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), pp. 94–​101. 78 Lynch, ‘Devotion bound’, pp. 191, 193. 79 These include: (1) a copy of 1642b, the second pirated edition; (2) a copy of 1643, the first authorised edition; (3) a copy of 1645, nominally the third edition, bound together with Digby’s Observations (not part of the work) and Descartes’s Discourse of a Method; (4) a copy of 1656, the fourth edition, corrected and amended, with annotations by Thomas Keck; (5) a copy of 1659, the fifth edition, corrected and amended, with Keck’s annotations, ‘Also, Observations by Sir Kenelm Digby, now newly added’. 80 See W. P. Dunn, Sir Thomas Browne: A Study in Religious Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1950), p. 86. 81 M. Nicholson, ‘The early stage of Cartesianism in England’, SP, 26:3 (1929), p. 358. See also P. S. MacDonald (ed.), Kenelm Digby’s Two Treatises (n.p.: Gresham Press, 2013), pp. 5–​34. 82 Thus for Guibbory, ‘Though Browne has been described as a “moderate,” “the great proponent … of a spacious pre-​Laudian high church,” his statements of faith are discomfortingly close to the controversial positions of the Laudians’, Ceremony and Community, p. 120.

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83 L. Stapleton, The Elected Circle: Studies in the Art of Prose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 43. 84 N. Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism, and counter-​ revolution’, in Russell, The Origins of the English Civil War, pp. 120–​1. A more extended account is given in his Anti-​Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–​1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 85 Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism, and counter-​revolution’, p. 121. 86 Ross, Medicus medicatus, p. 51. 87 See Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, p. 99 and passim. 88 See W. Kerrigan, ‘The heretical Milton: from assumption to mortalism’, ELR, 5:1 (1975), pp. 125–​66. 89 G. Williamson, ‘Milton and the mortalist heresy’, SP, 32:4 (1935), p. 559. 90 C. Blount, The oracles of reason … in several letters to Mr. Hobbs and other persons of eminent quality and learning (London, 1693), qtd. in Williamson, p. 559. 91 I am endebted here to Preston’s explication of the text’s ‘two speaking voices’ in terms of the Senecan ideal of ‘civil conversation’, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science, pp. 46–​50. 92 Post, ‘Browne’s revisions of Religio Medici’, p. 145. 93 See Aristotle, Poetics, 1.4. 94 See A. C. Howell, ‘Res et verba: words and things’, ELH, 13:2 (1946), pp. 131–​42, at p. 131. The Cato translation appears to be Howell’s; the Quintilian, C. S. Baldwin’s. 95 J. L. Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote’, in Collected Fictions (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 91. 96 Fish, Self-​Consuming Artifacts, pp. 353, 371. 97 Digby, Observations, p. 39. 98 Fish, Self-​Consuming Artifacts, p. 372. 99 Cf. Milton, Areopagitica (1644): ‘Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.’ 100 As W. P. Dunn memorably put it, ‘One lobe of [Browne’s] brain wants to study facts and test hypotheses on the basis of them, the other is fascinated by mystic symbols and analogies’, Thomas Browne, p. 131. Religio Medici would of course soon be followed by Browne’s expansively Baconian Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646). 101 V. Silver, ‘Liberal theology and Sir Thomas Browne’s “soft and flexible” discourse’, ELR, 20:1 (1990), p. 87. 102 I am endebted for this detail to Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism, and counter-​revolution’, pp. 137–​8.

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3 ‘But Iconoclastes drawn in little’: making and unmaking a Whig Marvell If Thomas Browne –​literary history tells us –​is a writer not to be mistaken for Milton, Marvell is one often found riding in the great Milton’s wake. Thus does Marvell, late in the Second Part of his Rehearsal Transros’d (1673), pull up short to complain of his interlocutor, the future bishop Samuel Parker: ‘You do three times at least in your Reproof, and in your Transproser Rehears’d well nigh half the book thorow, run upon an Author J. M. which does not a little offend me. For why should any other mans reputation suffer in a contest betwixt you and me? But it is because you resolved to suspect that he had an hand in my former book, wherein, whether you deceive yourself or no, you deceive others extreamly’ (PW, 1:417). The passage that follows has been duly appreciated for its ‘dignified defence’ of Milton, in the words of Christopher Hill, and for what it tells us about the length and depth of Marvell’s friendship with the poet of Paradise Lost.1 But such appreciation has largely neglected what motivates Marvell’s digression in the first place –​Parker’s opprobrium for Milton, yes, but moreover opprobrium that would translate Marvell’s book in terms of Milton’s explosive political prose. In so disputing his attacker, however, Marvell also discomfits modern critics and historians, who have little less determinedly linked Marvell’s ideological interest to Milton’s, and never more forcefully than when contending with the politics of their own day. There are of course good reasons why John Milton and his young friend ‘Mr Marvil’ should be so closely aligned in our historical imaginary as fellow poets, Protectoral colleagues, and defenders against ‘popery and arbitrary government’. And yet, just as surely, Marvell’s allegiance to Milton –​with all that is thereby implied of

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poetic and political discipleship –​is something made and not found, emerging in and through a series of historical, indeed polemical, discourses. Nicholas von Maltzahn has brilliantly described the Whig canonisation of Marvell in the decades following the Glorious Revolution.2 But in the first instance, as Marvell’s clash with Parker goes to suggest, the twinning of Marvell with Milton was a tactic pursued by Marvell’s enemies of the 1670s, by high-​flying divines eager to discredit his witty pamphlets in support of religious toleration and tender conscience. More latterly, a similar story –​indeed, as it will emerge, a virtually identical story –​alleging Marvell’s devotion to Milton has been told by Marvell’s ‘friends’: for if the ideology that originally sponsored a ‘Miltonic’ Marvell may be termed Anglican absolutism, that which has maintained it from the nineteenth century to the twenty-​first passes under the name of modern liberalism, whatever cavils that label may invite. While the ‘Miltonising’ of Marvell rarely appears as an explicit aim, the disciplinary politics that underwrite seeing Marvell and Milton hand-​in-​hand within a Whig-​liberal tradition nonetheless powerfully shape scholarly consensus. One consequence of this habitual conflating of Marvell’s and Milton’s identities is that it has made it harder to apprehend Marvell’s politics on their own terms: the irony, circumspection, indeed ease of crossing what we might think of as firm boundaries become merely screens for Milton’s ‘strident ideological certainties’.3 By untethering Marvell from a Miltonic paradigm, we can better gauge the illocutionary force of Marvell’s interventions in public discourse, and too we can perhaps imagine more fully the continuities between Marvell’s politics and poetics. As Annabel Patterson observes, ‘It has not seemed to possible to make a completely whole man out of this poet with too many personae, as Rosalie Colie called him, except by excluding what will not fit our immediate focus’.4 But the distance between the elusive ironist and the Restoration MP is significantly foreshortened if we consider that ‘heterogeneity and indeterminacy are both life and argument, indeed perhaps the life’s argument’, and that satire and polemic no less than lyric can also be modes of contingency and inconclusiveness.5 Disentangling Marvell from Milton thus provides a fresh bearing on the historical Marvell, but also, and what is of perhaps wider import, a suggestively Marvellian bearing on the divisions and tumults of his age.

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The making of an artificial man: Marvell, Milton, and the pamphleteers I should like to begin by pursuing a key point: that the identification of Marvell with Milton may be seen to emerge from a strategic confusion of these two writers, a tactic first pursued by Marvell’s interlocutors in the debate over toleration that surrounded Charles II’s suspension of the penal laws against Protestant non-​conformists and Roman Catholics in March 1672. With this aim in mind, let us turn our attention to the scandalous reception of Marvell’s pamphlet The Rehearsal Transpros’d; Or, Animadversions Upon a late Book, Intituled, A Preface Shewing What Grounds there are of Fears and Jealousies of Popery. Published anonymously in late 1672, the Rehearsal Transpros’d was widely rumoured to be the work of the MP for Hull, ‘Mr Andrew Marvel’.6 At once a bold defence of Charles’s Declaration of Indulgence and a literary send-​up of the more intolerant wing of the established church, Marvell’s book delighted and bedevilled readers from London’s coffee houses to the inmost chambers of Whitehall.7 The king himself, famous for his attention to things other than books, is said to have perused Marvell’s satire ‘over and over again’.8 Widely read and discussed, the pamphlet demanded an immediate response. Its author certainly expected a reply from his principal target in RT, the vituperative Samuel Parker, then archdeacon of Canterbury. By the middle of the following year, he had no fewer than half a dozen answers in hand.9 Indeed, as we may gather from this letter of May 1673, Marvell was impatient (and perhaps not a little anxious) to see how he might be handled, haunting print shops where the works of Parker and his ‘Posse Archidiaconatus’ (PW, 1:248) were being printed: I find here at my returne a new booke against the Rehearsal intitled: St, to him Bayes: writ by one Hodges. But it is like the rest only something more triviall. Gregory Gray-​beard is not out yet. Dr. Parker will be out the next weeke. I have seen of it already 330 pages and it will be much more. I perceive by what I have read that it is the rudest book, one or other, that ever was publisht (I may say) since the first invention of printing. (P&L, 2:328)

These ‘rude’ polemics against Marvell have garnered considerable attention in recent years for the cluster of salacious charges they make

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respecting Marvell’s sexuality: charges which are, to be sure, coded expressions of political difference and antagonism, but which may also, in the view of some critics, disclose a hidden aspect of this most secretive man’s life or character.10 My concern here is with how these strands of abuse –​the sexual and the political –​are in fact enmeshed with a complementary smear tactic, that is, with charges of Miltonic intimacy and dependence. For our purposes, the most telling of the replies to Marvell is The Transproser Rehears’d (1673). Though we now believe the anonymously published Transproser to have been written by Samuel Butler, of Hudibras fame, the tract is sufficiently similar to Parker’s openly acknowledged Reproof to the Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) that even the supremely well-​informed Marvell thought the text Parker’s work11 –​a sign of the collusive nature of the Anglican campaign against Marvell, and thus of a tacitly corporate programme of repudiation and abuse.12 I start with the memorable scene in which Butler turns to doggerel verse for the purposes of limning Marvell and Milton’s relationship: O marvellous Fate. O Fate full of marvel; That Nol’s Latin Pay two Clerks should deserve ill! Hiring a Gelding and Milton the Stallion; His Latin was gelt, and turn’d pure Italian. (p. 135)

Marvell had of course been Milton’s colleague in the Protectoral Office of Foreign Tongues, and the prospect here of Marvell as Milton’s catamite –​gelding to his stallion –​is, needless to say, humiliating. But the sexual idiom deployed and the sexual geometry here imagined function as argument as well as insult. As Paul Hammond’s work has superbly demonstrated, ‘sodomy’, in seventeenth-​century political culture, ‘is a sign of religious and political nonconformity’, and the story told by Butler thus ‘has an obvious polemical purpose in making [Marvell] … the junior partner politically, and so attempting to diminish his status as a spokesman for a version of the Good Old Cause in the 1670s’.13 Butler’s rhetorical strategy, however, is not simply to disarm and discredit a dangerous spokesman for a regenerate republicanism, but indeed to make the shape-​shifting Marvell legible as such a spokesman. Butler does so by claiming to discern the spectre of John Milton within the Rehearsal Transpros’d: the image Butler

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conjures of Milton the stallion astride his former colleague argues that Marvell’s pamphlet has been ‘inseminated’ by his ‘Dear Friend Mr. Milton’, or has perhaps been written by him. This replays in lampoon form some earlier prosaic swipes at Marvell as Miltonic copycat or ‘sponge’. A few leaves over, for instance, Butler had accused Marvell of plagiarising Areopagitica: ‘There is one Conceit behind which I had almost forgot, in his [Marvell’s] Discourse of the Liberty of Unlicens’d Printing p. 6 (which is little else but Milton’s Areopagitica in short hand) The very Sponges which one would think should rather deface and blot out the whole Book, and were anciently used to that purpose, are become now the Instruments to make things legible’ (p. 131). Scrupulously observing the typographical conventions of seventeenth-​century controversy, Butler’s italic text renders Marvell’s original, while the surrounding Roman type contains Butler’s acerbic commentary. In pulling up this passage, Butler the satirist clearly recognises Marvell’s ironies: for in lamenting that the ink which formerly blotted out heresy has, with the rise of cheap print, become a means of disseminating non-​conformity, Marvell is ventriloquising prelatical hysterics about control of the press and the need for religious persecution. Marvell’s pamphlet is itself, of course, an anonymous and clandestine product of the underground press.14 And Butler here dexterously seizes the opportunity to retort the figure of the sponge back upon its sender: ‘But truly’, Butler writes, I think the Sponge has left little else visible in his Book more then what it did in the Figures of those two Painters, in the one of which it fortunately dash’t the Foam of a mad Horse, and in the other, the Slaver of a weary Dog; the Sponges ruder Blot prevailing above all the light touches and tender strokes of the Pencil. And indeed for this inimitable Art of the Sponge, this of Expressing Slaver and Foam to the Life, I will not deny but his work deserves to be celebrated beyond the Pieces of either Painter. If you will have it in his Elegancy, I never saw a man in so high a Salivation. If in Miltons (I know he will be proud to lick up his Spittle) He has invested himself withall the Rheume of the Town, that he might have sufficient to bespaul the Clergy. (p. 132)

In the reference to the ‘Slaver of a weary Dog’, Butler seems to be recalling Marvell’s anonymous manuscript satire The Last Instructions to a Painter (1667), where Marvell commends the artist who ‘having

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long vexed his cloth –​/​Of his hound’s mouth to feign the raging froth –​/​His desperate pencil at the work did dart’, his anger reaching ‘that rage which passeth art’ (lines 21–​5). Butler jokes to the effect that Marvell formerly used his sponge or inking pad to blot out all traces of wit, leaving only foaming saliva. The jest is then extended to the Rehearsal Transpros’d, as Butler mock-​praises his opponent for having surpassed himself in the realm of salivary endeavour, the inking pad now becoming conflated with the kitchen sponge, used on this occasion to soak up Milton’s stale spittle and ‘bespaul’ the present clergy. Butler’s Marvell is a figure of zealous distemper: hostile to the established church, enmitous to the crown, brooking no authority. What I want to emphasise here is that Butler contrives to represent Marvell in this way by repeatedly daubing him with a Miltonic brush: [Marvell] might as well have cal’d him [Parker] Bayes Anonymus in imitation of Miltons learned Bull … who in his Answer to Salmasius calls him Claudius Anonymus. (p. 9) Once, perhaps in a Century of years, there may arise a Martin-​Mar-​ Prelate, a Milton, or such a Brave as our present Author. (p. 55) Your Account of the late War, p. 303, Whether it were a War of Religion, or of Liberty, is not worth the labour to enquire. Which-​soever was at the top, the other was at the bottom; but upon considering all, I think the cause was too good to have been fought for. Which, if I understand not amiss, is nothing but Iconoclastes drawn in Little, and Defensio Populi Anglicania in Miniature. (p. 72) His [Marvell’s] Malicious and Disloyal Reflections on the late Kings Reign, traduc[e]‌the Government of the best of princes and defaming his faithful Councellors in so soul a manner, as if he had at once made us of Miltons Pen, and Gerbier’s Pencil. (p. 146)

Butler is nothing if not consistent in claiming to see little odds ‘betwixt a Transproser and a Blank Verse Poet’ (p. 41). My point, however, is that in supplying Marvell with a Miltonic guise, in claiming to see Milton’s pen behind Marvell’s words, Butler was responding opportunistically not to his target’s pre-​existing identity as a republican or non-​conformist but rather precisely to Marvell’s lack of any such clear reputation. This argument finds support in the hint and others like it that the author of RT is a gelding or eunuch –​ possibilities raised in connection with innuendoes about Marvell’s ‘unnatural’ sexuality.15 Hammond’s insight –​that ‘in their emphasis

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on sexual ambiguity, on Marvell as an amphibian, the pamphleteers seem uneasy about his political and cultural allegiance’ –​is no doubt correct as far as it goes.16 But the corollary to this habit of characterising Marvell in terms of a monstrous lack, a threatening indeterminacy, is the no less concerted effort to expose Marvell as a Milton-​in-​miniature, to define him as the older poet’s political minion. While this claim is not always pressed in the galling, sexualised terms we find in Transproser Rehears’d, its cogency and effectiveness are nonetheless manifest. Thus we find Samuel Parker alleging that ‘if we take away some simpering phrases, and timorous introductions, your Collection will afford as good Precedents for Rebellion and King-​killing, as any we meet with in the writings of J. M. in defence of the Rebellion and the Murther of the King’ (p. 212). In another passage, he claims sarcastically to admire Marvell’s ‘zeal’ and ‘courage’ in defending the press ‘from the bondage of Imprimaturs and the Inquisition of Prelates’, here quoting from Areopagitica. In S’Too Him Bayes, the anonymous author likewise jeers, ‘Come, you had all this out of the Answerer of Salmasius: and your way had been to have transcrib’d the whole side again just as it lay’ (p. 130). While another animadverter, in finding fault with Marvell’s grammar, snidely suggests that he brush up on his lessons with the ‘blind M. who teaches School about More-​fields’, that is, ‘when next you see him’ (pp.  35–​6).17 Such prejudicial indexing of Milton’s texts in Marvell’s book is the pamphleteers’ way of hitting at an opponent who gives little of himself away, who attacks from the shadows: this ‘marvel’ (the pun is legion) who, though he writes on behalf of non-​conformists, disclaims identity with them.18 A Marvell who hectors Anglican bishops and divines while commending the ‘perfect’ beauty of the Church of England (1:179). And who argues for liberty of tender conscience even as he outgoes hardliners like Parker in defending the royal supremacy. Marvell’s refuters pull back the curtain of such riddling contradictions to reveal Marvell’s true Miltonic stripes, see through the Transproser’s witty byplays –​his ‘simpering phrases, and timorous introductions’ –​only to find enthusiasm and rebellion, murmurs of the Good Old Cause. To underscore the deliberateness and ingenuity with which Marvell’s answerers pursue this strategy, let us briefly revisit an earlier

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illustration, which sees Butler attempting to parse perhaps the most famous passage in Marvell’s book: ‘Whether it were a War of Religion, or of Liberty, is not worth the labour to enquire. Which-​soever was at the top, the other was at the bottom; but upon considering all, I think the cause was too good to have been fought for. Which, if I understand not amiss, is nothing but Iconoclastes drawn in Little, and Defensio Populi Anglicania in Miniature’ (p. 72). The telling phrase is surely ‘if I understand not amiss’: the pamphleteer, almost in spite of himself, gives voice to uncertainty over how to construe Marvell’s words, even as he professes to discover in them the lineaments of regicide and republicanism. Butler’s handling of his material, however, is anything but haphazard, as he takes care to leave off quoting Marvell exactly where Marvell’s text refuses to yield to the torque of Butler’s Miltonic application: but upon considering all, I think the Cause was good to have been fought for [here Butler’s quotation ends]. Men ought to have trusted God; they ought and might have trusted the King with the whole matter. The Arms of the church are Prayers and Tears, the Arms of the Subjects are Patience and Petitions. The King himself being of so accurate and piercing a judgment, would soon have felt where it stuck. For men may spare their pains where Nature is at work, and the world will not go the faster for our driving. Even as his present Majesty’s happy Restauration did it self; so all things else happen in their best and proper time, without any need of our officiousness. (1:192)

This passage seems rather extraordinarily to revise Marvell’s Horatian Ode, in which ‘restless Cromwell’ appears as irresistible force of nature, such that the revolution itself is now seen as ‘officious’, outside the natural course of events, whereas it is the Stuart restoration that here signifies divine providence (‘so all things … happen in their best and proper time’). The tag Marvell introduces in italic type (the ‘Arms of the church are Prayers and Tears’), far from sampling Miltonic polemic, is in fact lifted from the King’s Book, Eikon Basilike. And however modulated by shrewdness or irony, we can hardly miss the implied remonstrance of parliamentary rebellion in the phrase Marvell adds (‘the Arms of the Subjects are Patience and Petitions’). The remoteness in tone and substance of these remarks from the convulsive energies of Eikonoklastes or the righteous jeremiads of the First Defence surely needs no demonstration here.

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Andrew Marvell, in defence of himself One person who well understood what the archidiaconal posse was up to in so persistently tethering Marvell to Milton was Marvell himself. And while the second part of the Rehearsal Transpros’d mounts what has been called a ‘passionate’ defence of Milton, this misrepresents the circumspection Marvell assumes with regard to civil war radicalism and the current debate over toleration. To gauge the illocutionary force of Marvell’s intervention into that debate we must do some more work to establish the contemporary political and religious currents to which Marvell was responding. In a sense this requires that we re-​examine the Restoration settlement itself, for it was the failure of the Restoration effectively to address the religious divisions of the 1640s and 1650s that gave rise to the crisis over toleration a decade hence.19 The very idea of Restoration was of course bound up with reconciliation, with healing a kingdom divided. In his Declaration from Breda, which helped secure Charles Stuart’s return to the throne, the king promised to bind up ‘these wounds which have so many years together been kept bleeding’, to rule with compassion for all his subjects ‘how faulty so ever’, and with the advice and consent of Parliament.20 Such compassion was to include toleration for religious differences, those ‘moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes’ that comprise the body spiritual, so called by Milton in Areopagitica (CPW, 2:555). Thus, as a tonic for ‘the Passion & uncharitableness’ which have ‘produced several opinions in Religion, by which men are engaged in parties and animosities against each other’, Charles swore, ‘we do declare a liberty to tender Consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in religion’.21 And indeed, as N. H. Keeble writes, ‘For six months or so the signs were promising … and there was every indication that, in recognition of what the Restoration owed to Presbyterian opinion and of the continuing Puritan inclinations of a large part of the population, the national church would be established on sufficiently broad terms to allow it to accommodate both episcopalian and Puritan opinion’.22 In the wake of Thomas Venner’s Fifth Monarchist uprising in January 1661 and the king’s stirring coronation later that spring, however, the Cavalier Parliament returned in May 1661 took a rather narrow

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view of which religious opinions, as the Declaration had formulated it, ‘do not disturb the peace of the kingdom’. Archbishop Sheldon catches something of the virulence of this Anglican retrenchment in remarking, ‘’Tis only a resolute execution of the law that must cure this disease [of non-​conformity], all other remedies serve and will increase it; and it’s necessary that they who will not be governed as men by reason and persuasions should be governed as beasts by power and force, all other courses will be ineffectual, ever have been so, ever will be so’.23 Together the legislation passed between 1661 and 1665 known as the Clarendon Code effectively excluded non-​ conformists from public office and from ministry in the Church of England; outlawed unauthorised religious meetings of more than five people; and forbade ejected ministers from coming within five miles of their former livings and from teaching in schools.24 The king’s unsuccessful lobbying for ‘such a power of indulgence, to use upon occasions, as might needlessly force [dissenters] out of the kingdom, or, staying here, give them cause to conspire against the peace of it’, as he besought Parliament in February 1663, suggests something of the apprehension with which these penal laws received the royal assent, and so (once again, many Puritans must have thought) transformed England into a persecuting state.25 This is not to say, however, that the Anglican supremacy was thus assured. For as John Spurr writes, ‘Enthusiastic as they may have been about episcopacy, the Prayer Book and orderly parish religion, the provincial gentry … did not always go along with the divisive, persecuting policies deemed necessary at Lambeth and Whitehall’: ‘Thus many of those charged with enforcing the penal laws were at best indifferent to the cause of uniformity and at worst active sympathizers with Nonconformity.’26 Add to this the fact that key pieces of the legislation against nonconformity were of limited lifespan, and that, as Dzelzainis and Patterson note, ‘the leading ministers in the new government formed after the fall of Clarendon … were all patrons either of dissent or Catholicism’, and we can well see why the late 1660s and early 1670s should have given rise to an extended debate over liberty of tender conscience and the prerogatives of church and state.27 One of the loudest and most scabrous voices in this sphere of writing and opinion belonged to Samuel Parker. In a rapid-​fire series of publications, and in a style he himself characterised as vehement

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and severe,28 this future Bishop of Oxford fashioned what was essentially a two-​pronged argument: that the magistrate enjoyed absolute authority to determine matters of conscience and public worship, and that ‘to quarrel with those forms of Publick Worship that are establish’d by Authority … is at once notorious Schism & Rebellion: For when a Religion is Establish’d by the Laws, whoever openly refuses Obedience, plainly rebels against the Government, Rebellion being properly nothing else but an open denial of obedience to Civil Power’ (Preface 105). These views were expressed first in A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1670), followed by A Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiastical Politie (1671), and then by a polemical preface to Bishop Bramhall’s Vindication of Himself and the Episcopal Clergy (1672).29 Parker’s stance however –​combining awed respect for the magistrate’s ecclesiastical authority with a persecuting zeal –​was rendered distinctly awkward when, in March 1672, Charles unilaterally exercised his prerogative to suspend the penal laws against Roman Catholics and non-​conformists. It is a commonplace that Marvell’s pamphlet expends as much or more of its burlesque energies in mocking Parker’s intemperate style as it does excoriating his extreme views.30 But Marvell rarely misses an opportunity to expose this contradiction in Parker’s argument. What is more, Marvell goes so far as to fashion himself the traditional defender of royal prerogative, in turn linking Parker’s persecution of tender conscience with the socially disturbing forces of schism and rebellion. As Jacqueline Rose observes, ‘A high view of royal authority meant that Parker had grudgingly to admit that Charles II could indulge Dissent if he so wished’. Likewise Derek Hirst, who notes how ‘Parker was driven by the changed conditions of 1672 to abandon his earlier almost Hobbesian espousal of royal power in causes ecclesiastical’, falling back on ‘the independence of church and churchmen’.31 As Marvell embarks on an anatomy of Parker’s texts, he thus taunts his adversary with these evident inconsistencies. ‘Mr Bayes’, Marvell crows, had ‘a very Politick fetch or two that might have made a much wiser man then he, more confident’: For he imagined first of all, that he had perfectly secured himself from any mans answering him: not so much upon the true reason, that is, because indeed so paltry a Book did not deserve an Answer; as because

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he had so confounded the Question with differing terms and contradictory expressions, that he might upon occasion affirm whatsoever he denyed, or deny whatsoever he affirmed. And then besides, because he had so intangled the matter of Conscience with the Magistrates Power, that he supposed no man could handle it thorowly without bringing himself within the Statute of treasonable words, and at least a Premunire. (PW, 1:94–​5)

Indeed, Marvell continues, ‘he thought that whoever answered him must for certain be of a contrary judgment; and he that was of a contrary Judgment should be a Fanatick; and if one of them presumed to be meddling, then Mr. Bayes [as Marvell calls Parker] … would either burn that, or tear it in pieces’ (1:195). To an imagination such as Parker’s, in which pleas for freedom of conscience and civil rebellion were inextricably wed, only a schismatic dissenter could be heard making a case for toleration, his writings bound to be burned by the hangman (as were Milton’s shortly after the Restoration). How discomfiting in that case –​and Marvell plainly relishes the circumstance –​for Parker to find himself answered by someone who not only identifies with civil peace, but with royal authority. This was no doubt a sharp lesson for Parker, and it serves to remind us as well how the bilateral divisions of traditional historiography –​radicals and dissenters to one side, Anglicans and loyalists to the other –​often fail to capture the shifting geometries of principle and interest within the destabilised polity of later Stuart England. Marvell’s High-​Church adversaries were of course bound to deny that it was possible to inhabit the space Marvell claimed to occupy, of cosiness at once with dissent and the interests of the crown. Rather they had to keep on insisting that Marvell could not be other than a fanatical dissenter, certainly a non-​conformist and probably a republican to boot. Indeed, it was practically policy for the Anglican establishment to counter ‘demands for leniency by detailing and polemicizing the responsibility of the non-​conforming conscience for England’s woes, past and present. Civil war, revolution, and regicide had been the work of enthusiasts; and, eager conformists warned, the strains of enthusiasm could still be heard in meetings and conventicles, its texts encountered in bookshops and streets’.32 The pamphleteers’ habit of ‘Miltonising’ Marvell, of suturing his book to Milton’s writings and opinions, of associating him with civil war radicalism, may thus been

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seen as part of a concerted effort to chase Marvell from the advantageous political and rhetorical ground he had so carefully prepared for his argument, to write him into the more easily assailable territory of ‘Rebellion and King-​killing’ –​into the arms, that is, of the notorious ‘blind M’. Marvell’s follow-​up to the Rehearsal Transpros’d shows just how well he grasped this stratagem. It is toward the end of the Second Part (1673) that he unveils the pamphleteers’ programme of identity by association for what it is, and with great skill and decorum seeks to disambiguate himself from Milton. The dominant note is one of self-​deprecation, as Marvell wonders that his ‘simple book’ should be put to the learned Milton’s account, and forcibly remonstrates the pamphleteers for dragging Milton into a controversy he had nothing to do with. ‘You do three times at least in your Reproof, and in your Transproser Rehears’d well nigh half the book thorow, run upon an Author J. M. which does not a little offend me’, Marvell writes, taking Parker (as we have seen) to be the author of both tracts. For why should any other mans reputation suffer in a contest betwixt you and me? But it is because you resolved to suspect that he had an hand in my former book, wherein, whether you deceive yourself or no, you deceive others extreamly. For by chance I had not seen him of two years before; but after I undertook writing, I did more carefully avoid either visiting him or sending to him, lest I should in any way involve him in my consequences. (1:417)

Marvell’s concern to protect the politically vulnerable Milton from the consequences of his own unlicensed polemic rings true enough –​ especially when we recall that Marvell had a hand in shielding Milton from reprisal following the Restoration.33 But there is more at work here than Marvell’s wish to indemnify Milton from liability in the authorship of RT. Marvell also has occasion openly to doubt the ingenuousness of Parker and Butler in alleging the presence of Milton’s hand in his book, whether literally or figuratively, and to suggest their reason for doing so (to ‘deceive others extreamly’). For as Marvell perfectly realised, it was his own integrity as an advocate for toleration that was at risk in the pamphleteers’ association of RT with Milton, rather than Milton who was at risk from being linked to Marvell’s book. And this perhaps accounts too for the touch

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of over-​elaborateness with which Marvell insists on the extent of his absence from Milton’s company, ‘either visiting him or sending to him’. A few paragraphs later, Marvell is spurred once again to refute a Miltonic lineage, only now he hits back even more decisively, revising the opposition’s Miltonising script so as to transpose Parker into the role of Miltonic disciple. The scene is set at Milton’s house in Jewin Street, shortly after the Restoration, where, Marvell reckons, he first met Parker. ‘Since that’, says Marvell, I have been scarce four or five times in your Company, but, whether it were my foresight or my good fortune, I never contracted any friendship or confidence with you. But then it was, when you, as I told you, wander’d up and down Moor-​Fields Astrologizing upon the duration of His Majesties Government, that you frequented J.M. incessantly and haunted his house day by day. What discourses you there used he is too generous to remember. But he never having in the least provoked you, for you to insult thus over his old age, to traduce him by your Scaramuccios, and in your own person, as a School-​Master, who was born and hath lived much more ingenuously and Liberally then your self; to have done all this, and lay at last my simple book to his charge … when you your self too have said, to my knowledge, that you saw no such great matter in it but that I might be the Author: it is unhumanely and inhospitably done, and will I hope be a warning to all others, as it is to me, to avoid (I will not say such a Judas,) but a man that creeps into all companies, to jeer, trepan, and betray them. (1:418–​19)

That this inventory of Parker’s misdeeds climaxes with his laying Marvell’s ‘simple book’ to Milton’s charge gives us leave to ask who is really being vindicated, Milton or Marvell. To paraphrase the Milton of Areopagitica, Marvell is here insisting that he is a doctor in his book, not a pupil teacher: he claims responsibility for all he delivers in RT and will have no Miltonic imprimatur (doing his best impersonation of Miltonic vehemence just as ‘J. M.’ is exorcised from his book). Indeed, the pupil in this anecdote is not Marvell but Parker, remembered in this anecdote as an incessant hanger-​on at Milton’s house in the early 1660s. This is no doubt meant to call to mind the archdeacon’s own Presbyterian upbringing and erstwhile connections to the Puritan community, a reminder by Cromwell’s former Latin secretary that three decades of political and religious turmoil had left

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few Englishmen of whatever current partisan stripe without something of a chequered past.34 John Aubrey famously recorded of Marvell that ‘though he loved wine he would never drinke hard in company, and was wont to say that, he would not play the good-​fellow in any man’s company in whose hands he would not trust his life’.35 Some of this Marvellian mistrust of men’s society perhaps glimmers through the lesson he makes of Parker’s turning coat on Milton, that it may be ‘a warning to all others, as it is to me, to avoid (I will not say such a Judas,) but a man that creeps into all companies, to jeer, trepan, and betray them’. Betrayal is of course paramount in this episode, for the challenge Marvell here faces is to step clear of any simple equation between his church satire and Milton’s ‘learned Bull[s]‌’ without being seen to betray Milton as he accuses Parker of doing. Rather astonishingly, Marvell’s solution is to put distance not only between himself and Milton’s treatises, but also between the Milton of the civil wars and that of the present. ‘J. M. was and is’, Marvell writes, ‘a man of great Learning and Sharpness of wit as any man. It was his misfortune, living in a tumultuous time, to be toss’d on the wrong side, and he writ Flagrante bello certain dangerous treatises … At His Majesties happy Return, J. M. did partake, even as you yourself did for all your huffing, of his Regal Clemency, and has ever since expiated himself in a retired silence’ (1:417–​18). For all Marvell’s reverence for the older poet, John McWilliams has provocatively observed how Marvell here depicts ‘Milton’s cause as the “wrong” one’, indeed, that he goes so far as to ascribe the writing of Milton’s civil war pamphlets to ‘misfortune’, ‘which “toss’d” him, as if casually, on the wrong side’.36 To this we must add the observation that Marvell goes on to represent Milton as having actively received the king’s grace and forgiveness, supposing ‘J. M.’ to be a grateful penitent (the relevant sense of ‘expiate’ here is ‘To do away or extinguish the guilt of (one’s sin)’, ‘to do penance’, for which the OED cites this instance).37 Much as he did in 1660, then, Marvell plays the honest intercessor on behalf of his errant, guilt-​ stained friend, thus insisting on the resolute non-​identity of ‘A. M.’ and ‘J. M.’ either as authorial signs or political vectors. Rather than ‘veneration of Milton’, we find here much calculation and unease: champion of toleration though he may be, Marvell repeatedly disables attempts to define him in relation to Miltonic

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politics or to paint him as a civil war radical.38 Against enemies who would at every turn associate him with busy companies of men –​ with republican juntos and enthusiastic sects –​Marvell writes himself into delicious singularity, highlighting the occasional and performative nature of his discourse. That his interlocutors scoffed at such insistences, that they sought to outfit him with a continuous identity, to map that character onto polarised divisions over politics, religion, and government, to reinforce the polemical link between Puritan sympathies and civil rebellion, are all intelligible manoeuvres within the context of animadversion. As literary criticism, much less historiography, however, this can hardly do. And yet, as we shall soon see, the interpretive procedures Marvell’s enemies in the church applied to his pamphlet in fact much resemble the protocols of reading deployed by modern commentators in search of Marvell’s political identity. Writing the political Marvell The next phase of my argument, then, considers how Marvell’s political identity has been construed in our own time, seeking to make visible the spectre of a tendentiously ‘Miltonic’ Marvell within contemporary historiography. In starting out, we do well to recall that while Marvell and Milton may now seem obviously to inhabit the same literary-​historical terrain, this was not the case even a generation ago. As we know, Marvell’s reputation as a poet was revived from the ashes of eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century neglect by T. S. Eliot, whose TLS essay of 1921 effectively set the terms of Marvell criticism for decades to come.39 Eliot’s is the Marvell of ‘tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace’, a creature of irony, whose poems bear witness, ‘in the expression of every experience … [to] other kinds of experience which are possible’.40 Marvell’s later career as politician and controversialist held little interest for the High-​Church Eliot or for New Critics invested in the idea of poetry’s disinterestedness and internal autonomy. Marvell the metaphysical poet –​à la Joan Bennett or J. B. Leishman41 –​is still richly on display as late as 1978 in the volume of essays published on the tercentenary of Marvell’s death, as one may judge from chapter titles like ‘Marvell’s metaphysical wit’ or ‘The aesthetics of inconclusiveness’.42

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The notable exception to the Eliotic paradigm in this collection is the lead essay by Christopher Hill on ‘Milton and Marvell’ –​ ‘published first’, according to the volume’s editor, ‘in recognition of its particular argument’.43 Hill characteristically pulls no punches setting out his thesis: ‘Politics was an essential part of the experience of both [writers]’, he asserts. ‘I have no sympathy for the gentlemanly aestheticism which mars even so good a book as Leishman’s The Art of Marvell’s Poetry. Leishman contrasts writing for cultivated gentlemen with Marvell’s “rather philistine and ill-​informed … post-​restoration activities” ’, a view that for Hill ‘suggests a lack of imagination horrifying in one who sets up to be a critic of poetry’.44 And indeed, the historian’s bristling dismissal of ‘gentlemanly aestheticism’, his methodological commitment to understanding the role politics played in Marvell’s (and Milton’s) writings and experience, here provide a key index to some of the vital new directions Marvell studies would take going forward and arguably continues to embrace. It might be observed, however, that Hill was not the first person to take an interdisciplinary approach to Marvell or to insist on the political as an essential dimension of his work. Ten years previously, John M. Wallace had published Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (1968), which focused on the political poetry and controversial prose and sought to interpret these writings in their immediate historical and political context.45 Wallace’s study shares certain affinities with Revisionism, insofar as it was critical of Whig historians who ‘saw the revolutionaries of the 1640s and the whigs of the 1680s carrying the torch of progress’, and who consequently ‘dissolved many of the complexities of the period’.46 Wallace by contrast touted ‘the fluidity of thought’ in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, ‘and the existence of a large area of common ground shared occasionally by people of every stripe’47 –​a clear anticipation of Russell’s emphasis on consensus in his studies of Caroline Parliaments.48 Self-​consciously positioning his book as a challenge to ‘the whig interpretation of history’, Wallace was concerned to draw out the experience of ‘loyalists’, those ‘thousands and thousands’ of English men and women ‘who turned their coats with the times and followed with a clear conscience the changes of regime between 1649 and 1688’, and for whom he took Marvell to be an exceptionally eloquent spokesman.49

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If Hill’s essay marks an explicit rebuke to New Critical anachr­ onism, then, it also asserts a differently valenced historicism to that propounded by Wallace, one that aligns Milton and Marvell with the more radical and ‘progressive’ elements of seventeenth-​century political and religious discourse. And as the discussion that follows will bear out, subsequent scholars have much inclined to Hill’s view. Indeed, while Wallace is honoured for his ‘ground-​breaking interdisciplinary work’, Destiny His Choice is as often elided in critical debates over Marvell’s politics, a fate anticipated by C. A. Patrides in paying homage to the ‘particular argument’ of Hill’s tercentenary essay, and so enshrining it as a seminal moment in the political reconstruction of Marvell. This curious erasure points however to an even more curious shadow history: for on looking into Hill’s essay, what we find is that the personal, political, and literary connections forged between Marvell and Milton in the controversial literature of the 1670s are given a new lease on life. Though Hill’s purposes are of course antithetical to those of Marvell’s confuters –​to celebrate as opposed to embarrass –​his hermeneutic strategy both recapitulates Marvell’s secondary status to Milton and flattens the political horizon to which Marvell’s writing belongs and which it discloses. Proximity, subservience, deference, debt –​these are the signs under which Hill would have us apprehend Marvell’s relation to Milton. ‘Marvell was originally pushed forward by Milton, and almost certainly got his position in government service through Milton’, Hill contends in a capsule biography of Marvell, and there is at least some probable truth to this.50 Milton’s letter to John Bradshaw, Lord President of the Council of State, recommending Marvell to the government as ‘a scholler … well read in the latin & Greeke authors, & noe doubt of an approved conversation’, is of course well known.51 Though we might note that some four years had passed between the writing of this letter in February 1653 and Marvell’s eventual appointment as Assistant Latin Secretary in 1657 –​time during which Marvell had published The First Anniversary of the Government under O. C. and entered Cromwell’s service as governor to the Lord Protector’s ward. Far more problematic, however, is Hill’s further assertion that ‘[Marvell] retained –​as Masson stressed –​a deference for Milton which was almost servile’.52 The citation here to Milton’s great Victorian biographer, David Masson, invites our scrutiny. Taking out The Life of John Milton, we find Masson looking over

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Marvell’s commendatory verses on Paradise Lost, which elicits the assurance, ‘Marvell’s discipleship to Milton, it will be seen, is perfect and exceptionless to the last. He will do anything for Milton, –​drink up eisel for him, eat a crocodile’.53 That this comes from Hamlet’s graveyard boasts to Laertes of his love for Ophelia –​‘’Swounds, show me what thou’lt do. /​Woot weep, woot fight, woot fast, woot tear thyself, /​Woot drink up eisel, eat a crocodile? /​I’ll do’t’ (5.1.272–​5) –​ even supplies an erotic shade.54 It is with Masson’s authority behind him, then, that Hill instructs us to view ‘Marvell’s dignified defence of Milton in The Rehearsal Transpros’d, and his poem before the second edition of Paradise Lost’, as ‘the culmination of over twenty years of discipleship and friendship’.55 Yet it is striking how undifferentiable in this regard Masson and Hill are from Samuel Butler, together finding, or so it would seem, ‘little odds between a Transproser and a blank verse poet’. This thought makes itself more troublesomely felt at the point in Hill’s essay where he ventures his own gloss on Marvell’s gnomic utterance about the civil war: ‘the words “the cause was too good to have been fought for. Men ought to have trusted God; they ought and might have trusted the king with the whole matter” ’, Hill writes, ‘cannot be interpreted as a rejection of the Good Old Cause’ (my emphasis). ‘If the cause was too good to have been fought for, a fortiori it was too good to fight against –​as Charles I had done. Samuel Parker saw this point clearly enough; so did the author of A Common-​ Place Book out of the Rehearsal Transpros’d.’56 Hill’s wide reading in the ‘paper warfare’ between Marvell and Parker’s crew is creditable. But if we admire Hill’s learning, and respect his candour, what are we to make of the fact that Hill’s interpretation of Marvell is seconded by Samuel Parker himself, or that the hermeneutic Hill invokes exactly replicates the animvadversive techniques of Marvell’s antagonists. Indeed, the historian has simply rewritten a scoffing line of attack as if it were plain truth: for Hill’s reasoning, ‘If the cause was too good to have been fought for, a fortiori it was too good to fight against’, runs exactly parallel to that of the anonymous Common-​Placer, who jibes, ‘Now, according to Natural Logick, whatsoever is too good, is good enough, and more to spare. As if I should say of the Transproser … wherein he treats others, that he was too much a Knave to be trusted with any Office in the Kingdom; this would include that he was Knave enough’ (pp. 51–​2). The only difference being that one man’s knave

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is another man’s hero –​the same difference, it would seem, that lies between a perfect disciple and a catamitical minion. Of course, it is one thing to quibble with an essay going on four decades old, and which perhaps deserves some special consideration for being in the vanguard of the critical turn toward politics and history in Marvell studies. And too we might acknowledge the disciplinary savvy –​that is to say, the strategic bias –​in Hill’s ‘Miltonising’ of Marvell when apprehended within its own critical moment. As is clear from the combative tone of Hill’s article, the historian of 1978 was obliged to contend with the inertia of a prevailing formalism that prized Marvell for his lyric sensibility, his seeming transcendence of world and time; and in this, the cachet of a political Milton no doubt provided a certain amount of leverage. Significant here is the fact that the great modern edition of Milton’s prose, begun in 1953, was by the end of the 1970s nearly complete. For in the wake of those pioneering volumes of scholarship, Milton the ‘organ-​ voiced’ poet of Victorian cliché was being transformed (‘with remarkably little fuss’, to quote F. R. Leavis very much against the grain) into the now-​familiar emblem of Puritan radicalism and the ‘literature of dissent’.57 Whatever agenda such bias may serve, however, whether that of the Marxist historian or the Anglican high-​flyer, the bias remains just that –​a systematic misprision. What bears demonstrating, then, is how far Marvell criticism since the historical turn has tethered Marvell to Miltonic purposes and paradigms even as our understanding of the context Milton and Marvell shared has been radically transformed. Some of the most visible and consequential signs of the Miltonic programme at work in Marvell studies are to be found in the Yale edition of Marvell’s prose works.58 My focus here will be on Annabel Patterson’s general introduction to the prose and on the introductory essays and apparatus to both parts of RT (all found in volume one). Marvell’s political and religious writings –​deeply embedded as they are within Restoration controversies now largely obscure –​ pose an unusually high cost of entry to the would-​be thesis writer or researcher, to say nothing of the ‘general reader’. These introductions thus exert considerable influence in orienting readers to these works and to Marvell’s identity as a writer of political prose. So it is significant, to recall Marvell’s chastisement of Parker, that we do well nigh half the book thorow, run upon an author J. M. In her general introduction,

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for instance, Patterson refers to Milton more than a dozen times, broaching comparisons to Areopagitica, the First Defence, Of True Religion, Paradise Lost, and the divorce tract Tetrachordon. The textual introduction to RT yields half as many references again –​here also to the First Defence and Of True Religion as well as Eikonoklastes –​while the essay which prefaces RT2 chimes with still more, repeating Of True Religion and adding the Second Defence. Now, it would be churlish not to acknowledge how just and illuminating are many of the Miltonic resonances and parallels here registered. Moreover, considering the high standing Milton enjoys among seventeenth-​ century political writers, it makes sense in constructing an edition of Marvell’s prose to highlight his connection to Milton as a means of justifying Marvell’s claim on our attention. Yet we should also be wary –​especially in light of the use Marvell’s calumniators made of Milton –​of the potentially distorting effects involved in overstating that resemblance. All the more so when we take into account the canonical mass Milton has acquired in the course of more than three centuries of literary history, and when we think of how gravitationally massive bodies bend the fabric of space around them, subjecting lighter bodies to their influence. And indeed, the tug of established value produces some definite wobbles in the Yale introduction to Marvell’s prose. We might pause, for instance, over such blandishments as this one: ‘To focus on these last five years [of Marvell’s life] is to recognize Marvell as one of the most original political writers of his day –​as important as Milton, if we think in terms of the influence each had at the time.’59 I have misgivings here, for one, over the role Milton plays in defining Marvell’s achievement, recalling the invidious comparisons of the pamphleteers; with the ready conflation of ‘originality’, ‘importance’, and ‘influence’, terms we might well tease apart; and too with the temporal ambiguity of ‘[in] his day’ and ‘each had at the time’ –​ Milton being thirteen years older than Marvell, their ‘day’ and ‘time’ may or may not be thought to coincide, a fact that impinges on how their political writings compare. If we are talking about the last years of Marvell’s life, the years 1672–​78, then surely it is Marvell who has the incomparably greater impact on politics and public debate, a distinction curiously elided in a passage meant to underscore Marvell’s importance as a writer of prose. The first part of Rehearsal Transpros’d was the talk of the town

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and a best-​seller, despite appearing without a licence and its printing being disrupted by the authorities. As we have seen, it drew hundreds upon hundreds of pages of animvadversive response, generating an enormous discursive footprint within the London book trade. A few years later, Marvell would author An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677), another political tour de force which rocked the political establishment and which was subsequently praised and blamed by contemporaries for helping ignite the crisis over exclusion that punctuated the end of the decade.60 Milton’s Of True Religion (1673), the only explicitly polemical work issued by the poet after the Restoration, by contrast made almost no impression at all on London readers, judging by the near total lack of references or responses to it at the time. Indeed, the only trace of Milton’s pamphlet to be found in contemporary print culture is in the Transproser Rehears’d, which is to say, that it is occasioned by Marvell’s book.61 Thus with respect to the years Marvell was actively engaged in prose controversy, we can hardly say that Marvell is buoyed by comparison with Milton. Milton of course garnered a considerable international reputation as a political controversialist in the 1650s, on the basis of the series of Latin treatises he wrote as the official apologist of the Commonwealth. And he had been among the most notorious anti-​prelatical writers in debates over the nature of church government the decade prior. I have no qualm with seeing Milton’s ‘rich and various prose works … among his great achievements as a writer’,62 or as deserving a place beside the classic texts of seventeenth-​century political theory written by the likes of Hobbes, Harrington, Sidney, and Locke. Even still, in light of how successful were Marvell’s prose works in mobilising writing and opinion, we might recall that Milton’s two most famous examples of vernacular polemic –​Areopagitica (1644) and Eikonoklastes (1649) –​ were in fact spectacular failures from the point of view of intervening in contemporary debate. As Sabrina Baron notes, the first edition of Areopagitica ‘did not sell out and no reprint appeared until Milton’s works were published at the end of the century’.63 This only confirms what William Haller noted long ago, that ‘Areopagitica, though the greatest literary product of the exigency that gave it birth, was not a bolt from the blue. Nor does it seem to have attracted much attention at the time … even after Areopagitica references in text and margin by opponents of free speech are not to Milton, but to Henry Robinson,

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John Goodwin, Roger Williams, and to the anonymous John the Baptist and Compassionate Samaritane’.64 Eikonoklastes must have been an even more resounding disappointment: while Milton’s tract languished unsold and unread, the King’s Book, in the words of its true author, John Gauden, ‘was an army and did vanquish more than any sword could’, passing through thirty-​six editions in 1649 alone.65 If we are somewhat misled by the notion that Marvell bears comparison with Milton as a writer of prose in terms of ‘the influence each had at the time’, there may be some slippage as well in the equation of their ‘originality’ as prose controversialists. For as Patterson and Dzelzainis themselves note in their introductory essay to RT, the literary significance of Marvell’s prose and of that work in particular lies in ‘introducing wit and fantasy into an arena in which brute intellectual force was hitherto dominant’, thereby ‘transform[ing] the rules of the discursive game’.66 Surely no one –​with the possible exception of Hobbes –​in the sphere of seventeenth-​century political discourse is more associated with ‘brute intellectual force’ than Milton, which is to say that Marvell (by the lights of his editors) distinguishes himself as a prose author in a direction that points directly away from Miltonic precedent. Or does he? For as attuned as Marvell’s editorial team is to Areopagitica and The First Defence –​something they share with the pamphleteers –​it is notable that there lacks a single reference in the Yale edition to the element of Milton’s prose most closely related to Marvell’s ecclesiastical satire: Milton’s vituperative handling of Alexander More in Defensio Secunda and above all in Pro Se Defensio. A sometime professor of Greek at the University of Geneva and a Calvinist preacher and theologian, More had in 1653 seen through the press the anonymous royalist pamphlet Regii sanguinis clamor ad coelum, attacking both the Commonwealth government and its leading apologist, ‘John Milton, Englishman’. Despite being reliably informed otherwise, Milton supposed More to be the work’s author, and devoted part of his Second Defence to demolishing More’s character and reputation, drawing extensively on reports of More’s licentiousness and of trouble with local authorities in Geneva and Middelburg. In 1654 More brought out two replies, in which he disclaimed authorial responsibility for the Clamor, reproved Milton for ‘abuses which are scarcely to be spoken amongst camp-​ followers and soldiers’, and offered testimonials

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from various persons of quality as to the esteem he enjoyed in those places where he followed his ‘divine vocation’.67 Milton’s answer, In Defence of Himself against Alexander More, is his most sustained work of personal satire, one that virtually eschews politics as such in order to attack and discredit More. Milton’s strategy in this pamphlet thus entails a marked shift into a serio-​comic register that goes well beyond the rude and boisterous polemics of the Marprelate pamphlets or his own anti-​prelatical tracts. Indeed, not altogether unfairly does More complain that Milton’s book is ‘a collection of villainies and taunts from old and new comedy’, that it abounds with ‘the pleasantries of dissolute prodigals and in jests from brothels and cookshops’.68 We know that Marvell wrote Milton in 1654 on receiving a copy of the Second Defence, promising that he ‘shall now study it even to the getting of it by heart’. ‘[I]‌t seems to me a Trajan’s column’, says Marvell, ‘in whose winding ascent we see embossed the several monuments of your learned victories; and Salmasius and Morus make up as great a triumph, as that of Decebalus, whom too, for ought I know, you shall have forced, as Trajan the other, to make themselves away out of a just desperation’ (P&L, 2:306). Clearly it was not just the learned elaborateness of Milton’s defence that made an impression on Marvell: he seems equally to admire Milton’s rhetorical hounding of his enemies, the analogy with Trajan’s column aptly highlighting the aestheticised violence of Milton’s performance. We can thus be assured that Marvell would have taken an active interest in Milton’s third defence, which continues his crusade against Alexander More, intensifying both the artfulness and the personal animus of his previous attack. As Kester Svendsen notes, Milton here ‘uses traditional polemic techniques in reinterpreting More’s allusions and burlesquing his analogies, all with the stated purpose of discrediting his adversary by ridiculing his learning as well as his life’. ‘The most frequent devices’, Svendsen observes, ‘are the multi-​level pun and what might be called the boomerang. The double and triple world-​play moves between More’s life and his text; and time and time again Milton quotes and slants a phrase to retort it upon the sender’s head’.69 In this digest of Milton’s rhetorical playbook in Pro Se Defensio we cannot help but recognise shades of the Rehearsal Transpros’d. Like Milton, Marvell constructs his satire around a series of metaphoric links between

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sexual profligacy, scholarly slackness, and spiritual disorder. Perhaps the most famous such hinge is Parker’s infelicitous phrase ‘a more Comfortable Importance’, where he seems to be making the point that he has only been drawn into controversy reluctantly: ‘our Author, beside his aversion from the Press, alledges, that he is as much concerned as … any of the High and Mighty Burgomasters, in matters of a Closer and more Comfortable Importance to himself and his own Affairs’. ‘A man would wonder what this thing should be of a Closer Importance’, Marvell drolls, but being ‘more comfortable too’, concludes that it must be ‘a Female’. ‘Thus it must be and no better’, Marvell quips, ‘when a man’s Phancy is up, and his Breeches are down; when the Mind and Body make contrary Assignations, and he hath both a Bookseller at once and a Mistris to satisfie: Like Archimedes, into the Street he runs out naked with his Invention. And truly, if at any time, we might now pardon this Extravagance and Rapture of our Author; when he was pearch’d upon the highest Pinacle of Ecclesiastical Felicity, being ready at once to asswage his Concupiscence, and wreck his Malice’ (PW, 1:47–​8). In this way, every fatuous phrase Marvell seizes upon –​‘a more Comfortable Importance’ alone recurs half a dozen times –​is made to resonate thematically with fictions and innuendos about Parker’s personal life. Milton’s tactics are nearly identical, as he takes More’s text to pieces in the context of a running set of allusions to a pair of scandalous sexual episodes: one in which More is supposed to have been seen cavorting in a garden with a serving girl (invariably activating puns on More’s name, Morus, Latin for mulberry), and another in which More is set upon by a cast mistress with unpared fingernails (giving rise to an extended series of taunts about engraving, sculpting, plucking, and the like). The public discourse of Milton’s adversary, as in Rehearsal Transpros’d, thus becomes irrevocably entangled with his private morals, and ‘extravagance’ in one the sign of a corresponding fault in the other. What I would emphasise here is the sheer literary virtuosity with which Marvell and Milton fashion their rhetorical nets. Though it is not my aim to develop the parallel in detail, we might well compare, for instance, the brilliant flourishes of mock epic where Milton narrates More’s encounters with Pontia and Claudia Pelletta to Marvell’s ironic casting of Parker as romance hero. Further, Marvell justifies his witty, facetious style in RT by appealing to the same authorities Milton had cited.70

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I urge the connection between these texts not to explode the claim of Marvell’s having renovated the genre of animadversion in RT  –​ a claim I have myself advanced71 –​but to ask why so many other of Milton’s prose writings have been marshalled in contextualising Marvell’s pamphlet, almost wholly to the exclusion of Pro Se Defensio. The answer I think is not far to seek. For many Miltonists, their poet’s relish in destroying Alexander More, absent a broader national or ideological agenda, makes the Pro Se Defensio something of an embarrassment, as we can judge from the scarcity of commentary on this text since the nineteenth century. Thus for C. A. Patrides, ‘The two Defenses and especially the third Defense of Himself (1655) are considerably marred by the frequently intemperate language which readers have often remarked, and as often deplored’.72 Patrides’s judgement is echoed by Barbara Lewalski: ‘this treatise [Pro Se Defensio]’, she writes, ‘is Milton’s least attractive work: it is a tissue of vituperation and a strained defense of a serious error’.73 Even David Loewenstein, in the course of substantially revising our understanding of Milton’s ‘poetics of defence’, finds little to say about the third of Milton’s performances in this mode.74 I would suggest however that scholars have erred in neglecting those elements of personal satire in Milton’s defences, in accounts of his and of Marvell’s ‘writings of the left hand’, for to do so is to slight the force of the personal and the local in the name of a false ideological clarity. And it is in the name of securing for Marvell a political identity not only conformable with Milton’s, but with a Whig sense of history, that Marvell and Milton are yoked (occasionally by violence) together in the Yale Marvell where instead we might observe their differences, and decoupled –​as in the case of RT and Pro Se Defensio –​where we might most usefully think them together. That politics plays a role in this we may infer from Patterson’s précis of Marvell’s life, almost an abstract of the Whig history she elsewhere champions: ‘a robust story of increasingly liberal views and ameliorative effort, generated first by the traumas of the execution of Charles I and the creation of a republic, consolidated by loyalty to Oliver Cromwell, and maintained by the taking of considerable risks during the first eighteen years of renewed Stuart government’ (PW, 1:xlv). In the spirit of Samuel Butler, we might say that this is but The Life of John Milton drawn in little, or Hill’s tercentenary lecture in miniature. Thus Hill: ‘Marvell and Milton remained true to the beliefs

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which had united them in the early 1650s, and which continued to unite them until Milton’s death in 1674’, though these beliefs –​like Patterson’s ‘increasingly liberal views’ –​are left largely implicit, heuristically invoking a political signified that needs no specification.75 Indeed, what such formulae seem to express is the conviction that Milton and Marvell, by virtue of their vigilance against tyranny and persecution, belong to the ‘right’ side of history. As postmodernism and Revisionism alike have shown, however, a dialectical conception of history often belies the contingencies and contradictions of political struggle. It is well and good to remember Milton and Marvell as voices of liberty. But at the same time, we should recall that the Milton of 1659–​60, judging from The Ready and Easy Way, would have welcomed an army coup that established a commonwealth government in defiance of the multitude who would ‘creep back so poorly … to thir once abjur’d and detested thraldom of kingship’: for ‘More just it is doubtless, if it com to force’, Milton reasoned, ‘that a less number compell a greater to retain, which can be no to them, thir libertie, then that a greater number for the pleasure of thir baseness, compell a less most injuriously to be thir fellow slaves’ (CPW, 7:455). Such heated rhetoric may in turn prompt us to consider Milton’s views on the question of rightful subjection, that he ‘not only accepted the principles behind the concept of natural slavery’, as Steven Jablonski has argued, ‘but also recognized the existence of such people in the world’.76 Marvell, for his part, was indeed a friend to toleration, and a sometime scourge of royal malfeasance and arbitrary government. But if our historical understanding of Marvell is to be perfectly opened and cleared,77 we are obliged to take seriously what Rehearsal Transpros’d discloses as a key piece of its argument –​that Marvell c. 1672–​73 was for all intents and purposes a loyalist and a conformist and not a closet republican or sectarian radical. Revising the political Marvell In the final section of this chapter, I want to set out some points of rapprochement between the ‘liminal poetics’ of the lyric Marvell and the state poet and controversialist.78 Suggestively, Marvell’s elusiveness comprises something like a sub-​theme in the very libels that sought to pin him down as a religious enthusiast and political rebel –​ apparent in that line of attack that figured Marvell as an ambiguous

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castrato or a monster of both sexes. ‘Was not this Greg. begot by some Proteus of a Camalion’, exclaimed Edmund Hickeringill, in a revealing moment of frustration. ‘An Oedipus cannot riddle him: he fights backward and forward, sometimes for the King, and sometimes for modern Orthodoxy; he slashes with a two edged Sword and fights both ways’ (Gregory, Father Graybeard, pp. 134–​5). Notwithstanding the satirical force of this comment, we might note the aptness of the labile category of being here invoked for describing some of the figures we meet with in Marvell’s verse: the hermaphroditic sphere in To His Coy Mistress (lines 41–​2); the ‘orphan of the hurricane’ in The unfortunate Lover, ‘who languishèd with doubtful breath /​Th’amphibium of Life and Death’ (lines 39–​40); the strange, ontologically fluid dyad of the nymph and her fawn in The Nymph Complaining; to say nothing of the numerous images and tableaux of optical illusion and double perspective in Upon Appleton House, among other poems.79 Perhaps then we might consider whether the imagination that dwelt so brilliantly in and on the liminalities of pastoral is in fact the same imagination at work in Marvell’s political prose. This view finds a curious kind of support in the ideological vein of criticism that would see Marvell as a proponent of ‘liberalism avant la lettre’, in Derek Hirst’s sceptical phrase, or, failing that, as possessing or assuming a continuous political identity from some precipitous moment of choice.80 For in their quiet dissensus, what such interventions reveal is how much of Marvell remains unassimilable to the various ideological projects in whose name he has been read and appropriated, and indeed, how readily Marvell’s ‘inconclusiveness’ lends itself to hermeneutic violence. Thus for Warren Chernaik, writing in the early 1980s, ‘Marvell, Milton, and Locke, together with such figures as Harrington, Shaftesbury, Sidney and Neville, are writers in a single tradition’, one he identifies alternatively as ‘the classical liberal tradition’ or ‘Puritan libertarianism’. In the same book, Chernaik repeats this claim with a slightly different cast of characters, allying Marvell with the Puritan tradition found within ‘the writings of such men as [William] Walwyn, [Roger] Williams, and Milton and in the speeches of the Leveller leaders during the Army Debates of 1647–​9’.81 Surely we are painting with a broad brush when the classical republicanism of a Harrington or a Milton is conflated with the social radicalism of the Levellers. This mapping of Marvell’s political identity is restated

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in newly configured terms some fifteen years later, in Marvell and Liberty. There Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis, in view of the failure of new work on English republicanism to provide ‘a definitive fix on Marvell’, allow that ‘one conclusion to be drawn … is that Marvell was not a republican at all’. Rather, he is now seen in terms of a ‘neo-​ Roman’ theory of liberty said to be shared with Locke and Sidney –​ but above all with Milton.82 Subsequent commentators have been somewhat warier in presenting a Marvell ‘in the extreme Whig tradition, as the friend, with Milton, of regicide and republicanism’.83 Patterson herself significantly modulates the Chernaik position in concluding that the equivocal poet of the Horatian Ode ‘became far more of a Cromwellian than he had ever expected to be in 1650 and remained so during the 1660s and 1670s’, a view echoed by Blair Worden in claiming that ‘the protectorate … turned Marvell, the former royalist, into a Cromwellian monarchist’, while moving Milton ‘in an opposite direction’.84 And yet there persists an undertow of the older Whig narrative, even where that story is ostensibly being rewritten: how for instance are we meant to square the Cromwellian Patterson says Marvell became in the 1650s and remained throughout the 1660s and 1670s with what she also tells us is a biographical trajectory characterised by ‘increasingly liberal views’? Or with the Marvell whose ‘reinstatement as a prose writer of great style and important substance’ she hopes will be a boon to ‘modern secular democracies’ (thus recalling the Wordsworthian sentiment, ‘Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour’).85 Even David Norbrook seems to work himself into knots reading Marvell, as he tries to situate the Ode, for instance, among Milton’s ‘experiments’ with the republican sublime, while nevertheless acknowledging that ‘we can see [Marvell] as keeping his options open’.86 My suggestion is that we can begin to work ourselves free from some of these contradictions by remarking how the play of contingency comprises a thematic legible across Marvell’s pastoral and political careers. In the lyrics, this quality is usually associated with puns and word games, with emblems, allegories, and symbols, in which meaning can never be said to rest but rather to flicker, transiently and indefinitely. Such formal concerns are transmuted into a kind of historical consciousness in the Horatian Ode, staged as it is within the unfolding of a radically uncertain providence.

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By The First Anniversary and the Poem upon the Death, however, we usually think of Marvell as having become wholly politically committed and resolved; yet here too, I argue, Marvell self-​consciously stages his interventions at the threshold of chance and uncertainty. On its face The First Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector is a panegyric to Cromwell celebrating the first year of his rule under the Instrument of Government –​brilliantly conjured in the figure of Amphion/​Cromwell calling with his lute unto the ‘rougher stones’ and ‘ruder quarries’ of the commonwealth until they ‘in a palace meet’ (lines 49–​66). As any number of critics have pointed out, however, Marvell’s gestures of praise and celebration hardly align with the political realities of late 1654 and early 1655. Cromwell’s Protectoral government had been established in effect by military coup with the dissolution of the Nominated Assembly and the adoption of the Instrument of Government by army grandees in December 1653. Elections were held and a new Parliament called nine months later, in September 1654, but it soon became clear that the interests of this body would be incompatible with those of Cromwell and the army. As Austin Woolrych explains, ‘Consensus in the constituencies had been destroyed by Civil War and the successive political cataclysms that followed it’. Cromwell was thus facing ‘a range of opposition: overt and covert royalists, successors to the political presbyterians, who had never aimed at abolishing monarchy, republicans … who had never forgiven his expulsion of the Rump, more popular “commonwealthsmen” who included the remnants of the Leveller movement and particularly distrusted military power, and Fifth Monarchists who believed that he had usurped the authority that belonged by right to Christ and his saints’.87 Unable to pass any of the eighty-​four bills drafted by the Council of State and confronted with amendments to the Instrument that would have seriously eroded his executive powers, Cromwell dissolved the first Protectoral Parliament at the earliest opportunity allowed by the Instrument of Government, on 22 January 1655, just days after the collector George Thomason acquired a copy of Marvell’s poem. How then are we to understand the gap between Marvell’s epideictic rhetoric in The First Anniversary and the realities of the political situation? Nigel Smith suggests that ‘If the poem offers apparent support to the Protector, the opinions of its author may not be so readily identified with this stance. Six months before composing

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The First Anniversary M. had expressed republican sentiments in a letter to Milton. Although M. does not so obviously qualify his praise of the Protector as Milton did in his Second Defense (May 1654), it may be that, like Nedham and Milton, M. voiced outward support for the Protectorate, while remaining privately worried by its threat to liberty’.88 Even as we entertain the plausibility of this view, we should be cautious of overwriting Marvell’s conjectural private beliefs with Milton’s more public misdoubt. Imagining Marvell to be a secret sharer in Milton’s misgivings about the Protectorate also invites us to apprehend The First Anniversary as a piece of political opportunism, the ‘work of service’, for as Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker have shown, the arguments, the language, even the sensibility of the panegyric are everywhere inflected by Cromwell’s individuality.89 The poem thus becomes less revealing of Marvell’s politics than of calculated self-​interest. Alternatively, we could imagine that Marvell’s poem conforms entirely to his own political stance, that is, that Marvell has become by January 1655 a perfect Cromwellian. So argues Blair Worden: rather than a public mask for private reservations, as Smith would have it, he sees the poem as ‘unquestioning’ panegyric.90 This leaves us however to interpret the startling scene of danger and disaster Marvell tucks into the centre of the poem: Thou, who so oft through storms of thund’ring lead Hast born securely thine undaunted head, Thy breast through poniarding conspiracies, Drawn from the sheath of lying prophecies; The proof beyond all other force or skill, Our sins endanger, and shall one day kill. How near they failed, and in thy sudden fall At once assayed to overturn us all. Our brutish fury struggling to be free, Hurried thy horses while they hurried thee. When thou hadst almost quit thy mortal cares, And soiled in dust thy crown of silver hairs. (lines 169–​80)

On 29 September 1654, Cromwell had narrowly escaped with his life following a coaching accident in Hyde Park. The apparent aim in recounting this ‘one sorrow … among /​The other glories of our

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yearly song’ (lines 181–​2) is to emphasise the providential fitness of Cromwell’s rule, his delivery from near death to renewed triumph. But at the same time, it seems to reintroduce the very political tensions so artfully diffused in the opening section of the poem. For here are storms and dangers, plots and prophecies; and at the centre of all looms the Protector’s mortality and the prospect of constitutional crisis. Marvell may celebrate Cromwell as the lone figure capable of holding together the febrile English state, and in a sense it matters little whether the poem’s support is ‘sincere’. For as its acknowledged author, Marvell was answerable for his panegyric within the public sphere. But advocacy is perhaps not to be confused with political theory, and Marvell looks rather grimly and uncertainly on the demise of this singular figure and on the fragile political order he upholds. If this makes The First Anniversary a more liminal and unsettled performance than is usually thought, contingency is the very element of Marvell’s third and final Cromwell poem, the elegy upon the death of O. C. Unlike the Ode or The First Anniversary, the Poem upon the Death has been little appreciated by critics, who find its eulogising of Cromwell overwrought and its support for Richard unconvincing.91 Indeed, the poem has seemed to slight the political altogether, emphasising Cromwell’s virtues as father and friend above those of the soldier or statesman, eschewing the conventional idioms of martial or political heroism. At one point, Marvell takes the imaginative risk of projecting himself into the Cromwells’ nursery (lines 29–​34); at another he quakes beside the Protector’s corpse: I saw him dead. A leaden slumber lies And mortal sleep over those wakeful eyes: Those gentle rays under the lids were fled, Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed; That port which so majestic was and strong, Loose and deprived of vigour, stretched along: All withered, all discoloured, pale and wan, How much another thing, no more that man? Oh human glory vain, Oh death, Oh wings, Oh worthless world, Oh transitory things! (lines 247–​56)

While not without political valence –​Marvell’s picture of a ‘sweet’ Cromwell, who dies of heartbreak upon news of his beloved daughter’s

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death, is surely meant to deflect lampooning of Cromwell’s autocratic, self-​serving ambition –​the elegy floats free of ideology where ‘love adds its intimate note’.92 Yet far from being what enfeebles the poem, surely this is its argument and raison d’être. For writing the political as the personal allows Marvell at once to signal his service to Cromwell and to assert his own idiosyncratic liberty –​the ties of private affection, of personal devotion, being poignantly distinct here from pledges of allegiance to party or ideology. That Marvell nevertheless saw fit to withdraw the Cromwell elegy from the volume in which it was meant to appear only underscores his characteristic prudence and chameleonic adaptability. In this instance comparison with Milton has much to tell us. While the one Latin secretary inveighed against the restoration of monarchy and urged the ready and easy way to form a commonwealth, the other kept silent and laid low. Marvell was thus all the more easily to secure his election in 1659 as MP for Hull, a role in which he continued until his death in 1678. He would serve on diplomatic missions to Holland and to Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, and perhaps also acted as a crown spy. When he set his hand once more to writing, he could in one place paint ‘our Lady State’ warts and all, and in another be taken in earnest when referring to Charles I as ‘the best Prince that ever wielded the English Scepter’ (PW, 1:191) or epitomising the Restoration as ‘most happy and miraculous’ (PW, 1:90). When the publication of Rehearsal Transpros’d was disrupted by government agents, the Earl of Anglesey evidently threatened the examinate Roger L’Estrange, ‘Look you … I have spoken to his Ma:ty about it, and the King says he will not have it supprest, for Parker has done him, wrong, and this man has done him Right’.93 The same censor, serving the same king, however, was authorised to open an inquest into the authorship of that ‘vile’ pamphlet, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government. The lingering question may thus be –​if Marvell ‘was not a republican at all’, if he was perhaps only circumstantially a Cromwellian, then by what name shall we call him? My point of course is that this is the wrong question to ask, indeed that we invariably misrepresent and misunderstand Marvell’s engagement with politics by seeking to affirm those politics under convenient labels. As Derek Hirst has said, ‘There can be no question of Marvell’s hostility to

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dogmatism, and as well to the tyranny he denounced in The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government’,94 but my reading of Marvell’s political career suggests that he put no special stock in either kings or Parliaments to secure English liberties, nor did he subscribe to a progressive much less an imminently apocalyptic theory of history.95 Rather Marvell seems to have appreciated the fundamental indeterminacy of the political in his age, and was prepared to advocate for those rights he most prized –​liberty of tender conscience, freedom from arbitrary rule –​on the most advantageous terms circumstance presented. The irony of a reception history that has construed The Rehearsal Transpros’d as ‘but Iconoclastes drawn in Little’, or ‘the culmination of over twenty years of discipleship and friendship’ with Milton, is the certainty that Milton could not have written Marvell’s book: there may be a possible world in which a Stuart king could say that Milton had done him right, and his opponent wrong, but surely that world is not ours. Notes 1 C. Hill, ‘Milton and Marvell’, in C. A. Patrides (ed.), Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 17. 2 N. von Maltzahn, ‘Marvell’s ghost’, in W. Chernaik and M. Dzelzainis (eds), Marvell and Liberty (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 50–​74. 3 C. D’Addario, ‘Introduction’, in C. D’Addario and M. C. Augustine (eds), Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 4 A. Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 5. 5 D. Hirst and S. N. Zwicker (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 5. ‘Inconclusiveness’ was a term used of Marvell by B. Rajan, ‘Andrew Marvell: the aesthetics of inconclusiveness’, in Patrides, Approaches to Marvell, pp. 155–​73. 6 For the print, literary, and social history of RT, see the textual introduction by M. Dzelzainis and A. Patterson in PW, 1:3–​40; for RT2, 1:208–​20. 7 On Marvell’s strategic cultivation of a coffee-​ house audience for his pamphlet, see N. H. Keeble, ‘Why transprose The Rehearsal?’, in Chernaik and Dzelzainis, Marvell and Liberty, pp. 249–​68.

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8 G. Burnet, A Supplement to Burnet’s History of My Own Time, ed. H. C. Foxcroft (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902), p. 216. 9 These are S. Parker, A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed (London, 1673); H. Stubbe, Rosemary and Bayes (London, 1672); Anon., A Common Place-​Book Out of the Rehearsal Transpros’d (London, 1673); [S. Butler], The Transproser Rehears’d (London, 1673); Anon., S’too him Bayes (London, 1673); E. Hickeringill, Gregory, Father-​Graybeard, with his Vizard off (London, 1673); Anon., Sober Reflections, or, a Solid Confutation of Mr. Andrew Marvel’s Works, in a Letter Ab Ignoto ad Ignotum (London, 1673). 10 See P. Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 186–​204; D. Hirst and S. N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. Chs. 2–​3; and N. Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), esp. pp. 246–​78. 11 As seen in Marvell’s rebuff of Parker above. For the attribution to Butler, see N. von Maltzahn, ‘Samuel Butler’s Milton’, SP, 92 (1995), pp. 482–​95. 12 In RT2, Marvell will characterise Parker’s ‘Comarades’ as labourers in a glass factory, and Parker as the ‘breath’ that gives shape to their designs: ‘One burnt the Weed, another calcined the Flint, a third melted down that mixture, but he [Parker] himself fashion’d all with his breath, and polished with his stile, till out of a meer Sand and Ashes, he had furnish’d a whole Cupboard of things so brittle and incoherent, that the least touch would break them again in pieces, so transparent that every man might see thorow them’ (1:249–​50). 13 Hammond, Figuring Sex, pp. 201, 203. 14 On Marvell’s connection to the subterranean world of Restoration controversy, see S. Bardle, The Literary Underground in the 1660s: Andrew Marvell, George Wither, Ralph Wallis, and the World of Restoration Satire and Pamphleteering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 15 The author of A Common Place-​Book Out of the Rehearsal Transpros’d, for instance, suggests that Marvell is said to be ‘as tough and lasting as a Stone-​horse in a race; yet I have heard those who use the Newmarket-​ Course say that the Colingwood-​Gelding would hold it out to the end as the best’ (p. 22), and elsewhere compares Marvell to the historian ‘Eutropius the Eunuch’, who had maligned ‘the Priviledges and Power of the Church’ (p. 56). According to Edmund Hickeringill, the author of RT is ‘desperately disingenuous and unnatural’, ‘a monstrous beast, begot of a bitch, by a Fox, and so is half-​dog, and half-​fox’, ‘an Amphibious

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and degenerate Issue’ (pp. 6–​7). See Hammond, Figuring Sex, for more detailed discussion of these and like accusations. 16 Hammond, Figuring Sex, p. 201. 17 For the full panoply of references to Milton in the controversialists’ quarrel with Marvell, see J. Milton French, The Life Records of John Milton, 5 vols (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958), 5:6, 37, 38, 49, 51–​8. 18 In RT2, Marvell begs of his reader not ‘to impute any errors or weakness of mine to the Non-​conformists, nor mistake me for one of them’, 1:267. 19 On the relation between the religious and political ferment of the 1640s and 1650s and the Restoration debate over toleration, see G. S. de Krey, ‘Rethinking the restoration: dissenting cases for conscience, 1667–​ 1672’, HJ, 38:1 (1995), pp. 53–​83. 20 King Charls II. His Declaration to all His Loving Subjects of the Kingdome of England. Dated from his Court at Breda in Holland (London, 1660), pp. 4, 3. 21 King Charls II. His Declaration, pp. 4–​5. 22 N. H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 109. 23 Bodleian Library, Carte MS 45, f. 151, quoted in J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–​1689 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 47. 24 On the Clarendon Code and its religious and political ramifications, see P. Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–​1667 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 162–​95; Spurr, Restoration Church of England, pp. 42–​60; Keeble, The Restoration, pp. 124–​8. 25 Quoted in Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, p. 183. 26 Spurr, Restoration Church of England, pp. 49, 55. 27 PW, 1:5. 28 Thus Parker begins his Ecclesiastical Politie, ‘Readers, I cannot imagine any thing that our Dissenting Zealots will be able to object against this Ensuing Treatise, unless perhaps in some Places the Vehemence and Severity of its Style; for cavil I know they must: and if they can raise no Tolerable Exceptions against the Reasonableness of the Discourse itself, it shall suffice to pick quarrels with Words and Phrases’ (A2r). On Parker and the politics of style, see L. Cable, ‘Licensing metaphor: Parker, Marvell, and the debate over conscience’, in J. Andersen and E. Sauer (eds), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 243–​60.

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29 All of Parker’s works were published in London. Parker’s contribution to Bramhall is titled A Preface Shewing What Grounds there are of Fears and Jealousies of Popery, hereafter Preface. 30 Though as Cable justly notes, ‘what was actually at stake in the seemingly ancillary quarrels over expressive style during the toleration debate was in fact not style but freedom of conscience itself ’, ‘Licensing metaphor’, pp. 245–​6. 31 J. Rose, ‘The ecclesiastical polity of Samuel Parker’, The Seventeenth Century, 25:2 (2010), p. 359; D. Hirst, ‘Parker, Marvell, and political culture’, in D. Hirst and R. Strier (eds), Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-​Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 157. Hirst further records Parker’s need to blame the king’s ministers, especially Buckingham, for allying ‘with the sectaries to betray the king’: ‘Atheism and Enthusiasm are apart and by themselves the most desperate and dangerous causes of Misery and Calamity to Mankind … Especially if in the third-​place, it should ever so fall out, that crafty and sacrilegious States-​men should join themselves into the Confederacy’ (p. 157, quoting Parker’s ‘Preface’ to Bramhall at sig. e3v.–​e4). 32 Hirst, ‘Parker, Marvell, and political culture’, p. 146. 33 For Marvell’s part in ensuring Milton’s liberty at the Restoration, see D. Masson, The Life of John Milton (1880), 7 vols (New York: Peter Smith, 1946), 6:184–​95; Smith, The Chameleon, pp. 162–​3. 34 For Parker’s life, see the entry by J. Parkin in the ODNB. A fuller narrative may be found in Jason Jewell’s unpublished PhD thesis, ‘Authority’s advocate: Samuel Parker, religion, and politics in Restoration England’ (Florida State University, 2004), pp. 3–​35. Marvell makes much satirical hay of Parker’s genealogy and early career in RT2; see PW, 1:256–​67. 35 Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. O. Lawson Dick ( Jaffrey: Nonpareil, 1999), p. 196. 36 Von Maltzahn is gently taking issue with McWilliams in urging, ‘it is the passion and dignity of his defence of Milton that demands notice’, ‘Ruining the sacred truths? Marvell’s Milton and cultural memory’, in R. D. Sell and A. W. Johnson (eds), Writing and Religion in England, 1558–​ 1689: Studies in Community-​ Making and Cultural Memory (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 371. J. McWilliams, ‘Marvell and Milton’s literary friendship reconsidered’, SEL, 46 (1996), p. 162. I am grateful to McWilliams’s important article for pointing me in the direction of my own argument in this chapter. 37 OED, ‘expiate’, v3. 38 Cf. A. Patterson: ‘It is important to insist on Marvell’s retrospective commitment to the Revolutionary period, his determination to do it

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justice in a culture that prohibited and prosecuted such statements’, ‘Andrew Marvell and the English revolution’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 109. 39 For Eliot’s influence on Marvell studies, see Chernaik and Dzelzainis, Marvell and Liberty, pp. 1–​5; also von Maltzahn, ‘Marvell and the prehistory of Whiggism’, in D. Womersley, P. Bullard, and A. Williams (eds), ‘Cultures of Whiggism’: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), pp. 43–​6. In Marvell and Liberty, von Maltzahn modestly complicates the story of Marvell’s neglect avant Eliot, citing allusions to Marvell in Wordsworth and Byron, ‘Marvell’s ghost’, pp. 50–​4. 40 Eliot, ‘Andrew Marvell’, in Selected Prose, ed. F. Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975), pp. 162, 170. 41 See J. Bennett, Five Metaphysical Poets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell’s Poetry (London: Hutchinson, 1966). 42 See Patrides, Approaches to Marvell. The chapters here mentioned are by A. J. Smith and Balachandra Rajan, respectively. 43 Patrides, ‘Preface’, p. xv. It is also worth noting that Hill is the only historian among the contributors to the volume and had just published the year before Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber & Faber), which influentially sought to restore Milton to his radical context. The determining force of Milton’s precedence in Hill’s title should not escape our attention either. 44 Hill, ‘Milton and Marvell’, pp. 1–​2. Leishman was hardly alone in seeing Marvell’s state verse as abnegating his true poetic vocation. On the ‘modern pastoral/​political’ dichotomy’ in Marvell studies, see A. Patterson, ‘Against polarization: literature and politics in Marvell’s Cromwell poems’, ELR, 5:2 (1975), pp. 251–​72. 45 J. M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 46 Wallace, Destiny His Choice, p. 3. 47 Wallace, Destiny His Choice, p. 4. 48 See C. S. R. Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–​ 1629 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 49 Wallace, Destiny His Choice, p. 4. 50 Hill, ‘Milton and Marvell’, p. 17. 51 Milton to J. Bradshaw, 21 February 1653, in The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. F. A. Patterson, 18 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–​38), 12:330. 52 Hill, ‘Milton and Marvell’, p. 17.

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53 Masson, Life of John Milton, 6:716. 54 Hamlet is quoted from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. S. Wells, G. Taylor, J. Jowett, and W. Montgomery (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). 55 Hill, ‘Milton and Marvell’, p. 17. 56 Hill, ‘Milton and Marvell’, p. 16. 57 See, e.g., M. A. Radzinowicz, ‘The politics of Paradise Lost’, in K. Sharpe and S. N. Zwicker (eds), The Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-​ Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 204–​ 29; N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Seventeenth-​Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); J. S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); N. von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). 58 For an argument in some respects parallel, on the editorial misconstruction of Milton as ‘Puritan saint’ in his respective Yale edition, see C. G. Martin, ‘Unediting Milton: historical myth and editorial misconstruction in the Yale prose edition’, in C. Tournu and N. Forsyth (eds), Milton, Rights and Liberties (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 113–​30. In unravelling the ‘myth’ of Milton’s Puritanism, however, Martin means to show that Milton was in fact a ‘true progressive’, contra the Puritan godly, whom, she argues, ‘were religiously and in many cases, culturally and politically reactionary’ (p. 114). 59 PW, 1:xv. 60 On the influence and afterlife of the Account, see von Maltzahn, PW, 2:196–​207. 61 As noted by the Yale editor of True Religion, M. Kelley, CPW, 8:413. Milton’s other chief prose works of the Restoration include the Accedence Commenc’t Grammar (1669), The History of Britain (1670), and Artis Logicae (1672). 62 D. Loewenstein (ed.), John Milton: Prose. Major Writings on Liberty, Politics, Religion, and Education (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2013), p. xvi. 63 S. Baron, ‘Licensing readers, licensing authorities in seventeenth-​ century England’, in Andersen and Sauer, Books and Readers, p. 220. 64 W. Haller, ‘Before Areopagitica’, PMLA, 42 (1927), p. 900. 65 On the ‘vanity’ of Milton’s protest against the King’s Book, see R. Helgerson, Self-​ Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 199–​200; Gauden is also there quoted. 66 PW, 1:21.

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67 Selections from More’s Fides Publica and Supplementum are helpfully reprinted in CPW, vol. 4; quoted here at pp. 1097, 1110. 68 More, Fides Publica, in CPW, pp. 1100, 1108. On this aspect of Milton’s controversial mode, see T. Corns, ‘Obscenity, slang, and indecorum in Milton’s English prose’, Prose Studies, 3 (1980), pp. 5–​14. 69 CPW, 4:692. 70 On the notions of decorum governing Milton’s and Marvell’s prose satires, see. R. Waddington, ‘Betwixt jest and earnest’: Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift & the Decorum of Religious Ridicule (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). 71 See M. C. Augustine, ‘ “A mastery in fooling”: Marvell, the mock-​book, and the surprising life of “Mr. Bayes” ’, SP, 112:2 (2015), pp. 353–​78. 72 C. A. Patrides (ed.), John Milton: Selected Prose (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, new rev. edn 1985), p. 36. 73 B. K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, rev. edn 2003), p. 324. 74 D. Loewenstein, ‘Milton and the poetics of defense’, in D. Loewenstein and J. G. Turner (eds), Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 171–​92. 75 Hill, ‘Milton and Marvell’, p. 1. 76 S. Jablonski, ‘Ham’s vicious race: slavery and John Milton’, SEL, 37:1 (1997), p. 174. For a polemically sceptical account of Milton’s attitude toward democratic political sovereignty, see W. Walker, Antiformalist, Unrevolutionary, Illiberal Milton: Political Prose, 1644–​ 1660 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), Ch. 3. 77 PL, 9.706–​8, ‘…your Eyes that seem so cleere, /​Yet are but dim, shall perfetly be then /​Op’nd and cleerd…’. 78 For the ‘liminal’ Marvell, see J. Faust, Andrew Marvell’s Liminal Lyrics: The Space Between (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012); also M. C. Augustine, ‘Borders and transitions in Marvell’s poetry’, in Hirst and Zwicker, Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, pp. 46–​67. 79 On the ‘double function’ of perspective in Marvell’s verse, see R. Colie, ‘My Echoing Song’: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), esp. pp. 201–​10. 80 D. Hirst, review of The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. A. Patterson et al., Albion, 36 (2004), p. 698. 81 W. Chernaik, The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 100–​1, 131. 82 Chernaik and Dzelzainis, Marvell and Liberty, pp. 6–​7. 83 B. Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 6.

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84 Patterson, PW, 1:xxxii; Worden, Literature and Politics, p. 153. 85 Patterson, PW, 1:xiii. 86 D. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–​1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 269, 280. 87 A. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–​ 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 602. 88 N. Smith (ed.), The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Harlow: Longman, 2007), p. 283. 89 See Hirst and Zwicker, Orphan of the Hurricane, Ch. 1, ‘The work of service’. 90 Worden, Literature and Politics, p. 152. 91 For the reception history of the Poem upon the Death, see A. Marshall, ‘ “I saw him dead”: Marvell’s elegy for Cromwell’, SP, 103 (2006), pp. 499–​500. 92 The phrase is Pierre Legouis’s, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 114. 93 Qtd. in PW, 1:21. 94 Hirst, review of PW, p. 698. 95 Cf. M. Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell: The Second Coming in Seventeenth Century Poetry (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), passim.

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4 ‘It had an odde promiscuous tone’: Lord Rochester and Restoration modernity The suggestive line from which this chapter takes its heading was not of course written by Rochester; rather it comes from Samuel Butler’s Hudibras. One theme that resurfaces in various ways throughout this book, however, is the surprisingly elastic nature of authorial identity in our period, the relative ease with which a Randolph could substitute for a Milton, or a Milton for a Marvell, however much hindsight may have reified the differences between these figures. Such circumstances of unfixity no doubt tell us something important about the cultural coordinates from which writing in this world emerged and within which it was consumed. And surely there is no better emblem of unfixity than Lord Rochester, a figure whose cultural traces seem to cross every conceivable boundary of politics and poetry. While he was alive, and even more readily in the years following his death, all manner of ‘wretched and obscene and scandalously infamous’ verse was ‘fathered upon the earl, right or wrong, which came out at any time, after he had once obtained the name of an excellent smooth, but withall a most lewd poet’.1 So Anthony à Wood observed, a reminder of the textual morass that surrounds Rochester’s fame. From a biographical perspective, the witty earl’s legacy is no less a congeries of the genuine and the spurious, of conjecture and contradiction: the most notorious atheist of the age, he was also its most widely touted convert; foster son and boon companion to the king, his outrages nevertheless earned him frequent banishment from court, a pattern that may be construed in terms of Cavalier license, or as a gradual embrace of the ‘oppositional culture that was emerging in reaction to it’.2

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But how much of Rochester’s ambivalent cultural signature, or indeed of his status as a major English poet, is visible outside the purview of Restoration specialists? Taking the Norton Anthology as our guide –​that signal text of disciplinary orthodoxy and canonical currency –​the answer must surely be, very little. In the Norton’s most recent iteration, Rochester is represented by a scant four poems, The Disabled Debauchee, The Imperfect Enjoyment, Upon Nothing, and A Satire against Reason and Mankind, thus wholly denying any sense of Rochester as a writer of lyric, much less of his surprisingly tender letters or his conversations with Burnet on the road to Damascus. Rather he appears here as satirist and freethinker, versifying Hobbes, imitating Ovid and Boileau –​thus duly anticipating the rational Augustan spirit of Swift and Pope. Nor is such treatment peculiar to Rochester; on the contrary, his case is representative of the editors’ approach to the Restoration as a whole, which in the current (ninth) edition consists of three poets (Dryden, Butler, and Rochester), one dramatist (Congreve, with a play of 1700), and a modest selection of prose, the only example of which longer than a few pages is Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). There is no court poetry, no devotional verse, no tragedy or tragicomedy, epic or pseudo-​epic; neither do we find anything of Cavendish and Philips, of Marvell and Oldham, Filmer or Sidney. Though not exactly in the sense meant by Rochester in libelling his monarch, when measured against the varied and vibrant literary culture of these decades, the serving of Restoration literature offered by the Norton might well be thought scandalous and poor. It is of course the nature of anthologies to be selective, to truncate and condense, but the Norton’s snapshot of Restoration literature speaks to a much wider historiographical issue, that is, ‘the extent to which the period has been studied’, as the historian Jonathan Scott writes, ‘less in its own right than in terms of its capacity to give birth to, or at least display the origins of the political structures and sensibilities of the eighteenth century’.3 This preoccupation with what Scott calls ‘the shape of the future’ is plainly inscribed in the structure of the Norton Anthology itself: in its ‘flexible format option’, the ungainly 3,000-​page doorstopper covering English literature before 1800 is divided into a more portable three-​volume set, the third of which is organised under that familiar rubric of ‘The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century’. That there is nothing exceptional in the division of the seventeenth century, for the purposes of study and

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teaching, at the boundary of 1660, is exactly Scott’s point; but in this instance we are able to see especially clearly the effect of conceiving the Restoration as the opening act of a long eighteenth century. Indeed, taking stock of what gets left out of the Norton in so emphasising the forward movement of time’s arrow, we might consider how little or at least how tenuously the Restoration, in all of its synchronic richness, actually anticipates the century to follow, how narrow is the road to liberal modernity. This is not, I want to be clear, a problem of anthologies but a problem of professional organisation and historical imagination. Again, Rochester provides a good example of how difficult it can be to articulate Restoration ‘data’ within an eighteenth-​ century framework. We might start with David M. Vieth, who was the first scholar to map with systematic rigour the manuscript transmission of Rochester’s texts and the relation between contemporary scribal sources and the early printed editions of Rochester’s works. Vieth’s 1963 study Attribution in Restoration Poetry is regarded as a classic in the field of textual criticism. In the edition of Rochester toward which that earlier prolegomenal work was directed, however, Vieth somewhat counter-​intuitively produced a completely modernised text that made no attempt to record textual variants: ‘Extensive documentation is avoided’, he observed briskly.4 Moreover, Vieth organised the volume’s contents according to a neatly schematised plan of biographical development –​‘Prentice Work’, ‘Early Maturity’, ‘Tragic Maturity’, ‘Disillusionment and Death’ –​despite the fact that only thirty-​three of the seventy-​five poems he regarded as authentic could be dated confidently to one of the four periods he designated. As he freely admitted in his textual introduction, ‘poems whose order of composition remains uncertain are arbitrarily grouped on some other basis such as genre, theme, or tone’.5 Vieth’s edition –​the first to be based on manuscript sources –​ nevertheless and paradoxically erased from view any sense of the verse’s miscellaneity, any sense, that is, of the scribal culture in which these poems originally circulated. In so doing it presented not only a Rochesterian text consonant with print values, but a Rochester modelled on an ideal of authorial wholeness that seems altogether disjunct from the earl’s resolutely polysemous social construction and self-​fashioning. Yet the edition’s orientation toward ‘the shape of the future’ was not without its anticipations in Vieth’s textual studies: as

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Ronald Paulson –​that eminent scholar of the eighteenth century –​ had observed, one of the primary contributions of Attribution in Restoration Poetry (as Paulson saw it) was to shift ‘the emphasis from Rochester’s songs … to his satires’, for in these works ‘Rochester developed satiric methods and forms that were to have a powerful influence on the Augustans –​in particular on Swift –​at a time when Dryden was still writing his plays’.6 But insofar as Vieth’s edition of the Poems succeeded in re-​presenting and revaluing Rochester in terms of a privileged eighteenth-​century paradigm, it entailed a simultaneous betrayal of the texture of Rochester’s writing and indeed of Restoration literary culture. It would thus be left to others to marry Vieth’s pioneering bibliographical work with editions that more perfectly embodied its principles. Keith Walker’s old-​spelling The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester duly appeared from Blackwell in 1984, followed by Harold Love’s monumental Oxford English Texts edition at the turn of the millennium. Vieth’s ‘antiseptically clean’ 256 pages of text became 324 in Walker, including a collation of variant readings for most of the poems, a number that pales in comparison to the 712 pages occupied by Love’s edition, with its swarming tables of variants, detailed explanatory notes, transmissional histories, Rorschach-​ like stemmata, and stylometric analyses of poems of uncertain authorship.7 Notably, in the irreducibly complex cases of the ‘sceptre’ lampoon and Seigneur Dildoe, Love chose to print multiple texts of both poems, a revelatory concession to the major differences among versions of these texts descending from parallel manuscript families: we are not dealing here with variant readings, but with variant poems. Love’s Rochester was widely hailed as a significant achievement,8 yet scholarship has been somewhat indecisive in responding to the stimulus of Love’s ‘long-​awaited’ text,9 especially when compared, say, to the stream of work touched off by the publication of new editions of Marvell’s poetry and prose around the same time.10 To be sure, The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, together with Love’s other magnum opus, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-​ Century England (1993), has done much to spur investigation into ‘the culture and commerce of texts’ in this age.11 But though we have had both scholarly and popular biographies of Rochester in the time since Love’s edition, we still await a literary-​critical study to challenge the authority of Marianne Thormählen’s Rochester: The Poems in Context

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(1993), now twenty-​five years old.12 Nor have even the most innovative features of Love’s edition consistently shaped approaches to the poetry: often we find the most familiar lines of ‘In the Isle of Brittain’ quoted in illustration of Rochester’s politics, with no discernible sense that those lines may appear in a different sequence, or in an alternative text of more or fewer lines, or of what the effect of such variance might be. Why should this be so? A partial explanation perhaps has to do with the gap between materialist theory and scholarship –​which tends to focus on the role played in the making and meaning of texts by various non-​authorial actors and by the material conditions of production and dissemination (‘the culture and commerce of texts’) –​ and the unabated work of doing literary history, for which it is most often necessary to have authors.13 The conspicuous sociality of Love’s text must in a sense be denied or effaced if what we mean to produce is readings of ‘Rochester’. This dilemma is only compounded by the pressure of teleology, of construing Rochester and the age with which he is so deeply identified always in terms of anticipation or futurity. To see Rochester as an Augustan, or as more recent commentators would have it, a ‘proto-​W hig’, is perforce to strain against the varied cultural scripts he so promiscuously fashioned and in which he was no less promiscuously apprehended and imagined. The present chapter takes a different approach: on this account, time’s arrow points not just forward, but also back;14 the regimes of script and print, usually regarded as ‘opposing things’, both blend and clash;15 and politics has yet to harden into the ‘rage of party’.16 It is only with a due sense of movement and fluidity, with a due sense of process, as Scott has argued, that we can understand the Restoration world, or this ‘mixed thing’, in the pet phrase of Rochester’s Artemiza, here termed ‘Restoration modernity’. Rochester and the myth of print culture ‘The history of printing is an integral part of the general history of civilization.’17 This remark by S. H. Steinberg is quoted in the opening pages of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s landmark study The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), in connection with her regret that its truth was not manifest in ‘written history’ as it then stood.18 This is to give some sense of the stakes Eisenstein was playing for, in framing her

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own intervention as no less sui generis, and no less irrevocable, than the phenomenon of print itself. As her title suggests, in describing the impact of the shift from script to print, Eisenstein claimed to be describing nothing less, in Anthony Grafton’s words, than ‘the crucible in which modern culture was formed’.19 Whereas previous scholars had seen the invention of movable type and the rise of print as part and parcel with the intellectual, religious, and scientific ferment that swept across early modern Europe, Eisenstein reprioritised what she called the ‘fifteenth-​century communications revolution’ as the key to the whole.20 ‘To be sure’, Grafton reflected, ‘Eisenstein is far too learned and subtle a scholar to claim that printing by itself brought about the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution … Yet it is still clear that she sees printing as far more than one among many “factors in modern history.” It changed the directions of existing cultural movements as suddenly and completely as a prism bends and transforms a beam of light’.21 The decisiveness of Eisenstein’s claims on behalf of print’s transformative importance for Western civilisation nonetheless finds qualification –​indeed sustained qualification –​in the fringes of her own text. In the preface to the original two-​volume work, for instance, she writes: ‘As one might expect from a work long-​in-​progress, first thoughts had to be replaced by second ones, even third thoughts have had to be revised. Especially when I was writing about the preservative powers of print (a theme assigned special importance and hence repeatedly sounded in the book), I could not help wondering about the wisdom of presenting views that were still in flux in so fixed and permanent a form. I am still uncertain about this and hope that my decision to publish at this point will not be misinterpreted.’22 In part this merely rehearses the familiar trope of hesitation at publishing an elaborate work over which the author has long brooded; but we should not miss the particular force of Eisenstein’s hedging over ‘the preservative powers of print’. For as Adrian Johns has observed, Eisenstein ‘focuses on this this attribute of fixity as the most important corollary of the press, seeing it as central to most of the effects of print culture’: in standardising, rationalising, and reliably reproducing texts, printing in turn standardises, rationalises, and reliably reproduces knowledge.23 Eisenstein’s scrupling on this point thus becomes symptomatic of a potential breach in the text, of the ‘inevitable recalcitrance of detail’ to the positivism and abstraction of her argument, a breach

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extensively witnessed in the work’s sprawling footnotes, burdened as they are ‘with unsystematic and problematic information’. One recent book historian has gone so far as to state that Eisenstein’s notes ‘provide an unstated critique’ of the claims they are meant to evidence, a constant hum of opposition playing in the background of Eisenstein’s grand récit.24 Even as it invented the notion of print culture for a generation of scholars, then, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change may also be seen as laying the groundwork for subsequent revision.25 In the context of English studies, the seventeenth century and in particular the Restoration have been fertile grounds for such redress, insofar as the persistence of scribal publication right across the early modern period directly challenges the idea of script’s obsolescence in the face of print’s triumph.26 Corollary to this challenge is a troubling of the binary opposition between cultures of script and print Eisenstein’s model assumes. Already we have had occasion to consider a number of scenes in the history of early modern print culture that fail to manifest conditions of fixity, permanence, or possessive authorship. In the binding of Milton’s anonymously printed A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (1637) together with the Poems of Thomas Randolph (1638), we noted how the Maske is thus unfastened from its presumed spirit and purposes. We have also remarked the surreptitious and imperfect printing of Browne’s Religio Medici (1642), a circumstance its author exploited in reissuing the version of 1643, which simultaneously authorises and disarms the pirated text as one written ‘about seven yeares past, with some others of affinitie thereto, for my private exercise and satisfaction’ (‘To the Reader’). 1643 likewise emended hundreds of readings from its counterfeit even as it ‘continued to reproduce a significant number of errors and also introduced new solecisms and misprints of its own’.27 Virtually none of Marvell’s lyric verse was published while he lived. The Miscellaneous Poems of 1681 were brought to press and attested by his landlady Mary Palmer who claimed to be his wife, though Marvell did not ‘at any time … in his lifetime own or confess that he was married to the said Mary or any other person’.28 The uncertain prospect of Marvell’s marriage is fascinating for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that Mary Palmer, alias Marvell, is the only authority we have for the text of Miscellaneous Poems. In some respects, the 1681 Folio was obviously not a ‘true copy’. As is well known, the Cromwell poems were

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cancelled from nearly all extant pressings of the edition, nor were the verse satires of the 1660s included, though many such poems would be attributed to Marvell in the collections of state poetry that began to appear after 1688.29 Rochester was of course a poet –​indeed the poet –​of Restoration manuscript culture, and stands as perhaps the most significant counter, as David Vieth wrote, to ‘the twentieth-​century notion that a writer wishing to reach an audience would naturally seek to have his works printed’, and to the ‘unacknowledged assumption that printed books are somehow intrinsically more important than manuscripts’.30 Indeed, Rochester does not merely prompt us to rethink the irresistible assertiveness of print, but the very values print has been imagined to imbue on texts, and in turn on the culture it is said to define. The first printed edition of Rochester, Poems on Several Occasions by the Right Honourable, the E. of R—​, was issued just a few weeks after his death in 1680 under a false Antwerp imprint.31 Of the sixty-​one poems therein contained, approximately half were not by Rochester. This volume is nevertheless the most reliable of all the early editions, for 1680, as Vieth showed, derives from a carefully and knowledgably curated anthology of court-​libertine verse which survives in a collateral copy produced by the same scriptorium (Yale MS Osborn b. 105, the ‘Hansen’ miscellany).32 In other words, the 1680 Poems on Several Occasions is ‘simply a scribal miscellany in typographical dress’.33 Later print editions, often using 1680 as a copy-​text, only introduced further confusion into the canon by incorporating items from less reliable manuscript sources and by removing or expurgating the more profane poems from the ‘Antwerp’ edition. Andrew Thorncome’s 1685 imprint, for instance, subtracts nine poems from 1680 and adds five others, none of which are likely authentic. What was long thought to be the best early Rochester, Jacob Tonson’s 1691 edition, introduced nine apparently genuine poems and the text of Rochester’s Valentinian, even as it advanced upon Thorncome’s bowdlerising procedures, ‘castrating’ dozens of lines and in some cases omitting whole stanzas of verse in order to avoid any appearance of impropriety.34 But if Thorncome’s and Tonson’s editions seek to affirm Rochester’s place within the precincts of Augustan politeness and acceptability, other publishers took the opposite tack, assembling as much obscene or pornographic writing under Rochester’s name

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as was possible. One of these stands out for the sheer audacity of its fraud, a surreptitious 1761 imprint that included among its more than 100 Poetical Works of Rochester perhaps only a single genuine poem.35 Capitalising in this way on the ‘greatness’ of Rochester’s ‘Parts’ and the sins which sprang from them –​‘He seem’d to affect something singular and paradoxical in his Impieties, as well as his Writings, above the reach and thought of other men’, Robert Parsons eulogised the earl in a sermon preached at his funeral36 –​the late seventeenth-​and early eighteenth-​century print marketplace teemed with ‘Rochesteriana’, markedly increasing the uncertainty which had attended writings associated with Rochester within the scribal field. Taken together, the bogus assignment of coarsely pornographic poetry to Rochester by cynical booksellers, along with the demolition of his diction and prosody through systematic censorship, resulted in a distortion and a devaluing of his writings from which they arguably only began to recover in the second half of the twentieth century.37 In order to understand the emergence of print culture as transformative or revolutionary, it is of course necessary to posit the set of conditions which were transformed, that is, to hypostatise a ‘scribal culture’ in which the flow of texts and knowledge is characteristically limited by the inefficiency and unreliability of publication in the scribal medium. But if the foregoing discussion has suggested some of the liabilities of print culture in seventeenth-​century England, the example of Rochester can also help revise our sense of manuscript’s potentials. In An Allusion to Horace, Rochester famously hectors Dryden as a writer who caters to the degraded tastes of the public playhouse and the print trade: ‘your false sence /​Hitts the false Judgment of an Audience /​Of clapping fools, assembling a Crowd /​Till the throng’d Playhous crack with the dull load’ (lines 12–​15). In contrast, the aristocratic amateur celebrates the refinement and exclusivity of his personal literary circle: I loath the Rabble, ‘tis enough for me If Sydley, Shadwell, Shepheard, Wicherley, Godolphin, Butler, Buckhurst, Buckinghame And some few more, whom I omitt to name Approve my sence, I count their Censure Fame. (lines  120–​4)

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The scribal evidence, however, tells another story; for it seems that Rochester’s coterie verse in fact circulated increasingly widely over the course of his last decade. ‘In part’, Love writes, ‘this was purposive: poems written to wound enemies or to further his position at court would have failed in their aim if they had never spread beyond his intimates’.38 Surviving correspondence reveals that by the early 1670s poems by Rochester were circulating at the Inns of Court, one of the main hubs in the dissemination of scribal texts, and from there they radiated out ever more widely, through user publication, hand to hand, through the post, and even through memorisation and recital.39 ‘[If ] a poem aroused real interest’, Love observes, ‘it would reach the coffee houses, and … [then] there would be no stopping it’: a ‘scribal text which was circulating through the coffee houses’, as Rochester’s commonly did, ‘was just as much a public possession as a printed text’.40 Widening our view for a moment, we can see just how effective the scribal medium could be in transmitting literary, political, and news writing throughout the seventeenth century. There exist, as D. F. McKenzie reminds us, more than 4,000 manuscript copies of individual poems by Donne, a bare sliver of the number that must once have been in circulation.41 In 1662 and again in 1675, Roger L’Estrange, Surveyor of the Imprimery under Charles II, inveighed against the proliferation of scribal lampoons in official reports to his government paymasters: ‘Of Libells some are only written, others printed; and those in Manuscript are commonly ye more seditious & scandalous of ye two; Besides that they are forty times as many, & by the help of Transcripts, well nigh as public as the other.’42 John Dryden’s heroic opera The Fall of Angells and man in innocence (composed 1674), as his adaptation of Paradise Lost was known in manuscript, evidently found a wide readership in that medium before its eventual print publication in 1677, ‘many hundred Copies of it being dispers’d abroad without my knowledge or consent’, and this despite its formidable length (Works, 12:86). Of a manuscript newsletter by the enterprising intelligencer John Dyer, L’Estrange remarked in 1688: ‘There cannot upon a Fair Computation of it be so Few as Five Hundred Copies of it Spread over ye Kingdom.’43 And as W. J. Cameron and others have shown, the scriptoria responsible for producing the Hansen miscellany and other scribal texts like it were fully part of the commercial book

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trade, with no less of a sense of metier. Such scriptoria were still vitally active as late as the 1690s.44 Textual instability –​sometimes of a radical kind –​does of course obtain within the scribal universe, as does faulty and uncertain attribution. In their frustration with the problems thus arising within their spheres of activity, modern editors and bibliographers have most often regarded these as lamentable glitches in the system, a view reinforced by the dominant print cultural paradigm. As Paul Hammond reminds us, however, to those for whom manuscript was the medium of choice, its air of indeterminacy was as much a feature as a bug.45 In the summer of 1675, for instance, Rochester was evidently discomfited by his friend Henry Savile’s account of the Duchess of Portsmouth’s ‘more than ordinary indignation against me’, possibly over a wrongly attributed lampoon or, as seems more likely, an overheard bon mot against the king’s influential mistress. ‘I thought the Duchess of P. more an angel than I find her a woman, and as this is the first, it shall be the most malicious thing I shall every say of her’, Rochester complains. ‘For her generous resolution of not hurting me to the King, I thank her; but she must think a man much obliged, after the calling of him knave, to say she will do him no farther prejudice’ (Letters, 106–​7). From the rest of the letter it is clear that Rochester expects Savile to relay its contents to the duchess, to ‘do the office of a friend’ in this matter (Letters, 108). Nonetheless, only a few months later some verses reputedly by ‘L: R’ began to circulate at court, which included this stanza spoken by ‘Ports’: When Englands Monarch’s on my Belly With Prick in Cunt, thô double Cramm’d, Fart of mine Arse, for small whore Nelly And Great Whore Mazarine be damn’d. (Dialogue L: R, lines 5–​8)

No doubt Rochester (‘as this is the first, it shall be the most malicious thing I shall ever say of her’) would have denied any part in such a libel, relying on the operative ambiguity of scribal attribution to save social face. At the same time, the prospect of the earl’s authorship stands as a clear reminder of his power to hurt. The element of irony and indirection inherent in Rochester’s characteristically self-​dramatising (and of course unsigned) performances could also serve as a kind of screen between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’

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readings of the scribally published text, especially as the verbal artefact became unmoored from the original context of its composition or utterance. Consider for instance this passage from An Epistolary Essay, from M. G. to O. B upon their mutuall Poems: Perhaps ill Verses ought to be confind, In meer good breeding, like unsav’ry wind: Were reading forc’t, I should be apt to think, Men might no more write scurvily than stink; But ’tis your choice whether you’l read or no. If likewise of your smelling it were so: I’d fart just as I write, for my own ease Nor should you be concerned, unless you please. Il’e own that you write better than I do, But I have as much need to write as you: What tho’ th’ Excrements of my dull brain Runs in a harsh insipid strain, Whilst your rich head, eases itself of wit, Must none but Civit Catts have leave to shit? (lines  30–​43)

Who is speaking thus, Rochester, or a parodic persona? Is an excremental poetics being ironically celebrated or ironically mocked? Vieth has probably decoded the matter correctly in seeing ‘M. G.’ as Rochester’s rival John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, and ‘O. B.’ as ‘Bayes’ (Dryden), formerly Rochester’s, now Mulgrave’s client (c. 1679).46 But the poem permits other configurations of subject and object, as its transmission history attests: frequently copyists gave it variant titles like ‘To My Lord Mulgrave, from Rochester’, or ‘An Epistolari essay from E. R. to E. M.’. There is a consistent sense, in the manuscript record, that the poem originates with Rochester and is aimed at Mulgrave, but a very fluid grasp of the communication situation. This helps us to understand how Rochester could be rumoured the author of a played called Sodom and at the same time of a lampoon ‘Upon the Author of a Play call’d Sodom’. In this case, the opposing attributions indicate a shared perception of Rochester’s concern in the text but very different ways of imagining that concern (the renewed debate over Rochester’s authorship of Sodom is predicated on the same difference).47 Indeed, of the dozens of personal satires directed

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at Rochester, ‘about half were ultimately attributed to Rochester himself ’, including several that appear to be authentic (most notably To the Post Boy).48 No doubt Rochester was drawn to and so brilliantly inhabited the interstices of scribal culture in part out of an instinct for role-​playing and impersonation, and for self-​irony. As we have seen, these gaps also served to define one’s membership in a literary or political network, outside of which coterie language was often and deliberately subject to miscomprehension. The deciphering of lampoons, and the cachet that accrued to those with access to such writings, or who possessed or claimed to possess an intimate knowledge of their workings, were thus essential to the way scribal publication distributed both power and pleasure: ‘A man can make no visit now but his Caresse /​Is a Lewd satyr shewn which Pray sir Guess /​whose still [style] it is’ quips the anonymous author of ‘The Visitt’. This should of course remind us of the wonderful scene in the Rochesterian satire Timon, where the speaker recalls being seized in the Mall by a rakehell blade and bustled off to an unwelcome dinner: He takes me in his Coach, and as wee goe Pulls out a Libell, of a Sheete or Two; Insipid as the Praise, of Pious Queenes, Or Shadwells, unassisted former Scenes; Which he admir’d, and prais’d at evr’y Line, At last, it was soe sharpe, it must be mine. I vow’d, I was noe more a Witt than he, Unpractic’d, and unblest in Poetry: A Song to Phillis, I perhaps might make, But never Rhym’d but for my Pintles sake; I envy’d noe Mans Fortune, nor his Fame, Nor ever thought of a Revenge soe tame. He knew my Stile (he swore) and twas in vaine Thus to deny, the Issue of my Braine. (lines 13–​26)49

But it would be a mistake to let the social comedy of this passage overshadow the significant liberty afforded by scribal culture’s epistemological gaps. We can think about that liberty as a matter of literary theory –​Kirk Combe for instance has argued that Rochester ‘carries out these stratagems [of what Combe calls “deconstructive indeterminability”] intentionally in order to promote the possibility

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of meanings’, as a way of destabilising the socio-​linguistic order –​but we should preserve as well something of the term’s immediate force.50 Given that Rochester, an aristocratic peer, was banished from court for writing the sceptre lampoon, what might the author of Sodom have expected for a burlesque in which the royal pair is cast as King Bollixinian and Queen Cuntigratia, the former served by the likes of Buggeranthus and Pockenello, the latter by those virtuous maids Fuckadilla, Cunticula, and Clytoris? Not long after Rochester’s death in July 1680, amidst the backlash to the failed attempt at Exclusion, the satirical ballad-​maker Stephen College became one of the first victims of the Tory Reaction. In the days before his hanging for treason College wrote feelingly to his son, also Stephen, urging him to give up ‘that folly of Riming, for … it will do you hurt’.51 In a world of courtly decorum and press control, the indeterminacy of scribal publication was ever the helpmeet of disruptive speech acts. Revising the myth of print culture in seventeenth-​ century England is of course also to unsettle Whig narratives of modernisation and the eighteenth century to come. Here I would recall something Conrad Russell pointed out in the context of a like argument, in this case about sectarian religion, that ‘High Anglicanism, as well as Puritanism, was capable of becoming a revolutionary force when the weight of authority was turned against it’.52 Equally, we do well to consider that script and print do not bear any necessary or sufficient relation to ‘progress’, and so to imagine their uses in terms of a more fluid and contingent historical narrative. To Rochester’s contemporaries, he was the very image of the modern, the swaggering ‘new’ Cavalier, a figure epitomised by Thomas D’Urfey in a suggestively multimedia textual metonymy: His Pockets swell’d with Challenges and News, Lascivious Pamplets, Billet Deuxs, And Tickets from the Beldame of the Stews. Deaf to reproof he was, and hugg’d his Crimes, A modish Fop, a Creature of the times …

While challenges, love letters, and receipts would typically be handwritten, ‘news’ and ‘pamphlets’ could be scribal or printed; they represent connections to a world of gossip and scandal but also to one of political and religious controversy, as D’Urfey’s further limning of this modish character makes clear. He is one that

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… could flatter every Golden Clod, And call my Spindle Lord, that made him drunk, his God, Adore the reverend wrinkled Lady Quaint, And swear she’s more celestial than a Saint; Protest not Venus Doves had been White as her Faces skin, Though he could see no part of it for Paint: Stubborn as Eli’s Sons, or Iacob’s envious brood, Stranger to wise men, and a foe to good, And most ungrateful lov’d his Father less Because he did his Crimes express, And held the Mirror up to shew his wickedness.53

The concluding triplet accuses courtiers like Rochester and Buckingham of disloyalty, and likely glances at their undermining of the king’s dignity and authority in satires and lampoons. And indeed, it is on the same basis that modern commentators have increasingly identified Rochester with a ‘circle of Whig wits’, and so written Rochester into eighteenth-​ century futurity.54 But the figure of mirroring insists at the same time on the new Cavaliers as ‘expressing’ or ‘reflecting’ their monarch’s own libertine scepticism; at the head of this circle sits the king himself. Was Charles II the first Whig? ‘Court’, ‘Country’, and the occasions of wit In raising this question, our discussion thus turns more decisively to politics, in an attempt to reimagine the traffic between and among court-​ libertine verse, ‘opposition’ satire, and the emergence of Whiggism. Our point of departure is an important essay by Harold Love, in which he presents ‘some new hypotheses concerning the origins and production’ of Osborn b. 105 –​our link to the scribal origins of Rochester’s Poems of 1680. There Love sees the writing of these frequently obscene poems as ‘an ideological conscious-​raising exercise among a dissident political interest group at the court of Charles II’, namely the Rochester-​Buckingham circle. ‘Poetry’, Love writes, ‘along with sceptical philosophy and practical debauchery, was the bonding agent of a group whose ultimate rationale was political –​ the Erastian, anti-​clerical wing of Shaftesbury’s exclusionist alliance –​ and which through the influence of Buckingham, Dorset and Sedley was to play a significant part in bringing about the great political

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change of 1688’.55 There is much in the essay to admire, but we should be uneasy with the way Love’s argument telescopes a contingent and ambiguous process into a single static equation. Thus Rochester and his friends become ‘Whig placemen in a Tory court’, a circumstance that serves to explain both the motive and the meaning of their verse. But the seventy to eighty poems that made up Osborn b. 105 –​themselves but a small and tendentious selection of the multifarious body of scribal verse associated with the Rochester-​Buckingham circle –​ were not composed at one time (i.e. 1680, when they crossed over into print) but, like Milton’s early verse, at several times, spanning the better part of the previous decade.56 The opprobrious terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ only gained general currency c. 1678, amidst the controversy over Exclusion, and did not coalesce into something we might call ‘identities’ until after the Glorious Revolution (as late as 1706, in a famous anti-​union speech, Lord Belhaven declaimed, ‘The Names generally used to denote the Factions, are Whig and Tory, as obscure as that of Guelfs and Gibelins’).57 The animus of the poetry arising from the Rochester-​Buckingham circle is thus more centrifugal and promiscuous than Love’s characterisation would seem to allow, an attribute mirrored in its scribal transmission and reception, as will emerge in an encounter with Rochester’s most notorious piece of court-​libertine verse, the sceptre lampoon. Though not published until 1697 in Poems on Affairs of State, the sceptre lampoon was widely circulated and certainly fits the bill of a court-​factional performance; it is unquestionably obscene. But the ideological ‘shock’ of that obscenity is of course inextricable from the libertinism of Charles II’s court, whose tone was set by its titular head. This is sufficiently well understood as to need little demonstration. But we might turn to a keen observer of that court, the Earl of Clarendon, for a suggestive account of its libertine sociability. With a rueful eye toward what it augured for his own political fortunes,58 the chancellor thus recalls in his Life how the atmosphere of the restored court soon tilted toward infelicitous license: ‘It was very visible’, he writes, that the Duke of York liked the ‘Company and Conversation’ of his duchess (Clarendon’s daughter Anne Hyde) ‘very well’, and was believed to communicate all his Counsels, and all He knew or thought, without reserve to her; which, being so contrary to the professed Doctrine of the Court, administered Occasion to the Men

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of Mirth, in those seasons which took up a good Part of every Night, to be very pleasant upon the Government of the Dutchess, and the Submission of the Duke; in which there were always some witty Reflections upon the Chancellor. And this Kind of Liberty, being first grateful to the King for the Wit that accompanied it and the Mirth that it produced it, grew by the Custom of it more acceptable; and it may be the general and publick Observation of the Disparity in the Lives of the two Brothers made it wished, that there were no more of that Strictness in the one Place than in the other, towards which there wanted not Application and Advice accordingly as well as example.59

‘Mirth’ is not an emanation of politics, it has its own vitality, and its own rationale. At the same time, palace politics (the duchess’s ‘government’ of the duke, the chancellor’s stiffness) could and did ‘administer occasion’ to the court wits –​Buckingham, Dorset, Etherege, Rochester, Sedley, and Wycherley, as they are presented in J. H. Wilson’s classic study.60 This gibes well enough with Love’s claim, in English Clandestine Satire (2004), that the ‘Restoration lampoon, as a kind distinct from its precursors, first took shape at the court of Charles II as an instrument of factional warfare within that court.’61 But in what sense or at what point should we understand ‘this Kind of Liberty’ as ‘dissident’? Or as oppositionally Whiggish? Although we can already see, in the shape of this anecdote, the anti-​Clarendonian and incipiently anti-​Yorkist edge of the court wits’ project, the exercise of that wit served, in the first instance, as a bonding agent between the king and his ‘Ministers of Pleasure’.62 That Marvell is the author of that phrase should serve as a caution against conflating ‘the poetry of Rochester and his friends’ with satire of the kind Marvell himself wrote, or with the ‘conscious-​raising’ exercises of Whig placemen. Indeed, the language of political rebellion could itself be appropriated as a kind of shock tactic under the sign of Cavalier license. In one incident involving the dramatist and theatre manager Thomas Killigrew, possibly apocryphal but variously recorded, the memory of republican rule becomes a hobby horse, ridden through the court as a piece of audacious ribaldry. According to Anthony Wood, Killigrew one day went to pay his majesty a visit in his private apartments, habited like a pilgrim who was bent on a long journey. The king, surprised at the oddity of his appearance, immediately asked him what was the

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meaning of this, and whither he was going? To hell, bluntly replied Killigrew. Prythee (says the king) what can your errand be to that place? –​To fetch back Oliver Cromwell (rejoined he) that he may take some care of the affairs of England; for his successor taketh none at all.63

An alternative tradition places the encounter at a Whitehall ball, where Killigrew is said to have appeared ‘fully booted and spurred as though about to set out immediately on a journey’, thus prompting the scripted encounter; this version emphasises the king’s ‘uproarious laughter’ at Killigrew’s mock show.64 Within the archives of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Matthew Jenkinson has unearthed a contemporary jest that surely runs parallel to Killigrew’s, in which Rochester is portrayed ‘helping the king to mount a mad horse whipped by the wit once Charles was firmly saddled. This was so, retorted the jest’s earl, “we shall see yr Majesty ride as you reign” ’.65 With perfect economy, Rochester is here made to ventriloquise Country Party critique at the same time that he familiarly goads the king. Indeed, the difference between those two illocutionary acts is here compressed to the vanishing point. But the king too has a share in the jest; and we are reminded as well of the ‘untoward configurations in religion and politics’ that his shifty policies and changeable administrations could produce.66 Such lessons are paramount in reading the sceptre lampoon. It is often taken for granted that these verses constitute an ‘outrageous satire’ on Charles II, but what strikes me about the poem is how thin the line may be between laughter and laceration.67 Such performances of mock-​encomium derive subversive energy from the bonds of affection or dependency, bonds which also contain and delimit the subversive forces they unleash. The danger –​and the high-​flying pleasure –​of such ironic abuse is that pretended contempt or scorn may overflow the limit of the form. Marianne Thormählen for instance finds the ‘first third of the poem … unreservedly laudatory’.68 She highlights the favourable judgement on England’s monarch (‘The easiest King and best bred Man alive’) vis-​à-​vis the belligerent Louis, ‘a French Foole still wandring up and downe, /​Starving his People, hazarding his Crowne’ (lines A4–​7), as well as the flattering if indecorous comparison between the length of Charles’s ‘Scepter and his Prick’ (line A11). In its

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amplificatio of this rude praise (‘And she may sway the one who plays with t’other’), however, we might see the sceptre lampoon as daringly ventriloquising Country Party satire, to the point of tipping over into intolerable abuse (line A12ff.). For it was a common tactic among anti-​court writers to raise the spectre of gynocracy, to accuse Charles of being the plaything of power-​hungry mistresses and courtesans.69 Marvell’s humiliating portrait of Lady Castlemaine in The Last Instructions (1667) gives us a good indication of the vituperation libellists directed against the royal mistresses at the time, and thus of how threatening Charles’s bedfellows were perceived to be. Castlemaine at least was English; Portsmouth, who succeeded her as Charles’s favourite c. 1670, and who appears in the sceptre lampoon as ‘Carwell, dearest of All Deares! /​Thou best Releife of my declineing yeares!’ (lines A23–​4), was doubly reviled as both French and Catholic, a perceived (and in fact) tool of her paymaster Louis. It matters little then whether ‘All modern historians agree that Charles II’s mistresses exercised very little, if any, influence on matters of statecraft’ –​the fears put into play were quite real enough.70 These themes are sustained in the poem’s close, which, as Jonathan Kramnick has argued, further rewrite Charles’s ‘apparent turgidity’ –​ his ‘prowdest peremptory Prick’ (line A17), his ‘limber Tarse’ (line A28) –​as pliancy and dependency.71 In the Portsmouth vignette, Rochester highlights the ridiculous contrast the king’s sceptre makes with his ‘Graceless Ballocks’ (line A27), while in the succeeding frame he dwells on the ‘painefull Tricks of the laborious Nelly’ (Nell Gwyn), ‘Imploying Hands, Armes, Fingers, Mouth and Thighs /​To raise the Limb which shee each Night enjoyes’ (lines A30–​2). This last swipe literalises the king’s impotence, while the determined busyness of old Nelly sharply counterpoints Charles’s passivity. Rochester in fact goes well beyond a contemporary satire like The History of Insipids (c. 1675) –​whose nominal author, the future Whig radical John Freke, was prosecuted for high treason –​in upbraiding the king’s lubricity, but also in making explicit the political dimension of such sexual lampooning.72 At the same time, as Warren Chernaik points out, ‘there is not a shadow of a suggestion of possible action’ in Rochester’s poem.73 Whereas The History of Insipids concludes with a call for political revolution in the name of English liberty –​

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Then farewell, sacred Majesty, Let’s pull all brutish tyrants down! Where men are born and still live free, There ev’ry head doth wear a crown … (lines 163–​6, in POASY)

the sceptre lampoon ends, in Chernaik’s words, ‘not in a recommendation of possible reform, but in an explosion of hate’.74 The comparison is to Rochester’s capstone couplet ‘I hate all Monarchs and the Thrones that they sitt on /​From the Hector of France to th’Cully of greate Brittaine’ (lines A33–​4). But we have also to deal with the multiplicity of the text, which descends from at least five independent manuscript families or groups, in lengths ranging from twenty-​eight to forty-​one lines, and with groups of lines frequently migrating within the text.75 Thus in some copies of the poem the sentence beginning ‘I hate all Monarchs’ is transposed for the more comradely sentiment, ‘Ah Generous Sir! Long may you survive; /​For Wee shall never have such liberty, to swive’ (lines C40–​1), surely an ironic and ameliorative salute. Another family of exemplars ends with the ‘Nelly’ portrait, whose touch of fabulism (‘This yould believe had I but time to tell yee’), in calling attention to the lampoon’s stylised hyperbole, argues against taking its attack on the king too seriously. An even greater instability obtains at the level of verbal variants, which are prodigious and in many cases significant. In this regard, let us briefly consider the different permutations of one of the poem’s most shocking lines, the clinch of Rochester’s panegyric on the ‘Princes Prick’: His was the sauciest that did ever swive, The prowdest peremptory Prick alive: Thô Safety, Law, Religion, Life lay on’t Twou’d breake thrô all to make it’s way to C—​t. (lines A16–​19)

The suggestion of animism –​the syntax is contrived such that ‘peremptory Prick’ is the grammatical subject of ‘swive’ and ‘breake’ –​ gives rise to the Rabelaisian image of Charles’s sceptre-​like phallus coming to life and battering down doors, a scene punctuated by the brutal reduction of the king’s amours to ‘C—​t ’, an epithet Rochester wields like no other poet before or since. In the ‘C’ text, the four-​letter word lands without any redaction at all, ‘Twould breake through all,

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to make its way to Cunt’ (line C25). Versions from the ‘D’ group however rewrite the line as ‘T’would break through all to come to dearest C’ (line D22), a locution far less immediately legible; indeed, ‘C’ could as well be the ‘Carwell’ of the following line as ‘C—​t ’. The poem’s malleable form and its aporetic yoking of Cavalier license and court drollery with Country Party satire hedge against any certain identification of its illocutionary force. Such ambivalence is also the source of its interest: it points to bifurcations of identity and allegiance –​to the king on the one hand, and to Buckingham on the other; to a way of life (‘Court’) and a way of thinking (‘Country’) –​that necessarily qualify our sense of Rochester’s political placement. The same divisions also press on the poem from the outside. In his explanatory headnote to ‘In the Isle of Brittain’, for instance, Love firmly presents it as a political gambit: ‘These outrageous lines on Charles II were written late in 1673 at a time when Rochester’s disgraced friend and political patron, Buckingham, had moved into open opposition to the king’s pro-​French policies.’76 But in his detailed essay decoding the poem’s textual tradition, he also shows how its apparent subversiveness could as well or in part be the product of revision by intra-​court rivals. Love conjectures that the sceptre lampoon would have ‘circulated very rapidly at Whitehall but also have been rewritten as it circulated in order to reflect to the factional allegiances of its copyists and, possibly, to cast greater obloquy on the faction identified with its origin, which was that of Rochester’s once powerful but now declining patron, Buckingham’ (emphasis mine).77 As the poem passed beyond court circles and into scribal anthologies of Country-​aligned verse, ‘References that would only have made sense to courtiers … were pruned, and line order revised to give a tighter sense of progression’, a phase of revision that Rochester may have participated in –​or then again he may not have.78 If Rochester was in 1673 already a Whig agent in waiting, he was playing a very deep game: ‘By that God that made me’, he writes Savile two years later, in the letter touching on his alleged injury to the French duchess, ‘I have no more offended her in thought, word or deed, no more imagined or uttered the least thought to her contempt or prejudice, than I have plotted treason, concealed arms, trained regiments for a rebellion’. Toward the close he resolves, ‘how severe soever she pleases to be I have always been her humble servant and will continue so’ (Letters, 106–​7). Though one is always wary of

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Rochester’s habitual irony and fondness for poses, Treglown’s footnote to this exchange –​‘Rochester clearly felt he had been wronged, and he would not have lied to Savile’ –​is persuasive.79 When the decade reached its crisis in the Popish Plot and the bill for Exclusion, Rochester, according to his most recent biographer, seems to have ‘sided with the King and James’. His daughter Elizabeth would become a fervent Jacobite.80 Personal advantage, political conviction, and the occasions of wit were integers capable of various arrangement; we have little reason to expect ideological consistency from their combination. And indeed, any principle-​centred account of the politics of wit –​or of politics in this period full stop –​is duly chastened when we find Sir Charles Sedley opining, in a 1682 letter to the Earl of Chesterfield, that ‘the distinction of Whigg and Tory doth much add to the present desolation, they are in my opinion (at least the violent part on both sides) much of the same stuff at bottom since they are so easily converted one to another, I mean self interest’.81 Dryden’s celebration of aesthetic disinterest in Absalom and Achitophel (1681), written around the same time –​‘Yet if a Poem have a Genius, it will force its own reception in the World. For there’s a sweetness in good Verse, which Tickles even while it Hurts: And, no man can be heartily angry with him who pleases him against his will’ (Works, 2:3) –​may itself be part of the poem’s political calculus. But there he is, in 1697 –​now a Catholic and a Jacobite, deposed from his laureateship in favour of that ‘True-​Blew-​ Protestant Poet’ Tom Shadwell –​dedicating A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire to none other than the Earl of Dorset. Our literary histories would surely be the richer were they as flexible about labels and situations as were those writers we have come to know under the names of ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ or their earlier antecedents. As Christopher D’Addario writes, ‘we should recognise that a variety of pressures, including, psychological, formal, social, environmental, and geographic pressures, worked on authors alongside the political and the polemical as they wrote’, and too, ‘that literary texts … because of their aesthetic ambitions … [ask] us to look beyond the purely ideological for their meanings even as they seek to heighten or obscure’ political aims.82 Here we might pursue a little further the connection that has been made between Marvell and Rochester. We know of course of their mutual admiration: Aubrey records Marvell’s opinion that ‘the Earle of Rochester was the only man in England that had

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the true veine of Satyre’, while Wilmot in turn praises Marvell in Tunbridge Wells for his exposure of ‘Pert Bays, with his Importance Comfortable’ (line 69), an allusion to the prose polemicist’s humiliation of Samuel Parker in The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672).83 Lately, Marvell’s association with the Buckingham circle has served to put a Whig stamp on that faction of the court, as Milton has served so to stamp Marvell.84 If we are going to keep reading Dryden, we will no doubt have to find him secretly part of the opposition as well. Curiously, what gets left out of such histories is a full sense of the precedence and potency of Marvell’s contribution to the development of Restoration satire as a whole –​a corrosive brilliance and set of techniques that were widely copied and imitated if rarely equalled. In the first volume of the Yale Poems on Affairs of State (1963), covering the years 1660–​78, for instance, Marvell’s painter poems (1666–​67) give pride of place only to Robert Wild’s Iter Boreale (1660) and Waller’s Instructions to a Painter (1665), the latter of which is of course the piece that ignited Marvell’s scandalous rewriting of the history of the Dutch wars.85 In Wilson’s Court Satires of the Restoration (1976), again only a scant poem, ‘On the Ladies of the Court’ (c. 1663), pre-​dates Marvell’s rival treatment of ‘Lady State’. Obviously these twentieth-​century print anthologies only represent a selection of the extant scribal tradition, itself much reduced by loss; nevertheless, the paucity of court satire from the years immediately following the Restoration is striking, as Wilson himself observes.86 When the tradition of court-​libertine verse finally heats up in the 1670s, the fluid mass of Restoration satire had already been injected with imaginative and political potential by Marvell’s poetic response to the crises of the 1660s. But if the poetry of the court wits could thus appear Whiggish in its general debt to Marvell, the promiscuity of the scribal marketplace –​which frequently mingled opposition satire with the lewd rhyming of Charles’s courtiers –​simultaneously reveals affinities that run in the other direction. Though Rochester’s A Ramble in St James’s Park (c. 1673) is less recognised than it should be as a deliberately Marvellian inversion of Waller’s A POEM On St James’s PARK As lately improved by his MAIESTY (1661), this nexus of poetic imitation has at least been compassed.87 But what might it look like to read The Last Instructions in light of a more Rochesterian paradigm? Or to put it another way, did connoisseurs of clandestine verse always know or

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care to tell the difference between the frisson of ‘Court’ and ‘Country’ satire? Though few Restoration readers could have been familiar with Marvell’s unpublished lyric poetry, sensational prospects of looking and longing nonetheless figure prominently in that extraordinary body of writing: we might think in particular of those erotic spectacles of blood in The Gallery and The Unfortunate Lover. But nowhere in Marvell’s poetry are acts of voyeurism more brilliantly if ambivalently sustained than in the Last Instructions, the whole a tour de force meditation on ways of seeing. It is well understood that Marvell’s ‘Advices’ target Waller’s heroic idealisation of the English naval victory at Lowestoft and the grandeur of the Stuart court. In contrast to Waller’s ‘softest touches’ (line 29), Marvell asserts the rough truth of his own verse and vision. Recent scholarship on The Last Instructions has further intimated how the poem’s scabrous disclosures serve to demystify the exercise of power within the court by making the reader witness to its inhabitants’ most secret and perverse acts and arts.88 The satire thus opens with a sequence of bruising portraits of the good and great, among them these memorable lines depicting a liaison between ‘the king’s whore’, Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine, and the acrobat Jacob Hall. Marvell’s speaker instructs the artist to paint her: … in colours that will hold (Her, not her picture, for she now grows old): She through her lackey’s drawers, as he ran, Discerned love’s cause and a new flame began. Her wonted joys thenceforth, and court, she shuns, And still within her mind the footman runs: ……………………………………………… Great Love, how dost thou triumph and how reign, That to a groom couldst humble her disdain! Stripped to her skin, see how she stooping stands, Nor scorns to rub him down with those fair hands, And washing (lest the scent her crime disclose) His sweaty hooves, tickles him ‘twixt the toes. (lines 79–​84,  91–​6)

‘The burden of Marvell’s argument’, Steven Zwicker writes, ‘is that the servicing of Castlemaine by her lackey is a humiliation of the king’s mistress and of the king himself ’.89 But the sense of transgression and inversion goes beyond that: she is at this moment servicing

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him, not the other way round, a dissonance reinforced by the crux of ‘stooping stands’. And just what sort of ‘criminal’ exercise are we to imagine the lackey’s toes were being used for, and for whose pleasure or satisfaction? The polemical force of the Last Instructions lies in its connection of private vice with public ruin, identifying the corrupt appetites of the court as a disease on the body politic. So it bears observing how the imagination of this poet threatens to outrun the scandalous intrigues it records, as the poet’s gaze in this and a number of other scenes may be seen to violate not just the privacy of the bedchamber but also of the psyche. Castlemaine ‘Her wonted joys thenceforth, and court, she shuns /​And still within her mind the footman runs’ (emphasis mine): one keyhole opens onto another. Toward the conclusion of the poem, Marvell’s speaker will thus venture to look into the very bedchamber of the king, but what is more, into his darkest fantasies: ‘Raise up a sudden shape’, he commands, … with virgin’s face, (Though ill agree her posture, hour, or place), Naked as born, and her round arms behind With her own tresses, interwove and twined; Her mouth locked up, a blind before her eyes, Yet from beneath the veil her blushes rise, And silent tears her secret anguish speak; Her heart throbs, and with very shame would break. The object strange in him no terror moved: He wondered first, then pitied, then he loved … (lines 891–​900)

There is perhaps always some complicity of the satirist in those vices and follies he lashes, exposes, and reproves. As Alvin Kernan remarked in The Cankered Muse (1959), ‘Inevitably when he dips into the devil’s broth in order, he says, to show us how filthy it really is, he gets splattered’.90 But the possibility of collusive participation is surely heightened in a poem like the Last Instructions, which achieves its most dazzling effects through voyeurism and projection, something obliquely hinted in the section of the poem that narrates the crown’s attempts to negotiate a treaty with the Dutch: Two letters next unto Breda are sent: In cipher one to Harry excellent.

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The first instructs our (verse the name abhors) Plenipotentiary ambassadors To prove by Scripture treaty does imply Cessation, as the look adultery, And that, by law of arms, in martial strife, Who yields his sword has title to his life. (lines 449–​56)

Such is the rout of the English at this phase of the war, the English ambassadors are instructed to convince Breda that a peace wished is as good as a peace made (‘treaty does imply /​Cessation, as the look adultery’), a negotiation in which they are advised to cite the authority of Saint Matthew: ‘Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart’ (5:27–​8). The irony is not unintelligible –​even the diplomacy of this court is conducted in the language of sin and desire –​but the passage cannot help but reverberate as well with the illicit looking and imagining with which it is surrounded. And which parts of The Last Instructions, then or now, have been the most often read, and in what spirit, its slanted chronicle of political and naval affairs, or its gallery of scurrilous and titillating portraits? What we are faced with here is a problem of value and of perspective: the satirist surveils the court, with a view to publishing its sordid crimes and transgressions: peeping in at the keyhole, however, paradoxically opens a window onto his own preoccupations, onto the curl of his own imagination. Indeed, even more so than a court satirist like Rochester –​who, as a groom of the bedchamber, could actually hear and perhaps see how the king spent his private hours –​Marvell does not observe so much as fabricate those acts and thoughts which he records.91 To be sure, Marvell is playing, and playing brilliantly, on the gossip and innuendo then swirling through Whitehall and Westminster; but the tremulous details are his own. Through the literary performance of sanction and censure, transgressive desire is spoken into being. One thinks of Foucault on Counter-​Reformation confessional protocols: ‘Discourse … had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul, following all its meanderings: beneath the surface of the sins, it would lay bare the unbroken nervure of the flesh.’92 It may be worth noting in this regard that The Last Instructions circulated in a much more restricted fashion than did the Second and Third Advice[s]‌to a Painter, which were also surreptitiously printed.93

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We might suppose this merely a matter of prudence, that Marvell thought The Last Instructions too hot to handle outside of his immediate circle; surely though the effectiveness of ‘opposition satire’ depends on its being read, and read beyond the precincts of opposition already established. We have already affirmed Rochester’s success in reaching an audience beyond the court. Did the author of The Last Instructions perhaps count himself among those compromised by the poem’s shocking disclosures? Promiscuous voices in Artemiza to Chloe Though they are very different poets, Marvell and Rochester were drawn repeatedly to staging problematics of value within their verse, a trope Rochester raises to emblematic brilliance in his longest formal satire, A Letter from Artemiza in the Towne to Chloe in the Countrey (c. 1673–​75). Unlike many of Rochester’s poems, which are cross-​ hatched as we have seen by the hands of various scribes and users, the textual tradition of Artemiza is relatively stable; rather, its instabilities are internal and aesthetic. Those who have taught the poem to undergraduates will know how difficult of navigation are the poem’s layering of direct and indirect discourse and its matryoshka-​like nesting of story and narrative to those encountering it for the first time.94 But uncertainty over the poem’s speakers and their speech acts is no less fundamental to the poem’s critical reception. The problem with Artemiza to Chloe, to borrow a phrase from Anne Righter, is that ‘so much of what happens … is a matter of tone’.95 Does Artemiza’s panegyric to ‘Love, the most gen’rous Passion of the mynde’, represent an ideal or does Rochester mock her sentimentality? How far does Artemiza condemn the Fine Lady and the whore Corinna? Is Artemiza an avatar for Rochester, or does he stand at some ironic remove from her performance? We might begin to approach these questions by recalling the useful advice of Donald Friedman: ‘we must always be careful in speaking of figures in … poetry as if they were endowed with the consistency of a dramatic character’.96 Rochester’s poetry has often been read through the lens of the theatre –​he has a superb ear for the rhythms and cadences of the vernacular, and apart from the vivid impression of living speech his poetry imparts, some of Rochester’s best set-​pieces could well be the stuff of Restoration comedy, the pitch-​perfect

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encounter between the gallant and the young damsel in Tunbridge Wells (lines 98–​125), for instance, or the farcical dinner party in Timon (lines 111–​77). But Artemiza to Chloe is more ventriloquy than theatre, more narrative shell game than morality play –​qualities that invite us to consider how the formal strategies of the poem, its puzzles of tone, its narrative dislocations and ironic inversions, subvert the illusion of discrete moral psychologies or economies. Even Artemiza’s preamble, which forestalls the poem’s tumultuous descent into narrative, comprises not a univocal discourse but rather weaves together contradictory rhetorics of female agency and self-​assertion. Thus instead of seeing Artemiza as a subject ruling over languge –​ as ideologue –​we might more productively view her and the poem she fictitiously authors as devices in and through which Rochester projects heterogeneous and contestative social languages. Though the poem is more concerned with sexual politics than with politics as such, it may nevertheless provide a way of thinking about Rochester’s more obviously court-​factional verse, that is, as conscious-​raising exercises more in line with Rochester’s philosophical lyrics, juggling ‘with various discourses, stretching them and discarding them, only ever occupying them provisionally’.97 In the poem’s first thirty-​ two lines, Artemiza self-​ reflexively examines the motives and social meanings of her authorship. Thus she begins, Chloe, in Verse by your commande I write; Shortly you’l bid mee ride astride, and fight. These Talents better with Our Sexe agree Then lofty flights of dang’rous Poetry. (lines  1–​4)

There is perhaps an irony in the very adroitness of Artemiza’s couplets, couplets which ask whether women are fit for writing verse: ‘lofty flights of dang’rous Poetry’ are the prerogative of male virtue, not female fancy, she contends, and even those of the bolder sex run the risk of losing all when they adventure for the bays (lines 5–​11). ‘How would a Womans tott’ring Barke be tost’, Artemiza wonders plaintively, ‘Where stoutest Ships (the Men of Witt) are lost?’ (lines 12–​ 13). What may already strike us as a droll miming of male censure and female diffidence, however, is literalised as such when Artemiza suddenly ‘grow[s]‌wise’ (line 14), shifting from the first to the third

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person to address herself in the grave voice of male authority (lines 16–​23). Thus is she advised, ‘Bedlam has many Mansions: have a care. /​Your Muse diverts you, makes the Reader sad; /​You fancy, you’r inspir’d, he thinkes you mad’ (lines 17–​19). This masculinist pathology of women’s writing is succeeded by a further eight lines in Artemiza’s first-​person voice which countenance the imperatives of patriarchy seemingly the better to savour their transgression: Thus like an Arrant Woman, as I am, Noe sooner well convinc’d, writing’s a shame, That Whore is scarce a more reproachfull name, Then Poetesse: As Men, that marry, or as Maydes, that woe, Because ’tis the worst thing, that they can doe, Pleas’d with the Contradiction, and the Sin, Mee-​thinkes, I stand on Thornes, till I begin. (lines  24–​31)

No wonder readers and critics have had trouble getting a fix on Artemiza: which if any of these voices is authentic and which is merely being ‘put on’? In proudly calling herself an ‘Arrant Woman’ in defiance of the norms she ventriloquizes, Artemiza seems finally to embrace a stable role or identity; but of course this is also where she sounds most like Rochester. As David Vieth has pointed out, ‘Pleas’d with the Contradiction, and the Sin’ could stand as a slogan for Rochester’s ‘perverse artistry’.98 In this way we are also reminded of the poet standing somewhere behind the poem, for whom Artemiza is herself a disguise. Equally, the poem’s audience seems doubled: Artemiza is writing a private verse epistle to her friend in the country, yet the reproving voice imagines her reader as male (‘You fancy, you’r inspir’d, he thinkes you mad’) and her reception as public, warning against making herself ‘the Fiddle of the Towne’ (line 21). Everything about this speech act and its uptake is a conundrum. The ambiguity of this framing reverberates and multiplies throughout the rest of the poem. How for instance are we to understand the libertine posture Artemiza strikes at the close of this passage in conjunction with her ensuing complaint, that Chloe can little expect her to write of love ‘without a teare /​Synce soe debauch’d by ill-​bred Customes here’ (lines 38–​9):

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Love, the most gen’rous Passion of the mynde, The softest refuge Innocence can fynde, The safe directour of unguided youth, Fraught with kind wishes, and secur’d with Trueth, That Cordiall dropp Heav’n in our Cup has throwne, To make the nauseous draught of Life goe downe, On which one onely blessing God might rayse In lands of Atheists Subsidyes of Prayse (For none did e’re soe dull, and stupid prove, But felt a God, and blest his pow’r in Love). (lines  40–​9)

The nostalgic metaphorics of ‘most gen’rous Passion’, ‘softest refuge’, ‘safe directour’, ‘Cordial dropp’, recalling an idealised pre-​civil-​war state of sexual and poetic decorum, seem remote from the abrasive liberty of ‘Pleas’d with the Contradiction, and the Sin’, and it is hard to reconcile the speaker who would shed a tear at naming ‘that lost thing (Love)’ (line 18) with one who was so pleased to violate conventional standards. Certainly the gossip that Chloe wishes to hear does not concern ‘gen’rous’ passions, but ‘what Loves have past /​In this lewd Towne, synce you, and I mett last’ (lines 32–​3), perhaps anticipating for anthologists of court-​libertine verse the kind of talk alluded to rather less politely in the opening lines of the Ramble, ‘Of who Fucks who, and who does worse’ (line 2). The tale Artemiza eventually does tell is that of her encounter with a Fine Lady, newly come to Town and eager, like Chloe herself, for news of its goings-​on; in turn, the Fine Lady will displace Artemiza as the poem’s narrator in relating the story of Corinna and her booby squire, a discourse judged by Artemiza to mingle ‘some graynes of Sense’ with ‘Volleys of Impertinence’ (lines 256–​7). But separating the wheat from the chaff again proves less than straightforward. For if at some points in the poem Artemiza appears a stand-​ in for Rochester, so too, for all her ridiculous affectations, does the Fine Lady, who seems perfectly conversant in the sexual ideology of Restoration libertism. Mirroring Artemiza mirroring Chloe, the first thing the Fine Lady would like to know is ‘How is Love govern’d, Love that rules the State! /​And pray who are the men most worn of late?’ (lines 101–​2), a query that points, as Artemiza had done, to the lewdness of the town, but which also broaches the essential insight of Rochester’s satire on Charles II, that the prerogatives of sex and

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sovereignty are one and the same. Without waiting for a response, the Fine Lady thus launches into a disquisition about the current fashion for men of wit in the sexual marketplace, a trend she skewers as disadvantageous to female liberty, in what can almost be read as a winking critique of libertine sex comedy and its (Rochesterian) rake heroes: When I was marry’d, Fools were a la mode, The Men of Witt were then held incommode, Slow of belief, and fickle in desire, Who e’re they’l be persuaded, must inquire, As if they came to spye, not to admire. With searching Wisedome fatall to their ease They still fynde out, why, what may, should not please; Nay take themselves for injur’d, when Wee dare, Make ’em thinke better of Us, then Wee are: And if Wee hide our frailtyes from their sights, Call Us deceitefull Gilts, and Hypocrites. They little guesse, who att Our Arts are greiv’d, The perfect Joy of being well deceaved … (lines 103–​15)

Love, on this account, is a thinly veiled struggle for mastery, and deceit and hypocrisy its coin. As Rochester writes in his Hobbesian Satyr against Reason and Mankind, ‘Honesty’s against all common sense; /​Men must be Knaves, tis in their own defence’ (lines 159–​60). The same moral arguably informs the Fine Lady’s narrative of ‘That wretched thing Corinna’ (line 189). Seduced and ruined by a man of wit, this former Town belle is reduced to sex work, scraping by on her tawdry wages until she can afford a new gown, and so ensnares the booby squire. Thus ‘Nature’, the Fine Lady concludes, … who never made a thing in vain, But does each insect to some end ordain, Wisely contrived kind keeping feels, no doubt, To patch up vices men of wit wear out. (lines  252–​5)

Here Artemiza intervenes, distancing herself from the Fine Lady’s ‘Volleys of Impertinence’; though of course, it is Artemiza who has introduced the Fine Lady into her poem, and allowed her to occupy its narrative at such length (the Corinna episode runs to a little less

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than a third of the poem). Moreover, she signs off her letter to Chloe with the promise:

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By the next Post such storyes I will tell, As joyn’d with these shall to a Volume swell, As true, as Heaven, more infamous, then Hell; But you are tyr’d, and soe am I. Farewell. (lines  261–​4)

Is Artemiza then a ‘spokesman for romantic love’ or an irrepressible ‘gossip-​monger’?99 Does she make an unambiguous ‘attack on the Fine Lady’ or encourage her ‘hellish values to take root’?100 Is she a satiric butt or a satirist ‘witty and self-​aware, both amused and exasperated’?101 The critics cannot make up their mind about the poem; might we not allow Artemiza to remain unsettled and unsettling? In confirming Rochester as a ‘Whig’ satirist, we have come to see his poetry as demystifying Stuart ideology, as a counter-​history to the heroic stanzas of a Dryden or a Waller. But surely this is a tendentious way to view Rochester’s almost boundless scepticism: his poetry scarcely allows us to trust for long in a given way of seeing, and frequently implicates its various personae in its piercing ironies and sallies of ridicule. The taut problematics of that poetry may be viewed within an ideological matrix, but they do not readily permit of easy ‘Whig’ solutions. So far in this chapter I have argued that the writing, circulating, and reading of clandestine satire in Restoration England cannot be reduced merely to a set of ideological inputs and outputs or to the terms of a party politics that awaited sharp definition. I have further explored the ‘indeterminability’ of Rochesterian satire through the lens of scribal culture as well as Rochester’s own scepticism and negativity. As conclusion to this chapter, I thus want to consider a final Rochesterian paradox: his providential conversion to God, begun in his conversations with the Whig cleric Gilbert Burnet in the autumn of 1679 and realised on his deathbed in the summer of 1680. Suffering at that time from a recurrence of the pox, likely compounded by the effects of alcohol abuse and repeated mercury treatments, in May 1680 Rochester embarked on a final retreat to Woodstock House. There he commanded his scurrilous writings be burnt, along with his gallery of pornographic paintings. He insisted that his wife, whose Roman Catholicism he had previously

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encouraged, join him in Anglican communion. He had Scripture read to him until he had got his favourite passages by heart, calling out to Heaven, ‘God’s holy Will be done, I bless him for all He does to me’.102 On 19 June he signed a widely circulated Remonstrance of his past wickedness, calling in as witnesses not just his intimates and confessors, ‘but all his servants, even the piggard-​boy’.103 He charged Burnet ‘to publish anything concerning him, that might be a means to reclaim others’.104 On Saturday 24 July, Burnet left his side, assured by the patient’s physicians ‘he might live yet some Weeks’.105 Some hours later Rochester asked for the divine, ‘and when it was told him, I was gone, he seem’d to be troubled, and said, Has my Friend left me, then I shall die shortly. After that he spake but once or twice till he died: He lay much silent: Once they heard him praying very devoutly. And on Monday about Two of the Clock in the Morning, he died, without any any Convulsion, or so much as a groan’.106 To be sure, these scenes were superintended and published by interested parties: the shrewd and formidable Dowager Countess, Rochester’s mother, her chaplain Robert Parsons, and the calculating Burnet. Well aware of the scepticism with which news of the wicked earl’s conversion would likely be met, Rochester’s confessors are at pains to stress his soundness of mind, his authenticity of motive, and the public witness to his transformation: ‘if any shall continue to say, his Piety, was the effect of madness or vapours’, Parsons writes, let me tell them ’tis highly disingenious, and that the assertion as silly as it is wicked. And moreover that the force of what I have delivered may not be evaded by wicked men, who are resolv’d to harden their hearts maugre all all Convictions, by saying, This thing was done in a corner, I appeal, for the truth thereof, to all sorts of persons who in considerable numbers visited and attended him, and more particularly to those eminent Physicians who were near him, and conversant with him in the whole course of his tedious sickness; and who, if any, are competent judges of a Phrensy or delirium.107

The optics of Rochester’s apotheosis were thus carefully arranged, and we have little reason to doubt these penitent scenes in practical terms. Rather, the incertitude of the conversion lies in the very passions with which those scenes were acted. J. W. Johnson’s recent Life of Rochester discovers this crux only to walk away from it. ‘As his strength ebbed’, the biographer posits, ‘Rochester’s

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desperation to prove himself worthy of salvation led him to expend it in increasingly dramatic outbursts. No doubt his agony was sincere, but his long cultivated genius for role-​playing aided his determination to prove his sincerity by acting the Greatest of Penitential Sinners to the fullest’.108 Johnson’s desire to credit the internal validity of the performance leads him to beg the question of what he calls, following one of Rochester’s elegists, his ‘Sapience Angelical’; but there is nonetheless an uneasy awareness of the relish Rochester apparently took in playing this final role. We cannot help but think of Rochester’s delight in disguising himself, as reported by Burnet, ‘as a Porter, or as a Beggar; sometimes to follow some mean Amours, which, for the variety of them, he affected; At other times, meerly for diversion, he would go about in odd shapes, in which he acted his part so naturally, that even those who were on the secret, and saw him in these shapes, could perceive nothing by which he might be discovered’.109 And indeed, almost as if writing to future literary critics, in a letter dated but two weeks before his death Rochester implored the Dean of Salisbury, ‘Pray for me dear Doctor; and all you that forget not God, pray for me fervently. Take heaven by force, and let me enter with you as it were in disguise, for I dare not appear before the dread majesty of that Holy One I have so often offended’ (Letters, 246). Here the poet imagines his salvation as a holy rape, but one committed not by God upon his own recalcitrant will, but against God by Rochester and his deputy (‘Take heaven by force, and let me enter with you’); having gained entrance to God’s eternal kingdom, the profane wit’s fear and trembling before the Almighty is assuaged by a penitent mask.110 Thus did Rochester enter the eighteenth century, in editions fair and foul, sponsored by partisans of all sides; a figure at once of radical Enlightenment and of the ancien regime, winging his way on time’s ambiguous arrow. Notes 1 A. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss, 6 pts. in 4 vols (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, etc.; Oxford: J. Parker, 1813–​20), 3:1230. On the Rochester text and canon, see D. M. Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester’s ‘Poems’ of 1680 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), esp. pp. 3–​28; also H. Love (ed.), The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. xv–​xlvii, and Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-​Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 313–​56, hereafter abbreviated SPISCE.

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2 T. Harris, ‘Sexual and religious libertinism in Restoration England’, in M. C. Augustine and S. N. Zwicker (eds), Lord Rochester in the Restoration World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 163. 3 J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–​ 1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 4. 4 D. M. Vieth (ed.), The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. xliii. 5 Vieth, Poems, p. xlv. 6 R. Paulson, review of Attribution in Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester’s ‘Poems’ of 1680, by D. M. Vieth, JEGP, 63:2 (1964), p. 358. In this connection, see Vieth’s analysis of An Epistolary Essay from M. G. to O. B. upon their Mutual Poems as ‘a document illustrating the growth of a distinctive Augustan poetical technique’, pp. 103–​36. 7 ‘Antiseptically clean’ is how Carole Fabricant described the poems as edited by Vieth in a contemporary review, JEGP, 68:4 (1969), p. 702. Love’s edition is cited above; Walker’s The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) has since been revised by N. Fisher as John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: The Poems and Lucina’s Rape (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013). 8 Claude Rawson –​a reviewer not prone to over-​praise –​gushed in the TLS, ‘There has never before been an edition so fully and learnedly annotated and so wisely and thoughtfully conceived’. C. Rawson, ‘The soft wanton god’, review of The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. H. Love, TLS (17 September 1999), p. 4. 9 So described in Oxford University Press’s publicity blurb for the volume. 10 These are, of course, N. Smith (ed.), The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Harlow: Longman, 2003), and A. Patterson et al. (eds), The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). For discussion of Marvell’s reassessment as political thinker and prose writer, see Chapter 3. 11 ‘The culture and commerce of texts’ is the title under which the American paperback reprint of SPISCE was issued (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 12 The Rochester biographies are by J. W. Johnson, A Profane Wit: The Life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2004); R. E. Pritchard, Passion for Living: John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2012); and A. Larman, Blazing Star: The Life and Times of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (London: Head of Zeus, 2014). These accounts have not had an especially good press: see Love’s judgement on Johnson, ‘the useful things are vitiated by reckless speculation’, Seventeenth-​Century News, 63.3/​4 (2005), p. 140. In the Telegraph, Lewis Jones tartly remarked of Larman’s more commercial

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life of Rochester, ‘However terrible his sins, he deserves better than this’ (23 July 2014, Web). Thormählen’s monograph is Rochester: The Poems in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 13 See for instance the excellent discussions of Rochester in author-​ focused thematic studies like Christopher Tilmouth’s Passion’s Triumph over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) or Jonathan Kramnick’s Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), which are basically indifferent to textual problems. 14 See Scott, Restoration Crisis, p. 4, on the ‘two chief problems of Restoration historiography: of a period artificially wedded to its future, and artificially severed from its past’. 15 See J. A. Dane, The Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 14. 16 See Scott, Restoration Crisis, Ch. 3; see also his ‘Restoration process. Or, if this isn’t a party, we’re not having a good time’, Albion, 25:4 (1993), esp. pp. 627–​37. 17 S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (1955), qtd. in E. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 1:5. 18 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 1:5. 19 A. T. Grafton, ‘The importance of being printed’, review of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, by E. Eisenstein, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 11:2 (1980), p. 267. 20 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 1:39. 21 Grafton, ‘The importance of being printed’, p. 267. 22 Eisenstein, Printing Press, 1:xii. 23 A. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 10. 24 Dane, Myth of Print Culture, pp. 14–​15. 25 See Johns, Nature of the Book, and D. McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); J. C. Crick and A. Walsham, The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–​1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 26 See Love, SPISCE, and English Clandestine Satire, 1660–​1702 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); also M. J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2003). 27 J. F. S. Post, ‘Browne’s revisions of Religio Medici’, SEL, 25 (1985), p. 145. 28 As Marvell’s associate John Farrington testified in a bill of complaint against Mary over a disputed bond of £500. Qtd. in F. S. Tupper, ‘Mary Palmer, alias Mrs. Andrew Marvell’, PMLA, 53:2 (1938), p. 380.

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29 On the abridgement of 1681 and the way it formed and deformed contemporary imaginings of Marvell as poet, see N. von Maltzahn, ‘Marvell’s ghost’, in W. Chernaik and M. Dzelzainis (eds), Marvell and Liberty (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 50–​74. 30 Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry, p. 19. 31 See Love, Works, p. xxxv: ‘Although bearing the imprint “Printed at ANTWERP, 1680” it was probably printed in London with the connivance of the Stationers’ Company, whose members managed through under-​the-​counter sales to dispose in that and some following years of at least thirteen further “1680” editions.’ 32 See Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry, pp. 3–​8 and passim. On the genealogy of this miscellany, see Love, ‘Scribal texts and literary communities: the Rochester circle and Osborn b. 105’, Studies in Bibliography, 42 (1989), pp. 219–​35. 33 Love, SPISCE, p. 281. 34 For the early print editions of Rochester, see Vieth’s calendar in Attribution in Restoration Poetry, pp. 9–​ 15, and further discussion thereof, pp. 56–​102. On attribution and censorship in the early editions, see P. Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 241–​54, and The Making of Restoration Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 28–​ 48, 190–​212. On the politics of refining Rochester, see R. Robertson and G. Libhart, ‘Castrating Rochester: the politics of the poems in the 1680s’, HLQ, 75:4 (2012), pp. 503–​25. 35 The Poetical Works of that Witty LORD John Earl of Rochester (London, 1761); its fraudulence is noted by Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry, p. 15. 36 R. Parsons, A sermon preached at the funeral of the Rt Honorable John Earl of Rochester (Oxford, 1680), p. 9. 37 Dr Johnson’s judgment in The Lives of the Poets gives a fair survey of Rochester’s reputation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: ‘Thus in a course of drunken gaiety, and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, a total disregard of every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious obligation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness; till, at the age of one and thirty, he had exhausted his fund of life, and reduced himself in a state of weakness and decay.’ In R. Lonsdale (ed.), The Lives of the Eminent English Poets, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 2:12. 38 Love, SPISCE, p. 247. 39 Love, SPISCE, p. 248. 40 Love, ‘Rochester: a tale of two manuscripts’, Yale University Library Gazette, 72:1/​2 (1997), p. 46.

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41 D. F. McKenzie, ‘Speech –​manuscript –​print’, in Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. P. D. McDonald and M. F. Suarez, SJ (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), pp. 245–​6. See the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–​1700 (CELM), www.celm-​ms.org.uk/​. 42 [R. L’Estrange], ‘The minutes of a Project for the preventing of Libells’ (PRO SP29/​51/​10.1). 43 Qtd. in Love, SPISCE, p. 12. 44 See W. J. Cameron, ‘A late seventeenth-​century scriptorium’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 7 (1963), pp. 25–​52. 45 See Hammond, ‘Anonymity in Restoration poetry’, in The Making of Restoration Poetry, pp. 49–​72. 46 See Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry, pp. 119–​36; the mysteries of this poem have more recently been taken up by S. N. Zwicker, ‘Lord Rochester: a life in gossip’, in Augustine and Zwicker, Lord Rochester, pp. 79–​98 (at 80–​3). 47 Thus Love asks, ‘How can Rochester not have understood that the piece was subversive of courts –​and of authoritarian power –​in a way that his own court satire, because it restricted itself to personalities, was not and could never be? If there was a choice, he must surely have got greater satisfaction from his client Oldham’s poetical attack on the play’s author, because it so effectively blunts the ideological thrust of the original by deflecting its political claims back into the realm of the personal’. See Love, ‘But did Rochester really write Sodom?’, PBSA, 87:3 (1993), pp. 319–​36, at 34; an answer to J. W. Johnson, ‘Did Lord Rochester write Sodom?’, PBSA, 81:2 (1987), pp. 119–​53. 48 Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry, p. 168. 49 Love prints this among Rochester’s ‘Disputed Works’, though it has usually been regarded as authentic. 50 See K. Combe, A Martyr for Sin: Rochester’s Critique of Politics, Sexuality, and Society (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), pp. 19–​20. 51 A. Wood, qtd. in G. S. de Krey, ‘College [Colledge], Stephen (c. 1635–​ 1681), poet and political activist’, ODNB (online edn, 2008), accessed 10 May 2017. 52 C. S. R. Russell, The Origins of the English Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 23. 53 T. D’Urfey, The progress of honesty, or, A view of a court and city a pindarique poem (London, 1681), p. 4. 54 J. D. Canfield identifies Etherege as ‘a member of the Rochester-​ Buckingham circle of Whig wits’ in his widely used edition of The Man of Mode (1676), in The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-​Century Drama (Plymouth: Broadview Press, 2001), p. 527.

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They are likewise ‘Whig wits’ in Love’s English Clandestine Satire, p. 83, or ‘Whig placemen’ (‘Scribal texts and communities’, p. 225), as discussed below. 55 Love, ‘Scribal texts and communities’, pp. 224–​5. 56 Robertson and Libhart argue ‘that the anonymous editor of the 1680 edition designed the work as polemically Whig –​as an intervention in the debates surrounding the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis –​ and that Thorncome’s 1685 edition, while not contravening its overall stance, represents an effort to temper the strident partisanship of the 1680 volume’. See ‘Castrating Rochester’, pp. 504–​5. 57 The Poetical Works of the Honourable Sir Charles Sedley Baronet, And His SPEECHES in PARLIAMENT … With a New MISCELANY of Poems by several of the most Eminent Hands. And a Compleat Collection of all the Remarkable Speeches in both Houses of Parliament (London, 1707), p. 154. See Scott, Restoration Crisis, pp. 11–​12: ‘Some time ago Geoffrey Holmes, noting the fluid and incomplete process of party formation during the reign of William III, concluded that by 1702 “the line separating Tory from Whig had once more become firm and sharp”. The suggestion of this book is that it had become firm and sharp for the first time.’ 58 ‘[T]‌ here is a sense’, Love writes, ‘in which Clarendon and later Arlington were laughed out of office’ by those close to the king; English Clandestine Satire, p. 32. 59 The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, Lord High Chancellor of England, and Chancellor of the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1759), 2:340. 60 See J. H. Wilson, The Court Wits of the Restoration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948). 61 Love, English Clandestine Satire, p. 29. 62 The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. P. Legouis with the assistance of E. E. Duncan-​Jones, 3rd edn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 2:355. 63 Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 4:693. 64 See D. Wheatley, ‘Old Rowley’: A Private Life of Charles II (London: Hutchinson, 1933), pp. 85–​6. 65 M. Jenkinson, Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–​1685 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), p. 144. 66 M. Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Earl of Castlemaine’, in Chernaik and Dzelzainis, Marvell and Liberty, p. 291. 67 H. Love, ‘Rochester’s “I’ th’isle of Britain”: decoding a textual tradition’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–​1700, 6 (1997), p. 175. 68 Thormählen, Rochester, p. 296. She writes about the lampoon without the benefit of Love’s edition, though with as much awareness of the poem’s textual problems as could be gleaned from Vieth and Walker.

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69 See R. Paulson, ‘Rochester: the body politic and the body private’, in L. Martz and A. Williams (eds), The Author in His Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 106–​7. 70 Thormählen, Rochester, p. 301. 71 J. Kramnick, ‘Rochester and the history of sexuality’, ELH, 69 (2002), p. 279. 72 See F. Ellis, ‘John Freke and The History of Insipids’, Philological Quarterly, 44 (1965), pp. 472–​83. 73 W. Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 59. 74 Chernaik, Sexual Freedom, p. 59. 75 See Love, Works, pp. 596–​600, and ‘Decoding a textual tradition’, pp. 175–​223. 76 Love, Works, p. 420. 77 Love, ‘Decoding a textual tradition’, p. 205. 78 Love, ‘Decoding a textual tradition’, p. 205. 79 Letters, p. 106n. 80 Johnson, A Profane Wit, p. 301. 81 BL Add. MS 19,253 fols 121v–​122r. 82 C. D’Addario, ‘Introduction’, in D’Addario and M. C. Augustine (eds), Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 83 Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. O. Lawson Dick ( Jaffrey: Nonpareil, 1996), p. 196. 84 Of the Rochester-​ Buckingham circle, Love writes: ‘Rochester was the star writer, the political leader of the group was Buckingham, and their ideologue, Buckingham’s long-​term adviser, Andrew Marvell’, in ‘Scribal texts and communities’, p. 225. 85 See G. deF. Lord (ed.), Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–​1714, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). Hereafter POASY. 86 See J. H. Wilson, Court Satires of the Restoration (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976), p. xii: ‘The fashion seems to have grown slowly; there are comparatively few Court satires to be found from the date of King Charles II’s restoration (May 19, 1660) to about 1679. After that they multiplied fantastically during the last years of the reign and fell off during the brief reign of James II … In the dour and proper reign of William and Mary, many of the Court libelers turned to political satire.’ 87 See T. Raylor, ‘Waller, Tasso, and Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter’, in D’Addario and Augustine, Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell.

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88 See S. N. Zwicker, ‘Virgins and whores: the politics of sexual misconduct in the 1660s’, in C. Condren and A. D. Cousins (eds), The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), pp. 85–​110; B. Riebling, ‘England deflowered and unmanned: the sexual image of politics in Marvell’s Last Instructions’, SEL, 35:1 (1995), pp. 137–​57; Love, English Clandestine Satire, pp. 107–​16. 89 Zwicker, ‘Virgins and whores’, p. 97. 90 A. Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 24. 91 Though Rochester told Burnet that the lies in his libels ‘came often in as Ornaments that could not be spared without spoiling the beauty of the Poem’ (p. 26), a suggestive comment on the way the aesthetic of satire complicates or exceeds the aims of polemic. 92 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 20. 93 See Smith, Poems, p. 324. 94 The poem’s difficult narrative structure is diagrammed (how helpfully it is hard to say) by Vieth in ‘Toward an anti-​Aristotelian poetic: Rochester’s Satyr Against Mankind and Artemisia to Chloe, with notes on Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels’, Language and Style, 5 (1972), pp. 123–​45. 95 A. Righter, ‘John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’, PBA, 53 (1967), p. 62. 96 D. Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), p. 105. 97 S. Dentith, ‘Negativity and affirmation in Rochester’s poetry’, in E. Burns (ed.), Reading Rochester (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), p. 94. 98 D. Vieth, ‘Pleased with the contradiction and the sin: the perverse artistry of Rochester’s lyrics’, Tennessee Studies in Literature, 25 (1980), pp. 25–​56. 99 The progress charted by Vieth in Rochester and Court Poetry (Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1988), p. 18. 100 D. Sheehan, ‘The ironist in Rochester’s A Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country’, Tennessee Studies in Literature, 25 (1980), p. 306; H. Weinbrot, ‘The swelling volume: the apocalyptic satire of Rochester’s Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Countrey’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 5:2 (1972), p. 34. 101 Righter, ‘John Wilmot’, p. 55. 102 G. Burnet, Some passages of the life and death of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester (London, 1680), p. 145. 103 Aubrey, Brief Lives, p. 321. 104 Burnet, Some passages, pp. 146–​7.

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105 Burnet, Some passages, pp. 156–​7. 106 Burnet, Some passages, 157–​8. 107 Parsons, A sermon preached. 108 Johnson, A Profane Wit, p. 337. 109 Burnet, Some passages, pp. 27–​8. 110 Cf. Donne’s famous fourteenth Holy Sonnet: ‘Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe, /​Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I, /​ Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free, /​Nor ever chast, Except you ravish mee’ (lines 11–​14). John Donne: The Divine Poems, ed. H. Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

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5 ‘Transprosing and Transversing’: religion, revolution, and the end of history in Dryden’s late works Our final chapter begins with a pair of bonfires. The first, noted glancingly in the last chapter, is the reputed torching of Lord Rochester’s private papers in the course of his final Christian progress: ‘His strict charge’, as recorded by Robert Parsons, ‘to burn all his profane and lewd Writings, as being only fit to promote Vice and Immorality, by which he had so highly offended God, and shamed and blasphemed that Holy Religion into which he had been Baptiz’d; and all his obscene and filthy Pictures, which were so notoriously scandalous’.1 The second act of destruction I wish to recall is the welter of anti-​Catholic burnings in the wake of James II’s flight from the capital on 11 December 1688, a rout no doubt apprehended with horror by James’s poet laureate, the recent Roman convert John Dryden: ‘For the cry of No Popery’, in Macaulay’s words, was the signal for outrage and rapine. First the rabble fell on the Roman Catholic places of worship. The buildings were demolished. Benches, pulpits, confessionals, breviaries were heaped up and set on fire […] The pictures, images and crucifixes were carried along the streets in triumph, amidst lighted tapers torn from the altars. The procession bristled thick with swords and staves, and on the point of every sword and of every staff was an orange. The King’s printing house, whence had issued, during the preceding three years, innumerable tracts in defence of Papal supremacy, image worship, and monastic vows, was –​to use a coarse metaphor which then, for the first time, came into fashion –​completely gutted. The vast stock of paper, much of which was still unpolluted by types, furnished an immense bonfire.2

These scenes are valuable in reminding us that the two writers most deeply identified with Restoration literature and culture were

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both marked by experiences of religious conversion. Rochester’s, as we have seen, came only at the end of his life, and it remains an open question as to how we should regard his ‘sapience angelical’.3 His life was perhaps the most notorious of an age notable for outrage and excess, ‘His Sins … like his Parts (for from them corrupted they sprang) all of them high & extraordinary’.4 But the rake’s progress was hardly incompatible with the Augustinian prototype of the Christian convert,5 and as Frank Ellis acutely remarks, upon expiring, Lord Rochester ‘was left to sin and repent, to sin and repent, for 200 years in the chapbooks of evangelical Christians, with titles like A mirror for atheists and The libertine overthrown’.6 Dryden’s change of faith however presented a circumstance he would have to live with for the last fifteen years of his life, and it will be the argument of this chapter that we have erred in seeing the conversion as no more than a political expedient: it greatly deepened the impact of the Revolution on Dryden’s art, permanently reorienting his metaphysical compass, and in ways that seriously complicate the supposed triumph of Augustan values in politics and poetry. More broadly, my opening asks us to reconsider the place of religion and of spiritual politics in the Restoration, an era that has long been seen as the dawning of an Enlightenment culture of secularism and moderation. As Philip Connell has observed, ‘We continue to think of this period in terms of the cultural supersession, or sublimation, of religious and political conflict –​and thus in terms originally suggested by interested contemporaries like Davenant, whose ambition to “cool the impatient and raging world” by means of poetry, rather than the pulpit, has often been understood to foreshadow the dominant imperatives of Augustan literary culture’.7 While criticism has largely moved beyond the clichés of ‘balance, harmony, and perfection’, the marginalisation of religious tumult persists in accounts of Restoration and eighteenth-​century literature. In an important essay on the ‘Libertine sublime’, for instance, James G. Turner identifies ‘a displacement of religious sensibilities in the hastily assembled secular-​ hedonist culture of Restoration England’,8 while Gerald MacLean likewise notes that ‘By 1660, a secular and sometimes irreverent literary culture had come to adjudicate and regulate many aspects of social life formerly the domain of the church’.9 And since at least Ian Watt, ‘the rise of the novel in the early eighteenth century’

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has been taken as ‘particularly striking evidence of the emergence of a secular art’.10 As we have seen in previous chapters, however, the Restoration was far from being a serene cultural and political achievement. Notwithstanding the holiday atmosphere that for some attended the return of the king, contemporaries were fully alert to the provisionality of the new order: Jonathan Scott reminds us that in May 1661, Pepys was still pondering ‘the greatness of this late turne and what people will do tomorrow against what they all, through profit or fear, did promise and practise this day’, while the following year the king can be heard remonstrating Parliament, ‘He needed not to tell them that there was a Republican Party still in the kingdom, which had the Courage still to promise themselves another Revolution’.11 With particular respect to religion, ‘No sooner had the Cavalier Parliament completed a church settlement with the Conventicle Act of 1664 and the Five Mile Act of 1665’, writes Gary de Krey, ‘than that settlement –​like so much else about the restoration –​seemed to come unstuck’.12 Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. These words belong of course to Yeats, but they well convey the developments in Dryden’s late aesthetic that form the centre of interest in this chapter: the destabilising effects that arise through the laureate’s dislocation from the centre of English political and cultural life following his conversion to Rome and the failure of Stuart rule. But in the poetry of The Hind and the Panther (1687), the fables of Don Sebastian (1689), and in the raft of translations Dryden made after the Glorious Revolution, we find more than a shadowy figuration of loss and dispossession. We find rather a systematic decentring of language and authority, even as Dryden performs the faith of a Catholic and a Jacobite. Indeed, exploring how a poetics of transversion may be seen to structure Dryden’s late works, this chapter proposes to read ‘the end of history’ in Dryden’s culminating literary projects, by which I mean an emptying out of metaphysics –​of providential designs and typological orderings –​from Dryden’s representations of English history. If Dryden thus seems to augur the secularity of Enlightenment, he does so only paradoxically, writing as a Catholic martyr to the Protestant revolution; and it is anything but clear from these works that an improvident modernity promises another Golden Age.

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The Hind and the Panther: parody, fable, and the poetics of transversion On 19 January 1686, the English virtuoso John Evelyn wrote in his diary that ‘Dryden the famous play-​poet & his two sons, & Mrs Nelle … were said to go to Masse; & such purchases were no great losse to the Church’.13 This is the first contemporary notice we have of Dryden’s conversion, and its details are telling: Evelyn makes Dryden out to be a spiritual prostitute –​a Romish ‘purchase’ –​ an identity reinforced by the rumour that the late king’s ‘whore’ Nell Gwyn had accompanied Dryden to mass. Dryden’s faith was, throughout his career, a matter of some controversy: behind his religious personae and spiritual posturing, many discerned an atheistical wit, a hollow ‘play-​poet’. That Dryden’s conversion to Rome followed shortly on the accession of the Catholic James II only seemed to confirm what enemies and rivals had long accused him of: timeserving, opportunism, Machiavellian shape-​shifting.14 Such apparent expedience and hypocrisy help account for the detraction and malice that attached themselves to The Hind and the Panther (1687), Dryden’s paean to his new religion and to the policies of toleration pursued by his royal master.15 As an abstract of the poem’s reception, we might cite this squib, which has lately been discovered scrawled on the verso of the title page to a copy of Dryden’s loyalist satire Absalom and Achitophel (1681): ‘Traytor to God and Rebell to thy Penn, /​Priest ridden Poet, perjur’d sonn of Ben, /​If ever thou turnest honest, the whole Nation, /​Will readely believe Transubstantiation’.16 Indeed, few works by a major English poet can compete with Dryden’s poem as an enduring object for punishment.17 Yet the critical embarrassment and hostility surrounding the conversion and its apologia belie the fact that Dryden’s spiritual transformation constituted a risky wager of the political and literary capital the Stuart laureate had worked so assiduously to accrue. Moreover, Dryden’s experience of conversion, of detaching from a previous identity while being in a sense disabled from fully inhabiting a new one, seems to have provided the circumstance and the stimulus, as well as the imaginative and discursive bearings, for the brilliant work of fable, translation, and rewriting that crowned Dryden’s last decade. These are all, of course, modes of ‘transversion’, that motley crew of early modern textual practices instanced perhaps most famously

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in Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672), and as well in Charles Montagu and Matthew Prior’s burlesque of Dryden’s beast fable, The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d To the Story of The Country-​ Mouse and the City-​Mouse (1687). A ‘turning across or athwart’, ‘a turning into something else’, transversive writing is always secondary, derived, never original; constituting itself out of slippage and difference, transversion is inherently equivocal and impure.18 As such, it bears a strong resemblance to the word-​chopping and casuistry associated in the poem with Protestant spirituality, habits stingingly epitomised in the figure of Satan parsing Scripture; and yet, as I shall argue, transversion is the animating force behind Dryden’s own text and effects. ‘So the Protestant Poets say’, writes the inveterate Dryden scold Tom Brown, that Mr. Bayes could never have been an author, without stealing from Milton, and many others that have been helps for his Wit to furnish out the Stage: And how many good thoughts has he made his own … by Transprosing and Transversing: As now he hopes these arguments for Popery may pass for his, because he hath put them in an unusual dress, and hath tagg’d ‘em with Rhimes. And to speak truth, there is very little of his own in any book that he hath published, but the Arrogant and unparallel’d Censoriousness, which he exercises over all other Writers.19

To insist on the scattering or dispersal of meaning in the poem may well remind us of, and be illuminated by, the strategies and insights of deconstruction. But we need to understand that such dispersal emerges in a very exact way from Dryden’s own moment and mode of controversy and polemic, and it is to the historical contours of the poem’s emergence that my reading finally points.20 The Hind and the Panther –​in which Dryden’s titular beasts dispute the Real Presence, Scriptural hermeneutics, and the authority of ecclesial tradition, and end by taunting each other with fables of their own devising –​was written in the winter and early spring of 1687 with the apparent purpose of appealing to Parliament to suspend the penal laws against Catholics and non-​conformists. Before the laureate could finish his poem, however, James (like his brother in 1672) invoked his prerogative powers in issuing a Declaration of Indulgence, thereby granting freedom of conscience to all his subjects, dissenting as well as Catholic.21 This proved fatal for James politically, for while it

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temporarily achieved the monarch’s aim of mobilising support from the sects, it created a ferocious backlash among the Anglican interest, traditionally the crown’s obedient ally. As Tim Harris writes, ‘In his efforts to help his co-​religionists, James asserted his prerogative above the law and acted in ways which his subjects at the time believed to be illegal. Those Whigs who had predicted during the Exclusion Crisis that a Catholic ruler would mean popery and arbitrary government might have had good cause to feel that they had been proven right, after three years of a Catholic king on the throne’. In truth, however, ‘the simple fact of the matter is that –​besides the Catholics –​it was the Whigs and dissenters who gained most from James’s reforms. It was the traditional supporters of the later-​Stuart monarchy, in all three of the kingdoms, whom James upset the most, namely the Tory Anglicans in England and the Protestants of the Established Church in both Scotland and Ireland’.22 For his part, Dryden insisted that writing the poem ‘was neither impos’d on me, nor so much as the Subject given me by any man’ (Works, 3:121), and the text certainly underscores moments of personal confession and apology. Yet its real project remains disputing questions of ecclesial and political prerogative –​questions sharply raised by James’s policies. The poem’s satirical programme however embraces ‘the refractory and disobedient on either side’ (Works, 3:121), in other words, not only the resistant Anglican establishment, but also the Protestant sects and their champions as well as certain Catholic clergy –​the very allies the king was courting in his power struggle with Parliament. Even James himself comes in for some less than flattering treatment in the poem, appearing in the Hind’s allegorical fable as a ‘Plain good Man’ (3.906), the barnyard sovereign of pigeons and poultry, a characterisation certainly remarked by Dryden’s contemporaries. Critics interested in the psychology of the poet have thus seized on the surprising, even contradictory politics of representation in The Hind and the Panther as evidence of Dryden’s sense of isolation and unease in the wake of James’s Declaration, the king’s increasingly high-​handed dealings with Parliament, and his failure by spring 1687 to commend or reward Dryden with the preferments he had sought.23 But more than a barometer of the poet’s mindset or of the political atmosphere in which he wrote, ‘paradox and contradiction’, as Steven Zwicker has observed, ‘were central to Dryden’s expressive

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and argumentative modes in The Hind and the Panther’.24 Thus have critics like Zwicker and Anne Cotterill argued that the poem’s puzzles and indeterminacies serve at once to turn aside critical malevolence while asserting the poem’s authority as ‘mysterious writ’: by aligning his own poem (and within it the Catholic Hind’s fable) with a tradition of prophetic mystery distinct from the Panther’s self-​interested allegory, Dryden co-​opts a kind of Pauline sublime.25 In emphasising the strategic uses of mystery and enigma, recent interpretations have much advanced upon an older critical paradigm concerned with discovering how ‘the poem [can] be seen as whole’, with deciphering its ‘crowning ethos’.26 But we have yet to appreciate fully how Dryden’s Catholic text both reifies mystery and sublimity and at the same time draws enormous creative and contestative energy from Protestant methods of invention and exegesis –​the very devotional models the poem mocks. And further, to consider the poem an example of ‘mysterious writ’, its author now wholly Pauline allegorist, denies the promiscuous character of the poem, the ways in which it mobilises and invites the predatory energy of exchange, simultaneously claiming transcendent authority and engaging in polemical transversion. In harnessing and exciting the energies of literary exchange, The Hind and the Panther gives rise to a series of texts whose purpose is to seek and destroy ‘the famous play-​poet’, the ‘Renegado wit’; however, these attacks seemingly end up boxing with shadows. Both the needling preface and the text proper, with their traces of confession and autobiography, insistently promise to discover a spirit as real and palpable as ‘flesh and bone’. Yet the poem’s ‘tissue of artifice’, in James Winn’s phrase27 –​its allegories and fables, its dense networks of reference, its strategies of appropriation and transversion –​hints that beyond or behind what one believes can be circumscribed by Dryden’s text, there has never been anything but writing.28 Perhaps the scene in the poem that most fully opens this argument is the testy exchange of ecclesial dogmas between the Hind and the Panther in Part Two, a debate that replays a familiar scene in the history of Western metaphysics: the vindication of speech at the expense of writing. At stake in the debate is nothing less than the spiritual authority of the Roman and Anglican churches, the force of their promise to lead the soul to grace. Rejecting, as she must, papal infallibility and ecclesial pre-​eminence, while at the same time warding off the anomie of unchecked Biblical interpretation as practised by the

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sects, the Anglican Panther pleads for the self-​evident plainness and sufficiency of the Word: ‘Yet, Lady, still remember I maintain, /​The Word in needfull points is onely plain’ (2.143–​4). Or in the words of her opponent, ‘The sacred books, you say, are full and plain, /​And ev’ry needfull point of truth contain’ (2.108–​9). The Hind attacks the Panther’s conviction in the transparent fullness of Scripture by vigorously instantiating the fallibility of the written text and arguing the priority and necessity of a living tradition (embodied in the pope and General Council): Did not Satan tempt Christ, asks the Hind, ‘With Texts point-​blank and plain’? ‘The good old Bishops took a simpler way, /​Each ask’d but what he heard his Father say, /​Or how he was instructed in his youth, /​And by traditions force upheld the truth’ (2.162, 164–​7). The Hind and the Panther’s cases for the hermeneutic certainty (or uncertainty) of Scripture do not in and of themselves surprise, for, of course, Dryden is recapitulating a controversy that was being waged all around him at the time. We are reminded by Harris that in response to ‘James’s attempt to promote the Catholic faith’, Anglican clergy ‘orchestrated a press and pulpit campaign to defend their version of the truth faith against the efforts of Catholic polemicists’.29 And as Victor Hamm has shown, Dryden appears closely to rely on key texts of Catholic apology, in particular Hugh-​Paulin de Cressy’s Exomologesis (1647, 1653), ‘a book’, Hamm writes, ‘from which Dryden could have learned all the fundamental positions of Catholic doctrine, together with Biblical and Patristic texts to implement them, and the major refutations of Protestant charges against Catholic doctrine and discipline’.30 But it is surprising to note how tenaciously the terms and turns of the Hind’s argument against Biblical interpretation reproduce those of Plato’s condemnation of writing in the Phaedrus. The written text is ‘dumb’, ‘mute’; it cannot explain or correct itself; it speaks indiscriminately. ‘Suppose’, the Hind proposes, ‘we on things traditive [i.e. matters of tradition] divide’, And both appeal to Scripture to decide; By various texts we both uphold our claim, Nay, often ground our titles on the same: After long labour lost, and times expence, Both grant the words, and quarrel for the sense. Thus all disputes for ever must depend; For no dumb rule can controversies end. (2.196–​203)

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The Hind puts the dead letter in its place in order to sanctify church tradition and the authority of pope and council. Just as liars can figure, interpreters of the Bible can dissolve the ‘mute’ text into a babble of sounds.31 The Panther, however, is unimpressed by her antagonist’s logic. Why then, she retorts, ‘did Christ his Word provide, /​If still his church must want a living guide?’ (2.299–​300). Ah, but the Redeemer never wrote, chides the Hind, ‘Our Saviour preach’d his Faith to humane kind’ (2.306). And so too did the Apostles, ceaselessly extolling the Word to an ever-​expanding flock. Indeed, their cares were such that they could not carry the Word far or fast enough in their own person; and where they came they could not long remain. What was needed was a surrogate or substitute; a supplement: writing. Thus, the Hind insists, ‘preaching by Epistles was supply’d’ (2.335); she also calls these letters ‘absent sermons’ (2.340). The trouble, however, is that ‘all those letters were not writ to all’; Nor first intended, but occasional, Their absent sermons; nor, if they contain All needfull doctrines, are those doctrines plain. Clearness by frequent preaching must be wrought, They writ but seldome, but they daily taught. And what one Saint has said of holy Paul, He darkly writ is true apply’d to all. (2.338–​45)

‘Were not writ to all’: once speech is put in writing it becomes vagrant, disseminates freely, gets into the wrong hands; ‘Nor first intended, but occasional’: the text was never anything but provisional, contingent, a stop-​gap; ‘absent sermons’: preachings not superintended, not delivered ‘in the presence of ’, and therefore lacking self-​present meaning; ‘is true applied to all’: all the Books of the Bible but also perforce all writing, all texts. ‘The Savior has departed’, Donald Benson pointedly concludes. ‘The written testament is –​like Anglican real presence –​only “sound.” The words of Scripture can no more be trusted to convey the Savior’s will than can the words and symbolic actions of the Eucharist to convey the reality of the sacrament.’32 Instead of ruling over the empire of souls, the Holy Writ –​indeed the whole empire of signs –​is here put on trial. And thus the Catholic Hind sums the score against Protestant dependence on the letters of St Paul and the other saints: ‘No written laws

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can be so plain, so pure, /​But wit may gloss, and malice may obscure’ (2.318–​19). The ageing poet laureate and historiographer royal, combatant in countless pamphlet wars, author of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy and Mac Flecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel, target of satire and abuse from The Rehearsal and the Allusion to Horace down to the transversions and parodies of The Hind and the Panther, Dryden well knew the strengths and vulnerabilities of writing. Benson’s comment also reminds us how thoroughly interwoven are the Hind’s doctrinal arguments. Just as she contrasts the metaphysical presence and plenitude of Christ’s ministry and the oral tradition (the bishops ‘Each asked but what he heard his father say’) with the absence and lack of the written testament, the Hind draws distinctions between the Catholic miracle of transubstantiation, in which the flesh and blood of Christ are ‘really there’, and the symbolic meaning of Anglican Real Presence. This was, of course, a key debate not only between Catholic and reformed communities, but also historically within the Catholic communion itself.33 Indeed, Benson reads Dryden’s poem as an important document in the emergence of new ontological assumptions about the nature of substance in early modern theology. Whereas the medieval church’s neo-​Aristotelian distinction between sign and substance allowed a symbolic dimension to the miracle –​germane to reformers who claimed the sacrament was fundamentally memorial –​the ruthlessly empiricist ontology of substance ascendant in the seventeenth century drove Catholic doctrine toward inflexible literalism: physical sign and metaphysical substance were now one and the same. This helps make sense of the debate between the Hind and the Panther on the question of Real Presence, a quarrel that turns on competing definitions of ‘real’, of ‘presence’, even of ‘there’. Having just been accused by the Hind of intentional coyness and ambiguity in expounding the doctrine of transubstantiation (that is, until the Test Acts forced her to show her true reforming colours), the Panther insists, ‘grant such Presence were, /​Yet in your sense I never own’d it there’ (2.40–​1). What the slant rhyme heightens is the semantic slippage between ‘were’ and ‘there’, the odd confusion or conflation of time and space, which the Hind seizes on in her reply: ‘Then,’ said the Hind, as you the matter state, Not onely Jesuits can equivocate:

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For real, as you now the word expound, From solid substance dwindles to a sound. Methinks an Aesop’s fable you repeat, You know who took the shadow for the meat. (2.44–​9)

Against a spiritual economy that contents itself with empty signifiers, the Catholic Hind urges a paradigm of faith embodied by the miracle of transubstantiation, that moment when the sign asserts itself in supreme material and metaphysical fullness of being: ‘This is my body …’ And yet there is something of a crux in the Hind’s argument, for in the course of interrogating the Panther’s text-​based faith, we cannot help but note that the Hind twice describes the self-​difference of writing –​its inability to predicate a fully present meaning –​in terms of vocal speech. Comparing the interpretation of Scripture to the quarrelling of heirs over a legator’s final will and testament, the Hind observes: ‘The sense is intricate, ‘tis onely clear /​What vowels and what consonants’ –​notice she does not say ‘letters’ –​‘are there. /​ Therefore ‘tis plain, its meaning must be try’d /​Before some judge appointed to decide’ (2.385–​9). About fifty lines on, the Hind remarks on the doctrinal struggles among the reformed churches: ‘While sound and sound a diff ’rent sense explains /​Both play at hard-​head till they break their brains: /​And from their chairs each others force defy’ (2.442–​4). The dark writ of Scripture, the Hind maintains, can therefore only be decided by the proper judges, namely the pope and General Council. But if speech is itself composed of signs –​those bare sounds, ‘vowels’ and ‘consonants’ –​then surely it is defined by the same lack and absence, subject to the same slippages and deferrals, as writing. If this suggestion of the illusory opposition in the poem between Catholic vocality and Protestant scripturalism points to what we might have called, in the moment of high theory, the text’s ‘self-​ deconstruction’, I should like to skip the refrain of ‘always already’ in order to explore how those qualities we associate with deconstructive textuality come paradoxically to function in The Hind and the Panther on behalf of Roman Catholic mystery and metaphysics. We might first approach this question by considering how Dryden ‘has written his own reception into the poem’.34 ‘Much malice mingl’d

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with a little wit /​Perhaps may censure this mysterious writ’ (3.1–​2), Dryden muses at the start of Part Three, and as we have seen, the laureate well knew that of which he spoke. And to be sure, the poem’s armature of fable and allegory, of paradox and enigma, can be seen to shroud the poet’s religious privacy from his enemies, and to get distance on dilemmas of politics and conscience. Not least, of course, claiming a share of Pauline mystery also allows Dryden to ally his text with the authority of Scripture. But this too casually glosses over the metaphysically deflating force of the Hind’s anatomy of writing, for The Hind and the Panther is not a theatre of the mysterious or sublime so much as a theatre of interpretation, of writing as rewriting, as transversion. And as such it is a poem that celebrates Catholic mystery by performing with other texts –​including, perhaps even especially, Scripture –​the very kinds of abuses of which of which it accuses heretics and unchecked readers of the reformed churches. This insight helps makes sense of what C. S. Lewis called the ‘aesthetic insanity’ of ‘conducting in verse a theological controversy allegorized as a beast fable’.35 It is, after all, Dryden’s choice and application of fable that so provoked and perplexed contemporary readers. ‘Truly’, the author of the Revolter incredulously scoffed, ‘one would think the Author might have bethought himself of Allusions much more proper for his purpose than such Beastial Prosopopeia’s as these; now altogether Antiquated, notwithstanding his idle Apology for what he has done, and his miserable President of Mother Hubbard, as much out of fashion, as Hellen of Troys Wardrobe, or his Eye-​sore of Q. Elisabeth’s Fardingale’.36 The explanation that Dryden merely wanted to put a finger in the eye of his enemies by suturing high controversy to talking animals no doubt has its merits. Juxtaposing the rarefied discourses of religious controversy with the drives and appetites of beasts neatly suggests how the language of scrupling and high-​mindedness can serve to mask concerns rather closer to the ground. But more than just a set of sharp edges, fable presented an unusual combination of political and poetic potentials, of which Dryden took full advantage. For one, fables, and in particular political fables, were widely popular throughout early modernity. The later seventeenth century especially saw a flood of fables and fable collections into the literary marketplace, from the time of the civil wars until well into the eighteenth century.37 The attractiveness of fable in these decades of political division and cultural warfare, so

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Jayne Lewis has argued, lay in the collective grasp of fable as a field of conventional –​and thus malleable –​symbols that were nevertheless proffered as immutable iconic signs. Which is to say that paradox and contradiction formed the very fabric of fable: these stories were shared and communal yet also particular and interested; they claimed the sanctity of natural wisdom and ancient truth when in fact their suasive force derived unmistakably from the technology of print and the authority of poetry. What could be more suitable to Dryden’s challenges in championing Toleration and arguing the eternal mysteries of the Roman religion than fable? What more frustrating to his enemies? Far from mere surprise or perversity, Dryden’s choice of poetic mode seems inevitable, for the paradoxes of fable allowed the embattled laureate to slip through the discursive nets of his enemies, to float free of dialectic and escape into the interminable difference of writing.38 Commenting perceptively on Dryden’s apparent change of persuasive tactics following his conversion, David Bywaters contends that ‘The rhetorical authority … Dryden had habitually drawn from his claim to represent a unified or unifiable nation is replaced by a different kind of authority drawn from the poet’s professed mastery of and participation in a venerable and transcendent literary tradition’.39 This is surely right, but it stops short of recognising that fable’s claim to transcendence was merely an enabling fiction. Indeed, the measure of Dryden’s daring and brilliance in The Hind and the Panther is how skilfully the laureate tacks between claiming for his own poem the transcendence of fable, even divinely inspired ‘mysterious writ’, even as he flaunts fable’s artifice and arbitrariness, its capacity for what Lewis calls ‘reactive mediation’: fable, she says, ‘hotly pursues a single, highly interested perspective at the same time that it invites appropriation by competing interests’.40 The form of The Hind and the Panther is, in other words, relentlessly double, pointing to mystery and eternity and at the same time pointing to itself, to its status as text and to the conditions of its own performance. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Third Part, where the Hind and the Panther trade prophetic fables that both mirror one another and at the same time inexorably trope the poem itself. The opening move of this exchange is to the Panther, and she composes a tale about a race of swallows that, following a summer of sunshine and fair weather, prudently begins to prepare for migration when the

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cold winds of autumn begin to blow. Captivated, however, by the auguries of a superstitious priest who warns of ruin and misfortune, the swallows delay their departure and prepare to lay in for winter. Miraculously, a day soon comes when ‘New blossoms flourish, and new flow’rs arise; /​As God had been abroad, and walking there, /​ Had left his foot-​steps, and reform’d the year’ (3.553–​5). But this proves to be a false spring; the swallows that had ventured back outside perish in ice and snow, and those that sought refuge in a hollow tree are turned out by the winter residents of the swallows’ country to die of exposure or worse. Neither the coordinates nor the implications of the Panther’s allegory are far to seek. The swallows are English Catholics, the officious priest James’s spiritual advisor Father Petre, and the change of weather in the swallows’ native clime the blast of Anglican persecution. The false spring represents the temporary respite of James’s Toleration; while the swallows’ bitter extinction perhaps needs no explanation. The Hind recoils from what she takes to be plain hatred in the Panther’s fable: ‘The patience of the Hind did almost fail, /​For well she mark’d the malice of the tale: /​Which Ribbald art their church to Luther owes, /​In malice it began, in malice grows, /​He sow’d the Serpent’s teeth, an iron-​harvest rose’ (3.639–​43). The Panther’s ill-​ will has all the subtlety of heavy metal. The Hind’s answering fable, by contrast, shrouds itself in mystery and ambiguity, although the theme is the same. Her elaborately difficult allegory figures the strife between Anglicans and Catholics as a barnyard struggle for survival. Jealous of the brood of Catholic chickens supported and protected by the Master of the Farm –​who in his lordship but also in his slowness and artlessness figures forth the Stuart king –​Anglican pigeons enlist a champion on their side, ‘the noble Buzzard’ (3.11–​21). When the farmer, in a provocative glance at the death of James II, eventually passes away, the rapacious buzzard feasts upon the pigeons whose very interests he was brought in to protect. The identity of this predatory bird seems to shift within the Hind’s tale, in places conjuring the Protestant prince, William of Orange, and in others the Scottish clergyman and anti-​Catholic polemicist Gilbert Burnet. Confusion necessarily follows from this doubling of historical referents, ‘in much the same way that the final prophecy of the poem is ambiguous, its details unclear … [the] meaning is difficult to fix, and the uncertainty turns the Hind’s fable into a proper

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example of mysterious writ’.41 The distinction here asserted between ‘mysterious writ’ and the transparent malice of false prophecy, however, obscures the fact that the Hind’s fable turns on its structural homology with the Panther’s tale: it recapitulates the plot while reversing the characters and the outcome, substituting for Catholic greed Anglican rapacity, for Catholic doom Anglican demise.42 Given such structural correspondence, what differentiates the Hind’s from the Panther’s fable, then, is not inspiration but artfulness. And indeed the aim and measure of the Hind’s –​and Dryden’s –​fabulist art is a capacious doubleness that manages to compass the contingency of its symbolic materials even as it pursues a highly interested and politicised set of perspectives. This allows Dryden’s satire and criticism to rebound on parties of both sides, but more importantly, it substitutes discourse for truth, textuality for reality, converting the suspect integrity of the poet’s marks of conscience into hermeneutic suspicion of all identifying marks, all signs. Dryden’s ‘mysterious writ’ is a cipher that construes political and spiritual identity as nothing so much as discursive performances, thus displacing the locus of meaning from the transcendent subject within or behind or beyond or above the text and diffusing it into a set of textual relations. The portrait of James at the opening of the Hind’s fable provides a perfect example of this shifting and unstable poetics of representation: A Plain good Man, whose Name is understood (So few serve the name of Plain and Good) Of three fair lineal Lordships stood possess’d, And’ liv’d, as reason was, upon the best; ………………………………………….     As fortune wou’d (his fortune came, tho’ late) He took Possession of his just Estate: Nor rack’d his Tenants with increase of Rent, Nor liv’d too sparing, nor too largely spent; (3.906–​9, 915–​18)

The fitting of James’s royal inheritance to the chicken farmer rather stretches the conventional fabric of fable; no doubt Montagu and Prior were thinking of such moments when they wrote that the poem ‘naturally falls into Ridicule’.43 But Dryden is everywhere testing the limits of his mode and there is serious work being done here. ‘Three fair lineal Lordships’ of course refers to James’s claim to the kingship

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of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the modifiers attached to his holdings (‘fair’, ‘lineal’, ‘just’) in their stress on the legitimate transfer of title and lordship argue English political authority on its surest ground: the rights of property. Nevertheless, Dryden’s cloaking his king and patron in the garb of a homely farmer has a dangerous edge to it. Indeed, certain allegorical details are unmistakably ambivalent, for instance, the farmer’s being ‘So true, that he was awkward at a trick’ (3.922). This is no doubt meant to point up James’s honesty, his blunt forthrightness and purity of motive: ‘Impatient with the law’s subtleties and technicalities’, John Miller deadpans, ‘James stuck to simpler, more clear-​cut concepts like the laws of God and nature. These (he claimed) gave the king an inalienable right to his subjects’ service and imposed on those subjects or debarred them from serving him was … unjust in itself. Moreover, it was far from improper to dismiss judges who obstinately refused to recognize the injustice of such laws’.44 But in the context of James’s efforts to Catholicise the army and the universities, for which he relied on packing juries and purging recalcitrant judges, Dryden’s character of the king also allows something of the raw ambition and obtrusiveness of James’s policies. The Master of the Farm, moreover, is not the only figure for James in Part Three of The Hind and the Panther, nor property and inheritance the only arguments for imperial sway. Following the conclusion of the Hind’s fable, the Dryden-​like speaker of the poem resumes control, congratulating the Hind (and perhaps the poet himself ) on the ferocity and finality of the Hind’s argument while extrapolating James’s majesty along additional nodes of metaphoric likeness:     This said, she paus’d a little, and suppress’d The boiling indignation of her breast; She knew the vertue of her blade, nor wou’d Pollute her satyr with ignoble bloud: Her panting foes she saw before her lye, And back she drew the shining weapon dry: So when the gen’rous Lyon has in sight His equal match, he rouses for the fight; But when his foe lyes prostrate on the plain, He sheaths his paws, uncurls his angry mane; And, pleas’d with bloudless honours of the day, Walks over, and disdains th’inglorious Prey.

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So JAMES, if great and less we may compare, Arrests his rolling thunder-​bolts in air; And grants ungratefull friends a lengthen’d space, T’implore the remnants of long suff ’ring grace. (3.261–​76)

Conjuring the king of beasts as the emblem and image of English monarchy was, of course, entirely conventional. But in the context of the fabulist tradition, it was also fraught with symbolic peril. For the lion who is supposed to signify James’s strength and nobility also appeared in many fables to warn of tyranny and duplicity, the king’s most unwelcome and politically pernicious traits. In John Ogilby’s often republished translation of Aesop’s fable ‘Of the Lion, and other Beasts’, to take but one example, the sovereign lion calls his court to the hunt, promising ‘Profit; Feasts, as well as sport’, for all ‘Shold share alike with him, of what they found’ (lines 15–​16).45 The quarry of the hunt is a ‘Royal Hart’, who is eventually hemmed in and overpowered by the lion and his coalition of beasts, though at the cost of life and limb to several of the lion’s subjects. When it comes time to divide the spoils, however, the lion reneges on his promise of equal shares, invoking a brutal calculus: ‘One portion of the Quarry will appear /​My Perquisite, as I’m your Soveraign; /​The next is ours, as being Strongest here; /​The third you must acknowledge, for my Pain; /​The last shall be your Bounty, not Our Claim: /​ But who denies, look to’t, his Foe I am’ (lines 40–​5). This monarch is hardly a beneficent landlord: rather than the right of inheritance and prerogative, the lion of fable more surely evokes the principle of might and the threat of violent coercion, a precarious argument, to say the least, on behalf of a king whose absolutist pretensions were widely feared and resented. Might is, in any case, a dubious justification of rule, as Dryden seems to have anticipated, and as James sorely realised when his nephew and son-​in-​law, William of Orange, landed on English shores in November 1688 with an army of some fifteen thousand men. But if Dryden’s fables do ambivalent work on behalf his monarch, they also mediate the poet with like uncertainty. ‘Now for my converts’, the Hind bristles, defending English Catholics from the charge of disingenuous favour-​seeking, ‘who you say unfed /​Have follow’d me for miracles of bread, /​Judge not by hear-​say, but observe

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at least /​If since their change, their loaves have been increas’d. /​The Lyon buys no Converts, if he did, /​Beasts wou’d be sold as fast as he cou’d bid’ (3.225–​6). The defensiveness and vituperation that characterise this passage suggestively conflate the Hind’s concerns with Dryden’s own, and these lines in particular seem earmarked for the laureate’s detractors and critics. ‘Perhaps’, Zwicker ventures, ‘there is as well a note of ruefulness here. If the “Lyon” were not buying converts, there could not have been many beasts in England foolish enough to put themselves on the market’.46 But Dryden’s rue is also savvy and strategic: serving notice of his being passed over for advancement and patronage allows Dryden to frame his conversion as a heroic act of conscience and principle. Such gestures of course speak to Dryden’s eagerness to cut off at the pass unflattering readings of his poem, and of the need to give some accounting for his sudden change of sides. And indeed, readers inclined to scour this very public text for traces of the poet’s private voice did not have far to seek. Following an introductory passage that establishes the central fable, Dryden turns to a digression concerning the doctrine and discipline of Catholic belief, a digression marked by a conspicuously insistent first-​person grammar: My thoughtless youth was wing’d with vain desires, My manhood, long misled by wandring fires, Follow’d false lights; and when their glimps was gone, My pride struck out new sparkles of her own. Such was I, such by nature still I am, Be thine the glory, and be mine the shame. Good life be now my task: my doubts are done. (1.72–​8)

Here the laureate at last owns up to youthful vanity and ambition, his scepticism, his overweening pride; Dryden even suggests that he courted controversy and confusion as substitutes for humility and true belief. Yet it does not take an Empsonian ingenuity to find trouble in these lines –​for even as Dryden attests to conversion and spiritual alteration, he simultaneously asserts the continuity of his old, ambitious, prideful self, ‘Such was I, such by nature still I am’. And far from renouncing the language of Religio Laici, Dryden actually borrows its Anglican figurations to affirm the authenticity of his new religion, and, once more, ostentatiously so.

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The most memorable lines from Religio Laici, a poem otherwise known for its plain versification, come from its famous metaphysical opening, a benediction to the soul whose central figures are waywardness and light. But where Dryden rehearses these same figures in The Hind and the Panther, ‘He does not dramatize for the reader the poet casting aside one confession for the sake of embracing another, but rather layers his language so that the reader hears echoes of previous voices of belief, contradictory voices in the case of Religio Laici, even as one overhears the convert at prayer’. Moreover, this strategy of layering voices through allusion to other texts is characteristic of Dryden’s deployment of confessional language in The Hind and the Panther: as David Schmitt shows, the Hind’s advice to the Panther in Part Three (lines 279–​97), for instance, ventriloquises John Donne’s beloved ‘A Hymne to God the Father’ as well as a published sermon by Edward Stillingfleet, then Dean of St Paul’s, thus transversing prominent texts of Anglican spirituality into instruments of Catholic confession and conversion.47 Perhaps not coincidentally, transversion was the primary mode of published response to Dryden’s poem, from Montagu and Prior to The Revolter, a ‘trage-​comedy’ in the form of a dialogue between ‘Mr. D the Romanist’ and ‘Mr. D the Protestant’. And the strategies of transversion indeed provided a supple and effective means of ridiculing Dryden’s Catholic apologetics: it is hard not to laugh at the convoluted bathos of The Country-​Mouse and the City-​Mouse, where, for instance, a dispute over the grounds of Catholic and Protestant belief takes the form of a spluttering argument between a tapster (‘White’) and a publican (‘Dapple’). Yet at the same time, the scandalous literature excited by The Hind and the Panther –​the parodies and transversions, the mock-​ serious commentaries –​seemingly cannot avoid being subsumed into its endless chain of supplements or its train of textual sins. Seeking to outgo the poem in order to explode it, Dryden’s parodists hyperbolised his profusion of allegories and fables. But such hyperbole and exaggeration was, if anything, more confusing and unintelligible than Dryden’s own text. Indeed, Montagu and Prior tend to make The Hind and the Panther appear a study in poetic control. While they aim to pierce the veil of the poem, to master the text in order to expose the truth of Dryden’s spiritual life, the parodies and transversions simultaneously depend for meaning on their object of attack. And like the footnotes that swarm

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beneath modern editions of the poem, they distract from as much as they disclose any meanings it may secretly possess. In many ways, the publication of The Hind and the Panther can appear a huge tactical misstep on Dryden’s part –​indeed perhaps the greatest mistake of his career: its politics and theology were on what quickly proved the losing side, its formal risks extraordinary. And with the ascendance of William and Mary following the ‘Protestant Revolution’ of 1688, Dryden did of course suffer the loss of the laureateship to rival Thomas Shadwell, the dunce-​hero of Mac Flecknoe. But for all that contemporaries tried to expose and excoriate the poet’s bad faith, to lay hands on ‘Mr. D’ and force him to show his true colours, they found themselves vainly grasping at text. And indeed, The Hind and the Panther is arguably the terminal that leads from the discomfiture of James’s abortive rule to Dryden’s triumphs in the 1690s as translator and fabulist. For at the end of a lifetime spent aggressively distinguishing his poetic innovations from a field of rivals and precursors, Dryden, in a brilliantly ironic turn, achieves the stature of a laureate poet by embracing in the last decade of his life the fact of secondariness, dispersing his literary authority into the play of translation and rewriting. Don Sebastian and the end of history Following the Glorious Revolution, and indeed having been absent from the stage for the better part of a decade, the deposed poet laureate mounted his literary comeback almost exactly a year after James fled for France, and with a play called Don Sebastian (1689). Surely it was no coincidence that Dryden chose for this occasion to adapt the story of a lost sixteenth-​century king, rumour of whose return had been the stuff of ballad and legend for more than a hundred years. But Don Sebastian is much more than a nostalgic fable of James II, and it does little to conjure hope for the return of the king. Rather, its plot, its vocabulary, and its atmospherics provide a brilliant register of the workings of the Glorious Revolution and of the revolution’s ambiguous cultural and political meanings, and at the same time spectrally gauge the effects of 1688–​89 on the poet’s subjectivity and sense of self. If, as I shall argue, Don Sebastian records a turning away from providence and typology as theories of history in favour of a view that

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emphasises the groundlessness and fictiveness of political legitimation, it bears noting that Dryden’s play-​text is one of his most palpably written. He claims to have had to cut more than 1,200 lines of ‘Descriptions, Images, Similitudes, and Moral Sentences’ from the script in order to act it tolerably (Works, 15:66). And while stage and page obviously entail different expressive potentials, we find too that many of Don Sebastian’s tactics and devices seem to come directly from the playbook of The Hind and the Panther: the veiling of local and interested meanings with timeless plots and themes; the deployment of discontinuous allegory as a means of baiting and also frustrating interpretation; a welter of doubles, parallels, and correspondences; and a display of generic mastery and inventiveness that borders on parody and inversion. Don Sebastian is after all a Jacobite play written by a fallen laureate poet into a highly uncertain context: is it any wonder the play should effect a confusion of applications, of morals, of meanings? One thing we can say about the play with some certainty is that it was a popular success. Roger Morrice writes in his Entring Book for the second week of December 1689, ‘This Weeke the Queene and the Prince of Denmarke were at the Playhouse to see Mr Dreydens new Play called Sebastion King of Poland. It was well liked, but very much Curtled [curtailed] before it was suffered to be Acted. The concourse was great at the Playhouse, as of late it Ordinarily useth to be. It’s said that the Poet hath sold his day for 120. Guinneas’.48 Assuming Morrice’s note is accurate, aside from the slip of ‘Poland’ for ‘Portugal’, we might pause to consider the composition of these appreciative audiences, for Dryden can hardly have been sure of a congenial reception for his play in light of the events of the last year, which had seen both Dryden and his royal patron brought down by the arrival in England of William and Mary. We might thus be inclined to attribute the success of Don Sebastian to a swell of Jacobite patronage, but such an assumption is chastened by the attendance of Queen Mary and Prince George of Denmark. That his new play should still have pleased its audience suggests not only its aesthetic brilliance, but also Dryden’s ability to negotiate difficult meanings in dangerous circumstances, his capacity to mollify, to complicate, and not least, to disappear. The front matter to the published version of Don Sebastian, which appeared in January 1690, anticipates something of Dryden’s

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artfulness in the play, and in fact demands no less thoughtful attention than the text it presages. The choice of a dedicatee was crucial: it was an act of seeking approval and protection, and a claim to some form of relationship, and thus it involved a delicate negotiation of status and interests. Dryden was surely the undisputed master of the subtle dance of dedication and preface, and his performance for Don Sebastian is no exception. The play is dedicated to Philip Sidney, third Earl of Leicester, grandnephew of the poet and brother to the martyred republican Algernon Sidney, who had been convicted of conspiracy in the Rye House Plot to assassinate Charles II. Leicester himself had served Cromwell in the capacities of emissary and advisor during the Interregnum, but not having played an active part in the regicide, he was granted a general pardon upon Charles’s restoration, choosing then to retire from politics and public service.49 An enthusiastic humanist, Sidney’s residence in Surrey, where he lived until inheriting his father’s title in 1677, became known as a depoliticised hub for men of letters in years when patronage was increasingly bound to party politics. Selecting for his dedication the scion of a famous Protestant family, onetime ‘zealous republican’, and long-​standing patron of poetry and wit, whom ‘all Parties, as they rise uppermost, are sure to court … in their turns’ (15:59) allowed Dryden to claim for his play a place above the envy of partisanship and confession, to locate his work in the disinterested empyrean of Art that was being fashioned and theorised in later seventeenth-​ century England.50 Dryden’s presentation of Don Sebastian to Sidney’s magnanimity and discernment thus frames those who would find incitement in the play as irascible ‘cavillers’ and malicious partisans. Even as he elevates his play, however, Dryden aims to lower his own profile, exploiting the resources of the standard humility topos to effect a shrinking optics of self-​display. ‘Far be it from me (My most Noble Lord)’, Dryden begins, to think, that any thing which my meanness can produce, shou’d be worthy to be offer’d to your Patronage; or that ought which I can say of you shou’d recommend you farther, to the esteem of good men in this present Age, or to the veneration which will certainly be paid you by Posterity … [Y]‌ou have been always regarded, as one of the first Persons of the Age, and yet no one Writer has dar’d to tell you so: Whether we have been all conscious to our selves that it

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was a needless labour to give this notice to Mankind, as all men are asham’d to tell stale news, or that we were justly diffident of our own performances, as even Cicero is observ’d to be in awe when he writes to Atticus; where knowing himself overmatch’d in good sense, and truth of knowledg, he drops the gawdy train of words, and is no longer the vainglorious Orator. (15:59)

Dryden’s self-​abasement is enacted even at the level of syntax: his deliberate hesitations and circumlocutions, his halting commas and circuitous reasoning, all perform a thorough rehearsal of the supplicant’s humility before the great and good. The preface likewise opens with a disarming portrait of the poet as broke and out of favour, hounded by enemies, weakened by toil and old age, with little probability of coming into better circumstances. The overall effect is to make Dryden seem harmless, ‘an object of pity rather than of fear, yet nonetheless constant to his religion and his principles’; to harass or abuse him at this juncture would amount to no more than petty viciousness.51 Dryden though seems to take especial care figuring his relationship to Leicester on the analogy of Cicero and his great friend and patron Titus Pomponius Atticus, begging the question ‘whether there may not yet be found, a Character of a Noble Englishman, equally shining with that illustrious Roman? Whether I need to name a second Atticus; or whether the World has not already prevented me, and fix’d it there without my naming?’ (15:60–​1). And indeed the poet’s leave-​taking of Leicester and of the reader is a pastiche of Cicero’s letters to Atticus sent as the orator was fleeing Rome: Me, O Pomponi, valdè poenitet vivere: tantùm te oro, ut quoniam me ipse semper amâsti, ut eodem amore sis; ego nimirum idem sum. Inimici mei mea mihi no meipsum ademerunt. Cura, Attice, ut valeas. (Works, 15:64)52

As the California editors note, ‘Adopting the role of Cicero about to be purged under a dictatorship, [Dryden] suggests the dangers faced by a Catholic and Jacobite in the years following 1688. Amid such dangers, Dryden insists –​with Cicero –​that no one can take from him his most important possession, himself. In this insistence he appropriates for himself as well as Leicester the constancy of a Stoic sage’.53 Although the inscription is presented as being of one piece, it is actually a mash-​up of several different letters; and if there is some

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irony in the false integrity of the passage –​its theme being integrity itself –​it is only heightened by the fact that Dryden’s ventriloquising of Cicero serves here to voice his own constancy and self-​possession. In ways similar to the moments of autobiography and spiritual confession explored in The Hind and the Panther, just where we might expect the author to step out from the protective shadows of trope and convention, Dryden’s leave-​taking presents us with only more mediation, with the disappearance of the poet literally into another language, and into another’s identity. The life of Cicero was well known to early modernity through his abundant correspondence, of course, but moreover through Plutarch’s popular Lives.54 Like Dryden a product of the minor gentry, Cicero insinuated himself into the power elite of republican Rome through the force of his oratory in the law courts, and while popularly celebrated, was criticised and resented in certain circles for his naked desire of fame and admiration. Plutarch writes of the eminent Roman, he became ‘convinced that the fame towards which he was emulously struggling was a thing that knew no bounds and had no tangible limit. However, his excessive delight in the praise of others and his too passionate desire for glory remained with him until the very end, and very often confounded his saner reasonings’.55 Moreover, and despite his popularity with the people, Cicero was rarely master of his political destiny, ever subject to shifting allegiances and fluctuations of power, and beholden to the patronage of the great. Cicero may have been more than a mere instrument of men like Pompey and Caesar, but the constancy of a Stoic sage was a path that would have led him sooner to ruin than to glory (his lifetime of political manoeuvring, as it turned out, brought him both). Like Virgil, whose life Dryden wrote in the dedication of his Aeneis, Cicero owed ‘Obligations’; his career was indeed brilliant and often humane but circumstance and ambition more than once drove him to sacrifice principle to expedience and self-​interest. ‘Would that he had been able to endure prosperity with greater self-​control and adversity with more fortitude!’ was the lament of a friend and ally of Cicero’s, the Roman historian C. Asinius Pollio.56 Dryden, it is true, never exerted the kind of direct influence on public affairs, nor shared in the attendant perquisites, Cicero enjoyed as praetor or consul; however, there is no denying his effectiveness as Stuart laureate in shaping debate over the calamities and political

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crises of the 1670s and early 1680s, nor should we underestimate his notoriety as poet, playwright, and pamphleteer. Neither were Dryden’s drive and ambition, and as well his desire to please and impress, less marked: such charges are stock-​in-​trade in attacks on Dryden, and a crucial part of his own ironic self-​representations.57 And of course, Dryden was hounded by the perception that he was an unscrupulous opportunist, willing ‘to say or unsay anything’ to accommodate new regimes or to advance his position and his place, and never more so than in the years following his conversion.58 We can readily appreciate the pathos in Dryden’s identifying with Cicero’s purge at a time when Catholics were officially exiled from the City of London, when those suspected of practising the religion were routinely arrested and jailed, their families targeted and threatened. But as a writer unusually capable of objectifying his own faults and pretensions, surely Dryden recognised in the darker lineaments of the orator’s character aspects of his own wounding caricature as ‘Poet Bayes’. The meanings of the figure are thus deeply confounding, indeed irresoluble: by casting himself in the role of Cicero, Dryden at once denies and at the same time seems ruefully –​or is it exultantly? –​to embrace the scurrilous image of him contrived by his enemies. In one figure Dryden brings together the Catholic martyr and the atheistical operator. In the plot of Don Sebastian we are confronted with similarly ambiguous figural strategies only on a much larger scale. The play opens onto a world in violent flux: in the first hundred or so lines we hear of ‘long Wars’, ‘threatned Empire[s]‌’ and ‘doubtful Title[s]’; of ‘flattering Crowds’ and popular unrest; of ‘gallant Renegade[s]’ and plots and prophecies for revolutions to come; of the ‘Scales of Heaven that weigh the Seasons’ and the fickleness of fate. Dryden goes out of his way to make sure we hear the noise of his allegorical machinery: if there was an expectation that his new play would speak to the events of 1688–​89, Act One, Scene One of Don Sebastian only ratchets up that expectation. Dryden provocatively obtrudes the idiom of current English political debate into his fable of Barbary, and thus sets into motion a whirl of topical meanings and applications. Allegory and typology had of course served Dryden well before, nowhere more memorably and effectively than in Absalom and Achitophel. That poem, still Dryden’s most admired and most taught, uses the Biblical story of Absalom as a prophetic lens onto the

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Exclusion Crisis of 1678–​81. It is by no means an ‘easy’ poem; its publication in 1681 engendered a host of keys and decoders for unscrambling Dryden’s allegory, and few reading Absalom and Achitophel today would get very far without the sophisticated apparatus of modern editions. Yet once one acquires sufficient familiarity with the Biblical text and the politics of Exclusion, the typological scheme of Absalom seems transparent and ineluctable –​seems to bear the certainty and authority of providence, of prophecy –​whereas in Don Sebastian (and equally in The Hind and the Panther and Fables) the topical oscillates in and out of view, obliging us constantly to recalibrate the English coordinates of the unfolding drama. Typology becomes a prism rather than a lens, and we see things differently as we turn the play this way and that. No doubt this owes something to the exoticism of Dryden’s source material: shading the tragedy of Don Sebastian with recent English history was bound to seem somewhat ad hoc. It may also be a protective hedge against alienating his audience or inciting the authorities, and some perhaps would find in Dryden’s discontinuous and at times confused allegory the marks of haste or indecision. For my part, however, if the play seems a brilliant but finally incoherent matrix of parallels and allusions, it reflects the evacuation of metaphysics from Dryden’s sense of history following the Glorious Revolution, and thus the end of history, as Dryden and many early modern English Christians, both Anglican and Puritan, had understood it. As Perry Miller writes: In the type there must be evidence of the one eternal intention; in the trope there can be evidence only of the intention of one writer. The type exists in history or temporal experience and its meaning is factual … By contrast, the allegory, the simile, and the metaphor have been made according to the fancy of men, and they mean whatever the brain of the begetter is pleased they should mean. In the type there is a rigorous correspondence, which is not a chance resemblance, between the representation and the antitype; in the trope there is correspondence only between the thing and the associations it happens to excite in the impressionable … senses of men.59

The difference between Absalom and Achitophel and Dryden’s post-​ conversion fables of English history is that whereas in the former he emphasised the appearance of overweening providential intentions,

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of factual, irresistible correspondence, in the latter he highlights the arbitrariness of the sign or trope. History thus becomes not the unfolding of divine providence but the contingent, almost ludic rewriting of political legitimacy. Oddly enough, it is only in the last fifty years that critics have begun to overturn Sir Walter Scott’s surmise that in Don Sebastian Dryden was ‘not only obliged to choose a theme, which had no offence in it, and to treat it in a manner which could not admit of misconstruction, but also to exert the full force of his talents, as, by the conspicuous pre-​eminence of his genius, to bribe prejudice and silence calumny’.60 That even Scott should have failed to see through Dryden’s veils of fable and tragic passion suggests something of how elevation served to put distance between the play and contemporary politics, to frame the tragedy of Don Sebastian as harmless ‘phancy’. Moreover, the subtlety and complexity of the plot –​to which Scott perhaps alludes in his phrase about the ‘conspicuous pre-​eminence’ of Dryden’s genius –​vexes any simple geometry of political allusion. The ‘serious’ plot contains no less than four coups: Muley-​Moluch’s usurpation of the throne of Barbary from his uncle (who is also the father of the heroine Almeyda); the unsuccessful counter-​coup led by Don Sebastian in the name of Almeyda and her brother Mahumet; Muley-​Zeydan’s overthrow of his brother Muley-​Moluch with the help of the duplicitous counsellor Benducar and the Moorish rabble; and finally the backlash to Muley-​Zeydan’s revolution that restores Almeyda as the rightful heir. But this brings us only to the end of Act Four: a fifth act introduces a riddle of hidden identity (complete with interlocking signet rings) and of secret sin that will undo the political settlement that appeared to be achieved. Implausible as it may sound to those who have not read the play, there is also a comic subplot involving a Portuguese gallant, Antonio, who is sold into the service of the Mufti (a Muslim pontiff ) and proceeds to seduce both his master’s wife and daughter. Yet it is ‘in Don Sebastian alone’, wrote John R. Moore in 1958, ‘that we can still see in extenso the Dryden who expressed his discontent with the Revolution and his bitter scorn for some of the men who had had a share in bringing it about’, marshalling scores of passages and a formidable knowledge of the rhetorics of Jacobite dissent and Williamite propaganda to make his point.61 The historical

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Don Sebastian was lost at the Battle of Alcazarquivir in 1578. In the view of history, he was a headstrong and bellicose king who plunged his Portuguese army into the midst of a struggle for the throne of Morocco against all wisdom and advice. His forces and those of the Moroccan faction with whom Sebastian was allied were demolished at Alcazarquivir, leaving Portugal weak and without an heir to the throne. The ensuing dynastic struggles resulted in the crowning of Philip II of Spain as king of Portugal in 1581 and the establishment of the Iberian Union. In the sixty or so years of the Union, from 1581 to 1640, no less than four men appeared claiming to be the lost Sebastian and challenging the legitimacy of Spanish rule of Portugal. Don Sebastian thus became a popular figure of ballads and romances, O Encoberto (‘The Hidden One’) who would return to redeem Portugal in its hour of need.62 Needless to say, Don Sebastian is a figure for James II, not lost in battle but hidden in France under the protection of Louis XIV. As Moore observes, ‘Dorax, the Portuguese nobleman who has joined the Moors in order to seek revenge on Don Sebastian for supposed ingratitude, attributes to his former king the same virtues which the Jacobites professed to see in “James the Just”: “Well, I know him, /​ Of easy temper, naturally good, /​And faithful to his word” ’.63 This is not even the most obvious Jacobite shading of Sebastian’s character –​earlier in the play Dorax grudgingly admits, ‘he was a Man: /​Nay, though he hated me, and I hate him, /​Yet I must do him right; he was a Man, /​Above man’s height, ev’n towring to Divinity. /​Brave, pious, generous, great, and liberal’ (1.1.99–​103). Putting this cluster of attributes –​could this recital of James’s supposed virtues also be sly parody? –​in the mouth of Sebastian’s sworn enemy seems to argue for giving James his just due; to grant as much as Dorax does here, however, is to grant the considerable hypocrisy and self-​interest Jacobites saw in the Whig and Anglican embrace of William.64 Dryden’s play skewers and satirises those who had a share in bringing the revolution about, but moreover its instruments and rationalisations, its complicities and compromises.65 Act Three, for example, finds the Moroccan shereef Muley-​Moluch, having succeeded illegally to the throne, deliberating with the Mufti over how he can make Almeyda his bride and queen. Not only is Muley-​ Moluch in love with the beautiful and stoic princess, but the union

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makes good political sense: as the daughter of the former king (obviously a type of Mary), marrying Almeyda would help put to rest any latent factional strife in the kingdom. Besides the recalcitrance of the princess, however, there are two obstacles to the match: Almeyda has already married Sebastian in a secret ceremony observed by Benducar; and she has become a Christian, which means that Muley-​ Moluch cannot marry her under Muslim law. Thus Muley-​Moluch commands, ‘Cancel me that Marriage, /​And make her mine; … /​ Expound thy Mahomet; make him speak my sense, /​Or he’s no Prophet here, and though no Mufti (3.1.63–​5). ‘Why verily the Law is monstrous plain’, replies the Mufti, ‘There’s not one doubtful Text in all the Alchoran, /​Which can be wrench’d in favor to your Project’ (3.1.69–​72). We might hear in the Mufti’s demurral a send-​up of the Panther’s faith in Scripture, ‘The Word in needfull points is onely plain’, especially in light of the Mufti’s perfidious solution to Muley-​ Moluch’s dilemma, which we shall come to shortly. First, though, let us examine the language of the emperor’s ultimatum to the Mufti: Slave, have I rais’d thee to this pomp and pow’r, To preach against my Will? Know I am Law; And thou, not Mahomet’s Messenger, but mine: Make it, I charge thee, make my pleasure lawful … (3.1.83–​7)

This speech strikes Anglican authority at its very root, the separation of the Church of England from the Mother Church: here Muley-​ Moluch is a version of the Henry VIII of The Hind and the Panther, ‘A Lyon old, obscene, and furious made /​By lust’ (1.351–​2), inculcating schism and heterodoxy to cover his unlawful desire. The effect of the passage is also to explode the providentialism of Williamite apologetics, which for Stuart loyalists was only a ruse for the complaisance and greed of the Anglican clergy who had acquiesced to William for advantage in a national struggle for spiritual and political centrality. The word ‘Slave’ points this charge with the very language of Williamite propaganda: ‘popery and slavery’ was the familiar slogan of revolutionaries, the promised future state of England under James and his Catholic heirs. In this passage, however, the ‘slave’ is the complaisant (Anglican) clergyman, abusing his holy office to bamboozle the nation on behalf of a political strongman.

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The Mufti’s answer to Muley-​Moluch’s riddle offers oblique but nevertheless scathing commentary on the practice of finding divine sanctions for what was in effect an invasion and usurpation (here rape stands in for revolution):

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mufti.     ‘Tis

true, our law forbids to wed a Christian;        But it forbids you not to ravish her.            …………………………………… emperor.  Oh now it mends; and you talk reason, Mufti.       But stay! I promis’d freedom to Sebastian:       Now shou’d I grant it, his revengeful Soul       Wou’d ne’er forgive his violated Bed. mufti.      Kill him, for then you give him liberty.        His Soul is from his earthly Prison freed. emperor.  How happy is the Prince who has a Churchman       So learn’d and pliant to expound his Laws! In this comically transparent piece of prevarication, the Mufti expounds in his Alcoran justification for rape and murder to settle the state; surely it aims at the beneficent language used to frame William’s intervention, exposing it (to Jacobite thinking) for what it really was, a violent breach of English sovereignty and honour. But by Act Four the wheels of fate have turned on Muley-​ Moluch: his counsellor Benducar has fashioned a secret plot with Muley-​ Zeydan to usurp Moluch’s throne. While a group of conspirators gather to ambush Moluch in his bedroom, the Mufti and the Captain of the Rabble having caught wind of the plot attempt to gain control of the Mobile in the name of Muley-​ Zeydan’s nascent cause –​and their own gain. The Mufti stokes the mob by insisting on the preservation of ‘these three P’s, Self-​ Preservation, our Property, and our Prophet’, which as Zwicker has observed is an obviously ‘debased and ridiculed version of the slogans of 1688’.66 Captain Mustapha offers a still more transparent provocation to auditors in December 1689: Do you remember the glorious Rapines and Robberies you have committed? Your breaking open and gutting of Houses, your rummaging of Cellars, your demolishing of Christian Temples, and bearing off in triumph the superstitious Plate and Pictures, the Ornaments of their wicked Altars, when all rich Moveables were

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sentenc’d for idolatrous, and all that was idolatrous was seiz’d? […] Do I then spet upon your Faces? Do I discourage Rebellion, Mutiny, Rapine, and Plundering? You may think I do, Believers, but Heaven forbid: No, I encourage you to all these laudable undertakings. (4.3.124–​30, 146–​51)

Bywaters and other commentators have noted that this scene conjures the riots and the looting and destruction of Catholic homes and churches following James’s flight from the capital. What is more significant, ‘the present mob’, Bywaters writes, ‘is engaged in rebellion against the successor of the king – presumably Almeyda’s father –​against whom they were rioting when they plundered these temples. To the mob, however, it matters little against whom they rebel, so long as they may plunder’.67 He quotes the rabble on this point: second rabble. We are not bound to know who is to Live and Reign;

    our business is only to rise upon command, and plunder. third rabble.

Ay, the Richest of both Parties; for they are our    Enemies. (4.3.33–​ 7) The abdication of James and the ascension of William and Mary, in the terms so carefully parsed and prepared by the Convention Parliament, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ effected by providence to save the English people from ‘popery and slavery’, Dryden here represents as the machination of self-​interested elites with the aid and complicity of a restive nation, that same ‘headstrong, moody, murm’ring race’ Dryden had reproached in Absalom and Achitophel (line 45). The Glorious Revolution, according to the logic of this scene, is nothing more than a formula for future –​indeed endless –​revolution. The wilfully apparent Jacobitism of this prophesy gets complicated, however –​indeed, it may be that it unravels entirely –​when we consider the shell game Dryden is playing with his figures for the Dutch usurper. If Muley-​Moluch began the play as the Williamite prince –​ climber of his uncle’s throne, suitor of his royal cousin Almeyda –​by Act Four, as Moluch’s own near kinsman, his brother Muley-​Zeydan, moves against him with the help of the counsellors and advisors that effected his own ascendance, Moluch ‘is William III in James II’s plight but all the more vulnerable for being a usurper’.68 But

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Muley-​Zeydan never succeeds to the throne. In yet another plot twist, the treacherous counsellor Benducar seeks to double-​cross his royal master after the assassination of Muley-​Moluch by marrying himself to Almeyda and rallying the rabble behind their union. Almeyda resists by inciting the gathered crowd: Almeyda drawing a Dagger [on Benducar].     Dare not to approach me. Now Affricans,     He shows himself to you; to me he stood     Confest before, and own’d his Insolence     T’espouse my person, and assume the Crown,     Claym’d in my Right; for this he slew your Tyrant;     Oh no, he only chang’d him for a worse,     Imbas’d your Slavery by his own vileness,     And loaded you with more ignoble bonds:     Then think me not ungratefull, not to share,     Th’Imperial Crown with a presuming Traytor.     He says I am a Christian; true, I am,     But yet no Slave: If Christians can be thought,     Unfit to govern those of other Faith,     ’Tis left for you to judge. (4.3.250–​63)

Battle ensues: Benducar calls to his aid the troops of Muley-​Zeydan, while Mustapha rallies the rabble behind Almeyda’s cause; the rabble prevails, but only with the sudden help of Don Sebastian’s army. It is proposed that Muley-​Zeydan, who really was a pawn all along, be married to Almeyda to settle the disputed crown. But this Almeyda refuses: by rights of honour, marriage, and affection Don Sebastian –​ the Catholic prince of Portugal –​is her husband and her king. Thus the Jacobite hero of the play is also a version of William III and in no less certain terms than any of his rivals: he is the head of a foreign state, invited to lead his army into Barbary in the name of securing the rights of its people from supposed tyranny, only to marry the royal daughter and heir and with her ascend the throne. If Don Sebastian is by the lights of Dryden’s heroic drama –​that is, by the lights of Stuart art and apology –​the man who should be king, in the figural scheme of things he is only another Williamite prince. Don Sebastian is perhaps the most vexing and undecidable figure in the whole play, for his kingly virtues –​‘[b]‌rave, pious, generous, great, and liberal’ –​ are entirely at odds with his legal claim to political authority: if he is

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essentially noble he is also essentially other, different from those he would rule with respect to nation, ethnicity, and religion. It is difficult to say what Dryden is up to here. After titillating his audience for several acts with what seemed like Jacobite satire and provocation, the plot descends almost into farce: the Mobile shuffles hectically back and forth across the stage as one after another character makes an impassioned appeal to lead it; factional armies clash in the dim theatre even as the offstage collusions that prepared the tumult are breathlessly declaimed by the characters on stage. Rather than the delight of a plot in which fearsome scenarios ‘occur unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one another’, as Aristotle prescribes in the Poetics, audiences for Don Sebastian are treated in Act Four to a bonanza of soliloquies and spectacles, the ultimate outcome of which feels self-​consciously arbitrary.69 Topicality becomes illegible in this dizzying profusion of heroic conventions and plot devices, and thus so too, it seems, do Dryden’s politics and principles. Indeed, almost as if to emphasise that he is merely shuffling the tropes of romance and tragedy, and not engaged in any seditious project, the fifth and final act reveals through a set of stock devices the secret liaison of Sebastian’s father and Almeyda’s mother, culminating in the discovery that Sebastian and Almeyda are in fact siblings, and their union thus tainted with adultery and incest. This is their tragic fate; and the tragic outcome is that Sebastian and Almeyda resign to live forever apart, he as an anchorite in the deserts of Africa, she as an abbess in the island of Tercera. Of course, honour and resolve in the face of implacable circumstance may be construed as yet another, perhaps even the fundamental Jacobite argument and philosophy. ‘To abjure empire’, Zwicker writes, ‘to hold property and power in moral contempt’, as do Sebastian and by implication James, ‘suggests the final example of piety and elevation: Christ of the Gospels. Dryden may not explicitly draw all the analogies, but the materials for constructing such a pattern and abstracting such a meaning from the play and its legends are obvious’.70 Yet obviousness may itself be a kind of diversion. Although they are spoken by Dorax, the play’s sententious final lines delimit the moral with a kind of choral inevitability: ‘And let Sebastian and Almeyda’s Fate, /​This dreadfull Sentence to the World relate, /​That unrepented Crimes of Parents dead, /​Are justly punish’d on their Childrens head’ (5.1.724–​7). In construing unhappy fate as the outcome of parents’ crimes, surely

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Dryden alludes to original sin, but also to recent English history, the revolution of 1642 no less than that of 1688. But if Sebastian and Almeyda’s turning away from the fallen world of the play to cultivate self-​knowledge is the example of both Jacobite honour and Christian piety, are we to see in their pattern something of Dryden’s own character and principles? Don Sebastian is hardly an exercise of private meditation or self-​examination. Indeed, we might with Anne Cotterill ‘imagine Dryden writing to an audience of hostile readers as if from a cage, from which he tosses fables, allegories, prophecies, and portraits to watch the readers scramble’.71 It was a chase, as we noted earlier, for which audiences were evidently willing to pay and pay well –​120 guineas in third night rights was a huge sum for the time. Perhaps even more impressive is that literary criticism and commentary has still not caught up to Dryden either, although not for lack of trying. In the preface to the play Dryden teasingly writes, ‘beside the general Moral of it, which is given in the four last lines, there is also another Moral, couch’d under every one of the principal Parts and Characters, which a judicious Critick will observe, though I point not to it in this Preface’ (15:71). Earnestness and obviousness are the signs under which Dryden baits his critics –​contemporary and future –​to the game of interpretation, to search his text for some ultimate meaning in the perfections and unities of the whole (for the ‘message’, as Roland Barthes put it, ‘of the Author-​God’).72 But who has unravelled the secret of this play? If we imagine that its timeless plots and universal themes serve to disguise a range of topical applications and meanings, I have also shown how the play’s sliding chain of signifiers discloses the radical contingency of those meanings. We might say, then, that the secret of the play is that it has no secret, no final signified; and indeed, no Author, or what is the same thing, too many authors. The only power of the writer, Barthes insisted, ‘is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as to never rest on any one of them’73 –​whether or not one accepts this as axiomatic of all writing, who would deny that The Hind and the Panther, or Don Sebastian, or the capacious Fables, are sites of just such mixture? It follows, then, that Dryden aims in these texts not to reveal or express himself, but indeed to stage his own absent presence, to assert the authenticity and rectitude of his spiritual and political values, and at the same time to suggest their ultimate

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contingency; in other words, to inscribe self and nation alike within the precincts of ‘mysterious writ’. I want to suggest something of the deliberateness of these moves by highlighting what strikes me as a comic asymmetry between the insistency with which the prefaces and dedications of these late works advertise a coherent and harmonious design –​and at least implicitly an immanent and equally coherent designer –​and how thoroughly readers have failed to discover such immanence and order. We already noticed, for instance, in the letter to the reader of The Hind and the Panther, Dryden’s invitation to dig beneath the poem’s layers of controversy and satire for a consistent set of principles and values, to discern, as it were, a portrait of the artist: ‘What I desire the Reader should know concerning me, he will find in the Body of the Poem; if he have but the patience to peruse it.’ Yet trying to lay hold of Dryden in The Hind and the Panther, one usually succeeds in grasping only some other text. In the ‘Dedication of the Aeneis’, Dryden likewise rings out the harmonies and proportions of Virgil’s epic: ‘The Action of it is always one, entire and great. The least and most trivial Episodes, or under-​Actions, which are interwoven in it, are parts either necessary, or convenient to carry on the main Design: Either so necessary, that without them the Poem must be Imperfect, or so convenient, that no others can be imagin’d more suitable to the place in which they are’ (4:267). That in the dedication Dryden constantly digresses, that he wilfully dislocates his themes and arguments, is perhaps no more than a piece of irony; the translation itself, however, is shot through with the contingent and disjunctive in its flickering play of allegory and allusion. And in the preface to Fables, Dryden’s last published work, the poet once again puts the reader on notice of meanings said to be both hidden and obvious: ‘I have endeavour’d to chuse such Fables’, Dryden writes, ‘both Ancient and Modern, as contain in each of them some instructive Moral, which I could prove by Induction, but the Way is tedious; and they leap foremost into sight, without the Reader’s Trouble of looking after them’. Yet even admirers have found the morals of Fables contradictory or ambiguous, the collection ‘difficult to grasp as an imaginative whole’.74 What this pattern suggests is that capaciousness and digression, indeterminacy and transversion, these are Dryden’s instruments for subverting interpretive malice; for negotiating spiritual and political dislocation; for coping with literary belatedness; and, yes, for

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settling scores and touting principles without putting himself too much in harm’s way. But Dryden’s late aesthetic is much more than a matter of equivocation or evasion: rather what the poet’s ability to so fully inhabit this contingent mode of writing seems to disclose is Dryden’s painfully acquired scepticism toward what in our contemporary moment have been called ‘master narratives’. Without embracing nihilism –​indeed at the same time that he advanced or at least defended Catholic and Jacobite causes and beliefs –​in the wake of James’s disastrous bid for Toleration and the events of 1688–​89, Dryden comes to see the script of history as a palimpsest, an accumulation of traces without any validating ground.75 I want to conclude by conjuring one final instance of slippage and disjunction in the field of writing we have been ranging over –​the image of Aeneas in Dryden’s Virgil. The plates used to illustrate Dryden’s translation, it has often been noted, were the same engravings used for John Ogilby’s Virgil in 1654. The plates were, however, ‘a little retouched’, in Sir Walter Scott’s phrase, for Dryden’s volume.76 Writing to his sons in Rome in a letter dated 3 September 1697, Dryden remarks that ‘in every figure of Eneas’, his publisher Jacob Tonson ‘has caused him to be drawn like K. William, with a hooked Nose’ (Letters, p. 93). Inscribing the pious hero of the Aeneid with the profile of the English king was, obviously, intended as a piece of flattery, but also as political allegory: Tonson was a Whig, and the figure conjoins William not only with Aeneas, but with Augustus Caesar, Virgil’s patron and heroic model. But as Dryden says in the same letter, with no little pleasure, Tonson has ‘missed of his design in the Dedication: though He had prepared the Book for it’, for Dryden adamantly refused to lay at William’s feet the epic he might have presented, had there been no Glorious Revolution, to James II (Letters, p. 93). Nevertheless, Dryden must have recognised, if somewhat ruefully, that the difference between the rightful and the wrongful monarch was little more than a nose –​little more even than a trace in the text. Notes 1 R. Parsons, A sermon preached at the funeral of the Rt Honorable John Earl of Rochester (Oxford, 1680), pp. 28–​9. 2 T. B. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II, ed. C. H. Firth, 6 vols (London: Macmillan, 1913–​15), 2:1206.

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3 J. W. Johnson, A Profane Wit: The Life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004), pp. 327–​43. 4 Parsons, A sermon preached, pp. 8–​9. 5 See D. Schmitt, ‘Restoration spiritualities’, unpublished PhD thesis (Washington University in St Louis, 2004), esp. pp. 277–​83. A revised version of Schmitt’s thesis is anticipated from Baylor University Press. 6 F. Ellis, ‘Wilmot, John, second earl of Rochester (1647–​1680)’, ODNB (2004; online edn January 2008), accessed 22 April 2017. 7 P. Connell, Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 4. 8 J. G. Turner, ‘The libertine sublime: love and death in Restoration England’, Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Culture, 19 (1989), p. 112. 9 G. MacLean (ed.), Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 22. 10 C. J. Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 96. 11 Qtd. in J. Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-​Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 393. 12 G. S. de Krey, ‘Rethinking the Restoration: dissenting cases for conscience, 1667–​1672’, HJ, 38 (1995), pp. 53–​4. 13 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 4:197. 14 Beginning with Louis I. Bredvold, Dryden’s critical biographers have tried to establish the sincerity of Dryden’s conversion in the context of his spiritual and intellectual development. See Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1934), pp. 73–​129. Also P. Harth, The Contexts of Dryden’s Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 226–​44; S. Budick, Dryden and the Abyss of Light (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 163–​237; and G. D. Atkins, The Faith of John Dryden (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1980), pp. 96–​ 160. For accounts of Dryden’s faith more comfortable with self-​interest and ambiguity, see J. Spurr, ‘The piety of John Dryden’, in S. N. Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 237–​58; and Zwicker, ‘How many religions did John Dryden have?’, in M. E. Novak and J. E. Lewis (eds), Enchanted Ground: Re-​ imagining John Dryden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 171–​84.

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15 See, for instance, C. Montagu and M. Prior, The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d To the Story of The Country-​Mouse and the City-​Mouse (London, 1687); M. Clifford, Notes Upon Mr. Dryden’s Poems in Four Letters. To which are annexed some Reflections on the Hind and Panther. By another hand (London, 1687); Anon., The Revolter. A Trage-​Comedy Acted between the Hind and Panther and Religio Laici (London, 1687). In A Tale of a Tub, Swift famously refers to The Hind and the Panther as ‘the Master-​piece of a famous Writer now living, intended for a compleat abstract of sixteen thousand Schoolmen from Scotus to Bellarmin’, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1:43. 16 The copy of Absalom and Achitophel is held in the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts of the Ohio State University; qtd. in H. D. Weinbrot, ‘Apocalyptic satire, James II, and transubstantiation: pulpit, polemics, and the Declaration of Indulgence’, Journal for Eighteenth-​ Century Studies, 39:3 (2016), p. 325. 17 ‘What are we to say’, asked C. S. Lewis, ‘if not that the design of conducting in verse a theological controversy allegorized as a beast fable suggests in the author a state of mind bordering on aesthetic insanity?’, ‘Shelley, Dryden, and Mr. Eliot’, in Rehabilitations and Other Essays (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 9. Even Dryden’s sympathetic biographer J. A. Winn finds the poem a ‘failure’, undone by ‘too many inventions, too many styles, too many conflicting purposes’, John Dryden and His World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 423, 427. 18 OED, ‘transversion’, n.1, which cites three seventeenth-​ century examples, including Buckingham’s farce The Rehearsal (1672), from which the Dryden character, Mr. Bayes, is quoted on his theory of composition: ‘My first Rule is the Rule of Transversion, or Regula Duplex: changing Verse into Prose, or Prose into verse.’ 19 Reflections on the Hind and Panther, p. 32. 20 My argument in this chapter overlaps at a number of points with Molly Murray’s discussion of The Hind and the Panther in Chapter 4 of her The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Murray’s study was not yet available when I completed the earliest version of this chapter, and I hope our convergences might be seen as mutually validating. Here, compare Murray at her p. 139. 21 On James’s policies, see J. Miller, James II: A Study in Kingship (London: Methuen, 1989), pp. 156–​8, 167–​88; T. Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–​1720 (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 182–​238.

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22 Harris, Revolution, pp. 235–​6. 23 By early 1687, Dryden was rumoured to be in the running for the wardenship of All Souls College, Oxford, and his name was also mentioned in connection with posts at Magdalen and at Trinity College. See R. G. Ham, ‘Dryden and the colleges’, Modern Language Notes, 39 (1934), pp. 324–​32. On the pressures and vulnerabilities Dryden was then facing, see S. N. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 123–​38. 24 S. N. Zwicker, ‘The paradoxes of tender conscience’, ELH, 63 (1996), p. 853. 25 See Zwicker, Politics and Language, pp. 150–​8; A. Cotterill, ‘Parenthesis at the center: the complex embrace of The Hind and the Panther’, Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 30 (1996–​97), pp. 139–​58. 26 E. Miner, Dryden’s Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 145–​6. Miner’s attempt to ‘solve’ the apparent disjunctions of The Hind and the Panther is part of his book’s larger project of assimilating Dryden’s intellectual and poetic career to Augustan ideas of wholeness and consistency. In this vein, see also A. B. Gardiner, Ancient Faith and Modern Freedom in Dryden’s ‘The Hind and the Panther’ (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998): ‘[This book] will show that Dryden’s poem has a grand and unified design that has hitherto gone unnoticed. The design of the work is a seamless garment: the imagery, the plot, the animal characters, and the argument against the Test Acts all form a single whole’, pp. 8–​9. 27 Winn, Dryden and His World, p. 416. 28 I am here closely paraphrasing a famous passage of Derrida’s on Rousseau in Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 159. 29 Harris, Revolution, p. 199. 30 V. Hamm, ‘Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther and Roman Catholic apologetics’, PMLA, 83 (1968), p. 402. 31 Cf. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. R. Hackforth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 158: ‘Soc[rates]. You know, Phaedrus, that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive: but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words: they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever. And once a thing is put into writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it;

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and it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-​treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself.’ 32 D. Benson, ‘Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther: transubstantiation and figurative language’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 43 (1982), p. 206. 33 On the place of transubstantiation in the oppositional satire of James’s reign, see Weinbrot, ‘Apocalyptic satire’, pp. 321–​5. 34 Cotterill, ‘Parenthesis at the center’, p. 142. 35 Lewis, Rehabilitations, p. 9. 36 Anon., The Revolter, pp. 1–​2. 37 See J. E. Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–​ 1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 1–​13. See also A. Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); and M. Loveridge, A History of Augustan Fable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 38 ‘Through Aesop’, Lewis writes, ‘Dryden seeks a linguistic solution to the problem of how to produce a written text that, if it fails to fend off a truculent and divided society, might at least puts its own incoherence –​ its susceptibility to inversion and rearrangement –​to good use’, English Fable, p. 103. 39 D. Bywaters, Dryden in Revolutionary England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 10–​11. 40 Lewis, English Fable, p. 3. 41 Zwicker, Politics and Language, p. 157. 42 See Bywaters, Dryden in Revolutionary England, pp. 27–​8. 43 Montagu and Prior, The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d, sig. A3. 44 Miller, James II, p. 157. 45 J. Ogilby, The fables of AEsop paraphras’d in verse, and adorn’d with sculpture (London, 1651). On Ogilby’s Aesop and its significance to later fabulists, see Lewis, English Fable, Ch. 1; see also Patterson, Fables of Power, pp. 87–​110. 46 Zwicker, Politics and Language, p. 149. 47 Schmitt, ‘Restoration spiritualities’, pp. 345–​6. Cf. Murray, Poetics of Conversion, p. 157: ‘From the very beginning of his poem … Dryden gestures –​overtly or obliquely –​toward sources that trouble, or even flatly contradict, his poem’s “plain” or “simple surface meaning, putting allusion at cross-​purposes with argument.’ 48 Qtd. in E. Miner, ‘Commentary’, Works, 15:382. 49 For Leicester’s life, see C. H. Firth’s entry in the ODNB. 50 See the letter to the reader that prefaces Absalom and Achitophel, ‘Yet if a Poem have a Genius, it will force its own reception in the World. For there’s

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a sweetness in good Verse, which Tickles even while it Hurts: And, no man can be heartily angry with him who pleases him against his will’ (Works, 2:3). 51 Bywaters, Dryden in Revolutionary England, p. 34. 52 [I indeed, Pomponius, am heartily sick of life. One thing only I beg of you, since you have always loved me for myself, to preserve your affection for me. I am still the same. My enemies have robbed me of all I had; but they have not robbed me of myself. Take care of your health.] 53 Miner, ‘Commentary’, Works, 15:411–​12. 54 According to I. M. Green, ‘the text most often recommended and studied in school was De officiis, often referred to in England as “the Offices” or “the Duties”. At one level, this comprised three books of moral advice written specifically for his son, then a student at Athens, on the behaviour appropriate to his position and on the duties of a Roman gentleman. But at another, Cicero was writing a work of practical ethics in which he betrayed his concern with the political and social ambiguities of his age, and the difficulty of taking moral decisions when honourable conduct clashed with beneficial or expedient action’, Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 202. 55 Plutarch’s Lives, trans. B. Perrin, Loeb Classical Library, 11 vols (London: W. Heinemann, 1914–​26), 7:97. 56 Qtd. in H. J. Haskell, This Was Cicero (New York: Knopf, 1942), p. 296. 57 On Dryden’s use of biography as a means of writing his own life, and in particular the disinterestedness of Dryden’s life-​writing, see S. N. Zwicker, ‘Considering the ancients: Dryden and the uses of biography’, in K. Sharpe and Zwicker (eds), Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 105–​26. 58 [T. Brown], Reflections upon the Hind and panther, p. 21. 59 P. Miller (ed.), Images or Shadows of Divine Things, by Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), pp. 6–​7. On the wider English phenomenon, see P. J. Korshin, Typologies in England, 1650–​1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 60 The Works of John Dryden, illustrated, with notes, historical, critical, and explanatory, and a life of the author, by Sir Walter Scott; revised and corrected by George Saintsbury, 18 vols (Edinburgh: W. Paterson, 1882–​93), 7:288. 61 J. R. Moore, ‘Political allusions in Dryden’s later plays’, PMLA, 73:1 (1958), p. 37. 62 On Don Sebastian and Sebastianism, see A. R. Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 2009), 1:180–​1, 202–​4, 218–​19; for a detailed account of the Battle of Alcazar, see E. W. Bovill, The Battle of Alcazar (London: Batchworth Press, 1952). 63 Moore, ‘Political allusions’, p. 40. 64 And indeed, Moore reads exactly such accusations in the figures of Benducar and the Mufti: ‘Benducar, the chief minister, who (like the Earl of Sunderland) is represented as giving the advice which ruined his sovereign … But even worse than the treachery of the chief minister (who, like Sunderland, seeks to establish himself with the new sovereign after deserting the old one), is the treachery of the Mufti (who, like some prominent Anglican clergymen, uses his sacred office to secure wealth and power, preaches passive obedience until it thwarts his self-​ interest, and agitates the mob by a pretense of religious zeal)’, ‘Political allusions’, p. 40. 65 On the Dutch invasion and the Williamite settlement, see M. Goldie, ‘The revolution of 1689 and the structure of political argument: an essay and an annotated bibliography of pamphlets in the allegiance controversy’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 83 (1980), pp. 473–​564; L. G. Schworer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 205–​25; Harris, Revolution, pp. 273–​363. 66 S. N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–​1689 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 194. 67 Bywaters, Dryden in Revolutionary England, p. 53. 68 Bywaters, Dryden in Revolutionary England, p. 54. 69 The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R. McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 1452a: p. 1465. 70 Zwicker, Lines of Authority, p. 189. 71 Cotterill, ‘Parenthesis at the center’, p. 142. 72 R. Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, in Image/​Music/​Text, trans. S. Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), p. 146. 73 Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, p. 146. 74 J. D. Garrison, ‘The universe of Dryden’s Fables’, SEL, 21:3 (1981), p. 411. 75 Cf. C. Reverand, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode: The Fables (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), p. 193. See also S. N. Zwicker, ‘Dryden and the dissolution of things: the decay of structures in Dryden’s later writings’, in P. Hammond and D. Hopkins (eds), John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 308–​29. 76 Sir W. Scott, The Life of Dryden, ed. B. Kreissman (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), p. 326.

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With the fashioning of an English Bill of Rights and the consolidation of William and Mary’s authority, with the death of James II in exile, the ascendance of Queen Anne, the union of England and Scotland, the succession in 1714 of the Hanoverian Elector George I, and the definitive exclusion of the Stuarts, it would seem that we come to the end of ‘England’s troubles’, and so at last to the solid, rational eighteenth century. ‘Behold!’ Pope commands in the sonorous distiches of ‘Windsor Forest’,    … th’ascending Villa’s on my Side, Project long Shadows o’er the Chrystal Tyde. Behold! Augusta’s glitt’ring Spires increase, And Temples rise, the beauteous Works of Peace. (lines 375–​8)1

But we know better than this. As John Spurr observes, one direct consequence of the Revolution of 1688–​89 ‘was England’s involvement in the front line of major European wars for eighteen of the next twenty-​three years. William of Orange had intervened in England because he needed to bring her into his war against Louis XIV, but once he gained the English throne William was also forced to defend it against Stuart forces in Scotland and Ireland’.2 Inextricable from the dim but persistent noise of such conflict was the crisis of legitimation and groundlessness augured by Dryden’s late works. I am referring of course to that phenomenon known as Jacobitism, the enduring if practically uncertain loyalties of many British subjects to the displaced Stuart line, a movement that twice

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culminated in mass armed insurrection in the northern kingdom –​the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 –​to say nothing of the numerous plots, riots, demonstrations, commemorations, and irksome subterranean buzz which underlie Paul K. Monod’s assertion that ‘No seditious political cause at any time in English history had such a prolonged or widespread effect on the public’.3 Nor was Jacobitism simply benighted nostalgia for divine right monarchy. As Jonathan Clark and others have argued, defenders of the post-​Revolutionary state continued to appeal to divine mandate as ‘the most powerful (and, at that time, the only convincing) justification for monarchy’.4 At the same time, even fervent Jacobite writers like Charles Leslie applied deeply contractualist rhetoric and arguments in upholding Stuart prerogatives, and it was not unheard of for erstwhile Whigs, disillusioned with Williamite or, later, Hanoverian autocracy to join forces with Nonjuring Jacobites.5 Far from a reactionary cause of the political fringe, ‘the melancholy roar of the retreating world’,6 Jacobitism figures significantly in eighteenth-​century politics and public life, and in ways more complex than Whig historiography has usually allowed.7 But then there has always been something tenuous and contradictory about the very idea of an Augustan literary culture in eighteenth-​century England.8 The Roman penumbra of reason and civility masks sharp differences of political and historical vision. For writers like Swift and Pope, Augustan ideals were, almost from the beginning, vessels of anachronism put out to sea on a tide of opprobrium and resentment. Thus does Swift observe, in a miscellany of satirical apothegms, ‘The Epicureans began to spread at Rome in the empire of Augustus, as the Socinians, and even the Epicureans too did in England toward the end of Charles the Second’s reign; which is reckoned, though very absurdly, our Augustan Age. They both seem to be Corruptions occasioned by Luxury and Peace, and by Politeness beginning to decline’.9 For a Hanoverian Whig like Joseph Addison, the equation between Great Britain and imperial Rome could be proffered more seriously, falling somewhere between literary trope and political programme. Surveying the Tiber in ‘A Letter from Italy’ (1711), at a moment when the Whigs were briefly out of favour, the future secretary of state enthuses:

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Oh cou’d the Muse my ravish’d breast inspire With warmth like yours, and raise an equal fire, Unnumberd Beautys in my Verse should shine, And Virgils Italic shoud yield to mine! (lines 51–​4)10

Yet as Suvir Kaul argues, even as poems like ‘A Letter from Italy’ celebrate ‘the making of empires, of international commerce, and of powerful nations … they are also deeply aware of the domestic dislocations and changes that follow from these advances. Commerce and colony turn out to be double-​edge blessings; the growth of either can paradoxically suggest the decline of national virtues and strengths’.11 Thus though we might speak of ‘Augustanisms’ in the plural rather than the singular, the term retains an insistence on novelty and newness and at the same time on the abhorrence of the ‘modern’, on the perils of ‘progress’. Whither time’s arrow? ‘The emergence of modernity was anything but tidy’, Alan Houston and Steven Pincus write in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (2001). ‘Continuity and change were intermixed. Making sense of innovation, particularly at this point in time, requires careful attention to local and specific features of the historical landscape.’12 It is out of a like conviction that this book has urged the virtue of adaptable models of inquiry that work within, across, and against the traditional boundaries of literary period, in our case, those of civil war, restoration, and revolution. This seems to me especially clear when we consider the semi-​autonomy of literary genre with respect to political chronology. In light of the closure of the public theatres during the decades of republican experiment, a case can be made for treating the Restoration as a ‘fresh era’ in the history of English drama, so long as we bear in mind the prominent place of adaptations and revivals on the Restoration and eighteenth-​ century stage. Without due appreciation for earlier traditions of seventeenth-​century poetry, by contrast, what hope do we have of understanding Restoration verse? As Steven Zwicker and I have written elsewhere, ‘We cannot rightly admire Rochester without a knowledge of the forms and exemplars he so perfectly mimicked, nor reread cavalier poetry innocent of Rochester’s ironies, Herrick’s advice to tarrying virgins without Rochester’s brutal envoy, “Then if to make your Ruine more, /​You’ll peevishly be Coy, /​Dye with

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the Scandall of a Whore, /​And never know the joy” (Song [Phillis, be gentler], ll. 13–​16)’.13 Literary periods are not going anywhere. They are part of the standard equipment for the teaching and study of literature. Even when working with petits récits, critics and their readers usually need some sense of the larger grid with which those stories interact. What Derek Hirst has said of political historians is true for literary scholars as well: those ‘who ignore what comes before and after can fall victim to a myopia as damaging as that suffered by the most teleological Whigs’.14 But cause and consequence are exactly what get lost, as Mark Knights points out, when the later seventeenth century drops out of or gets skipped over in the historiographical traditions on either side.15 Another theme of this book has been the tendency of literary history to frame itself around dynamics of dialectical opposition which in turn power the irresistible march of that history. In calling attention to the contingency of the political in seventeenth-​century England, in attenuating the grip of party labels, we have been able to see writers of the civil war and Restoration in terms of a fresh set of relations and potentials, and so to situate them in a history ‘with movements to be seen running along lateral and recursive lines as well as linearly, and by strange diagonals and various curves, tangents, and even within random patterns’, to borrow a formula of Jerome McGann’s.16 This is also to be reminded that a sufficiently rigorous and ecumenical engagement with literary form, with the mysterious laws of influence and intertextual attraction, will almost always have the effect of complicating a text’s overt or apparent ideological import. In the old-fashioned close reading of Emrys Jones’s 1968 British Academy Lecture on The Dunciad, in which he suggested that ‘images … of the sordid and the grossly material are as exciting to Pope as they are repulsive’, lie the seeds of Sophie Gee’s recent account of Pope’s counter-intuitive commitment ‘to print as a distinctly modern institution, whose ideology and practice were forged by mostly Whiggish writers and publishers.17 There is no denying what fifty years of critical theory has taught us about the implication of art in the production of ideology. If this book has tried to reconfigure the politics and literature it treats, it nonetheless imagines politics as a key register of literary input and output. Yet the literary cannot finally be reduced be politics. If ‘aesthetics of contingency’ here comprise an array of strategies –​rhetorical, figural,

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generic –​for negotiating unstable ideological ground, for compassing antinomy and contradiction, the self-​conscious –​at times the outrageous –​literariness of many of the works discussed in this book surely transcends or goes beyond politics, to recall Browne’s theoretical surplus of signification. Forced to live in storms and wars, our authors, like Marvell’s double in the Unfortunate Lover, yet dying leave a perfume here, and music within every ear. Notes 1 The Poems of Alexander Pope: A Reduced Version of the Twickenham Text, ed. J. Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). 2 J. Spurr, ‘England 1649–​1750: differences contained?’, in S. N. Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650–​ 1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 11–​12. 3 P. K. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–​ 1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 161. 4 J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–​1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 126. See also J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–​1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), Ch. 2. 5 See Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, pp. 15–​44. On Swift’s ‘elective affinities with Leslie in political theology and rhetorical strategy despite the official political distance between them’, see I. Higgins, ‘Jonathan Swift and Charles Leslie’, in P. Monod, M. Pittock, and D. Szechi (eds), Loyalty and Identity: Jacobites at Home and Abroad (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 149–​66. 6 G. Glickman, review of Jacobitism, Enlightenment, and Empire, 1680–​ 1821, ed. A. Macinnes and D. J. Hamilton, English Historical Review, 131:548 (2016), p. 198. 7 See J. C. D. Clark, ‘The many restorations of King James: a short history of scholarship on Jacobitism, 1688–​2006’, in Monod et al., Loyalty and Identity, pp. 9–​56. 8 See H. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 9 J. Swift, ‘Thoughts on various Subjects [Further thoughts on various subjects]’, Miscellanies. The Tenth Volume (London, 1745), p. 235. 10 The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1914). Addison was named secretary of state for the southern department in April 1717.

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11 S. Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 92. 12 A. Houston and S. Pincus (eds), A Nation Transformation: England after the Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 10. 13 M. C. Augustine and S. N. Zwicker (eds), Lord Rochester in the Restoration World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 3. 14 D. Hirst, ‘Revisionism revised: the place of principle’, P&P, 92:1 (1981), p. 80. 15 See M. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 9–​10. 16 J. McGann, ‘History, herstory, theirstory, ourstory’, in D. Perkins (ed.), Theoretical Issues in Literary History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 197. 17 See E. Jones, ‘Pope and Dullness’, PBA, 54 (1968), pp. 231–​63, 249; S. Gee, ‘Milton’s Pope’, in B. Hoxby and A. B. Coiro (eds), Milton in the Long Restoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 242.

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Index

Addison, J. (1672–​1719) 242–​3 aesthetics Cavalier 2, 23, 39, 50, 52, 157, 170–​1, 173, 177, 243 contingency of 2, 3, 23, 82, 102–​5, 117, 144, 147, 213, 225, 232–​4, 244–​5 courtly 64 Puritan 56, 64–​7, 135, 143 republican 144 Anglicanism 21–​3, 79, 95–​6, 98, 117, 119, 122, 125, 127, 135, 170, 189, 204–​8, 212–​14, 224, 226–​7 Aristotle (384–​22 BCE) 104, 231 Arminianism 20, 22, 100, 107 Aubrey, J. (1626–​97) 26, 93, 94, 130, 178 Augustanism 23, 158, 160–​1, 164, 200, 242–​3 Barthes, R. (1915–​80) 232 Bible, the 44, 55, 59–​60, 105, 182, 189, 203, 205–​10, 223–​4, 227, 231 interpretation of 59–​60, 100–​2, 105–​7, 205–​10, 223–​4 Bridgewater, First Earl of (1579–​1649)  64–​8

Browne, (Sir) T. (1605–​82) 2, 28, 79–​115, 116, 163, 245 Christian Morals 85 class interest 80, 84–​7, 88, 107 conservatism 79–​80, 82, 83–​4, 86–​7, 88 heresies see Browne, (Sir) T., heterodoxy heterodoxy 83, 95–​6, 98, 100–​3, 106–​7 multitude 80, 82–​3, 86–​7, 89–​91, 95, 106 orthodoxy 79, 83–​4, 95, 98–​101, 105–​6 politics, religious 83–​7, 91, 98–​107 Religio Medici 79–​80, 83, 86–​7, 91–​107, 163 tolerance 83, 86–​7, 94, 99, 106–​7 Vulgar Errors 98, 102 Buckingham, Second Duke of (1628–​87) 171, 173, 177, 179 Burnet, G. (1643–​1715) 158, 188–​90, 212 Butler, S. (1612–​80) 119–​23, 128, 134, 141, 157, 158 Bywaters, D. 211, 229 Calvinism 94, 95, 99–​100, 107, 138 Campbell, G. 39–​40, 52, 54, 58

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I n dex

Castlemaine, Countess of (1640–​1709) 175, 180–​1 Catholicism 39, 94–​6, 101, 118, 125–​6, 175, 178, 188, 199, 201–​17, 221, 223, 227, 229, 230, 234 Cavalierism 2, 7, 18, 20, 21, 23, 39, 50, 52, 93, 170–​1 censorship 84, 100, 148, 165 Charles I of England (1600–​49) 4, 17, 19, 21–​3, 43, 65–​6, 71, 81, 88, 90, 94, 100, 124, 134, 141, 148 Eikon Basilike 88, 90, 123, 138, 148 Charles II of England (1630–​85) 2, 4, 7–​8, 15, 19, 28, 118, 124, 126, 148, 166, 171–​7, 179, 180, 186, 220, 242 Chernaik, W. 143–​4, 175–​6 Church of England see Anglicanism Cicero (106–​43 BCE) 221–​3 Clarendon, First Earl of (1609–​74) 93, 172–​3 Clark, J. C. D. 5, 242 Cooper, A. A. (1621–​83) see Shaftesbury, First Earl of Corns, T. 15, 39–​40, 52, 54–​5, 58, 64 Cotterill, A. 205, 232 Country Party 18, 171, 174–​5, 177, 180 satire 180–​3 Crashaw, R. (1612–​49) 56 Cromwell, O. (1599–​1658) 1, 25, 71, 88, 123, 129, 133, 141, 145–​8, 174, 220 Crooke, A. (d. 1674) 92–​4 Davenant, W. (1606–​68) 25, 200 Descartes, R. (1596–​1650) 95, 97–​8 Digby, (Sir) K. (1603–​65) 86, 92–​5, 97–​8, 105

dissociation of sensibility 9, 10, 23–​4 Donne, J. (1572–​1631) 8–​9, 16, 25, 83, 166, 217 Dryden, J. (1631–​1700) 1, 2, 14, 25, 158, 178, 179, 188, 199–​240 Absalom and Achitophel 1, 178, 202, 208, 223–​4, 229 autobiography 205, 215–​17, 222–​3, 232 conversion 200, 202–​3, 216, 223–​4 and passim 199–​218 Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, A 178 Don Sebastian 201, 218–​34 end of history 201, 224–​5, 234 Essay of Dramatic Poesy 208 Fables 224, 232–​3 fabling 210–​16 Fall of Angels and man in innocence, The 166 Hind and the Panther, The 2, 201, 202–​18, 219, 222, 224, 227, 232–​3 Jacobitism 201, 219, 221, 225–​6, 229–​32, 234, 241, and passim 218–​34 laureate 1, 199, 201–​2, 218–​19, 222 Mac Flecknoe 208, 218 reception 178, 202, 210–​11, 219–​20, 232–​3 Religio Laici 216–​17 transversion 201, 202–​3, 205, 208, 210, 217–​18, 233 Works of Virgil, The 233–​4 D’Urfey, T. (1653–​1723)  170–​1 Dzelzainis, M. 15, 125, 144 Egerton, J. (1579–​1649) see Bridgewater, First Earl of

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Eisenstein, E. (1923–​2016) 27, 161–​3 elegy 48–​52, 54, 61–​2, 64, 147–​8 Eliot, T. S. (1888–​1965) 8–​11, 14, 16, 131–​2 Idea of a Christian Society, The 9 Metaphysical Poets, The 9 Sacred Wood, The 12 English civil war 2, 3, 4, 9, 17–​24, 26, 27, 39, 42, 79–​82, 86–​8, 91, 97, 107, 123, 130, 134, 145, 232, 244 English revolution see English civil war epic 25, 26, 38, 51, 62, 64, 71, 158, 233, 234 Evelyn, J. (1620–​1706) 26–​7, 202 Exclusion Crisis 21, 137, 170–​2, 178, 204, 224, 241 Fish, S. 9, 13, 46, 83, 105 Gardiner, S. R. (1829–​1902) 17, 66 Glorious Revolution 22, 117, 172, 200, 201, 218, 222–​6, 228–​9, 234, 241 Goldberg, J. 40–​1 Greenblatt, S. 11, 15 Gwyn, N. (1650–​87) 175, 202 Haan, E. 49, 51 Hammond, P. 119, 121, 167 Harrington, J. (1611–​77) 137, 143 Harris, T. 21, 204, 206 Herbert, G. (1593–​1633) 16, 83, 96–​7 Herman, P. 26, 39 hermeneutics 63, 70, 83, 105, 133–​4, 143, 203, 206, 213 Herrick, R. (1591–​1674) 50, 52, 56, 243

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Hill, C. (1912–​2003) 17, 55, 80–​2, 86, 102, 116, 132–​5 Hirst, D. 21, 126, 143, 146, 148, 244 historiography literary 1–​3, 5, 6–​14, 16, 17, 22–​8, 80, 107, 131, 136, 158–​60, 244–​5 political 3–​10, 16–​22, 39, 58, 80, 82, 84, 107, 127, 131, 158, 242, 244 Hobbes, T. (1588–​1679) 82, 95, 98, 137, 158 Hyde, E. (1609–​74) see Clarendon, First Earl of Interregnum 5, 12, 22, 221 see also Cromwell, O.; Protectorate Jacobitism 178, 201, 219, 221, 225–​6, 228–​32, 234, 241–​2 James, Duke of York (1633–​1701) see James II of England James I of England (1566–​1625)  19 James II of England (1633–​1701) 2, 172, 173, 178, 199, 202–​4, 212–​16, 218, 226, 227, 229, 231, 234 Johns, A. 27, 162 Johnson, J. W. 189–​90 Johnson, S. (1709–​84) 85, 94 Jonson, B. (1572–​1637) 16 Killigrew, T. (1612–​83)  173–​4 Lake, P. 4, 6 Lawes, H. (1595–​1662) 64–​8, 90 Laud, (Archbishop) W. (1573–​1645) 50, 63, 84, 87, 91, 95, 97, 100, 107, 113–​14 see also Laudianism

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Laudianism 20, 39, 47, 55–​6, 80, 83, 93–​5, 97, 99, 107 Leavis, F. R. (1895–​1978) 8, 10, 135 Leicester, Third Earl of (1619–​98)  220–​1 Leishman, J. B. (1902–​63) 131, 144 Lewalski, B. K. 39, 50, 141 Locke, J. (1632–​1704) 137, 143–​4 Love, H. (1937–​2007) 160–​1, 166, 171–​3, 177 Lynch, K. 96–​7 lyric 23, 24, 69, 117, 131, 135, 142, 144, 158, 163, 180, 184 Macaulay, (Sir) T. B. (1800–​59) 6–​8, 10, 16–​17, 199 manuscript culture 27, 65, 68–​70, 92, 104–​5, 159–​61, 164–​72, 176–​7, 188 Marcus, L. 12–​14, 65–​6 Martz, L. 52, 54 Marvell, A. (1621–​78) 2, 23–​5, 116–​49, 158, 160, 163, 173, 175–​6, 178–​83, 245 Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, An 137, 148–​9 amphibiousness 2, 122, 143 Cromwell allegiance to 25, 129, 133, 141, 144, 145–​8 representations of 25, 123, 145–​8 Eyes and Tears 24 First Anniversary of the Government under O. C., The 133, 144, 145–​8 Gallery, The 180 Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, An 123, 144 indeterminacy 117, 122, 149

Last Instructions to a Painter, The 4, 24, 120–​1, 175, 178–​83 loyalism 127, 132, 142 lyric poet 23–​4, 117, 131, 135, 142, 144 Mary II of England (1662–​94) 218, 219, 227, 229, 241 Masson, D. (1822–​1907) 133–​4 Milton comparisons to passim 116–​49 friendship with 116, 119, 122, 128–​30, 133–​4 Nymph Complaining, The 23, 24, 143 On a Drop of Dew 24 Poem upon the Death of O. C., A 145, 147–​8 Rehearsal Transpros’d, The 118–​23, 134, 135–​7, 139–​42, 179, 203 Rehearsal Transpros’d, The II 25, 116, 126–​31, 135–​7 republicanism 119, 121, 123, 127, 131, 142, 143–​6 satirist 23–​4, 117, 118, 120–​1, 130, 138–​41, 164, 173, 178–​83, and passim 116–​49 Second Advice to a Painter, The 182 sexuality 119–​22, 142–​3 Third Advice to a Painter, The 182 To His Coy Mistress 143 Unfortunate Lover, The 23, 143, 180, 245 Upon Appleton House 143 Whiggism 117, 132, 141, 144 and passim 116–​49 Milton, J. (1608–​74) 2, 7, 13–​15, 22, 26–​7, 38–​71, 87, 89–​91, 102, 106–​7, 116–​24, 127, 128–​31, 133–​42, 143–​4, 157, 163, 172, 179, 203 apocalypse 41–​7, 57, 70

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Apollo 41, 44–​5, 47–​9, 50, 54–​5, 56, 61–​2 Apology for Smectymnuus 89 Areopagitica 57, 90, 120, 122, 124, 129, 136, 137–​8 Arcades 55 At a Vacation Exercise 44–​5 Comus see A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle Eikonoklastes 123, 136, 137–​8, 149 Elegia Quinta 49 Elegia Septima 50–​1 Elegia Sexta 48–​50 Elegy Five see Elegia Quinta Elegy Seven see Elegia Septima Elegy Six see Elegia Sexta First Defence of the People of England 123, 136, 138, 141 How soon hath Time see Milton, J., Sonnet VII Il Penseroso 51–​6 L’Allegro 51–​6 Laudianism 39, 55–​6, 63 Lycidas 26, 38, 40–​2, 58–​9, 60–​4 Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, A 55, 57–​8, 64–​71, 163 Nativity Ode see Milton, J., On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity 38, 41–​8, 49, 50, 54, 56, 57, 62 Paradise Lost 26, 27, 39, 42, 45, 46, 53, 102, 116, 134, 136, 166 Paradise Regained 51, 53, 71, 102 Pro Se Defensio 138–​42 Puritanism 55–​7, 62, 64–​5, 67–​8 Ready and Easy Way, The 90, 142 Samson Agonistes 57, 102 Second Defence of the English People 136, 138–​9, 141

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self-​presentation 38, 50, 69 Sonnet VII 57–​60, 61 Sonnet X 43 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, The 90 Tetrachordon 136 True Religion, Of  136–​7 mock-​epic  140 mock-​heroic  51 Moore, J. R. 225–​6 Morrice, R. (1628–​1702) 219 Morrill, J. 80–​2 narratives master 3, 18, 234 modernisation 6, 7–​8, 10, 27–​8, 170–​1 Nedham, M. (1620–​78) 2, 88–​9 New Criticism 10, 131, 133 New Historicism 11–​16, 20 Norbrook, D. 15–​16, 55, 144 Norton Anthology 10, 158–​9 Palmer, Barbara (1640–​1709) see Castlemaine, Countess of pamphlets, political 24, 64, 80, 88–​91, 99, 117, 118–​31, 136–​41, 148, 170–​1, 208 Parker, S. (1640–​87) 25, 116–​19, 122, 125–​31, 134, 139–​42, 179 Parliament 3, 5, 15, 17–​21, 43, 60, 63, 66, 81, 84, 87–​90, 93, 124–​5, 132, 145, 149, 201, 203–​4, 229 Parsons, R. (1647–​1714) 165, 189, 199 Patrides, C. A. (1930–​86) 96, 133, 141 Patterson, A. 15–​16, 117, 125, 135–​6, 138, 141–​2, 144 Pepys, S. (1633–​1703) 201 Plato (427–​347 BCE) 206

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politics, party 1, 22, 148–​9, 161, 188, 220, 244 Pope, A. (1688–​1744) 14, 158, 241–​2 post-​Revisionism 3, 4, 21–​2 print culture 27, 69–​70, 83–​4, 92–​3, 118, 120, 137, 159, 161–​7, 170, 172, 199, 211, 244 process, historical 4, 40, 57, 161, 172 Protectorate 1, 71, 144–​6 see also Cromwell, O.; Interregnum Puritanism 2, 7–​8, 17–​18, 20, 22, 39, 42, 50, 55, 56–​8, 62, 64–​7, 84–​5, 91, 94, 96, 98, 100, 124–​5, 129, 131, 135, 143, 170, 224 Randolph, T. (1605–​35) 157, 163 Real Presence 203, 207–​9 republicanism 16, 22, 70, 82, 119, 121, 123, 127, 131, 142–​6, 173, 201, 220, 243 Restoration 1, 4, 5, 6–​8, 15, 21–​5, 27, 90, 124, 127–​30, 137, 158–​61, 163, 179, 188, 200, 201, 243, 244 literary culture 158, 160, 199–​200 satire 170–​1, 173, 175, 177, 179–​80, 183, 188 theatre 5, 7, 25, 158, 243 Revard, S. (1933–​2014) 42, 47 Revisionism 3–​6, 11, 16, 18–​22, 39, 58, 80–​2, 132, 142 Rochester, 2nd Earl of (1647–​80) 2, 25, 27, 50, 157–​90, 199–​200, 243–​4 Allusion to Horace, An 165, 208 conversion 188–​90, 199–​200 Dialogue L: R 167 Disabled Debauchee, The 158

editions of 159–​61 Epistolary Essay, from M. G. to O. B., An 168 Imperfect Enjoyment, The 158 Letter from Artemiza in the Towne to Chloe in the Countrey, A 183–​8 manuscript culture 164–​71 Marvell, A., comparison to 178–​83 print culture 161–​4 Ramble in St James’s Park, A 179, 186 Satire against Reason and Mankind, A 158, 187 satirist 171–​90 Satyr on Charles II 160–​1, 170, 172, 174–​8, 186 sceptre lampoon see Rochester, 2nd Earl of (1647–80), Satyr on Charles II Seigneur Dildoe 160 Sodom 168, 170 Timon 168, 184 To the Post Boy 168 Tunbridge Wells 179, 184 Upon Nothing 158 Upon the Author of a Play call’d Sodom 168 Valentinian 164 Whig identity 161, 170–​3, 175, 177–​9, 188 Ross, A. (1590–​1654) 95, 102 Royal Society 7, 14, 27, 85 royalism 2, 9, 16, 18, 20, 27, 64, 88, 90, 91, 96, 107, 138, 144, 145 Russell, C. S. R. 19–​22, 58, 88, 132, 170 satire 23, 24, 117–​18, 120, 130, 138–​41, 160, 164, 168–​83, 186, 188, 202, 208, 213, 231, 233

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secular time 41, 43 secularism 28, 70, 144, 200–​1 Scott, J. 5, 21–​2, 158–​9, 161, 201 Scott, (Sir) W. (1771–​1832) 225, 234 scribal culture see manuscript culture Scripture see Bible, the Shaftesbury, First Earl of (1621–​83) 143, 171 Shakespeare, W. (1582–​1616) 12–​15, 52, 87 Shapin, S. 27–​8 Sharpe, K. (1949–​2011) 3, 6, 19, 20 Sidney, A. (1623–​83) 137, 143–​4, 158 Sidney, P. (1619–​98) see Leicester, Third Earl of Smith, N. 15–​16, 145–​6 Spurr, J. 125, 241 Swift, J. (1667–​1745) 158, 242 teleology 1, 21, 160 Teskey, G. 41–​2, 48, 51, 57, 58 Thormählen, M. 160–​1, 174–​5 toleration 4, 9, 24, 79, 83, 106–​7, 118, 124, 127, 128, 130, 142, 202, 211–​12, 234 Tonson, J. (1655–​1736) 164, 234 Tyacke, N. 20, 100

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ventriloquism 120, 174–​5, 185, 217, 222 Vieth, D. M. 159–​60, 164–​5, 168, 185 Villiers, G. (1628–​87) see Buckingham, Second Duke of von Maltzahn, N. 26, 117 Wallace, J. M. (1928–​93) 24, 132–​3 Waller, E. (1606–​87) 2, 25, 51, 179, 188 Whiggism 3, 6, 9–​10, 16–​21, 80, 117, 132, 141, 144, 161, 170–​3, 175, 177, 178–​9, 188, 204, 226, 234, 242, 244 Wilding, M. 42, 79–​82, 84–​5, 88–​9, 106 William III of England (1650–​1702) 212, 215, 218, 219, 226–​30, 234, 241–​2 William of Orange (1650–​1702) see William III of England Wilmot, J. (1647–​80) see Rochester, 2nd Earl of Woodhouse, A. S. P. (1895–​1964) 57, 59–​60 Worden, B. 15, 144, 146 Zwicker, S. N. 26, 64, 146, 180, 204–​5, 216, 228, 231, 243