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History of English Literature
History of English Literature Volume 3
From the Metaphysicals to the Romantics Franco Marucci Translated from the Italian by Arthur L. Whellens
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Marucci, Franco, 1949- author. Title: From the Metaphysicals to the Romantics / Franco Marucci. Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2018] | Series: History of English literature ; Volume 3 | Translation of Dal 1625 al 1832, volume 1, tome 2 of Storia della letteratura inglese. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018011220 | ISBN 9783034322300 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: English literature--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR97 .M366 2018 | DDC 820.9--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011220 Originally published in Italian as Storia della letteratura inglese dal 1625 al 1832 – Dai metafisici ai romantici by Casa Editrice Le Lettere (2018).
Cover image: Joseph Nickolls, Pope’s Villa, Twickenham (c. 1755). Cover design by Brian Melville. ISBN 978-1-78997-176-7 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-226-9 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78874-227-6 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-228-3 (mobi) © Peter Lang AG 2018 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Franco Marucci has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. Printed in Germany
Contents List of abbreviations
xi/I
Part I
Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose
1/I
§ 1. The Stuart century
3/I
2. Literary genres up to the Restoration
19/I
3. The Spenserians
28/I
4. Wither
30/I
5. William Browne
32/I
6. Drummond of Hawthornden
34/I
7. The Fletchers
37/I
8. Suckling
40/I
9. Lovelace
44/I
10. Carew
47/I
11. Herrick
53/I
12–14. Herbert
60/I
§ 12. The quintessence of Anglican spirituality, p. 60/I. § 13. The Temple. The builder of temples, p. 66/I. § 14. A Priest to the Temple. A vicar’s prayer book, p. 70/I.
15. Herbert of Cherbury
72/I
vi/I
§§ 16–17. Crashaw
74/I
§ 16. The English apotheosis of continental Baroque, p. 74/I. § 17. Cupid desensualized, p. 78/I.
18. Vaughan
84/I
19–20. Traherne
90/I
§ 19. A foretaste of Paradise, p. 90/I. § 20. Centuries of Meditations, p. 95/I.
21. Quarles
96/I
22. King
98/I
23. Cowley
100/I
24. Cleveland
104/I
25–26. Marvell
106/I
§ 25. Cromwell’s regime. Justification and nostalgia, p. 106/I. § 26. Return to Eden, p. 115/I.
27. Waller
122/I
28. Denham
125/I
29. The homilists. Andrewes, Taylor
126/I
30. The Authorized Version
129/I
31–39. Milton
131/I
§ 31. The uncreated idiom, p. 131/I. § 32. Early works, p. 139/I. § 33. Comus, p. 145/I. § 34. The enslaved voice, p. 146/I.
vii/I
§§ 35–37. Paradise Lost (§ 35. Genesis, allegory and theology of the poem, p. 151/I. § 36. Satan’s dynamism and God’s response, p. 161. § 37. Man’s redemption, p. 163/I). § 38. Paradise Regained. The new Adam, p. 167/I. § 39. Samson Agonistes, p. 169/I.
§ 40. Minor poets up to 1660
171/I
41. Bacon
173/I
42. Burton
179/I
43. Thomas Browne
187/I
44. Other prose writers
192/I
Part II
The Restoration
197/I
45. Restoration literature
199/I
46. The re-opening of the theatres
201/I
47–51. Dryden
205/I
§ 47. The re-consecration of Stuart civilization, p. 205/I. § 48. Early poetry. Elegiac, encomiastic, celebrative, p. 215/I. § 49. The comedies, p. 217/I. § 50. Genesis, development and limits of Dryden’s heroic tragedy, p. 221 /I . § 51. Satirical and theological poems, p. 226/I.
52. Lee
232/I
53. Otway
235/I
54. Etherege
241/I
55. Wycherley
247/I
viii/I
§ 56. Congreve
256/I
57–58. Shadwell
265/I
§ 57. Farces against foreign fads, p. 265/I. § 58. The Libertine, p. 270/I.
59. Vanbrugh
275/I
60. Farquhar
280/I
61. Rochester
285/I
62. Samuel Butler
290/I
63. Oldham
296/I
64. Restoration historians. Clarendon, Burnet
299/I
65. Pepys
302/I
66. Evelyn
307/I
67. Temple
311/I
68. Hobbes, Locke
313/I
69–70. Bunyan
318/I
§ 69. The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 318/I. § 70. Other works on the contest between God and the devil, p. 323/I.
71. Early feminism
326/I
Part III
The Augustan Age
337/I
72. England from the Glorious Revolution to 1745
339/I
ix/I
§ 73. The Enlightenment in England
343/I
74–76. Pope
354/I
§ 74. A ‘re-maker’ of genius, p. 354/I. § 75. Poetic experiments up to the Homeric translations, p. 359/I. § 76. Hordes of disorder, p. 366/I.
77. Prior
371/I
78. Gay
376/I
79. Dennis
384/I
80. Arbuthnot
385/I
81. Bolingbroke
387/I
82–88. Defoe
389/I
§ 82. The growth of the novelist, p. 389/I. § 83. Robinson Crusoe. Ambition, initiative and divine approval of the entrepreneur, p. 397/I. § 84. Captain Singleton, p. 403/I. § 85. Moll Flanders. Moral balancing acts in a monetized society, p. 404/I. § 86. A Journal of the Plague Year, p. 407/I. § 87. Colonel Jack, p. 409/I. § 88. Roxana. A more polished portrait, p. 411/I.
89–95. Swift
414/I
§ 89. Anathema of the monster and pitfalls of Swiftian irony, p. 414/I. § 90. Satires against ‘enthusiasm’, p. 422/I. § 91. Paradigmatic pamphlets, p. 424/I. §§ 92–93. Gulliver’s Travels (§ 92. Travel literature revisited, p. 428/I. § 93. The enigma of Part IV, p. 434). § 94. Journal to Stella, p. 441/I. § 95. Swift the poet, p. 442/I.
96. Addison
444/I
x/I
§§ 97–98. Steele
450/I
§ 97. Apostle to the gentiles, p. 450/I. § 98. The newspaper man, p. 456/I.
99. Shaftesbury
458/I
100. Berkeley
459/I
101. Joseph Butler
463/I
102. Mandeville
465/I
103. Law
468/I
104. Other deists
469/I
105. Lady Winchilsea
470/I
106–107. Thomson
473/I
§ 106. The theophany of nature, p. 473/I. § 107. The Castle of Indolence. England aroused from sloth, p. 481/I.
108. Dyer
484/I
109. Young
487/I
110. Minor anti-Popian poets
493/I
The Index of names and Thematic index for Volume 3 can be found at the end of Book 2.
xi/II
Part IV
The Eighteenth Century Comes of Age
1/II
§ 111. Britain from 1745 to 1789
3/II
112. The eighteenth century comes of age
6/II
113–115. Goldsmith
10/II
§ 113. Patriarchal society: nostalgia and defence, p. 10/II. § 114. The Vicar of Wakefield, p. 17/II. § 115. The plays. Psychosocial mechanisms unmasked and exorcized, p. 20/II.
116–120. Richardson
25/II
§ 116. Case histories and objectives of the seduction triptych, p. 25/II. §§ 117–118. Pamela (§ 117. Letter-mad maidservant redeems rake, p. 32/II. § 118. Degenerate nobility reformed from below, p. 39/II). § 119. Clarissa, p. 43/II. § 120. Sir Charles Grandison, p. 48/II.
121–124. Fielding
53/II
§ 121. Richardson parodied, p. 53/II. § 122. Jonathan Wild, p. 62/II. § 123. Tom Jones. A justified sinner, p. 63/II. § 124. Amelia, p. 71/II.
125–126. Smollett
76/II
§ 125. Transplant and growth of the English picaresque, p. 76/ II. § 126. Humphry Clinker. Turning towards the extravaganza, p. 84/II.
127–128. Sterne
93/II
§ 127. Tristram Shandy, or concerning relations, p. 93/II. § 128. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, p. 105/II.
xii/II
§ 129. Gray
112/II
130. William Collins
121/II
131. Churchill
126/II
132–133. Johnson
128/II
§ 132. Rise and fall of the artist as creator, p. 128/II. § 133. The three monuments to knowledge, p. 136/II.
134. Boswell
143/II
135. Wilkes, Junius
145/II
136. Letter-writers
147/II
137. Hume
150/II
138. Robertson
153/II
139. Gibbon
154/II
140. Mid-eighteenth-century drama
158/II
141. Sheridan
162/II
142. Walpole
168/II
143. Radcliffe
175/II
144. Beckford
182/II
145. Other exponents of the novel of terror
186/II
xiii/II
146. Burke
193/II
§ 147. Macpherson
197/II
148. Percy and the Reliques of English Poetry
200/II
149. Chatterton
202/II
150. Cowper
205/II
151. Smart
211/II
152. Crabbe
213/II
153. Wesley and Methodism
218/II
154. The Scottish awakening
219/II
155. Hogg
222/II
156. Mackenzie
227/II
Part V
Romanticism229/II 157. From the Napoleonic wars to the Age of Equipoise
231/II
158. English Romanticism
236/II
159. Burney
246/II
160–165. Austen
252/II
xiv/II § 160. Janeites and Austenophobes, p. 252. § 161. Gothic vaccination, p. 259/II. § 162. Mansfield Park. A thoughtful diagnosis of modern youth, p. 266/II. § 163. Emma. The masochism of match-making, p. 270/II. § 164. Persuasion, p. 272/II. § 165. Juvenilia and fragments, p. 273/II.
§ 166. Edgeworth
275/II
167. Galt
280/II
168. Other late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury novelists
283/II
169. Paine
287/II
170. Godwin
288/II
171. Mary Wollstonecraft
293/II
172. Burns
296/II
173–177. Blake
304/II
§ 173. The first English multi-media artist, p. 304/II. § 174. Biography and intellectual growth, p. 312/II. § 175. The contrary states of the human soul, p. 319/II. § 176. The Satanic verses, p. 323/II. § 177. The Prophetic Books, p. 329/II.
178–182. Wordsworth § 178. The dialogue of the soul with itself in the presence of nature, p. 333/II. § 179. The ‘loco-descriptive poems’, p. 341/II. § 180. Lyrical Ballads, p. 342/II. § 181. The major phase, p. 347/II. § 182. The Prelude, p. 352/II.
333/II
xv/II
183–188. Coleridge
357/II
§ 183. From the epistemic context to symbolic recreation, p. 357/II. § 184. Conversation pieces, p. 363/II. §§ 185–187. The demonic triptych (§ 185. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, p. 366/II. § 186. Kubla Khan, p. 372/II. § 187. Christabel, p. 375/ II). § 188. Biographia Literaria and Shakespearean criticism, p. 377/II.
§§ 189–194. Shelley
382/II
§ 189. Poetry to break the chains of the world, p. 382/II. § 190. Action and introspection in the early Shelley, p. 391/II. § 191. Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, p. 396/II. § 192. Other ‘Italian’ poems, p. 401/II. § 193. The Triumph of Life. A critical and phantasmagoric diagnosis of the Enlightenment, p. 407/II. § 194/II. A Defence of Poetry, p. 410/II.
195–199. Keats
413/II
§ 195. The uncertain plenitude of myth, p. 413/II. § 196. Endymion and other oneiric rhapsodies, p. 422/II. § 197. The two Hyperions, p. 430/II. § 198. Poems of death-bearing and life-bringing love, p. 432/II. § 199. The great odes, p. 437/II.
200–205. Byron
445/II
§ 200. Phases and forms of Byron’s self-fashioning, p. 445. § 201. The anathema of Romanticism, p. 453/II. § 202. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The grand tour of an eccentric Englishman, p. 457. § 203. Oriental tales, p. 460/II. § 204. Disputes and dilemmas in the dramas, p. 465/II. § 205. Don Juan. Mimesis and estrangement of Donjuanism, p. 471/II.
206–211. Scott
481/II
xvi/II § 206. Range and critical fortunes of Scott’s fiction, p. 481/II. § 207. The poetry, p. 490/II. §§ 208–209. The Scottish historical novels (§ 208. The founding trilogy, p. 493/II. § 209. The last Jacobite, p. 501/ II.). § 210. Ivanhoe, p. 508/II. § 211. The last phase, p. 512.
212. Mary Shelley
522/II
213. Polidori
527/II
214. Southey
529/II
§ 215. Landor
536/II
216. Campbell
543/II
217. Rogers
545/II
218. Moore
546/II
219. Clare
550/II
220. Beddoes, Darley
554/II
221. Keble
557/II
222. Hemans, L. E. L.
559/II
223. Humorous poets
564/II
224. Lamb
567/II
225. De Quincey
576/II
226. Hazlitt
583/II
xvii/II
227. Smith
589/II
228. Hunt
589/II
229. Peacock
596/II
230. Cobbett
602/II
231. Romantic drama
604/II
Index of names
607/II
Thematic index
635/II
Abbreviations W. Allen, The English Novel, Harmondsworth 1991 (1st edn London 1954). ASH M. Ashley, England in the Seventeenth Century (1603–1714), Harmondsworth 1952. BAUGH A Literary History of England, ed. A. C. Baugh, 4 vols, London 1967. CHI The Cambridge History of English Literature, 14 vols, Cambridge 1907, repr. 1949. CLA M. Praz, Cronache letterarie anglosassoni, 4 vols, Roma 1951 and 1966. CRHE The Critical Heritage, anthologies of criticism on single authors, with editors, and date and place of publication as stated in the bibliographies. DAI D. Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, 2 vols, New York 1960. DEA S. Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature, London 1986. DEE B. Dobrée, The Early Eighteenth Century 1700–1740: Swift, Defoe, and Pope, vol. VII of The Oxford History of English Literature, ed. F. P. Wilson and B. Dobrée, Oxford 1990 (1st edn 1959). ESE T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, London 1963 (1st edn 1932). GGM S. M. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, New Haven, CT and London 1984. GSM H. J. C. Grierson and J. C. Smith, A Critical History of English Poetry, London 1956. HWP B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London 1964 (1st edn 1946). IDM F. Marucci, L’inchiostro del mago. Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento, Pisa 2009. IZZ C. Izzo, Storia della letteratura inglese, 2 vols, Milano 1961, 1963. AEN
xx/I Abbreviations
JEL JLI LAM MAR MIT MVO OCE PGU PHE PLE PLU PMI PMLA PRA PSL REL SAI
I. Jack, English Literature 1815–1832, vol. X of The Oxford History of English Literature, ed. F. P. Wilson and B. Dobrée, Oxford 1963. S. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. A. Waugh, 2 vols, London 1979. G. Tomasi di Lampedusa, Letteratura inglese, 2 vols, Milano 1990–1991. Storia della civiltà letteraria inglese, ed. F. Marenco, 4 vols, Torino 1996. L. Mittner, Storia della letteratura tedesca, 3 vols in 4 tomes, Torino 1964–1977. F. Marucci, ‘A Victorian Oxymoron: The “Mastering” and “Merciful God”’, in Hopkins: Tradition and Innovation, ed. P. Bottalla, G. Marra and F. Marucci, Ravenna 1991, 191–206. G. Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus, 4 vols, Harmondsworth 1970. The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. B. Ford, 7 vols, Harmondsworth 1968. M. Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, Eng. trans., London 1969 (1st Italian edn Firenze 1952). M. Pagnini, Letteratura e ermeneutica, Firenze 2002. J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century, Harmondsworth 1950. M. Praz, Machiavelli in Inghilterra e altri saggi sui rapporti letterari anglo-italiani, Firenze 1962. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. M. Praz, The Romantic Agony, Eng. trans., London 1956 (1st Italian edn Firenze 1930). M. Praz, Storia della letteratura inglese, Firenze 1968. W. L. Renwick, English Literature 1789–1815, vol. IX of The Oxford History of English Literature, ed. F. P. Wilson and B. Dobrée, Oxford 1976 (1st edn 1963). G. Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature, London 1948 (1st edn 1898).
xxi/I
Abbreviations
SDR SEC SEL SES SSI TAI TCR TLS WATT WHM
G. Sertoli, I due Robinson e altri saggi sulla letteratura inglese del Settecento, Genova 2014. J. Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700–1789, London 1986. J. Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century, vol. VIII of The Oxford History of English Literature, ed. B. Dobrée and N. Davis, Oxford 1969. J. L. Styan, The English Stage: A History of Drama and Performance, Cambridge 1996. M. Praz, Studi e svaghi inglesi, 2 vols, Milano 1983 (1st edn 1937). H. A. Taine, History of English Literature, Eng. trans., 4 vols, London 1920 (1st French edn 1864). V. Woolf, The Common Reader, First Series, Harmondsworth 1938 (1st edn London 1925), Second Series, London 1935 (1st edn London 1932). The Times Literary Supplement. I. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Harmondsworth 1977 (1st edn London 1957). R. Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950, 8 vols, New Haven, CT 1955–1992.
Volumes of the present work will be cited as follows: Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 6 Volume 7 Volume 8
F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 1, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 2, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 4, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 5, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 6, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 7, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 8, Oxford 2019.
Note. Except for the above abbreviations, full publication information of cited works will be found in the bibliography for each author.
Part I
Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose
§ 1. The Stuart century The seventeenth century – in England and more in general in Europe – shows clearly, if indeed proof were needed, that political, civil, cultural, and, consequently, literary history, is inextricably tied up with religion, which in turn becomes a ‘political subject’.1 The key to understanding aright the events of the century is to be found in the clash of confessional positions, in differing versions of the Christian life, and even in the debate on the importance of ritual and the hierarchical structure of the Church; in other words, in the acceptance or refusal of religion as the foundation of the state. This is also the century in which England becomes a parliamentary monarchy, or rather, more parliamentary, and produces a judicial system and an evolutionary process of decentralization which inverts the arrogant absolutism of the continental courts. The seeds of two-party politics are sown, and the controversy over the divine right of kings fades into the distance.2 From this time on, the English political system will become an exportable model championed by her libertarian thinkers. In 1660 and in 1685, a return to the past was a tangible threat, but by then the reins of powers were firmly in the hands of Parliament, and the king was forced to bow to its commands. 2. During the century, as may be seen in a statistical table drawn up in 1688 by the citizen Gregory King, the population of England had reached five and a half million even taking into account the plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London the following year (among the consequences of the Great Fire were innovative building norms, the elimination of straw, replaced by carpets as a covering for floors, and the extensive use of bricks for walls). Demographic increase was limited by emigration; throughout the century colonization acted as a safety valve against Dissenters. Patriotic
1
2
Puritanism began as a religious movement but soon took on party political identity: the congregations of Bible readings in chapels were led by leaders of the elite ‘like Communist Party cells in the twentieth century’ (138 of L. Stone’s book, quoted below in n. 8). The last advocate of divine right after the Restoration was Sir Robert Filmer (1588– 1653) in Patriarcha, published posthumously in 1680. It was rebutted by Algernon Sidney (1622–1683) and, above all, by Hobbes (§ 68.1 and ASH, 162–3).
4/I Part I Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose
historians played down the suffering of those who embarked upon the long journey to America: any who did not feel at their ease in the home country could always find fame and fortune in the colonies, and could pray whatever way they liked, protected by the English flag. Quite apart from the religious motivation – Puritan proselytism – the Dissenters sailed in the hope of finding affordable land and opportunities for employment. The colonists indeed quickly exported models of local self-government, thus developing a federal system with ever weaker ties with the mother country. In the course of the century the English seized colonies from Spain and the Low Countries, and trade with the Indies made it necessary to increase the size of the merchant fleet. Thanks to the abolition of monopolies, spices were imported, along with silk, porcelain, tea and coffee, which changed the way of living of the middle classes. Another favourite theme of the patriotic historian was social responsibility. A sort of direct chain of transmission connected the King’s Privy Council in London with local authorities, whose job it was to look after the poor and the unemployed. This constituted a kind of welfare state ante litteram, which pre-empted and eliminated the possible causes justifying a real revolution, so that when a Glorious Rebellion did come it was a watered down version of what was to take place in France a century later. A comparison is often made between the Wars of the Roses and the Civil War, but such a parallel is misleading: the latter was fought for reasons that were less self-serving and materialistic, and more idealistic. 3. James I (1601–1625), who for a good half of his life sat on the throne of Scotland, proved to be a scholar king second only to Alfred the Great. As a ruler he was precociously Machiavellian. The son of Mary Stuart and her second husband, Lord Darnley, he was tutored by the classicist Buchanan, and by the time he was twenty-two had written and published a treatise on poetry.3 In 1597 he published Demonologie and in 1604 A Counterblaste to Tobacco (anonymously). His conception of the divine right of kings was put forward in two books published before the end of the century. James, who at the age of twelve laid claim to the throne of Scotland, developed a 3
Which deserves to be studied and placed alongside the various English treatises of aesthetics published at the end of the sixteenth century.
§ 1. The Stuart century
5/I
strategy of not making enemies; he stood aloof, equidistant from Catholics (even when conspiracies were discovered, as in 1589) and from Presbyterians, opting, however, for the latter when Catholic power became a threat. It is strange, therefore, that a king so precociously skilled and experienced – though ruler only, at the time, of a ‘minor’ country like Scotland – should find himself not up to the task of ruling England.4 The tug of war between absolutism and democracy began when James ceased to convene Parliament and relied more and more on the adventurer George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.5 Denied funds by Parliament, he borrowed heavily, doubling the royal debt, and was compelled, in the end, with disastrous results, to resort to dubious stratagems, like the selling of monopolies. These same financial straits caused him to leave the German Puritans to their fate, thus arousing suspicions of harbouring Catholic sympathies. Again for reasons of expediency, he pandered to Spain by having Ralegh executed. Ralegh had fallen into a trap laid by the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, in an affair that caused a stir and provided the raw material for a play by Middleton.6 James had managed to silence the Scottish assemblies, but was unable to place the English Parliament under similar restraint. This was partly because of his weakness for his favourites. His ecclesiastical policy was summed up in the motto: ‘No bishop, no king’. Towards the Puritans he assumed a position of defiance but never brought them to heel. He harried
4 5 6
For his favouritism towards fellow Scots while he was king of England, see what happened to the playwright Marston (Volume 1, § 107.1 n. 12). Buckingham replaced Robert Carr, Duke of Somerset, as favourite when the latter became embroiled in indiscreet marital affairs. Volume 1, § 136. It was Gondomar who plotted for the king’s son, the future Charles II, to marry the Infanta of Spain. Parliament protested, but nonetheless Charles travelled to Madrid in 1623 to decide whether or not to contract the marriage. Nothing came of it. The ‘Overbury affair’ was a scandal with far-reaching consequences: Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, divorced from her husband, Robert Devereux, in order to marry Robert Carr, on the grounds that the marriage had not been consummated; a panel of ladies was formed to carry out a gynaecological examination (it is possible that some other woman took the place of the Countess). In 1616 Thomas Overbury, who had opposed the divorce, was murdered; the newlyweds were tried and found guilty, but subsequently pardoned by the king.
6/I Part I Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose
them into exile or simply had them eliminated. As to the Catholics, he fined and persecuted them from the very start of his reign. The so-called Gunpowder Plot, organized by the Jesuits, discovered and neutralized in 1605, was a result of this repressive anti-Catholic policy. 4. Charles I, second son of James I, was a late child, and anything but precocious in learning to walk. He became an excellent horseman, but was plagued by a stammer throughout his life. He loved Italian painting and was a patron of the arts. A devoted husband, he became the subject of John Gauden’s Eikon Basilike, a text which was said to be the king’s memorial in articulo mortis, and helped to create the reputation of Charles the martyr. Milton’s pamphlet, Eikonoklastes, is a violent riposte to Gauden’s moving portrait of the dead king.7 Charles’s wife outlived him, and his sons were to become Charles II and James II. His dynasty covers the whole of the seventeenth century, and beyond, if we consider that, after 1688 and for three more decades, the Old Pretender, James III, wandered through the courts of Europe. As I mentioned, according to his father’s plans, Charles was to marry the Infanta of Spain. Instead, he married the Catholic Henrietta Maria, daughter of the King of France, Louis XIII, with the understanding of a solemn promise that Charles would grant English Catholics freedom of worship. Friendly relations between France and England soon faltered because Charles refused to help the French subdue the Huguenot uprisings. As if this were not enough, England suffered a setback in the Thirty Years War because the Elector Frederick (who had married the king’s sister, Elizabeth) was unable to retake the Palatinate. The Cadiz expedition against Spain in 1625 also met with failure, making the final result three defeats out of three endeavours. After the murder of the King’s favourite, Buckingham, in 1628, Parliament was not recalled for another eleven years, during which the king ruled as an absolute monarch, levying ever increasing taxes on the wealthier of his subjects in order to maintain his fleet. This period is in fact referred to as ‘the eleven years of tyranny’. However, it is also true that 1628 saw the approval of a Petition of Rights which provided guarantees
7
§ 34.2.
§ 1. The Stuart century
7/I
against arbitrary imprisonment and the raising of taxes without the consent of Parliament. 5. ‘The causes of the Civil War’ is the title and the subject of a book by Lawrence Stone,8 who challenges the theory that the spark that lit the fire was the economic rise of the gentry throughout the century. He sees the root cause, instead, in the appearance of a political subject – Puritanism – which sought and found representation in the House of Commons, and the tangible and irreversible result of which was religious tolerance. By the end of this process, Puritanism had been assimilated and metabolized, and could no longer be expunged. According to Stone, there are six historical models of revolution, empirically reconstructed, from which to choose in order to identify and classify the English Civil War: of these, the ‘conspiratorial coup d’état’ seems the closest match. In reality, all six types are included by the Solomonic scholar in what is a kind of mixed regime model. Stone adds that the Civil War was a revolution that looked back to golden ages or similar, as well as forward, to the future. For him, everything comes together, because there are, as in every revolution, ‘pre-conditions’ and ‘detonators’. The causes are to be sought in the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth: absolutism and the draining of the Exchequer to finance the war against France – so that the reign of James may be seen as chaos skilfully kept under control (the distant pre-condition) –; the nearer prerequisite was Elizabeth’s wait and see policy, made worse by her successors on the throne. Concrete steps leading to the Civil War, the detonators, can be identified in the series of repressive measures taken by Charles against both Puritans and Presbyterians. In 1639 Scotland reacted against blatant attempts to depuritanize her and to impose the Laudian Prayer Book (Archbishop Laud’s intent was to ‘re-Catholicize’ the Anglican Church on a model preceding the errors of Rome) by issuing the Covenant, a national pact against the English king and in favour of religious freedom and the laws of Scotland. In the same year, the English border garrison had been harried. The king summoned the governor of Ireland, Wentworth – celebrated 200 years later in a play by Browning – to lead a punitive expedition against the
8
L. Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642, London 1972.
8/I Part I Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose
Scots.9 But the financial requests made to the reconvened Parliament could not be met and the house was dissolved, becoming known as the ‘Short Parliament’. A second war against the Scots was inevitable and, owing to inadequate funding, was lost. The reconvened Parliament, traditionally known as the ‘Long Parliament’, had the upper hand, thanks to the guidance of the Puritan veteran, John Pym. By the summer of 1640 a silent revolution was under way and Parliament was largely victorious in bills discussed and approved, amongst which were: the obligation to summon Parliament every three years; the abolition of the Prerogative Courts; taxes to be levied only with the consent of Parliament. The Great Remonstrance of 1641, which formalized these successes, was passed in the House with a majority of only nine votes (among the nays was the poet, Waller, convinced that the reform was a step towards revolution, though Parliament included a number of moderate Episcopalians). The reaction of the king was a botched attempt to arrest five members of the house. The Queen saw the direction events were taking and left for Paris, where she subsequently was to take under her protective wing a number of Catholic or moderately Protestant poets. Furthermore, the Court was transferred to York (summer of 1642). The two parties which were to join combat in the war that was about to break out were called, from then on, ‘Cavaliers’ (royalists) and ‘Roundheads’ (Puritan parliamentarians); in other words, the nobility who were loyal to the king against the wealthy merchant class. This clear-cut opposition soon crumbled: sects appeared which were even more radical than the Puritans,10 overtaken in reforming zeal by Congregationalists and Independents, who demanded complete freedom from the Church of England and autonomy for local religious communities. On a national scale, an area comprising the North, West and Midlands, home of the landed gentry, was a royalist stronghold; the South, East and London were mercantile and parliamentarian. Generally speaking, the Puritan side had the support of those involved in trade and living in economically dynamic 9 10
Papers taken from Wentworth revealed plans and manoeuvres to land an Irish army to crush the Scottish rebels; with Laud, the Irish governor was imprisoned in the Tower, where both were executed in 1641 and 1645. For a complete list see ASH, 28ff.
§ 1. The Stuart century
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areas, as well as sea ports and manufacturing districts with a burgeoning network of connections between the smallholder and the merchant class. The countryside was largely royalist, as were market towns with no overseas connections. 6. Oliver Cromwell, a descendant of Henry VIII’s chief minister, was born in Huntington near Cambridge, into a family of the well-to-do gentry. He was a mediocre student of Latin, but excelled at sports from an early age. He inherited property and entered Parliament. Fiercely anti-Papist already in 1628, he stood up for his fellow citizens against abuses of power and petitioned in favour of the inhabitants of his native Fenlands. Around 1636, he went through a religious crisis and believed himself to be singled out as the secular arm of God’s design for England, which consisted principally in the ‘root and branch’ abolition of episcopacy. In January 1642 he organized a coup aimed at taking control of the army and key military infrastructures. Immediately afterwards, he formed a parliamentary army, choosing its commanders with great care and imposing iron discipline on the cadres. This was Cromwell’s reaction to the creation of an army by Charles, who in the meantime had repaired to Oxford. The name of ‘Ironsides’ was given to Cromwell’s soldiers by Prince Rupert, the royalist general whose troops were repeatedly routed in the field. At this point, enter at Cromwell’s side the famous General (or Lieutenant) Fairfax of Hull, or, more precisely, of Appleton House, the subject of several poems by Marvell.11 After the victorious battle of Marston Moor in 1644, during which Cromwell was wounded, the final blow to the king was delayed owing to the indecision of the Earl of Manchester, who in a famous speech pronounced that ‘the king was the king’. This defeatism was rejected by Cromwell, a maximalist and enemy to compromise, ready to criticize Parliament for withholding funds for the army, whose troops were underpaid (indeed, Parliament ordered the dissolution of the Army). With an act of insubordination, Cromwell proceeded to bring the Civil War to an end, defeating the royalist Scots and seizing the king, who was executed on 30 January 1649. By this time, however, Cromwell’s army had given birth to a number of fringe
11
§ 25.3.
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groups – such as the Levellers and the Independents – who were to have brief significant repercussions on the political scenario. In 1647 a People’s Agreement was put forward on the initiative of agitators inside the army demanding payment of back pay, indemnities and sundry guarantees, and above all, a republican constitution, universal suffrage, freedom of worship, equality before the law and abolition of monopolies. Faced by the refusal of Parliament, the army at first mutinied, then increased the stakes, making demands that fell just short of blackmail. In play was the redistribution of seats on the basis of the counties’ taxable income, and increased levels of taxation for those counties with the greatest number of parliamentary seats. So there threatened to be an alliance between the agitators of the army and the radical elements of London. Fairfax restored order and calmed the agitators with promises. On this occasion the moderate gentry was already moving towards the king, fearing a widespread uprising if the radicals and agitators were to prevail. Ordinary people, on their side, protested against the current crisis and invoked honest government. In fact, they and the gentry formed a common front in calling for a return to law and order and the status quo, whilst at the same time denouncing the repressiveness of the Puritan regime. Alongside the Puritans, Independents and Baptists could be heard the clamour of the Fifth Monarchists who believed human history had reached the fourth of the five ages predicted in the Book of Daniel, the age of the Antichrist of Roman Catholicism. In their different ways all these separatist and radical groups were advocates of a ‘government of saints and the righteous’. But the coalition between ordinary soldiers and the Levellers aimed at radicalizing the People’s Agreement into a democratic constitution could not last, in part because some groups were willing to make do with the partial victories they had achieved, unlike other more extreme movements.12 7. In 1647 Cromwell found himself confronted by two enemies: the king, who had escaped and taken refuge on the Isle of Wight, promised 12
Some writers (Lilburne, Walwyn, Overton, Winstanley) did in fact put forward ideas not far from communism (cf. ASH, 110–12), or, rather, ‘Christian socialism’, which was to come back into fashion among the Victorians. Many of the above became Quakers.
§ 1. The Stuart century
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the Scots Presbyterianism for three years in exchange for their support. When the war resumed in 1648, the Scots were blocked on their way to London. A ‘purge’, which led to the expulsion from Parliament of those members who intended to come to terms with the king, was decided upon by the cadres of the army; the officer who proposed the purge happened to be called Pride. The king’s execution, while not decided by Cromwell, was approved in writing by him. Stories abounded of him wandering about in disguise at night, muttering, like some character out of Shakespeare, that ‘cursed necessity was the cause’. In reality, Cromwell, though at first intending to save the monarchy, soon became convinced that the king had to die. The birth of the Commonwealth entailed ipso facto the abolition of the House of Lords besides the monarchy itself, leaving a Parliament reduced to 90 members (irreverently referred to as the ‘Rump’), practically an oligarchy. With the end of the civil wars in 1652 came the need to restore the legal and ecclesiastical spheres. A Parliament subsequently named ‘Barebones’, instated in July 1653, lasted barely long enough to approve Cromwell’s election as Protector, an appointment welcomed by Milton but deplored by the Fifth Monarchists. Levellers and New Levellers, who set up forms of kolkhoz in Surrey, were wiped out; foreign courts sniffed suspiciously; Charles II was biding his time; royalist Ireland was rebelling, and Scotland was horrified by the treatment meted out to Presbyterians in an army dominated by Independents, and secretly considered the possibility of reaching an advantageous agreement with the king. After defeating the Irish in August 1649 (the massacre of Drogheda), Cromwell returned home to the praise of Marvell, whose protector, Fairfax, however, gave up his command of the troops when Cromwell marched against the Scots, who had indeed made a pact with the king to the effect that, if reinstated, he would allow the clauses of the Covenant. The Scots were defeated, and Charles forced to flee in September 1651. In the summer of the following year Cromwell declared war on the Dutch with a Navigation Act which imposed restrictions on the entry of Dutch goods into England. On the home front the army in disarray invoked either an oligarchic government of ‘saints’ or a reformed Parliament. In April 1653 an exasperated Cromwell dissolved the ‘Rump’ and became from then on sole dictator of republican England. Yet he was a dictator who regulated ecclesiastical appointments,
12/I Part I Jacobean, Caroline and Republican Poetry and Prose
levied taxes, formally kept Catholics under close scrutiny without persecuting them, and summoned and dissolved other parliaments. He also selected as regional commanders men of proven and boundless loyalty. Death took him (1658) when his star was beginning to fade. In 1654 he had survived an attack on his life, and refused the new Parliament’s offer of the royal crown; an expedition against the Spaniards in the Caribbean was largely unsuccessful. In a matter of a few years he had become a cynical and Machiavellian dictator; of the cheering crowd he would say, echoing Shakespeare, ‘these very persons would shout as much if you (General Lambert) and I were going to be hanged’.13 Overall, Cromwell was above all one of the greatest military leaders of all time, and, according to the English, second only to Marlborough or Wellington. His overriding aim was to promote the Protestant cause in Europe and to favour English colonists wherever they went. He may therefore be seen as the first conscious imperialist, and responsible for restoring England’s prestige among the European powers. His tolerant version of Puritanism, too, should be seen in a new light, though the English tend to overstate his much trumpeted freedom of conscience, from which only Catholics were excluded! He was a lodestar for Marvell and Milton and became an inspiration for future writers, not only English, in poetry, the novel and the theatre. Contemporary historians and those immediately following were divided in their judgement according to their religious and political beliefs. In the eighteenth century he was execrated by Whigs and Tories alike. Carlyle made him the model of his heroic, Romantic conception of history, which justified even massacre in the name of palingenetic ideals and aims. The repercussions of Cromwell’s rule on the cultural life of the nation are inescapable: not only did the Puritans call a complete halt to all theatrical performances, deemed ‘frivolous’, but at Oxford and Cambridge they presented the dons with an ultimatum: either they signed the Covenant which asserted the supreme authority of Parliament and limited the rights of the king, or they would be expelled. The objective was the puritanization of the nation’s culture (compare the ‘fascistizzazione’ of the state in Italy in 1925). Many teachers
13
ASH, 93.
§ 1. The Stuart century
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pre-empted the expected blow and escaped, first to royalist Oxford, then to France in the wake of the Queen, Henrietta Maria, who was already safely installed in Paris, where she extended her protection to those caught up in this temporary diaspora. From 1640 to 1660 literature became particularly militant, with writers becoming secretaries or government officials, either collaborating with the new regime, like Marvell and Milton, or choosing exile with the royalists. Cowley was the first to write a contemporary poem on the Civil War, and then to plan, begin but then abandon his Davideis, after taking from the Bible a ‘type’ of history then unfolding, the deadly quarrel between David and Saul, the latter representing Cromwell and inspired by the figure of Satan in the first diabolic council. 8. At the death of Cromwell, his son Richard proved to be incapable of taking on the role of Protector; the army was against him, and put forward their own candidate, an insignificant figure. Richard ended up by fleeing to France, where he lived under an alias (though he died in England in 1712). But why did Parliament, inexplicably, invite Charles II to return? Because it was feared that radicalism would rear its head again and haunt the country; because discord broke out between the two generals of the army, resulting in the victory of the one representing the moderate Presbyterian faction which favoured a monarchy that was willing to come to terms; and because the army’s political role was no longer predominant. In 1661, on the anniversary of the beheading of Charles I, the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw (his right hand men) were disinterred; their severed heads were displayed in front of Westminster Hall. Charles II was recalled, on the assurance (the Declaration of Breda) that he would pay salaries and arrears to the army, allow freedom of conscience, and regulate the selling and purchase of land14 – in order to restore not a personal monarchy but a parliamentary one. The King’s Council was made up of officials of the former Protectorate. The Scottish and Irish Parliaments were restored, many post-1642 laws were repealed, the bishops returned to their sees from abroad with greater powers than before, and the Laudian Book of 14 Not all royalist landowners were compensated for land bought by the Puritans at ridiculously low prices; these measures created new Whig landowners but made a lot of Tories unhappy.
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Prayer was enforced, albeit with slight regional modifications. With a certain amount of discretion Charles chivvied local authorities to ensure their support for him, to control the farther-flung parts of the country and to influence the choice of members of Parliament. In other words, he broke the chain that Elizabeth had forged to link the Privy Council with local councils and justices of the peace. Persecuted Dissenters found a new institutional identity in the Whigs, while the Tories stood for the national status of the Anglican Church.15 The Whig party arose from a strange mixture of Puritanism and neo-rationalism. We shall see more clearly in the following section how the Royal Society gave rise to a huge amount of scientific research, and contributed to the separation of science from religion. On the cultural plane, for the first time in twenty years the theatres re-opened, but with significant functional changes.16 On a sociological level, consumers welcomed new goods on the English market, the production in series began of clothes and objects, local arts and crafts grew apace, the first regular coach service revolutionized travel within the kingdom. A townbased bourgeoisie, often called a ‘pseudo-nobility’, gained strength, creating relationships with the landed aristocracy, often becoming its partner: vicars, doctors, lawyers, administrators, as well as army and naval officers. The first weekly newspaper was published, the work of John Houghton and Roger L’Estrange, which advertised books, auctions, inventions and miscellaneous news. 9. Charles II, tall and dark-skinned, was an athlete, horseman, hunter, as well as an affable and incorrigible libertine, who appropriately fathered
15
16
The use of these ideological and political labels became stabilized when the Parliament of James II split in two, the ‘Abhorrers’ siding with James and the ‘Petitioners’ against him. Etymologically the name ‘tories’ may be traced back to ‘Irish bandits’ who supported the landed aristocracy and the royal prerogative and who were distinguished by non-resistance to the Crown. The term ‘whigs’, instead, goes back to ‘Scottish peasants’, who supported the progressive mercantile class, were against royal absolutism and favourable to religious tolerance. More precisely, ‘whig’ is a shortened form of ‘whiggamore’, supporters of the Presbyterian cause in Scotland, and averse to the handing over of the crown to James II. § 46.1.
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a number of illegitimate children but none within wedlock. Known as the ‘merry monarch’, he was indeed popular and well-loved by his subjects; the care-free pleasure-seeking atmosphere of his reign, which owed much to the court of Louis XIV, was only temporarily disturbed by two national disasters: the plague of 1665 (68,000 dead in London in one year) and the Great Fire of London a year later (eighty-four churches destroyed, amongst which St Paul’s, subsequently rebuilt by Wren). Religious controversy was far from dead, although Charles did his best to maintain the balance between opposing forces. He promised to pardon the Puritans as soon as he came to power in 1660, but in fact resumed the persecution of Dissenters; this was entirely logical, since the Parliament was royalist. In spite of his Catholic leanings, Charles ratified laws against religious freedom, and made it necessary to belong to the Anglican Church in order to obtain public office. The opportunity was missed to turn England into a religiously tolerant nation, which would have made her stronger, not weaker. The fault lay both with the Anglicans and the intransigent Puritans. His foreign policy, too, was confused and contradictory. His need of money led him to take sides with France; he declared war on the Low Countries in 1665–1667 and 1672–1674, the motivation being the usual trade disputes and the American colonies, without winning either time (also because, as Dryden remarked, the outcomes of war were dependent on the two national disasters already mentioned). In 1667 Dutch vessels had sailed up the Thames creating panic until peace was declared. After the fall of Clarendon, the despicable social-climber Buckingham formed a ministry together with four other noblemen, whose initials, together with his, spelled the word ‘Cabal’. The Cabal ministry was forced to resign in 1674 after the third Anglo-Dutch war. Charles then formed an alliance with Sweden and the Low Countries in order to hinder French activity in Holland, while, shortly after, signing an agreement with Louis XIV to reinstate Catholicism in England as state religion. By 1674 Charles’s Parliament flaunted pugnaciously republican tendencies while his court oozed Catholicism from every pore. Some small colonial gain had been made at the expense of the Low Countries, but this, together with the fruits of the alliance with France in terms of subsidies, was insufficient payback for the king’s adventurous policies. Further obstacles were raised by the new minister, Danby, and Parliament. A hugely important
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event was the marriage of Mary, daughter of the king’s brother, James, to William of Orange.17 Charles died a Catholic in 1680, proof of the victory of France, just after the discovery of yet another alleged Papist plot (Titus Oates), which sent a shiver through the nation, and led to purges and executions of Catholics, as well as to the rise of Shaftesbury and Buckingham, who presented to Parliament the Exclusion Bill (with special reference to the future James II), which is the central theme of Dryden’s famous satire.18 The last years of his reign were marked by bitter disputes between the two parties, for and against the king, by another far-fetched plot to assassinate him, and by new revolutionary, Cromwellian conspiracies. 10. James II, unlike his brother, was haughty, pedantic, attached to etiquette, and just as libertine though less discerning. Before his accession he had married the daughter of Clarendon. The second openly Catholic monarch of England (the first being ‘Bloody Mary’), he had a distinguished career as an officer in both the French and Spanish armies, and, after the Restoration, reformed and governed the navy in attacks against the Low Countries. He converted secretly to Catholicism in 1671, and persuaded his wife to do the same, but his two daughters, Mary and Anne, were raised as Protestants. On the death of his first wife, he married the Catholic Princess Maria of Modena. He personally summoned the priest who administered extreme unction to his dying brother. All this induced the Protestants to demand his exclusion from the throne. Once king, he bullied a weak Parliament into handing over the money they had denied his brother. He punished severely those who took part in two failed rebellions (one led by the illegitimate son of Charles II, Monmouth, who was executed). But he lost the favour of his people by showing quite clearly his intention to bring back Catholicism as the state religion: key roles in the army, navy
17
18
ASH, 138–9, opines that this was a slap in the face of France, as Charles II, after all, had gained a very small subsidy from Louis XIV compared to his considerable needs, and that he aspired to become Europe’s arbiter. On the contrary, European diplomatic transactions in 1677 caused a reduction of British prestige and spread in the nation, once again, the fear that a form of Catholic despotism might be introduced. § 51.2. One of the better laws passed concerned legal guarantees, usually known as Habeas Corpus.
§ 1. The Stuart century
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and judiciary were already occupied by Catholics. Parliamentary activity, now reduced to a relationship between the king’s plenipotentiary and Parliament, gradually ground to a halt. Parliament’s deficiencies were made up for by the scrupulous work of local authorities. The point of no return was reached when James’s pro-Catholic policies were no longer tolerable, and it was clear that the king had lost the support of the country. The Anglicans reached out to William of Orange.19 In February 1689, the Whigs scored an important point: the office of the king was to be elective, not by divine right, which meant that the king could be deposed if he ruled badly. The Clarendon Code was abrogated, and measures were approved with guaranteed greater, if not yet total, religious freedom. This led to discontent in some quarters (seven bishops refused to swear allegiance to James).20 It is only slightly paradoxical that the Parliament’s decision to depose James and crown William was approved by the Pope, Innocent XI, since the choice of William meant that England would be removed from the French sphere of influence. 11. Considered objectively, the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 is a bundle of inexplicable contradictions: the English people had accepted an openly Catholic king a few years after the end of a civil war against what might be called ‘creeping Catholicism’; a Catholic king married his Protestant daughter to a Protestant, and the daughter of this same king took up arms against her father and dethroned him. Yet no major playwright took
19
France was spoiling for war and threatened the Low Countries, which obviously feared the intervention of England. In January 1688, six English regiments were withdrawn from Holland, leaving her much weaker. The final straw was the unexpected birth of an heir to the throne. A letter urging the invasion of England was delivered to William by an admiral disguised as a deckhand. Hasty concessions made by the English king served no purpose, and on 5 November 1688, the Dutch fleet, joined by English and Scottish exiles, landed in Torbay, meeting no resistance. William was determined to return England to the Protestant fold and ensure the right of succession of his wife, Mary. 20 Non-jurors: bishops led by Sancroft, who refused to violate the oath of allegiance made to James II.
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up this eminently theatrical plot.21 James II aged rapidly, became overtly pious, and set up his court in exile. Any hopes he may have had of a return to power were shattered by the peace of Ryswick (1697), with which Louis XIV recognized the legitimacy of William as king of England. The Old Pretender, James III, survived many years, causing ever-decreasing ripples in the pool of early eighteenth-century English politics. Interest in the ‘romantic’ aspects of this figure was revived by writers such as Thackeray. The Old Pretender, and his son, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, stirred nostalgia among the Scots (and particularly in Scott) until the middle of the century (see the Jacobite toast to the ‘king across the water’). With a number of laws, among which the Bill of Rights of 1689, William and Mary placed constraints on the powers of the Crown and sanctioned freedom of religion for all – except Catholics. Never a popular king, William suffered from asthma, tuberculosis, and limped to boot. He stipulated the Great Alliance against France. The course of history might have been changed had William been unsuccessful in his Irish campaign, but it was thanks to help from Louis XIV that James’s attempt to regain power was crushed in the great battle of the Boyne in 1690. After the defeat of the French, the Channel became English again after centuries of French control. In truth, William’s position was always somewhat precarious, and, almost inevitably, the country began to wish for the return of the deposed king, James II, if only he were not a Catholic! Plots, real or imaginary, abounded to get rid of William, who had lost his wife Mary in 1694. Jacobitism was on the rise, and even if James himself died in Calais, the Old Pretender was acknowledged as legitimate king by Louis XIV. The death of the son of the future queen, Anne, raised the prickly question of succession, while, at the death of William in March 1702, on the horizon appeared John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, head of the army in the war against France.
21
Possibly only the poet, Anne Finch, Lady Winchilsea (§ 105), made any reference to the ‘theft’ of the throne by his daughter and her foreign husband, appealing to all those who loved their country (cf. her elegy on the death of James II).
§ 2. Literary genres up to the Restoration
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§ 2. Literary genres up to the Restoration It goes without saying that English literature from 1601 to 1660 – excluding the theatre up to 1642, which is dealt with in Volume 1 of this History – does not include the novel, and that the principal genres are, in order of importance, poetry, religious and political tracts, polemical pamphlets, sermons and philosophical essays. In a very real sense, the most important literary work of the period is anonymous or collective, and a translation – that of the Bible, published in 1611, fruit of the labours of a team of scholars appointed by James I. All together, these genres present numerous epistemic and ideological motifs, ipso facto giving rise to a literary landscape enriched by the products of the conflicts underlying it. Broadly speaking, two schools of thought predominate in the seventeenth century and form the background to its literature: atheism (with its offshoots of materialistic hedonism and rationalism) and fideism. Materialism branches into science, experimentalism, naturalism and Ramism, the sworn enemy of Aristotelian philosophy. Fideism is Neo-Platonic, Anglican, Puritan, Catholic, not to mention numerous other denominations and sects. None of the above-mentioned can be fitted neatly into a particular poetic or prose genre. In general, scientific materialism lies in the province of the philosophical essay, where at times it is even reconciled with fideism; it may, however, appear in a purely poetic context. Hedonism ties up with erotic, or Cavalier, poetry. On the other hand, the presence of fideism can be found in various genres, mainly poetic, and Neo-Platonism is a pervasive element in every kind of seventeenth-century religious poetry. On a European level, the terms of reference are concettismo, Baroque and Mannerism. The gradual transition to the Augustan age is foreshadowed in Cowley, Denham and Waller. Poetic imagination measures up against science, and, weakened almost to extinction, will only be fully restored in the Romantic Age. Until Milton, short poetic compositions abound, but the ‘large, grand poem’ is absent, though there are plenty of long ones, mostly the work of the followers of Spenser. 2. It might be argued that poetry dominates the seventeenth-century literary scene mainly because of a lack of rival genres (leaving out Herbert, Marvell and Milton). There is a gap of nearly fifty years between, on the one hand, Spenser and Sidney, and the first significant Caroline poets on
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the other. Donne lived on until 1631, but only as a preacher. In political terms, ‘Cavalier’ refers to the supporters of Charles I and the monarchy in general; in literary terms it indicates the court poets, usually of noble family, whose verses are characterized by neoclassical clarity and elegance of style, and by moral laxity and, often, profanity, in the content. Behind the four main exponents – Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, plus Herrick with reservations – lies the refinement, concision and balance of Jonson’s poetry. Cavalier verse finds its opposite in Metaphysical poetry, which is, however, not content (or not only content) but a poetic style, so that it is possible to find, for example in Donne, erotic content couched in a Metaphysical style. Metaphysical poetry is usually said to begin with Donne, though elements of the style can be seen in Elizabethan poets. Initially the word ‘metaphysical’ was used in a derogatory sense – as a kind of nickname. A much-used synonym was the expression ‘strong lines’, indicating brevity, concentration, the use of ingenious but appropriate conceits. Both terms implied a vivid, real life experience behind the poetic composition. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery by Rosemond Tuve,1 still today the most detailed study of imagery in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, suggests that Renaissance writers already had an organic concept of poetic composition, according to which the meaning was not a nucleus in prose embellished by decorative elements, as stated in many contemporary aesthetic theories. Metaphysical poetry is grounded in logic, and indeed is often a ‘poetry of definition’. Ramist logic is the basis of Metaphysical poetry when the direction of the argument is ‘from the particular to the universal’, or when the poem hinges on a disjunctive syllogism. One chapter of Tuve’s book is dedicated to Henry King and his poetry based on definition, differentiation and discrimination, and corroboration or proof through similitude. Her last chapter deals with the didactic element in seventeenth-century poetry, where ‘didactic’ is not to be understood in a merely literal sense. As T. S. Eliot observed, everything in this poetry is theoretically fused together, so that it is impossible to separate ‘poetry’ from ‘reasoning’. The Metaphysical becomes
1
Chicago 1947.
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Baroque in the mingling of sacred and profane love, in the fantasizing on death and in its eschatological fixation.2 Furthermore, Metaphysical poetry is conceptual while Baroque verse clearly shows strong affinities with the figurative arts. 3. The religious poetry of seventeenth-century England is tri-polar: Anglican, Puritan and Catholic; and in form and style, as well as perception, it may be Metaphysical, Baroque or indeed Cavalier, with reference to Jonsonian concision. The main stimulus for the seventeenth century’s collective imagination was the King James Bible, with the result that a good half of the books published between 1600 and 1640 were of a religious nature (rather like the situation in the Victorian age). Literacy levels had risen, and if there were as yet no newspapers in the modern sense of the word, there were plenty of preachers, some extemporary, in the streets and market squares, not just in the churches and chapels. The Quakers later maintained that one did not need to be ordained to preach according to one’s belief. Puritanism became synonymous both with holy living in the fear of the Lord and with rabid anti-Catholicism. The typical Puritan read the Bible every day, prayed, kept a spiritual diary, catechized. More and more merchants and shopkeepers tended to become Puritans for economic, rather than purely spiritual, reasons; that is, to compromise Spanish supremacy on the high seas, which was in fact tolerated, not to say encouraged by monopolies that the king had awarded to his favourites. Though politically speaking it lasted only twenty years, Puritanism left indelible marks on the country; ‘Puritan Sunday’ cast its gloomy shadow right up to the time of Dickens and Ruskin; deeper and more lasting was the effect on the American mentality. But only the most unsophisticated and extreme
2
In her fine essay, ‘The European Background to Baroque Sensibility’ (PGU, vol. 3, 89–97), the author, Odette De Mourgues, creates the identikit of a certain kind of English Baroque poet who wrote, she says, as if suffering from mental contortions and from paroxysms of sensuality, subject to Montaignesque mood swings, and pervaded by symptoms of crisis in contrast with Renaissance harmony. The author admits that England did have some well-balanced minds, but deems that these were outnumbered by this species of mad poet, delirious, visionary and with no sense of proportion.
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Puritans were hostile to the arts and to entertainment, and the Great Tew circle is witness to tolerance and mutual respect across ideological divisions.3 The flourishing of English poetry in the seventeenth century has no precedents and may be compared only with that of the thirteenth century; but explicitly Puritan verse is less frequent than Anglican or Catholic poetry; Marvell’s work is not only Puritan, Milton transcends all limitation, and Bunyan has become a household name as a preacher and story-teller. 4. L. L. Martz and Barbara Kiefer Lewalski are the authors of two well-known, conflicting interpretations of seventeenth-century religious poetry tout court. In The Poetry of Meditation4 Martz argues that there is a great deal of the Catholic and crypto-Catholic in the Anglicanism of the first third of the century, and that the meditative spirituality of the principal Anglican poets was influenced by Italian, French and Spanish spiritual treatises translated and published secretly in England. The Ignatian model of meditation not only does not exclude, but belongs together with the treatises on rhetoric and logic studied by Tuve, as the author himself admits. Before Donne, one writer who certainly was familiar with these texts was the now neglected poet William Alabaster (1567–1640), suspected of Catholicism and author of sonnets in manuscript which bring to mind the Donne of the Holy Sonnets. Indeed, Alabaster anticipates various aspects of Jesuit meditation, so that the expression ‘the school of Donne’ appears to be something of a misnomer, since the founder of the school is Alabaster. Thus Martz discovers a seventeenth-century Catholic England which is larger than was thought, and from which it is not at all true that the Counter-Reformation was absent. The first consequence of the use in poetry of the Catholic meditative technique is the visual method, in, for example, the ‘graphic’ opening lines of the poems by Donne or Herbert. So Martz defines Donne’s Holy Sonnets as ‘parts of an exercise […] transposed into an explicitly poetic form’. The structure of the Petrarchan sonnet, 4–4–6, may be taken as a model also for the analogy with Ignatian 3 4
In this Oxfordshire mansion, owned by Lord Falkland, churchmen and writers of various confessions retreated in the 1630s to meditate and debate in a spirit of harmony. New Haven, CT 1954.
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meditation. Loyola’s meditation was complex and demanding, and so a simplified contemplative technique, elaborated by St Francis of Sales and by his disciple Camus, gained popularity in England. Another text that had a great influence on poetry was St Bonaventure’s Meditations on the Life of Christ, which entailed the imaginary dramatization of every single detail of the life of Christ. The meditations focus on both the divine and the human in the nature of Jesus. The cult of the Virgin, too, was practised clandestinely and openly by Herbert and Vaughan. The practice of the Dominican rosary and the ‘little crown of the Virgin Mary’, launched by Southwell, was taken up by Donne. Martz sees all this as a split between Scholasticism and meditative, mystical trends; an amalgam, in short, of the emotional and the rational. But the essential point is that for Martz ‘self-examination’ is a Catholic rather than Puritan trait; indeed a Jesuit one, and included in the Spiritual Exercises. In the context of tract literature, Lorenzo Scupoli’s Combattimento spirituale is relevant on this score, establishing as it does ‘a kind of Catholic Puritanism’. Herbert is ‘Salesian’ in feeling no repugnance for death. The few Puritan spiritual tracts that Martz examines would have been quite extraneous to the Catholic genre, and this because of the Calvinist doctrine of grace. Particularly alien to the Puritans was the Ignatian technique of compositio loci. The Puritans revered Christ the Redeemer, the Catholics the infant Jesus and the Nativity (like Crashaw, and like Milton too). Martz points out that the Puritan Richard Baxter (The Saints Everlasting Rest, 1650) cautiously indicates and recommends meditative methods similar to those of the Counter-Reformation, above all the need for sensory assistance. Objections to Martz were raised particularly in Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric by Kiefer Lewalski.5 Everything is turned upside down: those elements that Martz associated with Catholicism (the paradigm of ‘sin and salvation’, the fluctuations in mood, the Deus absconditus) are re-interpreted in a Protestant light, and traced in Protestant tracts and Biblical compendiums that underlined the centrality of the Psalms as poetry. The Bible itself was a source of tropes that would be used in contemporary poetry: sin as sickness,
5
Princeton, NJ 1979.
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darkness or slavery; the Christian life as a pilgrimage, or as a garden, with God as the gardener; the building of the Temple. But compared to the Catholics, the Protestants limit the proliferation of the ‘senses’ and condemn the abundance of allegories, favouring the bare, literal text. Concluding her counter-arguments, Lewalski goes so far as to find in Herbert ironic barbs against Ignatian meditation. On the other hand, ornament and wit were held to be an integral part of the Bible, the style of which was to be imitated as an insuperable model of eloquence and rhetoric. As a synthesis of these two antithetical books, let me repeat what I said at the beginning: different factors from different sources mingle and mix so completely that it becomes almost impossible to distinguish which is which. Emblems and emblem poetry served Catholics and Anglicans alike, and Puritans too, and its extraordinary, superior, primeval power of persuasion,6 based on the symbiosis of text and image, kept everyone happy. In the end the relationship between image and text was inverted, with the words becoming the fundamentals and the image an added extra. 5. It is equally indispensable to define English seventeenth-century poetry in its relation to the three or four aesthetic and epistemic sensibilities that permeate and mould the development of the arts on the Continent: the Renaissance, the late Renaissance, Mannerism, and the Baroque. These labels are notoriously difficult to pin down, and allude to some dominant components which are clear and others which are variable and less distinct, difficult to place chronologically (and, in the case of Mannerism and the Baroque, often allotted inverted time slots depending on points of view and the culture of individual countries). In A Social History of Art,7 Arnold Hauser proposed the most obvious genetic transition by observing that Renaissance classicism was brief and fragile, and Mannerism picked up the signs of crisis and disintegration, reacted to its formalism and for this reason remained anchored to the preceding style, instead of developing new ideas of reality. The manneristic ‘open’ text is revealed in clearer signs of 6 7
Studied, for example, in its expressive and semiotic mechanisms, in L. Innocenti, Vis Eloquentiae, Palermo 1983. Vol. 2, Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, New York 1987 (1st edn 1951). The page numbers in brackets refer to the 1987 edition.
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conflict in its rhetoric, in the prevalence of antitheses and oxymora, in an unsettling sense of the infinite (Pascal’s frisson), and in the tension present in even calm and peaceful scenes. In a topological context, too, spatial unity is shattered, and centre and periphery are inverted. The identification of Mannerism with several anti-classical anomalies of form – such as the mixing of plot-lines, irrationality, eccentricity, digressiveness, lack of structural unity, discarded material – swells the bounds of the category and turns even Sterne into a mannerist ante litteram (147ff.). For Hauser, Shakespeare is a mannerist, perhaps even the main English representative of the category; and since Mannerism and the Baroque are like father and son, or brother and sister, he is also a baroque mannerist or vice versa, without there being any contradiction in terms. Page 178 of Hauser gives a list of contrasts – formal, structural, linguistic and stylistic – to support his diagnosis. As for chronology, Mannerism may be seen as preceding, contemporary with, or even later than the Baroque (103). In terms of the social history of art, Mannerism was a court phenomenon which spread throughout Europe, achieving an international status second only to the earlier Gothic fashion; the Baroque is rooted in the people and is largely an emotional and theatrical phenomenon. Baroque brought painters into the ecclesiastical fold and made religion more attractive and persuasive. Court Mannerism undoubtedly is an expression of the Counter-Reformation, but this is even more true of Baroque that aimed to revive the faith of the ordinary people. As an example of the chronological precedence of Italian Mannerism – which is complex, intellectual and cold, and is followed by a sensual Baroque, hot and passionate, addressed to the masses rather than to the intellectual elite – Hauser cites the Carraccis, great simplifiers, and the whole Roman Baroque culture with its reference points of Pietro da Cortona, Rubens and Bernini. Mannerism is, in any case, homogeneous, while the Baroque takes on various forms according to where it is practised. 6. In the wider but more disorderly panorama presented by G. R. Hocke8 we find a repetition of the general thesis that Mannerism is tension and torsion, above all ideological, psychic and stylistic. Hocke too
8
G. R. Hocke, Manierismus in der Literatur, Hamburg 1959.
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tends to see Baroque as proceeding from and developing into Mannerism rather than the other way round. Baroque was attenuated Mannerism, but a Mannerism which in turn was destined to decline and become a patchedup version of itself. Compared with other studies of mannerist culture, that of Hocke must be credited with linking artistic phenomena with the manuals by Tesauro or Gracián, which theorized and recommended composition in code, verbal labyrinths, cryptography, and, above all, any creative method in which the acoustic, verbal or puzzle effects overshadow the content. Another merit of this book is to include Greek and Asian culture – seen as opposite poles – as possible distant cradles of Mannerism.9 A third merit is to have identified connections with Hermetism, absent in Baroque. The principal exponent of Mannerism is Giambattista Marino, who owes much to the Florentine Neo-Platonists, who in turn are versed in cabalistic alchemy and the arcana of the Hebrew alphabet (it may be remembered that the Runic alphabet was endowed with similar metaphysical, occult value). From the time of the ancient Egyptians and the Old Testament Hebrews, the letters of the alphabet were considered to be of divine origin. mannerist semantics, esoteric and secret, expresses itself in the permutation and reassembling of letters; Hocke cites the famous Shakespearean tongue-twister from Love’s Labour’s Lost, ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’, as containing a mysterious coded message. The premise of mannerist cryptography is that the letters of the alphabet are secret divine messages that can be read if combined in the correct way. However, the real question for the student of seventeenth-century English poetry is how much attention it receives from students of seventeenth-century European literature, what results emerge from analyses carried out using Hocke’s litmus tests, and what kind of prospective affiliations appear possible. Judging from Hocke’s study, it might seem at first that there is, in fact, not much in the way of English Mannerism to be found, and in particular that, in the great period of European Mannerism – the second half of the seventeenth century – there is no English benchmark figure. Hocke 9
Mannerism therefore equals disorderly and wild fancy (labyrinthine, exaggerated, complicated, enriched), whereas Atticism is analogous to controlled sobriety. Daedalus is the mythic prototype of Mannerism.
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mentions Donne and Shakespeare only by the way, and completely omits any reference to Herbert,10 the closest there is to a mannerist. So, he takes a great leap forward to Hopkins, who, he says, must have known Gracián in depth. ‘In Hopkins echoic lines abound. His poetry is a treasure chest of formal mannerisms’, he says. In reality, Hocke later postulates the existence of a group of genuine mannerists – Shakespeare, Crashaw, Hopkins and, above all, Joyce. The last two are, of course, not seventeenth-century writers. The witticisms or euphuisms of Romeo and Juliet are re-branded Mannerism, and he finds traces of ‘alchemic-Hermetic elements’ everywhere in Shakespeare. He goes on to say that Shakespeare presents an evolution from an early mannerist period to later Baroque. John Dee (1527–1608) is one of the few known practitioners of Hermetic Alexandrianism, and, according to Hocke, was revered by the English Metaphysicals. Hocke’s book, incidentally, is not without flaws, of which the most serious is the widening of the term ‘mannerist’ so that it no longer refers to a specific, circumscribed artistic phenomenon of the mid-seventeenth century, but is freed of all constraints of time and place and comes to mean ‘dazzling verbal acrobatics’, especially with a touch of the occult thrown in. Hocke is clearly an admirer of Mario Praz, indeed a learned acolyte whose main achievement seems to be the piling up of examples or mere aphorisms – often left unglossed – by writers who, by this very inclusion, automatically become mannerists, without any reasoned justification being given. Some of his short chapters on Mannerism in music are interesting, the essence of which would appear to be what comes between the musical form of the ricercare (without a central point, and ‘alogical’ in so far as it expresses freedom from fixed norms) and the Baroque fugue with its strict structural rules. It is, however, surprising, to say the least, that a follower in the footsteps of Praz should fail to examine the phenomenon of Mannerism in the visual arts. 7. The so-called ‘Cambridge Platonists’ were in search of an alliance between philosophy and religion.11 One of them, Herbert of Cherbury, examined the concept of ‘universal consensus’, which is inborn and given 10 11
He states explicitly that figural poetry is mannerist. See § 158.3 for their connections with the Romantics.
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to us by God as the basis of truth. This was tantamount to studying the elements common to all religions, starting with the fact that religion itself is common to all peoples and in all ages. John Smith, much admired by Matthew Arnold, maintained that God is a form of transcendental consciousness deriving from sensations: other Platonists like Cudworth and More, going against Hobbes, proclaimed the real existence of God and the soul. Joseph Glanville, on whom Arnold based his ‘scholar gipsy’, was a natural theologian who paved the way for Thomas Browne. Although Milton had met Galileo in Florence, nonetheless, for impelling poetic needs, the universe he presents in Paradise Lost is largely Ptolemaic; this points to a situation of angst and instability similar to Donne’s many years before. Thomas Browne himself is capable of extremely modern intuitions along with disconcerting, childish leftovers from the Middle Ages. Renaissance individualism is counterbalanced by a sense of human limitations. The poetics of the time made a clear distinction between the mythological poets of antiquity, who dressed truth up in fine fables, and modern poets who denounced their demise. The threat of a possible obsolescence of poetic imagination, and the decline of poetry itself, was to haunt the early Victorians after being discounted by the Romantics. Macaulay’s famous aphorism comes to mind, in which he states that poetry declines as civilization progresses. God and the soul were not included in the agenda of the Royal Society, and poetry became philosophy tout court. Fancy was demoted by Hobbes, and ‘judgement’ took its place.12 § 3. The Spenserians The founder of a literary movement is bound to have followers. Although this may not apply to Shakespeare, at least not patently, it is true as regards Chaucer (the English and Scottish Chaucerians in Volume 1 of this History), Jonson and above all Sidney and Spenser. Of all the 12
The first meetings of the Royal Society were held during the Protectorate; the Royal Patent was granted in 1662. Among its members were the biographer Aubrey, the philosopher Locke, the diarists Pepys and Evelyn, the architect Wren, and the poet Dryden. Newton, whose epistemology is based on the reconciliation of religion with science, became a member in 1684.
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former, only the Scottish Chaucerians were poets of any worth, while the Jonsonians and, especially, the early seventeenth-century Spenserians were undoubtedly second-class writers. Of course, any label will include quite different personalities and will be, in some respects, unsatisfactory. We know of the close friendship between Wither and William Browne, but of nothing similar between them and Drummond and the Fletchers. Drummond was reclusive and selective; he was ambitious, and his friends tended to be established classicists like Sir William Alexander1 and, above all, Jonson. While some of them did write lengthy poems, they were not exactly the kind of poems written by Spenser: the two Fletchers wrote one each, both so bizarre as to be quite new. The fact is that no one could or indeed wanted to be a replica of Spenser; too much water had flown under the bridge since then, and in that water had swum Donne and Jonson, to mention only the greatest. Donne as a poet was not yet in print, but was read in manuscript in London, where the Spenserians, all of them born outside the capital, ended up living. So their poetry is eclectic and heterogeneous. Only William Browne attempted something approaching a Spenserian poem, and it is possible that the three books of this Britannia’s Pastorals were to be followed by others (a fourth was left unfinished, just as the Faerie Queene was). The sonnet, too, follows the Spenserian or Sidneyan mould. But almost all the Spenserians take to composing in genres unknown to the author of the Faerie Queene, like the masque or the epigram. On the other hand, from Spenser onwards, the Puritan vein becomes more pronounced. Spenser was anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish, as was Wither, only more so. On the whole, the Spenserians may be seen as the counterpart of the more cynical Jacobean dramatists, who, while making poetic justice triumph in the end, depict a world dominated and dilapidated by dishonesty, machiavellism, duplicity and especially by lust, with men perpetually aroused
1
Scottish secretary of state from 1626, William Alexander (1567–1640) was the author of a collection of songs and sonnets in 1604, a poem on the (Last) Judgement in eight-line stanzas, and four plays with classical subjects and characters, served up in watered-down Senecan sauce reminiscent of Robert Garnier. Echoes of Alexander’s plays are purported to be traceable in Webster’s two masterpieces, written not long after.
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and women little better than whores. The Spenserians stand guard on a pseudo-Platonic Puritanism, which sees women restored to their pedestal of purity and angel-like chastity. For this reason, the four poets that will be discussed now are ‘moral’, indirectly speaking, but not ‘religious’ (except for Wither and Drummond in their final period). Nor are they devotional, although the two Fletchers were Anglican priests. Obviously they were also fervently patriotic, united by their respective debuts with elegies mourning the premature death of Prince Henry.2 From Spenser these poets take inspiration for hymns to spiritual beauty and pastoral eclogues. Essentially, they absorb Spenserianism in metrical form; they inherit the Spenserian stanza but proceed to modify it: the two Fletchers, for example, cut one, sometimes, two lines, and change the rhyme scheme. § 4. Wither George Wither (1588–1667), a man of action as well as being a thinker, lived an appropriately adventurous and complicated life. Fierce polemicist, fervid, fearless Puritan, impulsive and Quixotic, he was also the author of delicate, exquisitely wrought descriptions of the English countryside. He was born into a landowning family, went up to Oxford, without, however, completing his studies, and subsequently entered one of the Inns of Chancery. In 1612 and 1613 he wrote two elegies, one on the death of Prince Henry, the other for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth. His first mishap was to write and publish in 1611 a series of twenty satires against private vices and public misdemeanours, which were held to be detrimental to the reputation of someone very important (no actual personal correspondence has ever been established). This cost him a few months in the Marshalsea. While there, he conceived the idea of a pastoral dialogic poem, The Shepherd’s Hunting (1615), in which for the first time Wither dons the mask of Phil’arete (lover of virtue). In all likelihood, the pastoral mode responded to a deeply felt inspiration in Wither, but it also served as a screen from behind which to attack his previous targets, vice and corruption. The five eclogues show Phil’arete’s love of hunting; he tells the other
2
First son of James I, he died in 1612, aged eighteen, of typhoid fever.
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shepherds about his dogs, which are personifications of vices and virtues, like the wild beasts in Dante. In 1621 another satire, Wither’s Motto,1 caught the attention of the authorities, and the author was again imprisoned. His Motto, though, sold 30,000 copies, at least according to him. After he was released he used the character of Phil’arete once more in Fair Virtue, or The Mistress of Phil’arete (1622), which represents perhaps the best of Wither as a lyric poet. The diction is characterized by apparently maudlin simplicity, not without the occasional well-aimed barb: ‘I am no Italian lover / That will mew thee in a jail; / But thy beauty I discover, / English-like, without a veil’. Speaking through this mask Wither spurns all temptations of the flesh and takes on the role of the preacher launching anathemas against vice, especially lust. The poem begins with a long, pleasant prelude in which the poet describes a landscape, pointing out and naming flowers, plants, unsullied brooks and lakes. Then comes an ecstatic panegyric to his loved one, which goes on and on, and becomes wearisome, especially as there are no striking images, just a series of commonplaces conveyed by trundling heroic couplets. Not that Wither is incapable of variation: he inserts songs with echo effects and even a diamond-shaped one in the style of Herbert. Tautological and hyperbolic verses weave the praises of unsophisticated, natural female beauty. Make-up and trinkets hide rather than enhance the beauty, which is divided into its anatomical components, but emerges, sharply defined, as beauty of the mind, celestial or spiritual beauty, and the triumph of modesty. The poet ends up by confessing that the woman of the poems has no name and never actually appears (in the poem Phil’arete converses with various nymphs) because she is only an idea, a woman so pure and of such rarefied beauty that she could never exist in flesh and blood. 2. According to Wither himself, the year 1622 marks the end of his Juvenilia period (which accounts for nearly 1,000 pages in the first complete edition published in the nineteenth century), after which he became a more committed Puritan polemicist. 1628 saw the publication of an 1
The motto in question is: Nec habeo, nec careo, nec curo; some editions have a frontispiece bearing another motto which contains a play on words on his surname: ‘I grow and wither both together’.
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extravagant visionary poem that is also a documentary of the 1625 plague. There followed (1635) a Collection of Emblems, the forerunner of a new genre, and, in Holland, in 1641, a book of religious verse, Halelujah, with paraphrases of psalms and some original songs. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Wither was a convinced Parliamentarian, and had no hesitation in selling some of his land in order to recruit a small cavalry regiment. He was arrested by the royalists, and only escaped the gallows thanks to a quip made by Denham,2 to the effect that as long as Wither lived there was in England a worse poet than him (Denham himself ). In subsequent phases of the war, Wither was anything but heroic, but nonetheless received an indemnity from Parliament. During Cromwell’s regime his position became more radical and egalitarian. At the Restoration he was arrested and spent three years in prison. On his release he became an Anglican with leanings towards Quakerism. In these nearly forty years Wither wrote a huge amount, a chaotic and eclectic hotchpotch dominated by polemicist prose.3 His reputation was awful right up to the end of the nineteenth century (or, more precisely, up to the publication of Lamb’s short rehabilitation of his work): he was considered a kind of buffoon. His contemporary, Jonson, was quick to mock his works as fast they appeared, and Wither was not backward in responding. The anecdote about Denham says it all. Pope repeats the negative opinion in the Dunciad. Palgrave included only one poem by Wither, a few misogynistic verses which are hardly representative, put into the mouth of a love-sick shepherd in the 1622 poem. However, today Wither is valued for his nature scenes which foreshadow Wordsworth and Burns, and for the passionate intensity of his pastoral mouthpieces. § 5. William Browne If a poet is labelled a Spenserian, then some connection with Keats is sure to be lying in wait. William Browne (1591–1645 – both dates conjectural – born in Tavistock, Devon) is often presented as the link between the two. Browne lived for a while in France, graduated from Oxford, was a member 2 3
Or – for GSM, 92 – Waller. In his bland, benevolent pages on Wither, Baugh gives a detailed account of these prose writings (BAUGH, vol. II, 639–41).
§ 5. William Browne
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of the Inns of Court, tutor to the son of a nobleman, and twice married. This is all we know. The last twenty years of his life are shrouded in mystery. He was a man of formidable scholarship, a collector of old manuscripts with the vocation of an antiquary.1 His literary production is immense, and was only brought to the attention of the ordinary reader in its entirety at the end of the eighteenth century. Some of his works could be read by his admirers only in manuscript, and were therefore confined to an elite.2 His first work was The Shepherd’s Pipe (1614), a miscellany containing, as we have just seen, one or more eclogues by Wither, writing under the pastoral pseudonym of Roget. For James I he wrote an exquisite mythological masque on Ulysses’ arrival on Circe’s island (performed at the Inner Temple, of which he was a member),3 a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, and other occasional poems and songs, including a solemn elegy and an epitaph for Sidney’s sister. These poems show the influence not of Spenser or Donne, but of Jonson (some critics have expressed doubts as to whether they are indeed by Browne). The poetic voice here is not pastoral; some parts are visionary, grotesque, even sarcastic, in Jonson’s pithiest style, together with epistles with bizarre titles recounting banal, everyday occurrences, such as ‘An Epistle thrown into a River in a Ball of Wax’. The several odd epigrams include one addressed to a ‘hanged rope-maker’. 2. Britannia’s Pastorals, his most important work, was begun before he was twenty years old; two books of songs were published in 1613 and 1616, while fragments of a third remained in manuscript until 1852. Here Browne eschews the Spenserian nine-line stanza in favour of easy-flowing couplets of a kind that Keats would like. Of all the Spenserians – many of whom he knew personally, and who wrote commendatory verses which appear at the beginning of the three books4 – Browne is most successful
1 2 3 4
An admirer of Hoccleve, Browne brought to light one of his poems and published it in The Shepherd’s Pipe, saying he was ready to publish more – even the complete works, if he was asked to! The first complete edition of the works was, and remains, The Poems, ed. G. Goodwin and A. H. Bullen, 2 vols, London 1894. The Inner Temple Masque (1615), in MS until 1772. Browne reciprocates the praise in a digression in the second canto of Book II.
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in creating graceful, delicate, candid, agreeable poetry. Echoing in verse some plot elements of Sidney’s Arcadia, the poem narrates, rather aimlessly, the stories of various shepherds and shepherdesses. In the end, one is left with admiration for the descriptive qualities, the sense of colour, the often funny, Biedermeier-like anecdotes (the heroine lovingly fed by a robin), the long Homeric or Dantesque similes, and the amusing misunderstandings.5 Behind the story of Marina, spurned in love by Celandine and saved by the god of the river, then thrust into the Spenserian monster’s cavern, lies the age-old Gothic archetype of the virgin in distress and of the dying glimmers of a Golden Age (beginning of the fourth canto of Book I). Devon is greeted and honoured in the prologue as the cradle of many heroes and navigators of the end of the sixteenth century, against a background of a ‘weak piping time of peace’. The monotony of the couplets weighed down by erudition and scraps of mythology is often punctuated by the use of alternative verse forms, as in the fine hymn of the river god on the multifarious forms of life to be found in the water. The poet, as if with the complicity of the reader, juggles carefully between the ‘suspension of disbelief ’ and the register of objectivity. His poetic world is pitted with extraneous elements that do nothing but break the spell and leave the reader wondering. § 6. Drummond of Hawthornden It is not immediately clear why William Drummond (1585–1649, called ‘of Hawthornden’ after his place of birth) – a literally Metaphysical poet, much given to speculative meditation, mostly on death – is usually classified as a Spenserian. If anything, he should be considered a follower of Sidney, as he was practically the last English poet to write a series of sonnets to his loved one. However, if ‘Spenserian’ does not quite fit him, to call him
5
Or the bathetic solutions such as that of Celandine who, after an appearance at the beginning, is absent from the poem for more than two books; he then returns to look for his beloved Marina, and in the land of the Fairies comes across a sleeping Spenser. Perhaps as a homage, the second and last cantos of this third book are in ottava rima. The book breaks off after about 300 lines, and before Marina is saved from the monster.
§ 6. Drummond of Hawthornden
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‘Sidneyan’1 is equally unsatisfying, though it is pointless to deplore his belatedness, as if centuries separated him from the classic English sonneteers.2 It might be more useful to see him as a pre-Romantic 200 years ahead of his time, or a Romantic akin to Shelley and already using his lyre; or even a decadent ante litteram, or a precocious existentialist, and an investigator of the relationship between man and the cosmos. The perspicacious definition given of him as ‘literary epicure’3 brings to mind Huysmans’s Des Esseintes. Drummond became a recluse when still young and spent his life reading and writing, a forerunner of all those future poets who were to discover a vocation in themselves only to realize that they have taken a wrong turning. One of his sonnets praises his hermitage, ‘Where from the vulgar I estranged live’; his dream was to be part of an aristocracy of the mind, which he sought and found in his friendship with some of the most renowned writers of the day (Alexander, Drayton, Jonson above all),4 who became frequent guests in his home. Although a Scot, he deliberately wrote a refined, classical English that was devoid of all trace of regionalism. He may be said to be the greatest Scottish writer after Dunbar and before Burns. His vantage point was above and beyond the petty squabbles of his fellow countrymen, for he had travelled far and knew the world. Untouched by Scottish patriotism, he was an anti-nationalist and an anti-Calvinist. His first emotional involvement with death came with the loss of his father and his fiancée, remembered and lamented in several of his poems; after a ritual elegy on Prince Henry, Drummond writes of his fiancée while still alive 1
2
3 4
More Sidneyan than Spenserian according to W. C. Ward, in the introduction (vol. I of two, xv–cxxv) of his edition of Drummond’s works (London 1894), and F. R. Fogle, A Critical Study of William Drummond of Hawthornden, New York 1952, 11–14, 39. Drummond wrote nothing to compare with the Faerie Queene, and the only work which is in any way Spenserian (the Spenser of the Hymns) is the Hymn of the Fairest Fair, on beauty as the moving force of life. Praz in particular insisted on this definition of Drummond: a late or belated sonneteer (cf. PSL, 236, and PMI, 14, 202). Jonson was the first to open the wound, saying his poetry ‘smelled too much of the Schools, and [was] not after the fancie of the time’. CHI, vol. IV, 151. Volume 1, § 120.1.
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and after her death. His last work is a prose meditation on death. Mortality, therefore, becomes in Hawthornden a leitmotif, like love in Leopardi’s ‘Il pensiero dominante’, sadly but firmly repeated. 2. The Drummond family boasted illustrious monarchic traditions. The father, subsequently appointed gentleman usher of the court, was part of the cortège that had accompanied James to London on his accession to the English throne in 1603. After graduating from Edinburgh, he studied law in France. On the death of his father he became laird of the family estate, and abandoned the pursuit of law to dedicate himself to study and to writing. His inspiration was first his love for his betrothed and then her untimely death. His book of poems, published in 1616 in two parts and several sections, in various metres and genres (mostly fine madrigals), was divided into the ‘Life’ and ‘Death’ of his bride-to-be. Much later (in 1632) Drummond married another woman, but by then he too was a different man and poet. The 1616 sonnets, undoubtedly more imitative of Petrarch, Guarini and Marino than those of other collections, use their sources gracefully while maintaining the author’s own personality.5 They are also innovative in that they do away with the paraphernalia of the traditional sonnet, choosing not to employ the pastoral, idealized mask, or even to give the name of the loved one; they are lyricism pure and mature. The first part consists of fifty-five sonnets, the second of only thirteen, plus madrigals and songs. In reality there is no obvious break between the two parts: the poet is pensive, melancholy, sad, even before the tragedy of her death; a prey to fears and black thoughts, joyless, deprived of fulfilment, he observes the cosmos as it drifts towards extinction. His sonnets are the celebration and recollection of an occasion long sought, of some tragic, prophesized event. Indeed, A Cypress Grove begins by expressing the certainty that the soul may have forebodings of coming disasters or dangers. Flowers of Sion (1623) is thoroughly imbued with orthodox, that is, Christianized, Platonism, and ponders the transience of human life in a way that recalls Herbert in the anaphoric lists of the material beauties that
5
The sonnet form is, by and large, Shakespearean, with varying rhyme schemes in the three quatrains and final couplet.
§ 7. The Fletchers
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fade and die, and Donne in several paraphrases of the Gospel pertaining to the nativity, passion, death and resurrection of Christ. 3. After 1623 Drummond’s literary career was interrupted, or rather, took a new direction for the next twenty-five years. Among his other works, only an account of a very Scottish nature’s welcome to the visiting King James, Forth Feasting (1617), stands out in any way. The already mentioned A Cypress Grove is an essay in the manner of Bacon or Montaigne, which presents an undulatory concept of the human psyche. The long list of self-invitations to resignation, given the universal vanity, echoes the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes. Other verses of pomp and circumstance were prompted by a visit to Scotland in 1633 by Charles I. Drummond also wrote a History of Scotland, published after his death, and in various pamphlets he voiced ever louder opposition to the Presbyterians and support for the royalist cause. Drummond was no closet or declared Puritan like the English Spenserians; in the Civil War he was either on the King’s side or equidistant. This serious, solid, respectable man of letters was credited with a posthumous, macaronic poem, Polemo Middinia inter Vitarvam et Nebernam (1684). Nor should we forget that this melancholy dreamer was also an inventor, and took out sixteen patents for various items of military machinery, among which the machine gun and the torpedo. § 7. The Fletchers The Fletchers form part of a small but productive dynasty of early seventeenth-century writers; the father of John, the playwright who collaborated with Beaumont and Shakespeare, was the brother to Giles Fletcher the Elder (1548–1611), the great eclectic scholar, Professor of Greek at Cambridge and diplomat in the service of the Queen. The account of one of his missions to Russia was incorporated into the travel books of both Hakluyt and Purchas. Fletcher the Elder was a poet too, and published a sonnet sequence (Licia, 1593). ‘Elder’ is used for him, as for Palma and Bruegel, to distinguish him from one of his sons, also called Giles (1584– 1623), who, with his younger brother, Phineas (1582–1650), appeared on the literary scene in 1603 with a poetic miscellany celebrating the passing of the crown from Elizabeth to James. After graduating, Giles was ordained and held a position at the church of St Mary in Cambridge. He
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was renowned for his piety and for his preaching. Like his father before him, he became Professor of Greek at that university. In 1610 he published Christ’s Victory and Triumph, in Heaven, in Earth, over and after Death, consisting of four cantos, with stanzas of eight decasyllabic lines, of which the three final ones rhyme and the last is an alexandrine. Though the verse form and the personifications are Spenserian, the imaginative model can be traced back to Du Bartas and his Semaine in the English translation by Sylvester.1 Both brothers succeeded in bringing a personal note to what otherwise would have been mere imitation, and the poem by Giles not only abounds in anticipatory echoes of Milton but foreshadows, in its dreamy, comfortable visions of Heaven, the future Pre-Raphaelites. This, the first great religious epic, introduces what were to become characteristic features of the genre, like the connection between paganism and Christianity by means of a network of parallelisms (Ganymede foreshadows the Ascension as Deucalion does Noah), and the definition of the divine as a combination of contradictions and oxymora. It must be read from the very beginning, with the solemn introduction of the classic, essential alternative present in all English religious poetry up to the end of the nineteenth century, and personified by the Janus-like Jehovah, who is both terrible and tender. A similar ambivalence is embodied in the figures of Justice and Mercy. Human and divine actions are exemplified through the use of theological puns, as in the rhetorical question whether a ‘depraved’ man must always be ‘deprived’ (of Grace). In the second canto, the lush garden of Presumption – an episode which is drawn out and decorated – is taken from Spenser and from Italian Renaissance poetry. The third canto exploits inverted parallelisms in sacred history, topoi that would become familiar in the nineteenth century, like the Tree of Knowledge that becomes the Tree of the Cross. The narrative tempo of this canto is brisk and not without suspense, with paraphrases taking the place of allegory and personification. Heavenly bliss is illustrated in further lists of oxymora.
1
This influence is extended to the Spenserians as a whole by J. Grundy, The Spenserian Poets, London 1969, 43–4, where Drayton is included (with reservations and restrictions [107]), but Drummond of Hawthornden is not.
§ 7. The Fletchers
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2. Phineas Fletcher, too, was a clergyman, and, after leaving Cambridge in 1616, spent the rest of his life, starting from 1621, in a rectory in Norfolk. His immense, often highly eccentric production covers a whole range of poetic and prose genres. He wrote a pastoral play for the king in 1614 which was, however, never performed; Locustae, a poem in Latin, was translated into English in 1627 (The Locusts or Apollyonists) in five cantos full of pictures and visions paraphrasing Revelation, and can be seen as rightly belonging to the substantial genre of Elizabethan and Jacobean anti-Catholic and anti-Jesuit literature (cf. Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave),2 much stimulated by the foiled Gunpowder Plot. At the end of an infernal council, Satan forms an alliance with the Jesuits to bring the whole of Europe under his tyrannical rule. The contagion of Catholicism spreads. In the fourth canto another conclave presided over by the Pope decides in favour of the plot, which is foiled in the fifth. It has often been thought, some might say proved, that Milton was inspired by this text for his Satan. Fletcher, though a clergyman, was very much awake to the seductive power of evil; time and again he comes back to a conception of life as a contest, an eternal battle between good and evil, so he needs to keep reminding himself that the human psyche is firmly under control and its functions hierarchically regulated; or that Satan is always defeated, but only after much uncertainty. An erotic poem, Britain’s Ida or Venus and Anchises (1628), about the seduction of Anchises that led to the birth of Aeneas, was attributed to Spenser, to hide the truth that the author was a man of the cloth. Fletcher is best known as the author of The Purple Island,3 a scientific-religious poem published in 1633 but probably written much earlier. With its twelve cantos it is about the same length as a single book of the Faerie Queene. Although it bears the signs of creative genius, it has generally been considered inferior to the work of his brother, and branded frankly unreadable or verging on the ridiculous. It is classified as Spenserian because it presents a pastoral scene through the mouth of a shepherd who sings a song about the long gone Golden Age; each canto begins and ends with a finely wrought, stylized 2 3
Volume 1, § 83.1. Dark red, the colour of the clay used by God to create matter, and, for Fletcher, the colour of blood.
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word-painting. So, Spenserian, certainly; but also Blakean and Joycean.4 The author opens with a barbed reference to the explorers of the day who are so hungry to discover new lands while being ignorant of the island that is Man. Fletcher goes back to the beginning and starts his exploration with the Creation itself. He gives a Lucretian version of the divine creation of matter and human life. With reference to his allegory of the body and the human anatomy (first six books), it would make no sense to criticize his ignorance of contemporary theories on physiology and the circulation of the blood; there are a number of resounding errors that appear to constitute an attack on scientific progress. The spirit of Blake hovers over these first six books. From Book VII the scene is occupied by a vision of the evil forces that are in all men and that are in constant struggle with the forces of good. Personifications abound: Ignorance, Heresy, Concupiscence, a long, imposing parade of allegorical characters, a great feast of pageantry and emblems – each allegorical figure bears a motto explaining the meaning of the allegory itself. By this point it has become quite tiring. It is true that Dante too personifies lust in the figure of the leopard, but in more telling and powerful words, and more economically. In other words, Fletcher is not looking forward to Blake; nor is he looking over his shoulder to Spenser. His eyes seem to be fixed on the distant William Langland. The cosmic battle between good and evil begins with a visionary extravaganza and an unbridled orgy of hallucinations, at the end of which the satanic dragon is defeated and forced to surrender.5 § 8. Suckling An amateur who stands outside the literary arena, an outsider who could afford to mock the fight for fame and fortune of many contemporary 4
5
Coming back to this poem after reading Joyce, one is tempted to see it as a parody – though it is obviously not – and more specifically as a parody of the language of medicine and pseudo-medicine. From the second canto on, Fletcher’s poem, with its very detailed marginal annotations, resembles the second chapter (‘on homework’) of the second part of Finnegans Wake, with its three sets of notes. Fletcher added seven Sannazarian Piscatorie (rather than Pastoral) Eclogs in which he, together with his father and brother, is presented as a fisherman.
§ 8. Suckling
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poets, such was the vaunt and the reality of John Suckling (1609–1642), libertine love poet, not only in the sense of a joyful and unfettered celebration of the sexual urge and its promiscuous satisfaction, or a delightful propitiatory ritual, but in a precocious, Baudelaire-like ennui of the ‘chair triste’. Suckling’s literary vocation was late in coming, almost in extremis, and when it did come it was meteoric. In the short life of this eclectic and talented aristocrat, poetry, it seems, came second to a life of pleasure and action; it was to remain an unproductive curiosity of this multifaceted man. Son of a courtier promoted to Secretary of State, Suckling, like Drummond of Hawthornden, lost his father before he was twenty and inherited the huge family fortune and estate. He spent much time in London in the company of the other Cavalier poets in the court. He travelled in France and Italy, and on his return to England in 1630 was knighted. He then left for Germany with a regiment to provide assistance to Prince Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years War. In the meantime his fame grew as a tombeur de femmes, as a wit at the court of Henrietta Maria, and even more as the best player of cards and bowls in the country: in both these activities, he won enormous sums of money. He abandoned his life of pleasure in 1635 after a violent quarrel with a rival for the hand of the daughter of Sir John Willoughby, and retired to his country estate where he occupied himself in literary pursuits. In 1639, like Wither, he invested much of his fortune in fitting out a troop of 100 horse to support the king’s Scottish campaign. The scanty military success and extravagant and costly equipment of Suckling’s troops caused sniggers in London. In this turbulent decade, Suckling was involved in several episodes to favour the king, as when he attempted to help the Earl of Strafford to escape from the Tower; the attempt was foiled and Suckling was forced to flee the country. After many dangerous as well as romantic adventures – like falling into the clutches of the Inquisition on the one hand and eloping to Spain with a noblewoman on the other – he met his death, according to Aubrey, by poisoning himself in France. 2. The critical edition of his works (Oxford 1971) replaces that of 1910 in two volumes which (with the exception of Selections published in 1836) restored Suckling to the reading public after two and a half centuries of neglect since Fragmenta aurea, published posthumously in 1646. Both
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the 1910 and the 1971 complete works consist of two, not very large volumes, which contain prose works, letters, a philosophical-theological tract against Socinianism, as well as four plays, one of which unfinished, with plots involving mystery, intrigue and the exotic. They were performed, at the expense of the author himself, in a gesture of independence and selfgratification, in the late 1630s. They have never found a place in the canon of English theatre, and are usually mentioned only because they contain several songs which were included in the poetic works. The latter make up a slender volume of short compositions in various metrical forms. Most are poems of ‘decantation’, in which the initial emotion is studied in a subsequent moment of cooling, and thus objectivized. Others simulate greater immediacy in the opening lines and rapid changes of mood, or half-formed thoughts. One of the best and most famous of these battles of wit is ‘I prithee send me back my heart’.1 Suckling does not belong to ‘the tribe of Ben’ mainly because he has no great predisposition for careful, polished style, and gives the impression of an improviser who makes do with shoddy, unpolished lines with no pretence to style. But it is just an impression.2 In actual fact, Suckling leans towards the manner of Donne, albeit tempered and unburdened with subtlety. From Donne he takes the shows of impatience, anger, of rage, even. He foregoes the decorative and the mythological, but accepts his anti-Platonic arguments, stating that love cannot be only spiritual, merely ‘Platonic’, but must be a union of body and mind. More than one poem is based on the use of the extended metaphor, though in such a way that it becomes almost invisible. ‘Love’s World’, for example, is a rather naïve poem which draws a comparison between the lover’s soul and a spit of land assailed by the elements and by the effects of the sun and moon. In the humorous ‘’Tis now, since I sate down’, courting is presented as the lover besieging various parts of his lady’s 1 2
Other genres are verse epistles to fellow poets such as Denham, quips, occasional poems, as well as pornographic epigrams, such as ‘A Candle’, about an erect phallus and what women do with it. ‘Ballad Upon a Wedding’, which is discussed below, is, with its ungrammatical colloquialisms, an unexpected foretaste of Hopkins’s poem ‘The Bugler’s First Communion’ (Volume 6, § 203.2).
§ 8. Suckling
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body. At a closer look, it appears that Suckling is a parodist who echoes and mimics Donne, or Jonson, or Spenser. ‘A Session of the Poets’ is a satire in the style of Pope (or of Byron) of the literary milieu of the 1630s, with Suckling in the role of a dabbling dilettante who affirms, with his habitual disdain, that poetic glory is nothing compared with a lucky strike at bowls or a pair of bewitching eyes. While all the other authors scramble for the laurel crown, Suckling stands aside, and with a wicked twist, has Apollo crown not a poet but a wealthy alderman. The poetic voice itself is both his and not his; it is not his when it becomes a ventriloquist’s or a barber’s, or a peddler’s or that of the half-educated townsman who, in the ‘Ballad Upon a Wedding’, a short dramatic monologue, describes an aristocratic wedding in an account full of Spenserian allusions, humorous thumbnail portraits and witty understatement. 3. Suckling the poet and lover is normally seen as the symbol of the lax, pleasure-seeking, even scandalous life style of the court; he is, therefore, for many, a superficial poet and the author of elegant, biting witticisms. For his contemporaries, he was ‘the most gallant of the age, and the greatest player’. Restoration theatre, too, through the mouthpiece of Congreve, paid homage to him, calling him ‘easy, natural Suckling’. There is another side to him, however, as evinced by several statesmanlike letters, the already mentioned tract against Socinianism, his friendship with thinkers like Falkland and Hales. And what of his suicide? Was this to be expected in someone by definition considered frivolous and cynical? Every time Suckling exalts the sheer physical energy and exuberance of the self-assured lover, he sounds boastful and unscrupulous. In his most famous song he spurs himself to action, banishing mute melancholy; if his siege should fail, then ‘the devil take the woman’. This is no lovesick suitor kneeling in tears before his unattainable Lady; this lover is quick to spurn if refused. Suckling’s categorical doubt is that an ‘honest’ lover, that is one who is patient and upright, runs the risk of missing opportunities for pleasure. He will be crowned, ironically, for not having any conquest to his name. The terms ‘kind’ and ‘honest’ are transformed by the ironic vision and applied above all to the lover who is content to love without being loved, and who boasts about it too! In the long run, Suckling is almost always on the point of unmasking the flame of love, while hoping to extinguish it. If all the lover’s tricks and guile fail,
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then best forget it. His first ‘sonnet’ tells of being vaccinated: ‘It is mere cozenage all’. ‘A Farewell to Love’ presents the visionary metamorphosis of a lady whose beauty is violently sullied. ‘Proffered Love Rejected’ – the story anticipates Browning – shows money being offered for sex with a beautiful woman, and being turned down; the lover’s desire wanes with time and in the end it is the woman who begins to burn and offers herself, free, to the lover, only to be met with a refusal. The equally famous ‘Out upon it!’ is an exclamation of amazement at having been constant in love despite rebuffs for three whole days. Anyone who peruses Suckling’s works as a whole will see that some poems are clearly contradicted by ones that follow: the poem I have just referred to is trumped by a point by point retort, to the effect that constancy in love is folly and ridiculous. It is almost as if Suckling had intercepted Montaigne’s new theories of the undulatory nature of the human psyche, rocked by an unceasing battle between nature and passion, and painfully aware of its fragility; aware too that surface hides depth (‘Loving and Beloved’). Counterpart to the poems vaunting male assurance are others in which the poet admits to the superiority of women: he is at their mercy. While appearing to claim victory he is conscious of how much unhappiness and disgust is caused by love, whether requited or not. Fulfilment of desire is fleeting, so it is better to feel desire without satisfying it. ‘Fruition adds no new wealth, but destroys, / And while it pleases much the palate, cloys’. Two poems are entitled, significantly, ‘Against fruition’. § 9. Lovelace There are many apparent similarities as well as many differences between Suckling and Richard Lovelace1 (1618–1657), quite apart from the fact that they constitute the vanguard of the Cavalier poets. They were not friends, it seems: Suckling was nine years older than Lovelace, and died fifteen years before him. Their paths never crossed. They both came from wealthy, influential families in the south of England (Norfolk and Kent), were educated at different preparatory schools but the same university, and belonged naturally to the same monarchist party. Both tried their hand at 1
Biographical notes come chiefly from Anthony à Wood, with various errors rectified in the course of time.
§ 9. Lovelace
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writing for the theatre (Lovelace wrote two plays of which we have only fragments, practically just the titles), both cultivated poetry as an aristocratic pastime, though Lovelace was no self-confessed libertine, and indeed respected love and honour, even going so far as risk his life for his king, making Suckling’s loyalty seem somewhat false, snobbish, and a matter of routine. In his blind dedication to his ideals, Lovelace resembles Sidney or Ralegh;2 like them he had a variety of interests such as music, falconry and hunting. Both died young (Lovelace at forty). Lovelace became famous for his legendary beauty and charisma that acted like a magnet, making him everyone’s favourite.3 He went to school with Crashaw, who was a little older than him. More will be said on this friendship later. Once at court, he offered his services to the king in the two Scottish wars. When he returned to his Kent estate he was delegated to present to Parliament a petition in favour of the restoration of the old religious practices (called the ‘Kentish Petition’). As a consequence he was sentenced to seven months in prison, followed by a period of house arrest, which prevented him from taking part in the Civil War, though he contributed with vast amounts of money. He left England after the surrender of Oxford, fought for the French against the Spanish and was wounded in action. He returned to England only to be imprisoned once again because of so-called incriminating documents found in his house in London. In prison he spent his time arranging his poems for publication. He was freed after 1649, and died in poverty. 2. Lucasta, the title of a collection of poems first published in 1649, was revised and enlarged by his brother in 1659, and dedicated to Lady Lucy Sacheverell, who, believing him to have been killed in the battle of Dunkirk had married another.4 This figure, real and ideal at the same time, transfused into so many other poetic personifications like Althea,
2 3 4
An echo of Lovelace may be found in a few poems by James Graham, Marquess of Montrose (1612–1650). The two poets are so similar that Walter Scott attributed Lovelace’s most famous ‘Farewell’ to Montrose. Samuel Richardson was to use his name and character for the unscrupulous suitor of Clarissa in the novel of the same name. Anthony à Wood suggested that the name could be split into Lux (‘light’) and casta (‘chaste’).
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Flora, Amarantha or Gratiana, had great talismanic power for Lovelace and gave rise to a cycle of inspired poems still remembered and quoted by a large number of readers. From Donne, Lovelace takes a much-used topos, the farewell to his loved one dictated by duty or loyalty to his sovereign. Lovelace is steeped in this Sehnsucht, and is torn like Donne, while insisting that the union of the two lovers is strong in spite of their separation.5 ‘To Lucasta, going beyond the seas’ is the most Donne-like, terse and conceptualized of Lovelace’s poems, as can be seen in the use of logical argument and in the specific terms borrowed from the style and vocabulary of his model. In ‘To Lucasta, going to the wars’ he asks forgiveness for being inconstant; his duty is to a higher loyalty, to his king, and thus he is guilty of a most honourable disloyalty. According to the ancient knightly code, honour comes above all: ‘I could not love thee, Dear, so much, / Lov’d I not honour more’. For Lovelace, honour, which is both Lucasta’s chastity and his duty as a soldier, is the same as that rejected by Suckling, as a giant feeding only on air. The last stanza of ‘Althea, from prison’ states scornfully that freedom is an inner dimension and value and that the freedom of the human soul that loves is equalled only by the angels.6 Few other poems indeed may be added to those I have quoted from a corpus of almost 200 titles. Of a small bestiary (the snail, ant, hawk, toad and spider) the one that has survived is the Aesopian fable of the cricket, which masks nostalgia for the good old days and forecasts the Puritan axe that is about to fall. Other aspects of the feminine are present in Herrick-like close-ups, such as Lucasta’s muff and beauty-spot. Lovelace becomes more captivating each time he approaches the chaste, reasonable Metaphysical manner of elementary, though ingeniously apparent, contradictions, in relatively short poems showing considerable metrical variety;7 but this equation becomes rarer and rarer. Some of his poems were set to music, but Lovelace’s
5 6 7
‘unconfined’ is an adjective often used by Lovelace to describe love. It also identifies the Golden Age in ‘Love Made in the First Age: To Chloris’. Lovelace’s hyperboles are resounding, categorical, delirious, of ‘impassionate eloquence’, like those of Marlowe fifty years earlier. The final parts of poems that are longer than three or four stanzas are often superfluous and forced.
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reputation has plummeted through the years. Even his most ardent admirers admit that most of his poems are not only forgettable, but are damaging to his overall image. Apart from the gems I have referred to here, written in a state of grace, Lovelace is almost always incapable of controlling his craving for analogies, and indulges in witticisms and ridiculous conceits that weaken the fame of Donne and quite crush Crashaw. In the Lucasta poems, where his style is terse and unadorned, Lovelace is superb; elsewhere, his verse is often opaque and laboured, a far cry from the ever clear and flowing Suckling. Many of Lovelace’s poems are in the form of riddles, or long, extended metaphors, sometimes highly eccentric, obscure and most unexpected. In short, Lovelace is a master of bathos. § 10. Carew* A poet firmly established in the court rather than in the countryside or in a rectory, and therefore the very opposite of Herrick or Herbert, Thomas Carew (1594–1640) was the author of a poetry that is, as it were, the mise en abyme or antonomasia of the age of Charles I (much as Van Dyke1 is in painting). Of him it may truly be said that he was as dissolute in life as he was conscientious in the practice of his art, which was essentially that of a love poet, erotic, if not, at times, pornographic. The deeds and writings of this erotomaniac were carefully closeted by his contemporaries, and only now, after centuries, have come to light in their entirety. But if Carew is obsessed with sex, he is also plagued by guilt beneath his mask, as emerges from the few certain biographical facts available to us.2 From a wealthy family, the *
A first edition of the Poems of Carew appeared posthumously in 1640, followed by a second, enlarged, in 1642. The standard modern edition is still that of R. Dunlap, Oxford 1949, 1957. E. I. Selig, The Flourishing Wreath: A Study of Thomas Carew’s Poetry, New Haven, CT 1958; L. Sadler, Thomas Carew, Boston, MA 1979; J. Kerrigan, ‘Thomas Carew’, in Proceedings of the British Academy, LXXIV (1988), Oxford 1989, 311–50.
1 2
Dunlap 1957, lii, quoting H. J. C. Grierson. Complicated by the existence of his namesake Thomas Carey (1597–1634), whose career was similar: he too went to Oxford, was a courtier and favourite of James I, whose unpublished poems he transcribed. Shortly before his death, James appointed him ambassador to Venice. The composer Henry Lawes set to music the poems of both.
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son of a lawyer, he followed the usual course of studies, and matriculated at Merton College, Oxford. His father complained that at twenty he was a madcap who showed no signs of settling down. He became secretary to the English ambassador in Italy (where he visited Venice, Florence, Naples, Rome and Turin) and The Hague. In 1616, after three years’ service, he was dismissed for slander and other unacceptable behaviour (including, perhaps, an affair with the ambassador’s wife). He entered the service of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, accompanying him to France from 1619 to 1624. Both periods spent on the Continent were fruitful: Carew got to know some of his fellow writers and came into direct contact with the recent, militant poetry of both literatures (and with Marino, who was in Paris at the time). In 1630, after a few years living a bohemian-style existence in London, he was given a position at court with the rather strange title of ‘taster-in-ordinary’ (a kind of personal servant or valet) to the king. The special favour which the Queen extended to him was owed to the fact that one night Carew supposedly put out a candle to prevent the king, who was just about to enter the royal bedchamber, from seeing his wife in the arms of her lover. Carew was a friend of Jonson and the other Cavalier poets, and his poems, circulated in manuscript, gained him the accolade of virtual Poet Laureate. In all likelihood he died of syphilis, and, in the words of the historian Clarendon, tormented by remorse for his dissolute life. He was refused absolution and Extreme Unction by Hales.3 His erotic, sensuous poems contrast strikingly with his translations, or rather, ‘paraphrases’ of the Psalms (only one of the aspects of Carew that recall Wyatt). 2. Carew addressed a subtly imitative panegyric to the recently dead Donne, in which he pronounced him ‘monarch of wit’ who had left no heirs, while, of course, Carew himself was the wit of his court by antonomasia. Donne had cut the dead branches of the Petrarchan tradition and done away with the weeds that strangled English poetry, bringing fresh vigour. Carew’s philosophy of love hinges on the eternal unity of lovers’ souls even 3
In reality ‘The Second Rapture’ shamelessly invokes, not gold, fortune, honour, or long life – fleeting gifts, ‘semblances of happiness’ – but a thirteen-year-old girl who can make an old man’s blood race and restore his appetite, and in whose arms he can die: ‘This is true bliss, and I confess / There is no other happiness’.
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when – in the occasional ‘Farewells’ – their bodies are separated.4 From Jonson, to whom he dedicated an affectionate but balanced ode while he was still living, he acquired the architectonics of verse. In Carew we witness an escalation: his poems are aesthetically more mature and show that he has assimilated and metabolized the need for unity of form; unmistakable are the signs of labor limae and ‘suffering and fatigue’, whereas those of Suckling (the author of the phrase in quotation marks) and, especially, of Lovelace, always bring with them an impression of improvisation, however splendid. Carew is now accepted as an artist in the original sense of the word, that is, a maker of artefacts. Of all his contemporaries, he is the most attentive to proportion and measurement; he is never confused or vague, and avoids the use of extravagant conceits. The exquisitely modelled and adorned short songs – some of them indeed very short – were ideal for being set to music and sung. In the course of time, readers and critics were satisfied with such an aproblematic appreciation of a poet who filtered and distilled the urgency of sexual desire in immaculate euphemisms and finely wrought constructs. He was a man of peace although he did in fact fight alongside the king in the first Bishops’ War; he was not a soldier poet, a fervent defender of Charles, ready, like Lovelace to take up ‘a sword, a horse and a shield’. The spell cast by his poems was in general recognized in English anthologies, only slightly tainted by a few timid objections to a monotonous, repetitive style that soon wearies, and by a limited emotional range and imagination. Subsequent sociological and political interpretations have overturned our 4
In ‘To my Mistress in Absence’ the reader half expects the simile of the legs of the compass to pop up, but it doesn’t. As in Donne, the two lovers are ‘canonized’ and therefore contrasted with ‘gross lovers’. In the other poems of the collection, however, the woman is the lodestar of the storm-tossed ship. Donne’s most famous metaphor, that of the compass, is repeated verbatim in ‘Excuse of Absence’, discovered among his manuscripts. In ‘The Ribband’, which follows on from the two Donne poems, ‘The Funeral’ and ‘The Relique’, a complicated conceit contrasts the perishable silk band worn round their wrists by the two lovers with the undying union of their souls: one ‘moves like air’, the other ‘as the centre stands’. ‘The fly that flew into my mistress’ eye’ in turn echoes Donne’s flea: once it has sucked from the lady’s face ‘the incense and the spice’, it becomes a bird of paradise. The dialogue between Donne and Carew goes on and on.
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view of a poet intent on making time stand still in a kind of fenced-in, soundproofed Eldorado. In other words Carew gave voice to an instinctive but ideologically based reaction against the unnatural Puritan ethos; between the lines of his poems he debates the cultural model of his time, studying and proposing a restoration or refounding, or even the maintaining of the status quo. ‘A Rapture’, which has been judged the most pornographic poem of the age (it is, however, pornography behind a veil of metaphor and periphrasis, untouched by vulgarity) is at the same time, as we shall see, a new discussion on the code of honour, a value deflated by Suckling and trumpeted by Lovelace. Carew quotes verbatim the ‘giant’ mentioned by Suckling,5 and discredits, indeed demystifies it: it is a false value, a fetish handed down through the centuries in order to limit the sexual freedom of women, and is also against true religion. As an individual, Carew defends his instincts and desires against a society that tramples them underfoot. In 1634 he wrote a masque, Coelum Britannicum, and, with the collaboration of Inigo Jones and the music of Henry Lawes, had it performed before the king and the court. In it, the apotheosis of Charles and Henrietta is held back by no less than seven antimasques.6 Carew’s country poems, Jonsonian celebrations of still-surviving traditional aristocratic hospitality, are potent expressions of the theme of a civilization under threat.7 Lovelace, too, in
5 6
7
§ 9.2. Mercury in blank verse and Momo in biting, blown-up, crabbed prose (derived from Giordano Bruno’s Spaccio della bestia trionfante), are the registers of a purifying action of the pagan cosmos in allegorical scenarios which, according to G. Pellegrini, ‘Coelum Britannicum: A Masque at White Hall’, Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, XV, 2 (1962), 85–107, owe much to Italian sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury mythographies and iconographies, mainly those of Cesare Ripa. Criticism of the Stuart regime permeates the allegory, but with a sudden change of scenery a pageant of English history appears, which starts with the Celts and ends with the present monarchs. The final scenario, the work of Inigo Jones, representing clouds descending from the sky, reforming and going up again, and rocks disappearing under the stage, is however clumsy and pretentious. In ‘To Saxham’ the dominant image is that of après nous le déluge, with the stately home becoming a kind of Noah’s Ark for the local animals.
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his poetic fable of the grasshopper, brings the sickle down on the blind, blissful joie de vivre of his protagonist. 3. The dates of composition of Carew’s poems are difficult to determine with any degree of precision, with the exception of the psalms, which are presumed to belong to a later, maybe final period, though some editors think differently;8 and excepting, too, compositions like the elegies and funeral odes and others that can be dated from internal evidence. His reputation as a poet grew in the first twenty years of his century, but in the last five years of his life his inspiration was clearly waning. The cycle to Celia runs through his production, with various interruptions, and Celia herself was a real person, albeit never identified. The figure is conventional, the name long popular amongst poets and most obviously with Ben Jonson.9 In truth there are no internal times, for this is a Catullian liber characterized by changing moods. It is practically a diary, but with interruptions, pauses and occasional interventions in other veins. The predominant literary mode is the silent dialogue with the loved one, a dialectic ruled by the laws of erotic causerie and poetic courtship. We learn, for example, that according to Caroline usage, it was the woman who permitted the man to declare himself, after which actual courtship may begin, though the result is uncertain. In ‘Eternity of Love’, Carew, like Suckling, proclaims that to love is to perform an action which is not languid, but virile and forceful. The lover’s address may vary from a brisk command to a persuasive invitation, from a tender reproach to the hyperbole of deification. Without Donne’s mimesis, they come across as slight and incorporeal. With few exceptions, Carew is unable to communicate emotional power, perhaps even to feel it; his register is sarcasm, offended pride, sudden flashes of humour, or often a touch of bitterness with which he brings his poem to a hurried end. The Celia poems are sweet-sounding and harmonically pleasing, never tart,
8 9
Dunlap 1957, xxx and xli. For details concerning the recurring name, see Dunlap 1957, xxx n. 2. The bones of this story are that ‘Celia’ was blonde, sang divinely, was welcomed in noble homes, wept when the poet left for France in 1619, but then fell out of love and demanded her love letters back. She married, was unhappy, and Carew resumed his courtship of her. In real life, Carew never married.
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soothing and reassuring like a musical box. In Carew there is almost nothing of the heroic, heartfelt dedication of a cavalier servente to his Lady, who is reminded that, if she has fame and glory, it is thanks to his poetry; and she should remember that the supply of poetry can be interrupted. This verbal construct, that is the loved one’s fame and the loved one herself, is temporary, indeed extemporary and may well disappear. The poet awakes, the suspension ceases. He is a god that only for a moment is slave to the illusion he has created with his words (the poem is entitled ‘Ungrateful Beauty Threatened’). Here Carew quite clearly echoes Donne’s use of religious terminology for profane and erotic purposes: the woman should not think she has attained a state of transcendence and so can command adoration; she remains a human being. It is difficult to think of a more cynical or anti-Petrarchan poem. Verses of protest or admonition alternate with lines of adulation. Carew’s rhetorical weaponry includes surprise, as seen in ‘The Comparison’, which begins as an apparently misogynous poem aimed at demolishing the fascination exercised by women and destroying the traditional wisdom on female beauty; but halfway through all trite classical comparisons are rejected because they diminish the divine beauty of woman, which ‘holds nothing earthly’.10 The poet speaks with the voice of wisdom, or pretends to, and exhorts the lady to carpe diem because all earthly things will pass. And yet, at other times he appeals to the eternity of the love that unites them. Two significant details are the much used adjective ‘fleeting’ and the verb ‘to fade’ in its various forms. Fading is affirmed and confirmed by the transitory, but denied by that which can be made eternal. ‘Ask me no more where Jove Bestows’ is perhaps the most structured poem written in English up to its date; it could be successfully analysed with the methods used by the first twentieth-century formalists based on the recurrence of syntagmatic patterns. The first stanza presents a syntactic-constructive and thematic model which is repeated five times (the number of stanzas in the poem), similar to the highly complex type that was to be used by Dylan Thomas (18 Poems, 1934) in, for example, ‘The 10
Suspense in ‘The Complement’ is created by revealing only at the very end the reason why, and because of which bodily feature, the poet loves his lady, after passing in review her whole anatomy. The answer to this riddle, however, is disappointing.
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§ 11. Herrick
force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, where, however, the last stanza modifies and resolves, unlike in Carew, the established syntactic pattern. Carew’s poems hinge more and more on the antithesis between a first stanza that presents a situation or an assertion, and a second beginning with ‘But’ that points a difference. 4. In ‘A Rapture’ the breathless overlapping of the semantic, symbolic, figurative and literal levels evokes the foetal erotic poetry of Dylan Thomas. The metaphors of the bee sucking from flowers, or the loved one who sails his boat to anchor, or the ‘bag of honey’, are archetypal as well as personalized. From an icastic plane the poet modulates to a more prosaic declarative tone, ending with the lapidarian, gnomic sentence: ‘We only sin when Love’s rites are not done’. The philosophy of the union of bodies, the natural sexual realization of love, and the profane creed of sexual enjoyment, all lie pulsating here in an anticipation of D. H. Lawrence, especially in the sting of moral denunciation at the end. In a kind of saccharine souvenir of Donne, Carew speaks of the orgasm as an ‘ecstasie’, with a clear reference to the Donne poem that most resembles Carew’s, whose ode is in reality also a reflection and second paraphrase of Giordano Bruno’s message, evidently perfectly assimilated by Carew. The last fifty lines are dedicated to famous women whose lives were made wretched by their subjection to ‘the goblin Honour’, and whose stories are utopically retold (Lucrece, Penelope, and Daphne). § 11. Herrick* When set alongside the other poets of the early seventeenth century, Robert Herrick (1591–1674) is seen to share some of their characteristics, 1
*
The order of poems of the 1648 edition is followed in Poetical Works, ed. L. C. Martin, Oxford 1956, and, revised, 1965, and in The Complete Poetry, ed. J. M. Patrick, New York 1963, which first used the now standard numerical identification of poems (e.g. H-612) rather than by titles. Both editions have been superseded by The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. R. Connolly and T. Cain, Oxford 2013. F. W. Moorman, Robert Herrick: A Biographical and Critical Study, London 1910, New York 1962; F. Delattre, Robert Herrick, Paris 1912; L. Mandel, Robert Herrick, the Last Elizabethan, Chicago, IL 1927; E. I. M. Easton, Youth Immortal: A Life of Robert Herrick, Boston, MA 1934; S. Musgrove, The Universe of Robert Herrick, Auckland 1950; M. Chute,
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but to lack many more. He stands out as an isolated, eccentric figure; a unicum. To begin with, he was not the son of a bishop, or a clergyman, or a courtier; his father was a goldsmith in Cheapside, one of the poorer parts of London. Stubborn, yet ready to make a virtue of necessity, intransigent and at the same time mild-mannered and calm, he showed promise from an early age. His father having died (he committed suicide by falling out of a window when Herrick was still a baby), he became an apprentice in his uncle’s goldsmith workshop – an auspicious beginning for one who was to become a master craftsman in the art of poetry. In 1613 he turned his back on the family calling, and asked instead to be allowed to study law, which he did at Cambridge, taking at least ten years longer than the average to complete his degree. He decided against a career in the legal profession, which he hated, and, having failed to gain acceptance to the court, chose the ecclesiastical life (1627) without having a real vocation. He withdrew to Devon for many years as priest of the remote parish of Dean Prior.1 Before this, he had led a life of pleasure in the taverns of bohemian London with the ‘sons of Ben’. He willingly gave up all thoughts of promotion and put his mind at rest in his little sinecure, showing himself that he could be a
Two Gentle Men: The Lives of George Herbert and Robert Herrick, London 1960; J. Press, Robert Herrick, London 1961; R. B. Rollin, Robert Herrick, New York 1966, 1992; R. Deming, Ceremony and Art: Robert Herrick’s Poetry, The Hague and Paris 1974; L. DeNeef, ‘This Poetick Liturgie’: Robert Herrick’s Ceremonial Mode, Durham, NC 1974; G. W. Scott, Robert Herrick, London 1974; G. Braden, ‘Robert Herrick and Classical Lyric Poetry’, in The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies, New Haven, CT 1978, 154–254; ‘Trust to Good Verses’: Herrick Tercentenary Essays, ed. R. B. Rollin and J. M. Patrick, Pittsburgh, PA 1978; F. Ferrari, L’influenza classica nell’Inghilterra del Seicento e la poesia di Robert Herrick, Messina-Firenze 1979; E. H. Hageman, Robert Herrick: A Reference Guide, Boston, MA 1983; A. B. Coiro, Robert Herrick’s ‘Hesperides’ and the Epigram Book Tradition, Baltimore, MD 1988; ‘Lords of Wine and Oyle’: Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. R. Connolly and T. Cain, Oxford 2011. 1
His unsuitedness to a life of action was confirmed in 1627 when, as chaplain, he accompanied an English army on an unsuccessful expedition to the island of Rhé to liberate French Protestants.
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Prospero in his inland island.2 In 1647, however, he was suspended from office by Cromwell for refusing to accept the Puritan ecclesiastical laws. He thus paid in person for his beliefs. After the Restoration he was reinstated in his parish. He never married, and died at the then old age of eightythree, having been spared the more serious consequences of a dissolute life style that had proved fatal to other Cavalier poets. Herrick himself sorted and arranged his works for print. They appeared when he was nearly sixty, at a time when the poems of his fellow writers were being circulated in manuscript, published, at their death, by friends or acquaintances and given the simple title of Poems. Herrick, instead, gave his book one of the first humorously allusive titles in English literature – Hesperides. Published in 1648, it contained all the poetry that Herrick wished to hand down to posterity, thus establishing well in advance the canon on which the future would judge him. He published nothing more. Before him, only Jonson had given proof of such literary maturity. The idea of deliberate confusion is contradicted by the methodical, scrupulous arrangement of the contents, which follows a bipartite if not rising order, so that a first part containing secular verse is followed by Noble Numbers.3 The general prologue in verse, or protasis which parodies the opening of the Aeneid, reviews the range of subjects of the individual poems, thus making Herrick’s book an organized poem, with a beginning and an end, instead of a hotchpotch of separate compositions. It becomes a parable of life, death and eternity; or rather, a comedy. ‘I write of Hell’ (though if anything, he writes of Purgatory); ‘I sing (and ever shall) / Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all’. 2. Herrick stands out among his fellow poets as being essentially healthy, concrete, lucid, self-mocking, and detached. In line with current literary fashion, he uses one or more female personae with namesakes never used before (fourteen in all) to court, exhort, pamper and idolatrize, in a context of extreme artificiality (quite natural for the time), which is 2
3
Local anecdotes referred that Herrick kept a pet pig that he had taught to drink from a tankard. Parish routine was far more prosaic, and it is said that at times Herrick, annoyed that his congregation was not paying due attention, would throw his prayer book at them. Formally this shorter section is marked with the date 1647.
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both anti- and post-Petrarchan as well as parodistically authentic. He is never bewitched, bothered or tormented by a woman, and the kind of love he writes about throughout his works has nothing in common with the spasmodic, violent passion of Donne. Quite apart from when the individual poems were written,4 Herrick dons the mask, not of a blushing young lover, but of an old man affected by paedophile satyriasis (in actual fact, he was in his forties when he became vicar of Dean Prior), stimulated by the pretty peasant girls by whom he was surrounded. To be more precise, he is a fetishist, with a weakness for certain parts of the female body, behaviour or dress – from scarves to petticoats, from breasts and nipples to long, flowing hair. In ‘The Vision’ he is a priapic voyeur like Joyce’s Bloom, dreaming of ‘a virgin […] Spartanness’ with naked legs, of whom he sees ‘the happy dawning of her thigh / which when I saw, I made access / To kiss that tempting nakedness’. He is foiled in this by a branch of myrtle. Not many other poets had the opportunity to get to know at first hand those peasant girls that had been the subject of their poems since the Elizabethans. They are portraits from a long period of research in the field. Herrick was, in effect, an ethnologist, an anthropologist and a student of local customs and folklore, fascinated by the pagan residues in England, which he would never have discovered had he not ended up in that out-of-the-way corner of deepest Devon. Taine was the first to observe that Herrick is not interested in the classically beautiful so much as in the pretty – a foreshadowing of the innocuous and familiar, Biedermeier Romanticism. He does not explore beauty to reach its essence, but lingers on the surface. His poetry is a series of impressions in the pictorial sense of the word, and reality strikes the eye with bright, glittering colours and with its synaesthesias. The reader is not rocked and raked by empathetic involvement with the poem; all he feels is a slight itch.5 Herrick is at home with the miniature rather than the large canvas or the frescoed vault. Long, structured poems are few; the vast majority are 4 5
Conjectural (Press 1961, 18, and Coiro 1988, 12 and 220 n. 21). Premonitions of even a Swift-like abstention from ecstatic rapture, or of its immediate deflation, may be exemplified by the following couplet (H-350): ‘Fain would I kiss my Julia’s dainty leg / Which is as white and hair-less as an egg’.
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fragmented and short, on average not more than ten lines. We are faced with a mosaic of 1402 pieces which can only be compared, in modern poetry, with the work of Emily Dickinson. Or we might think of the later pioneer aesthetics of minimalism or of the sonatinas of Domenico Scarlatti, composed more or less at the same time, and whose number is roughly one third of Herrick’s poems. In such a limited space every word, every punctuation mark, even, becomes highly functional, and, as is often said, Herrick seeks and achieves the inevitable. At times he reduces the lines to disyllabic verses, a far cry from the old fourteen syllables of the poulterer’s measure. 3. Though minimalism, dislike of complexity and admiration of spontaneity are characteristic of the period we live in, Herrick is still largely unknown or, if known, not much liked. Hesperides received little attention throughout the seventeenth century, attracting no list of admirers and stirring up no controversy either. It was reprinted only in 1823, and later welcomed with enthusiasm by Swinburne (who pronounced Herrick to be the purest lyric poet in English)6 and by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Such admiration, however, was not echoed in textbooks, which spared only a few lines for the poet; and the critical bibliography on Herrick is far from overflowing. Everyone agreed that Herrick’s poetry lacked profundity and was not sufficiently complex, a discriminating criterion taken up later by structuralists. He was attacked because he was deficient in intellectual vigour and logical vis; in his hundreds of poems he did nothing but repeat the same old message that everything in the world fades away and so it is best to enjoy oneself while one can. Sometimes querulous and earnest, reserved and sober, he is seen as a little too languid and genteel. And that simple refrain Herrick drew, without novelties, from the Latin classics, from Horace, Catullus, above all Martial, and from the epigrams of the Greek Anthology.7 Critics have been hostile to him simply on the basis of the aesthetic criterion of his limited thematic range. His admirers 6 7
Press 1961, 5. See, on Herrick’s position in the epigrammatic tradition, the overly initiatic and philologically oriented debate between Coiro 1988 (119, 129, 166) and passim, and Braden 1978.
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respond that, instead, he reformulates well-known axioms in lilts and prosodic forms that delight and captivate, and on an assortment of occasions, moods and states of mind that look forward to later sensibilities. Critical reception started to veer when Herrick’s poetry ceased to be considered simple, easy and straightforward, but possibly complex and much less superficial that it had appeared, thus inverting the initial thesis with a petition of principle. The very fact that Hesperides was published just before the execution of Charles I is no sign of evasion or escapism. In fact, the hortus conclusus that Herrick celebrates is a criticism of growing Puritan severity, and its poetry a form of support for rural festivities at a time when the regime was tightening its hold on the country. Herrick invites the reader to share the pleasure of country activities and the give and take of a still perfectly functional microcosm; to share the roots and residues of pagan or medieval rites, such as the Maypole. The insistence on the transience of all earthly things in a way betrays, masks, and one might say exorcises the Puritan threat hanging over the Caroline belle époque. We even hear distant echoes of the heartfelt pleas of Hopkins, expressed with similar verbal devices. Hopkins too foresaw with dread a coming end, and like Herrick looked back to an unsullied primeval creation. Herrick’s acceptance of a life beyond our earthly existence is stripped of all exceptionality, presented as it is, as sometimes in Hopkins, in disarming dream visions of a childlike, naïve quality. 4. Herrick’s poems have for many years taken pride of place in anthologies thanks to their easy, flowing verse, their musicality and accessibility. We must beware, however, of a partial and fragmentary reading of his work. Each individual reader of Hesperides will choose his handful of favourite poems, his main problem being Herrick’s abundance – so unlike the slender volumes of other Cavalier poets – or the variety of forms and genres (epithalamia, epistles, epitaphs, panegyrics, epigrams, occasional poems, short satirical pieces, bare couplets, jottings, notes, parables, stories, imaginary anecdotes, aphorisms, songs). If we wished to exclude the crowded gallery of events and happenings that present and ‘photograph’ his female hypostases, we would find ourselves faced with Herrick’s wellknown ‘limited range’. He is not a natural or a nature poet, but some poems on features and phenomena of the landscape – obviously with the usual
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message appended, that everything must die – are triumphs of wit in verse, like the delightful ‘Funeral of the Rose’ (H-687), slighted by Leavis in one of his many instances of aesthetic blindness and idiosyncrasy. In Herrick, the Petrarchan is shot through with anti-Petrarchan effects. In every poem, the words are counted, listed, given their place; the vocabulary is the most common, ordinary, most worn out possible, and yet it works, thanks to the relocation and summation of these tired locutions. There are exceptions: unusual words, apparently out of context, or stretched almost beyond recognition to yield new meanings. For example, ‘protestant’ in the sense of ‘suitor’, a trisyllabic word in a stanza of, mainly as always, monosyllables, and surrounded by terms in themselves quite common in the rhetoric of eroticism. Examples of polysyllabic Latinisms are: ‘repullulation’, ‘liquefaction’, ‘principality’ and the coinage ‘circummortal’ (H-231). Herrick’s love poetry succeeds because of the strange, naïve, unusual argumentation, the seductive sweetness of its music, and, not least, the contrast between ordinary, run-of-the-mill language and a loftier style. The religious verse of Noble Numbers has always been less popular than the love poems, and is often completely ignored because it does not fit in with the heart-rending conflicts usually associated with the genre. In Herrick there is no diabolical or satanic denial of the desire to accept death; the journey to the afterlife is undertaken with serene acceptance. Herrick’s ‘Litany’ is down-to-earth, as always, and predicts death with expressions that are indiscreet, not to say disrespectful and satirical. The entire chorus of beautiful country nymphs is summoned to his deathbed by the dying poet and entrusted with the meticulous execution of his funeral service. Herrick’s theodicy is mixed with a satisfied irenic spirit in blatant contrast to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Heaven is within reach and there will be a huge outburst of light that will disperse the shades of darkness. Of course, God will wield his rod but the blows will be painless and will soon cease. Forever naïve, Herrick does not speak as a priest, from the pulpit or ex cathedra, but using understatements or the banalizations of the eavesdropper or someone who has just dropped in (‘As learn’d Aquinas saith’, or Boethius, or Cassiodorus). This calm, clear, confident meeting with the life to come recalls, once again, the floral Hopkins of ‘Heaven-Haven’, before his religious poetry turned ‘terrible’.
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§ 12. Herbert* I: The quintessence of Anglican spirituality As in the past, critical opinion today is far from unanimous concerning George Herbert (1593–1633), the second greatest religious poet in the seventeenth century, a period that includes not only Donne, but Crashaw *
The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson, Oxford 1941, The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. H. Gardner, Oxford 1961, and The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C. A. Patrides, London 1974, have now been superseded by The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. H. Wilcox, Cambridge 2007. Concordance of the complete works, ed. M. A. Di Cesare and R. Mignani, Ithaca, NY and London 1977. The first biography was by Izaak Walton, The Life of Mr George Herbert, in 1670. A. Tate, A Reading of George Herbert, Chicago, IL 1952; R. Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert, London and Chicago, IL 1952; M. Bottrall, George Herbert, London 1954; L. L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, New Haven, CT and London 1954, 249–320; J. H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art, London 1954; M. Chute, Two Gentle Men: The Lives of G. Herbert and R. Herrick, London 1960; T. S. Eliot, George Herbert, London 1962; M. A. Rickey, Utmost Art: Complexity in the Verse of George Herbert, Lexington, KY 1966; V. Poggi, George Herbert, Bologna 1967; A. Stein, George Herbert’s Lyrics, Baltimore, MD 1968; H. Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert, Cambridge, MA 1975; A. M. Charles, A Life of George Herbert, New York 1977; S. Fish, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing, Berkeley, CA 1978; ‘Too Rich to Clothe the Sunne’: Essays on George Herbert, ed. C. J. Summers and T.-L. Pebworth, Pittsburgh, PA 1980; B. L. Harman, Costly Monuments: Representations of the Self in George Herbert’s Poetry, Cambridge, MA 1982; CRHE, ed. C. A. Patrides, London 1983; R. Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry, Chicago, IL 1983; D. Benet, Secretary of Praise: The Poetic Vocation of George Herbert, Columbia, MO 1984; C. Bloch, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible, Berkeley, CA 1985; G. E. Veith, Jr, Reformation Spirituality: The Religion of George Herbert, Lewisburg, PA 1985; George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, ed. L. L. Martz, Oxford 1986; S. Stewart, George Herbert, Boston, MA 1986; M. White Singleton, God’s Courtier: Configuring a Different Grace in George Herbert’s ‘Temple’, Cambridge 1987; T. G. Sherwood, Herbert’s Prayerful Art, Toronto 1989; M. C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship, Chicago, IL 1991; H. Toliver, George Herbert’s Christian Narrative, University Park, PA 1993; E. Clarke, Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry: ‘Divinitie, and Poesie, Met’, Oxford 1997; C. Malcolmson, Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic, Stanford, CA 1999, and George Herbert: A Literary Life, Basingstoke 2002; J. Falloon, Heart in Pilgrimage: A Life of George Herbert, Milton Keynes 2006; C. Sullivan, The Rhetoric of the Conscience in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan, Oxford 2008; J. Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, London 2013.
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(judged by some to be, at his best, superior to Herbert),1 besides Vaughan and Traherne, and excluding Milton – though, strictly speaking, Milton is more a poet of theological epic than a devotional poet. Those sneaking objections once raised against Donne have been reoriented, with an added aggravation, against Herbert, targeting his ‘quaintness’ – a term first used by Coleridge and since become ubiquitous – that is, the strangeness, or, in a more derogative sense, the odd, sometimes kitsch2 nature of his imagery.3 It is symptomatic that Herbert was rediscovered and reassessed more systematically about 100 years ago, at the same time as another religious poet – so similar in many respects to Herbert that the parallelism between them is now accepted by all – Hopkins, initially subjected to ostracism dictated by the same aesthetic taste, or prejudice, and from 1918 and for the next few decades criticized and misunderstood on the basis of almost identical infringements of presumed norms of literary decorum. In this discussion I shall only hint at the dialogue at a distance between the two poets on the level of conceptual, theological and even terminological parallels that offer ample proof of the number of doubles – not all of whom coinciding with each other – that the Victorian poet would elect. Apart from the Romantic interlude (not indifferent to Herbert, but with exceptions),4 from the late seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth, with the parenthesis of some, though not all, of the avant-garde movements, Herbert criticism was overshadowed by an Enlightenment fear of similar violations of aesthetic norms. When he criticized Herbert’s ‘tricks’ Addison was using the same criteria as Bridges who castigated Hopkins’s ‘faults of taste’.5 Herbert was 1 2 3
4 5
Cf. Eliot 1962, 16. The best example is that of Christ’s winding sheets which become handkerchiefs for the faithful. Praz (in PSL, 254), composing his ‘epigraph’ on Herbert, repeated verbatim in other writings, is one of the few who row against the stream; he finds Herbert’s metaphors ‘in the long run monotonous and lacking surprise’ (while received opinion finds them full of surprises), also blaming them for their coldness. It must be admitted that it is not at all easy to grasp the compelling logic behind this statement. One wonders which poet William Cowper had in mind when he judged Herbert to be ‘gothic and uncouth’ (CRHE, 164). Nine editions had appeared before Walton’s hagiographic biography. Coleridge makes several mentions of him in Biographia Literaria; interest in him was revived
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accused of showing off; it was said that behind all the stylistic acrobatics there was very little substance, and that all his insistence on the poetic signifier is scarcely offset by his earnestness. So Herbert aroused curiosity but not praise, without being an actual fiasco. Like Lovelace, he was called the specialist in bathos. Now, the main difference between him and his brother, Lord Herbert of Cherbury,6 is first of all that George Herbert starts from the concrete image while Herbert of Cherbury is purely dianoetic; the older brother seems to have been right when he pointed out in George the family traits in his temperament: outbursts of anger, pride, and above all, boastfulness and ambition. 2. Herbert, like Hopkins, was the rising star of his Cambridge college; both were sickly, both formidable classicists, capable of writing poetry in Greek and Latin; one was Welsh by birth, the other ‘by vocation’; both were university dons, musicians and linguists. It is significant that both composed their carefully wrought poems with misgivings, suspecting they were not so much prayers or homilies as displays of sinful narcissistic indulgence; and that both, almost on their deathbed, entrusted them to a friend to decide whether or not to publish them (Ferrar7 for Herbert and Bridges for Hopkins). Herbert also carried out a ‘slaughter of the innocents’,8 burning or otherwise getting rid of his worldly poetry before taking holy orders; his posthumous book is similar in size to that of Hopkins and contains poetic exercises in Latin and Greek; altogether, it describes a fierce struggle between the poet and God, as in the case of Hopkins, ending in reconciliation (Herbert openly said as much to Ferrar). In both, the arrival in a
6 7
8
by various religious poets and writers such as Ruskin, Christina Rossetti and Hopkins himself. § 15. Nicholas Ferrar (1592–1639), born in London from a wealthy family, returned from his journeys on the Continent with his Anglican faith intact; he entered the Church as a deacon, and, on the death of his father, in 1630, founded a religious community near Little Gidding, to the north-west of Cambridge (the first monastery after the dissolution by Henry VIII, it was destroyed by the Puritans in 1647). It was probably the thought of Ferrar’s Little Gidding that induced T. S. Eliot to write his short study of Herbert in 1962, for the reasons indicated in Volume 7, § 100.6. Volume 6, § 192.4.
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safe haven is accompanied by small but nonetheless disturbing waves that threaten to pitch the repentant sinner back into the deep.9 Recent criticism has underlined supposed existentialist premonitions, accentuating the tones of anguish and the torment of misbelief, starting from the pioneering suggestion found in Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity.10 The only obvious difference is that Herbert’s poems appeared only a few months after his death, while those of Hopkins had to wait many years. Early twentieth-century critics commenting on Herbert and his imagery posited analogies with, for example, Lewis Carroll (Hopkins was as yet unknown, and Dylan Thomas still to come), Keble,11 Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson,12 even T. S. Eliot and Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and Anthony Hecht. The vast critical bibliography, of which only a small selection is given in my Bibliography, far exceeds the importance generally attributed to him as a poet. Scarcely a year goes by without the publication of one or more books on him, and the innumerable papers to be found in the various learned journals are a clear sign that Herbert has become a cult figure. 3. A third and still more famous book of poems appeared in 1633, the same year as Herbert’s: that of John Donne. This is like an optical illusion, of course, in that Donne was old enough to be Herbert’s father. The two were brought into contact by Herbert’s mother, Magdalen Newport; 9 10
11 12
Hence Aldous Huxley’s description of Herbert as the poet ‘of variable English weather’. Cf. the reading of ‘The Sacrifice’ (the second, and longest, poem in The Temple) in W. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, London 1984 (1st edn 1930), 226–33, and Tuve’s point-by-point rebuttal (1952). ‘The Sacrifice’ is the dramatization of Christ’s ascent of Golgotha in the form of a dramatic monologue in rhymed tercets, each followed by a refrain. Empson interpreted the fifty-first verse, dealing with the Fall and the restitution of the apple by Jesus, as a metaphor for incest. Tuve sees no contradictory impulses or Freudian complexes in the poem, just traditional liturgical and iconographic models and representations of Easter. Empson replied with an extended version of his interpretation, published in TLS (31 December 1993, 11–12), in which, after much lengthy and contorted decoration, he confirmed the presence, for him at any rate quite clear, of ‘double meanings somewhere in the poet’s mind’, that is, ‘without his realizing them and totally unintentional’. MVO, 196–200. Praz associates Herbert with Dickinson in CLA, vol. II, 150, as do other critics quoted in CRHE, 47–8 n. 103.
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she was left a widow when George was three and moved to Oxford to give her ten children a better education. She fell under Donne’s magnetic spell, and was immortalized in one of his ‘anniversaries’. Herbert addresses Donne in several sonnets written at the age of seventeen to bid farewell to love poetry and embrace exclusively religious themes. Herbert’s inclusion in the Metaphysical school of Donne has been exhaustively debated by critics without any agreement being reached. The difference between the two is one of poetic intensity: Donne is spasmodic, Herbert more graceful, almost feminine in the way he embroiders his tales of fancy. Herbert makes poetic use of philosophy and the new science but without Donne’s obsessiveness; and, of course, Herbert wrote no love poetry. T. S. Eliot expressed their diversity with a formula: Herbert represents the dominion of feeling over intellect, Donne the opposite.13 Herbert differs from Donne in the pictorial or iconic nature of his writing, or ‘visual hieroglyphic’, as seen in the shape of the verse in ‘The Altar’ or in ‘Easter Wings’.14 In a handful of Herbert’s poems, the theological content is reduced to a play on words, like an anagram or an acrostic. Similar stratagems or stylistic devices are auditory as well as visual: Herbert exploits onomatopoeia and the echo effect, and internal conflict is conveyed in the dissonance of the verse, which gives way to harmony when inner peace is restored. Setting these poems to music came natural to a poet who was himself a talented musician.15 The debate which raged in the golden age of Herbert’s ‘redis-
13 14
15
Eliot 1962, 17. ‘Easter Wings’ can be read vertically or horizontally, the latter being the case in some editions (where, for example, the page is too narrow to allow a vertical reading): wings beating, or the shape of a funnel, or bellows, to suggest an upward movement. For greater effect, a different system of reading would be necessary, from the bottom up. Like many of Herbert’s poems, this one dazzlingly recapitulates the story of the Creation, the Fall (the lowest point), the Incarnation and the Resurrection (the highest point). ‘Jordan II’ casts doubt on the idea of Herbert as a ‘Metaphysical’ poet: the temptation of the ornate is like a flame that winds and rises, but winds in vain because it is ‘vanitie’ – the word is whispered in the poet’s ear by someone, a friend, his other self, his conscience, God. The admonishment of this friend takes us back to the concept of the poet, not as an original inventor, but as a medieval copyist. As Hopkins will
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covery’, the 1950s and 60s, has however extended its range of interest from his imagery to include the question of his beliefs. Was there, in Herbert, a basic Calvinist element even before Puritanism became ‘official’? Or was he, instead, a Catholic at heart, influenced by St Francis de Sales and owing much to Ignatian meditation? L. L. Martz, in the classic historical reconstruction I have already quoted, in which he explores the background of religious Metaphysical poetry, saw in Herbert a specifically ‘Salesian’ spirituality which showed, if nothing else, that Herbert was a great mixer, capable of combining very different influences in a final product that is unmistakably his own. Lewalski disagreed, saying that Herbert reflects the Protestant-Pauline paradigm of ‘justification’, with salvation lying entirely in the hands of God while Man is powerless.16 Herbert’s only intervention in the theological controversies of the day was a Latin thesis against the Scottish Puritan Andrew Melville. It is equally certain that in 1632 Herbert not only read the spiritual handbook by Spanish Giovanni Valdesso, given to him by Ferrar, but that he also translated it, pronouncing the author ‘a true servant of God’.17 In the end, it is difficult not to feel that impec-
16
17
say in ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’, the things were already there, only the ‘beholder’ was ‘wanting’. Cf. § 2.4 for the differing opinions of the two scholars. Judging from ‘Love III’, man believes himself to be really ‘guilty’ and unworthy to take part in the Eucharistic feast or eternal life; but he receives repeated, loving invitations from the Lord, who has taken upon himself all man’s sins, and at last sits down at the banquet. Herbert often exhibits fears and senses of guilt that have no grounding in reality. The debate on Herbert’s Calvinism or Anglo-Catholicism is ongoing, enriched by contributions which are becoming more and more technical and specialized. See in this regard, for example, Fish 1978, Sherwood 1989, and Malcolmson 1999. A poet who was praised by the Puritan, Baxter, paraphrased by the Methodist, Wesley (CRHE, 11, 16–18), and imitated by the Catholic, Hopkins, is clearly ecumenical and non-confessional. In ‘The British Church’, probably a very early work, Herbert enters the fray as an Anglican. Echoing Donne’s ‘The Anatomy of the World’, the Anglican Church represents a balance between two extremes: the Church of Rome is a scantily dressed woman with a painted face while the ‘Protestant’ Church is too bashful and quite naked. The ideas present in this composition are repeated in ‘The Church Militant’, which completes The Temple, in long sections ending in a refrain. The development of the Church has been towards the west: Egypt, Greece
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cable, methodical Herbert is a facsimile of an Anglican priest at the time of Elizabeth, the closest comparison being with Sidney or Hooker under the banner of the ‘via media’. § 13. Herbert II: ‘The Temple’. The builder of temples The collection of poems entitled The Temple, sent by the dying Herbert to his friend Ferrar, was published posthumously in 1633. It consists of more than 150 poems,18 a good third of which, usually no more than three or four stanzas of mixed metre verse, are compositions of extreme semantic compression produced by the combined action of allusion, reticence, and ellipsis. They are examples of a poetics of false simplicity, in which the richer the network of implication, the more ordinary and literal it appears. Many attempts have been made, some of them well-argued and illuminating, to establish a chronological order different from the original one; but Herbert’s time is mental and symbolic, not calendar-based, and few chronological indicators can be considered certain. However, it is likely that quite a few of the poems were written in the last three years of his life, when he was rector of the little parish (in fact a branch) of Bemerton in Wiltshire, near Salisbury. He arrived here in 1630 after his studies first at Westminster school in London, then at Cambridge from the age of
18
(where philosophy gives way to religion), Rome, then Germany, from where, as is to be expected, the sceptre of religion passes to England. Sin, too, progresses from east to west: idolatry in Egypt, the oracles of Greece, Rome where sin is crowned. Unable to overthrow the Church, Sin becomes a Jesuitical prelate or a Pope. Rome assimilates all the Egyptian vices and the worst of the pagan world. Old and new Rome are joined in a new empire, which for a Protestant is, of course, the empire of the Antichrist. The future is seen in the voyage of religion to America, since the Thames has been ‘polluted’ by the waters of the Seine and the Tiber. The Americans, instead, choose poverty and stay far from the curse of gold. Not included in The Temple are a few poems in the so-called Williams manuscript (which includes preliminary versions of sixty-nine poems of The Temple). Some were transcribed by Walton in his biography; for others the authorship is uncertain. Of particular interest are one in which God is beyond reach and one dedicated to Trinity Sunday, the subject of another poem remarkable for linguistic artifices. ‘Evensong’ compares the sun with man, setting every day. Several of the Latin poems are celebratory or polemical with regard to Catholicism.
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seventeen. At Cambridge he taught rhetoric from 1618 and from 1620 to 1627 held the office of ‘public orator’, an official of the university whose job it was to welcome visiting authorities. Elected twice as a member of Parliament, his ambitions for a place at court were shattered by the death of James and of his patrons. After some hesitation he took Holy Orders and became rector first in Lincoln and then at Bemerton,19 where he died of consumption at the age of forty. Almost every single poem in this collection is a microcosm; but just as we can, and should, read Donne’s Songs and Sonnets in the light of an organizing principle, so we should do with Herbert, as T. S. Eliot earnestly enjoined. We find in The Temple a modular organism for the cyclical recurrence of symbolic archetypes, themes, titles, and metrical forms. Three internal organizing modules overlap and interweave in the collection: the first is architectural; the second is the liturgical calendar; the third is the ‘typological’ shuttle offered by the Bible. The entire cosmos is, for Herbert, a divine temple. The choice of the word ‘temple’20 is significant: it is found in the only two works in prose and verse left by Herbert, where it is used in preference to ‘church’, which carries, whether with a capital letter or not, age-old institutional associations that are absent from ‘temple’, a synonym for sacrality, spirituality and transcendental meditation. In his biography of Herbert, Walton pays great attention to Herbert’s idée fixe and tells the reader about his subject’s ambitions, his achievements as an architect, planner, and above all unpaid restorer of churches and chapels, and therefore ‘divine mason’. The temple already existed, but it was falling down literally and symbolically – a paradigm of his personal faith as well as faith in general at that time, which seemed to be involved in a kind of precocious twilight of the west. Herbert had rebuilt the dilapidated church at Lincoln, paying for the reconstruction and working physically too, although his mother pleaded with him not to over-exert himself. The little church of Bemerton, too, was in ruins and he repaired it. In The Temple, then, building metaphors are numerous, to say 19
His wife never appears in the poems; Herbert nurtured the image of an ideal woman as a companion for an equally ideal country vicar. The Herberts had no children. 20 Some attribute the choice to Ferrar or to the editor Barnabas Oley, in either case in compliance with indications from the author himself.
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the least, as are allegories that use as their vehicles houses and other kinds of buildings. In ‘The World’, one of the many poems constructed on this equation, the world is a stately house brought to ruin by demonic or evil forces (amongst them Fortune, Pleasure and Sin), but completely restored by divine grace; this may be read as an extreme synthesis of the story of the Creation, Fall and Redemption of mankind. In the third stanza, Sin appears in the form of a shady, beckoning sycamore, described as ‘winding slyly’, suggesting the tree under which Adam and Eve took shelter. The symbolic advance into the temple proceeds in ‘The Altar’, ‘The Church-floor’, ‘The Windows’, ‘Church-music’ and ‘Church-monuments’. 2. The vestibule is formed by the seventy-seven stanzas of ‘The ChurchPorch’, the same number, it has been pointed out,21 as the words of the Credo in the vernaculars. It symbolizes an act of purification, like the dipping of fingers in holy water before proceeding up the aisle. In ‘Superliminare’, a second vestibule opens for a believer who may now advance towards the altar. Spatially, The Temple is a place it is now possible to enter; permission has been given with the removal of all profane thoughts. Movement from the door to the altar is millimetric and mimes both the liturgical calendar and eschatological and apocalyptic time. One would expect, therefore, the collection to begin with the Nativity; instead, Herbert starts from the Creation, which is closely followed by the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.22 In reality the criterion of succession and the sequence of the poems become confused and vague, with the insertion of poems in the form of musical variations and according to the poet’s free inspiration.23 Herbert’s art is principally that of the witty title:24 neutral or thematic titles, allusive or suggestive ones, often ambiguous, like ‘The Collar’ or ‘The Pulley’, in which latter that particular mechanical device is not in fact mentioned. The fact that some titles are used more than once is far from being a sign of failing imagination; quite the contrary: it indicates the cyclical repetition of themes 21 22 23
Martz 1954, 291 and n. 6. Bottrall 1954, 90. Bottrall 1954, 57, suggests that the book was left open at the author’s death, and that every cycle is to some extent left unfinished. 24 Often noted and discussed, for example in Rickey 1966, 92–102.
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and new ways to meditate on the same subject. Herbert often takes some everyday occurrence and lifts it to a moral plane, creating an allegorical parallel or contrast involving his typical, graceful fantasy and lively curiosity. He often invents visionary dialogues in which the believer first denies or doubts God’s gifts, only to accept them in the end. Tone and registers alternate, and two frequently used modes are the prayer, begging God not to be angry, and the apostrophe, or, more liturgically, the antiphon. ‘Prayer I’ is a brilliant illustration of the logical-argumentative category of poetry as ‘definition’ and, at the same time, a volley of metaphors, some of them quite ordinary, others shocking. As I have already said, Herbert sometimes loves to play with words, and reduces, or raises, aspects of the spiritual life to a level of transcendental paradox, as in ‘Sinnes Round’, where the three stanzas end with the same line as begins the following one, and the poem ends with a repetition of the opening words; the semantic circularity reflects the circuitous action of sin (sins go in a circle, starting with thoughts, proceeding to words, from words to evil intentions, and thence to the hands, that is to say, actions, which in turn generate sinful thoughts; and so the ‘round’ begins again); or in ‘Paradise’,25 or in ‘The Water-course’.26 3. Each step forward is matched by one step backwards, but there is a final, decisive step that brings the supplicant to the heavenly feast, but only by the grace of God. Hence the shifts of mood in the highly dramatic
25
Content is fused with form whenever it reproduces the concept of a divine faith as a shelter for man, protecting him against invasion and danger; this explains the almost riddle-like device of the dropping of letters in the rhymes of the four threeline verses: ‘grow-row-ow’ and so on, with the inclusion of one word inside another. 26 The two stanzas of this poem end with a bracket containing two alternative words and where the meaning is completed according to which of the two contrasting words is chosen. In the first: the world is full of suffering, but this is not surprising since suffering awaits him who ‘loves life’ or ‘strife’. In the second: the sinner is told to ask Nature for all the liquid she possesses to turn into tears of joy or remorse. In ‘Coloss. 3. 3’ – which argues that life has two motions like the sun, one straight and visible, the other hidden and inclined towards God – the words in italics present in every line, when read one after the other, contain the following message: ‘My life is his in Him that is my treasure’. Other poems contain a numerological mimesis, as in ‘Trinity Sunday’ in three triplets.
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interior monologue of ‘The Collar’ or ‘Temper I’, where the speaker is conscious of his shortcomings and weaknesses. The world is always a source of danger and temptation, and its fruits offer themselves for man’s picking and enjoyment: man gathers his strength and abstains in the name of God. Herbert’s God looks after his creature and does not abandon him, and the poet believes he has discovered the divine plan. God has his own creative logic, together with tactics and strategies. He keeps him on edge, making him pull at the leash, so that he doesn’t wallow in the enjoyment of natural beauty. The plan of salvation, the purpose and aim of human suffering, emerge: it serves to bring man closer to God. Herbert’s theology is quite anti-Calvinist seen in this light: divine grace is necessary but not sufficient without man’s collaboration; each has a part to play and man’s spontaneous agreement is always an essential part of the equation (‘The Windows’). Hence the concept and the word ‘combination’ or grafting: wings fly high if they are grafted onto the divine in ‘Easter-Wings’; doctrine must be combined with real life. Now, God is, besides other things, a strategist: he gives free rein to man but when he intervenes, the effect is instantaneous, and the situation is overturned, as in ‘A Parody’, where the word is used in a musical, rather than literal, sense. And yet Herbert at bottom is writing a parody when he portrays himself forever falling, a prey to temptations that appear in the allegorical guise of the various Vices, not those of Langland but a parody of them; it is as if the poet were whispering to the reader that he is ‘being allegorical’, that is, parodic. § 14. Herbert III: ‘A Priest to the Temple’. A vicar’s prayer book Herbert considerably increased his production in the last three years of his life: besides working incessantly on the poems of The Temple, he completed, in 1632, the admittedly short A Priest to the Temple27 (in thirty-seven chapters plus a prayer and a sermon). He was, however, never frenetic. In one sense, the book is a confession, in another a prescription, a reminder by the poet to himself. It is, therefore, a practical handbook, an account of past or present experiences, and of ideals to be pursued. The reader will
27
Published only in 1652.
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find no blinding light of transcendence here; the first page conveys the well-known traits of solidity, order and precision, with an immediate distinction between three kinds of clergyman, and his decision to deal only with the country variety. In the course of his treatise, Herbert identifies, separates, documents, examines and classifies activities, offices, gifts and particular aspects of a minister’s duties. Rather than exalted, he is downto-earth, listing and analysing the tactics, techniques, instruments and even stratagems of the office, like the most effective way of preaching, for example, which may be to stir up emotion, quite unlike catechism, which is based on questions and answers. He unwittingly reveals a persuasive technique, a theory, if not of communication, of the strategy of the preacher. His meticulous analysis of the Christian life may seem excessive, with his obsession with finding two or more alternatives, or possibilities or case histories. In this it is almost like Spinoza. On the other hand, almost every affirmation is measured and founded on numerous Biblical sources, so that one thinks of the erudite, almost pedantic, prose of Burton’s Anatomy (in particular when he deals with the vicar’s diet, the healthy foods that aid and the unhealthy ones that block digestion).28 No mention is made of fears or failings, or the sudden crises of conscience of which we read in the poems; all gives way to the need to put on a display of integrity, blamelessness, and absolute control of one’s impulses and weaknesses. However, chapter twenty-seven does state that a curate is, or ought to be, always sad because of the Cross, but that in order to reach out to his parishioners, he should temper his sadness with the occasional outburst of joy. Among his various tasks, the vicar mediates with the Crown and acts as a public official. Chapter thirteen deals with church maintenance, furniture and adornments, and the functioning of all the components of liturgical actions. Herbert does make the odd slip, as when he says that visits to parishioners are a necessity, even to cottages ‘though [they] smell never so lothsomly’. Herbert’s manual is a link between old and more recent English handbooks of various kinds, the fruit of eccentricity in the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, and it launches a human archetype
28
Herbert had translated Discorsi della vita sobria by the Italian Luigi Cornaro.
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that will be part of the English way of life right up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Before Herbert, we had the book of the governor and that of the archer with Elyot and Ascham. After him will come the book of the angler. The good country curate, who for Herbert could be married or celibate, will become a staple in English comic and realistic theatre, and in the ‘scenes of clerical life’, from Goldsmith to George Eliot, to Kingsley and up to Orwell. § 15. Herbert of Cherbury George Herbert’s elder brother, Edward Herbert, usually called ‘of Cherbury’ (1583–1648), studied at Oxford, married at the age of fifteen a rich heiress several years his senior, was appointed while still young to various official posts by King James, and spent seven years in Europe as a diplomat and soldier fighting for Prince Maurice of Nassau. From 1619 to 1624 he was ambassador to France, accompanied, as we have seen, by the poet, Carew. Herrick participated with him in the unsuccessful English expedition to the island of Rhé in 1627.1 From 1629 to 1642 he was always by the side of King Charles, who had given him the title of lord, but during the Civil War, in an unexpected gesture of cowardice or common sense, he negotiated a position of neutrality with the parliamentary forces in order to save his castle and avoid the destruction of his library. He died shortly after. An ‘Elizabethan’ gentleman, cosmopolitan and eclectic, objectively versatile, and therefore a man both of action and of thought, he was active in three fields: philosophy, autobiographical prose, and poetry.2 While it is as a philosopher that Herbert is remembered, in my opinion his autobiographical writings constitute his most forward-looking and innovative work, though in actual fact they had no influence on his immediate successors since they were published only in 1764. His poetry, on the other hand, is pretentious, abstruse and unnaturally complicated. Today his autobiography is still the object of prejudice; the time has come to right the
1 2
§ 11.1 n. 1. He wrote a history of Henry VIII as well as pamphlets praising various figures of public life.
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balance: it cannot be denied that Herbert is often ridiculous in his boastful self-confidence and his tendency to lay down the law; critics have had a field day mocking him, calling him a Falstaff, a Bobadil, a Don Quixote reborn, but they have never been able to deny the ease and finesse of the consummate raconteur. The autobiography is modern in that it is based on facts; the style is perfect, elegant without being orotund, sometimes rather solemn but never boring, and with just the right amount of digressions. He recounts his prowess in duels, love affairs and diplomacy with Castiglionesque nonchalance. Can his unadorned chronicle not be seen as an anticipation of Defoe? And the story of the nun from Murano, with the marvellous voice whose singing provokes the following comment in the Venetian dialect: ‘Moria pur quando vuol, non bisogna mutar ni voce ni facia, per esser un angelo’ [‘Let her die when she will, one doesn’t have to change either one’s voice or face to be an angel’]. Does this not look forward to the ‘sentimental’ prose of Sterne’s journey? Herbert’s slender volume ends abruptly, breaks off, we might say, with the news that De veritate was ready for the press, approved by Grotius and Tilenius; but Herbert knew he could go ahead only when he received a kind of divine seal of approval in the form of ‘a peal of thunder, loud but soft’ in the skies. 2. De veritate (1624), written in Latin, is Herbert’s major work and places him among Bacon’s young contemporaries, though with different results. In it Herbert, wishing to clear the ground of idola, states the pragmatic principle that what has always been thought and believed can be accepted as true. At the basis of religion he placed five principles, later deformed and distorted by the ministers of the various confessions. Assigning absolute value to original belief makes him unable to contemplate a ‘development of faith’ as a feature of history and evolution, unlike other contemporary and future schools of thought. The reconciliation of this ‘primitive’ faith with Anglicanism – in other words, of innatism with rationalism – rests on the belief in a supreme being, God, whom it is man’s duty to adore; virtue is necessary for a righteous life; every sinner can repent, and predestination is rejected; but in the life to come, God dispenses rewards and punishments. In this reductive sense Herbert’s five principles are ‘catholic’, that is, valid in all religions. With another work, published posthumously in 1663, De religione gentilium, Herbert acquired
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the reputation as the founder of English deism. His poetry, collected posthumously in Occasional Verse (1665), is, on the other hand, difficult to place: Herbert appeals to Jonson and greets him, but is not of ‘the tribe of Ben’. Cavalier? He is too thoughtful. Is he a poet of conceits and philosophic speculation like Donne? This is certainly nearer the mark, but he is more arid, awkward and circumlocutional, less able to weld feeling, emotion and thought into one inseparable whole. Not a few poems display laboured reasoning or sophistry ill-digested and dressed up in rhyme. The ‘question’ in ‘An Ode Upon A Question Moved’, clearly traced on ‘The Extasie’, might well have been suggested to him by Herrick, who dismissed a Platonic-Christian solution but registered the very problem debated here, that death is the end of everything, including love, or at least physical and sexual love. Herbert’s answer is that it is only physical love that ends with death, while chaste, spiritualized love lives forever. The fame of this poem was enhanced partly by the fact that Tennyson uses Herbert’s quatrain in In Memoriam, adapting it as a metrical signifier for the same or similar meaning, but also because the question is contextualized in a pastoral dialogue between a doubting Celinda and a Melander as know-all stand-in for the poet himself. Ideologically inundated by Platonism, Herbert plays ceaselessly with related concepts, ending up in quite a tangle. Not one, but three poems are entitled ‘Platonic Love’. The normal evolution of poetic creation is reversed, and the poet progresses not from sense data to abstract thought, but vice versa. In only two, particularly effective, poems do we find a starting point that is real and concrete: in one, a clock measuring the inexorable march of time; in the other, a candle that gutters and dies. § 16. Crashaw* I: The English apotheosis of continental Baroque Richard Crashaw (1612 or 1613–1649) and George Herbert are usually mentioned in the same breath, and the parallel between the two is still 1
*
Poems, English, Latin and Greek, ed. L. C. Martin, Oxford 1927, and, revised, 1957; The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, ed. G. W. Williams, Garden City, NY 1970, 1974; The English Poems, ed. R. Rambuss, Minneapolis, MN 2013. M. Praz, Seicentismo e marinismo in Inghilterra, Firenze 1925, Richard Crashaw, Brescia 1946 and Roma 1964, and ‘The Flaming Heart: Richard Crashaw and the Baroque’, in The Flaming
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instructive, or worth rediscussing. They are chronological neighbours and practised the same poetic subgenre; Crashaw acknowledged his debt to Herbert – more openly than Herbert did his to Donne – when he entitled his first work Steps to the Temple as a tribute to his predecessor. However, on closer examination, it becomes clear that Crashaw, the most likeable, most ‘cavalier’ of poets, has in fact little else in common with Herbert. The word ‘temple’, which I have discussed in the section on Herbert, has in Crashaw a different connotation: rather than a place of naked contemplation and silent meditation it echoes with the fanfares of triumph and glitters with gold and silver. While Herbert is introvert, sombre, dry, of few, measured words, Crashaw is extrovert, exuberant, torrential. Herbert is a poet of habit: his poetry expresses the variable in the unvarying; almost all his poems are the same size and make. Crashaw tortures form, making it metamorphic and never solidified; he ranges free, knowing no borders. What emerges is a contrast between Herbert’s poetry, Metaphysical but sui generis, with the
Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and Renaissance Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot, New York 1958, 204–63; T. S. Eliot, ‘Note on Richard Crashaw’, in For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, London 1928, 117–25; R. C. Wallerstein, Crashaw: A Study in Style and Poetic Development, Madison, WI 1935 (on Crashaw’s sources, and full of misprints); A. Warren, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility, Baton Rouge, LA 1939, London 1957; B. Willey, Richard Crashaw: A Memorial Lecture, Cambridge 1949; M. E. Rickey, Rhyme and Meaning in Richard Crashaw, Lexington, KY 1961, New York 1973; G. W. Williams, Image and Symbol in the Sacred Poetry of Richard Crashaw, Columbia, SC 1963; J. Bennett, ‘Richard Crashaw’, in Five Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Marvell, Cambridge 1964, 90–108; L. L. Martz, ‘Richard Crashaw: Love’s Architecture’, in The Wit of Love: Donne, Carew, Crashaw, Marvell, Notre Dame, IN 1969, 113–47; R. T. Petersson, The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini and Crashaw, London and New York 1970; M. F. Bertonasco, Crashaw and the Baroque, Tuscaloosa, AL 1971; Essays on Richard Crashaw, ed. R. M. Cooper, Salzburg 1979, who is also the author of An Essay on the Art of Richard Crashaw, Salzburg 1982; P. A. Parrish, Richard Crashaw, Boston, MA 1980; T. F. Healy, Richard Crashaw, Leiden 1986; New Perspectives on the Life and Art of Richard Crashaw, ed. J. J. Roberts, Columbia, MO 1990; M. Sabine, Feminine Engendered Faith: The Poetry of John Donne and Richard Crashaw, London 1992; V. Roger, Le cœur et la croix: l’esthétique baroque de Richard Crashaw, Paris 2012.
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addition of Baroque elements such as grotesque and far-fetched images, and Crashaw’s, one of the principal examples of continental Baroque, with which he came into direct contact in the variety of its literary, pictorial and architectural forms.1 So, even if he was one of the first poets to be labelled ‘Metaphysical’, he is in fact one of the furthest from the ‘Metaphysical’ sensibility, both because Baroque favours visual mediation and because the source of its imagery is different: the Metaphysicals draw on science and learning, the Baroque on the physical and the sensual aspects of reality. While Herbert commits timid, prudish evasions and infractions, which do not compromise an underlying unity, Crashaw’s representations of reality are exaggerated and undisciplined, and teeter on the edge of insanity. He abolishes anxiety and celebrates only the uncontrasted triumph of faith and the brilliance of his own paradoxes. T. S. Eliot noted the difference, obvious, no doubt, but true for all that, between a ‘devotional’ poet like Herbert and a religious one, like Crashaw, one who extols and persuades, proselytizes, inflames the lukewarm or unbelieving heart.2 His is the voice of exhortation rather than of tortured introspection, the voice of one who keeps to himself his doubts, his hesitations, his moments of rebellion, if any, and with unshakeable faith in the proximity of salvation, attempts to encourage and convert his fellow men. 2. Considering he is a Catholic as well as a Baroque poet, and bearing in mind the prejudiced treatment meted out to Hopkins, the English reception of Crashaw has been exceptionally positive. The high priests of literary criticism, instead of giving thumbs down, have been surprisingly indulgent, open-minded, even enthusiastic. Of course, everyone points out that Crashaw did not write much, given his short, adventurous life, and what he did write is of uneven quality, though a good number of excellent poems tower over the rest. Altogether, English critics have given a good example of fair play in their handling of this poet. Saintsbury observed that things 1
2
T. S. Eliot (1928, 125) eulogizes Praz for preferring Crashaw to Marino and Góngora. Praz is also the acknowledged authority concerning parallels between Crashaw and Jesuit and Latin poetry, and with the painting of Murillo, Rubens and El Greco. Eclectic and versatile, Crashaw excelled in drawing and engraving. Eliot 1928, 124.
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change radically, and one is led to make diametric judgements according to which of two schools one belongs to, the Enlightenment-Classical, or the Romantic. The former ostracizes, the latter sympathizes.3 He followed up with a strangely positive, nostalgic, deeply committed exaltation of the infinite grace of the non-religious ‘The Wishes’, whereas he castigated ‘The Weeper’ and its dubious taste. He becomes ecstatic again, loudly so, even by his own standards, when he comes to the hymn to St Teresa, an explosion of passionate feeling, unmatched by anything to be found ‘in English, perhaps in all poetry’. Eliot in 1928 was just as enthusiastic, and asserted, with some degree of provocation, that it was completely out of the question to compare Crashaw with Keats and Shelley; while Keats is out of the running in the comparison, Shelley, too, surprisingly, loses. Coleridge stated enigmatically that he was thinking of Crashaw when he wrote Christabel, though there is no obvious connection. Crashaw had no immediate heirs and was not read for 150 years after his death, despite Cowley’s elegy; but he re-emerges in the neo-Baroque, Catholic Victorian poets at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Hopkins in the ‘Deutschland’ or Thompson in ‘The Hound of Heaven’. 3. A study of Crashaw’s biography leads us up or down to several recurring idiosyncrasies and symbolisms to be found in his poetry, and enables us to follow his transformation into a Catholic Baroque poet. His life was an asymptotic journey towards Rome in all senses: towards the Marian cult, the veneration for saints, especially female ones, the sacrificial auto da fé of the martyr.4 The search for a spiritual father – and his belief that he might find one in Herbert – could be seen as a reaction against his real father, a Puritan preacher renowned for his anti-Catholicism, were it not for the fact that the father in question was also a translator of Jesuit hymns to the Virgin Mary. Even stronger was Crashaw’s need for a mother’s breast on which to take refuge: his own mother died when he was a baby, her place taken by a loving stepmother half his father’s age. When Crashaw was eight, she too died. It is not surprising, then, if Crashaw grew up in 3 4
SAI, 412–14. On one hand Crashaw wrote an early work against the Gunpowder Plot, on the other he had to apologize for writing the hymn to St Teresa while still an Anglican.
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the shadow of Madonna-like substitutes, and if his poetry is dominated by the figures of Mary Magdalen, representing a fusion, not synchronic (or perhaps it is) of spirituality and physicality, and St Teresa of Ávila.5 He graduated from Cambridge in 1634, and later that same year published a book of sacred epigrams in Latin. In 1635, already a fellow and teacher at Cambridge, he was ordained in the Anglican church, thus showing that he had moved away from his father’s persuasion and now sympathized with the High Church position of Archbishop Laud, becoming a frequent visitor to Ferrar’s community at Little Gidding. It was here, in all likelihood, that the myth of George Herbert took possession of him, which meant that sooner or later he would collide with Puritanism. Having refused to subscribe to the Covenant, Crashaw fled to Holland in 1643, and then to France, where he converted to Catholicism. The English queen in exile, moved by a plea from Cowley, sent him to Rome with a letter of recommendation to Cardinal Pallotta, whose secretary he became. Crashaw’s life might have taken on the heroic dimensions and the stigmata of the martyr, but he did not succeed in becoming another Southwell.6 The immoral, debauched behaviour of the Cardinal’s court was an affront to his integrity and he openly denounced the scandalous situation, with the result that Pallotta thought it wise to remove him. In the year of his premature death he was given a benefice at the sanctuary of Loreto,7 but died a few weeks later, in August 1649, and was buried in the local basilica. Since he had made enemies in Rome, a rumour was spread in England, and believed, that he had been poisoned. § 17. Crashaw II: Cupid desensualized Crashaw criticism is about 100 years old. At first, and for several decades, it was held back by problems of sources: the twenty-nine-year-old Mario Praz gained a reputation as the best tracker of echoes and imitations of Crashaw’s first published work, Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber (1634). Praz showed in 1925 that epigrammatic, emblematic and Marinist traditions, 5 6 7
Canonized by the Catholic Church in 1622. Volume 1, § 47.2. Light needs to be shed on this appointment, since there is no record that Crashaw, an Anglican minister at Cambridge, was ever ordained a Catholic priest.
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along with Jesuit Latin poetry, arrived in England and gathered followers from all confessions. All this criticism, including Praz – devoured by the readers of the day – is nowadays practically unreadable in so far as pure erudition, though not without some valuable scraps of information of a general or particular nature. Since Crashaw died at the age of thirty-seven, it follows that most of his English poems were written in little more than a decade, without interruption; but, as with other poets who died young, the internal chronology is uncertain. This is no great problem, as inspiration is gradual, unitary and centripetal. Problems of textual criticism are more complex and open, given that the author himself, forever on the move after 1643, was unable to prepare his books for printing himself. 1646 saw the publication of Steps to the Temple, with a preface by an anonymous editor; the book was republished in 1648 with revisions and the addition of other poems, some of them non-religious, grouped together in a separate section, The Delights of the Muses. In 1652 the posthumous Carmen Deo nostro was published in Paris, complete with illustrations and marred by printing errors, with a dedication to the Countess of Denbigh. In this progressively expanding corpus, some of Crashaw’s major poems appear three times, with various textual variations, like cuts or additions of material, so that the question must always be asked: which is the right version? 2. Steps to the Temple is a short miscellany that seems to show that Crashaw was not yet ready to fly with his own wings, and that he preferred to remain in the shadow and protection of more established poets, translating or adapting their works: Herbert, Marino, the Psalmist, the Evangelist. In his case it is wise to abstain from the usual deploration because the original texts are revitalized in often quite personal adaptations. Il sospetto d’Herode (Herod’s Suspicion) is itself a signal, in that it is a paraphrase, not a literal translation, of the first book of Marino’s Strage degli innocenti (The Slaughter of the Innocents). It has the merit of bolstering the weakness of the original (the experts, Praz in the forefront, judge Crashaw to be a better poet than Marino on the grounds of this version), and of giving Milton some ideas for his Satan.8 It is also an example of what Crashaw’s poetry would not become: he shows remarkable skill in writing narrative verse which is
8
PMI, 14.
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flowing and clear, and in which the content, though not original, is well structured and organized. Crashaw here makes great use of a premonitory epithet, the meaning of which he will subsequently invert – ‘flaming’ – here obviously referring to Satan. Music’s Duel, variations on a poem by the Jesuit Famiano Strada, narrates the singing contest between a nightingale and a lutenist,9 and succeeds in proving a rare example of translation and the description, in highly suggestive language, of the sounds of the music. Crashaw failed to complete the translation of the Strage but at last found his own voice in the choral and dialogic poem In the Glorious Epiphany of Our Lord (on the journey of the Magi) and in In the Holy Nativity, where the shepherds see the light that comes from the eyes of the Infant Jesus, the eyes that have dethroned the sun and now turn night into an eternal dawn. 3. The series of paraphrases and evangelical meditations on the Cross already contains most of Crashaw’s stock of imagery – a limited number of symbols and metaphors repeated in unexpected combinations, often so daring as to be found nowhere else, save, perhaps, Thompson, Hopkins and – according to Praz – Swinburne. ‘The Tear’ is shed by ‘Maria’, who might already be Mary Magdalen; the tear is also a spark and a diamond made of water; in the course of the eight stanzas it becomes a falling star, a drop of rich wine, one of a choir of angels. The starting point for Crashaw as the contemplating and contemplative poet is the eye that weeps before the Cross, so that the tears bathe the feet of the crucified Christ; but it is also the point of arrival, with, in the middle, a whole host of metaphors that tumble out in a flurry of logical and icastic leaps and bounds. Each single icastic circuit leads to tautology: a tear weeps for itself, in a kind of ‘etymological figure’ which is common in Crashaw: that is to say, a construction based on concentricity rather than linear sequence. Crashaw’s great odes and great hymns celebrating martyrs are characterized, or vitiated, by being a series of stanzas connected by loose-linked chains, so that the connections are often very weak or imperceptible. The most daring device is that of intersecting semantic fields, where one metaphor is joined to, or runs into, a second one, and the second to a third, but where the fields are 9
A much abused anecdote that also appears in The Lover’s Melancholy by Ford (Volume 1, § 145.1). Cf. Praz 1958, 246 and n. 80.
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heterogeneous: as in that part of the hymn to St Teresa where the dart is dipped in the rich flame which writes the name of Christ on the vault of heaven. Crashaw often abandons himself to this kind of icastic propagation and seems so intent on it that, at a time when criticism, especially in Italy and France, was occupied with the relationship between signifier and signified, his poems were pointed to as ‘mere self-indulgence to displays of wit’.10 The most frequent metamorphosis is the essence of Baroque, and concerns spiritualized bodily love, or spiritual love that is projected, but only metaphorically, onto the body, and performs all the actions leading to physical arousal, but all, so to speak, for nothing. In other words, love is really the Cupid of tradition, and Cupid would like to shoot his darts, only he can’t, because his quiver is empty. ‘Wishes to His Supposed Mistress’11 is one of the few significant non-religious poems by Crashaw and, at the same time, a parody of the mythological theme of the birth of Venus; but little by little the reader sees that it is also a virtual epithalamium, with no particular wedding. The Platonic ‘idea’ is incarnated, but enters a little temple of pure crystal so that the flesh does not defile it. Faced with this, desire denies its true essence and declares its own absence, turning into an ungiven kiss. The heart of the poem polemicizes on the fact that beauty lies in accessories and is by these elevated and intensified; instead, nature triumphs over art, in this case, cosmetic art.12 Sadness at having to renounce the flesh is apparent after this parenthesis. Why is a blushing cheek a text that saddens the reader? Because it stirs his senses but reason tells him he must abstain. From now on, the poem is dominated by an argument based on, one might say, thrusts and sallies: each part of the female body excites the senses, which are immediately reined in – the repeatedly heard conjunction is ‘yet’. The kisses 10
11 12
M. Pagnini, ‘Introduzione’, in Lirici carolini e repubblicani, Napoli 1961, 23. Crashaw would seem to fit perfectly the definition of Metaphysical poetry given by Johnson (cf. Volume 1, § 75.2 and n. 30), but was not included in the main exponents of the school. In particular, Crashaw had platonic relationships with Ferrar’s niece, Mary Collet, with the Countess of Denbigh, and with Queen Maria Henrietta herself. Maybe this is a swipe at Herrick, who was in the habit of rejoicing in the contribution of fashion to female beauty, and a nod of deference to Herbert who, as a young man, inveighed against the ‘false hair’ of women.
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the poet would like to plant on the lady’s face are theoretical, possible, but they return – even if attempted in his imagination – ‘carry[ing] nothing thence away’. In reality, Crashaw ends up by admitting that some mysterious bewitching power exudes from this chaste, natural beauty: it gives, it takes back, and so it teases. Cupid has a quiver, as we have seen, but no arrows! Smiles ‘warm/ The blood’, we are told explicitly. Other signs of arousal are misinterpreted: sexual consummation, as in Spenser’s epithalamia, is chaste in marriage, though the loss of virginity is bewailed. 4. In ‘The Weeper’, a probably early ode of Dionysian ecstasy which displays red-hot imagination at work in an orgy of imagery, the eyes of ‘The Tear’ are the radiating centre. Crashaw imagines himself to be before the figure of the weeping Magdalene, and presents, one after the other, a series of closed stanzas modelled on epigrams, conceits, at times wildly farfetched, and quips and puns roundly condemned by subsequent critics as the height of kitsch, as well as other more delicate and witty imaginative exploits. From the eyes’ twin fountains run silver streams; the eyes also spend this silver as if it were a never ending flow of precious coins; the eyes seem to be falling stars, whereas they are in fact fixed, and seeds that fecundate the earth and make it vie in brightness with the sky. The stars/tears, that is, do not fall, but ascend to heaven, because the ‘sordid’ earth cannot receive such purity. But suddenly the imagery turns to the world of the dairy: the earth’s milky rivers are quite different to the creamy stream of tears, and the sea of the heavens becomes a gigantic cup from which the cherubs drink greedily and, fortified by the precious beverage, sing their celestial songs. So begins a cluster of stanzas that show how all the most wonderful natural secretions retreat before the tears of the Magdalene. There follows another conceit: the tear is like a bud on a vine, that blushes before her violator, the sun, or ‘This watery blossom of thy eyne’ that makes wine richer, the drink of angels rejoicing for the arrival of a new guest in heaven. Stanza eighteen takes from ‘Wishes’, and repeats in the Hymns to St Teresa, the image of the dart of Cupid, transformed into the Lamb that has pierced the ‘wells’ (Magdalene’s eyes, or perhaps her breast), and opened the conduit between the heart and the eyes. Cherubs feeding on milky tears have been a cause of great amusement for critics, who have sniggered even more at the idea of a Christ in the mountains of Galilee well supplied with the ‘portable and compendious oceans’ of Mary Magdalene’s tears, which, reverting to
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the original image, again become a silver mine or mint. The Magdalene’s epitaph is of one who has always lived a life of suffering, measured out by tears, tears which descend and ascend at the same time, which rise like incense towards Heaven, but bathe and stain ‘Our Lord’s feet’. 5. Crashaw’s most accomplished work, ‘A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa’, is, surprisingly, the least typical, beginning as it does in a calm, unhurried style, which is, above all, uncharacteristically argumentative – that is, really ‘metaphysical’: the first fourteen lines – by chance or by design, the length of a sonnet, though here, as throughout the Hymn, the metre is the heroic couplet – elaborate the concept (which is not a ‘conceit’) that divine love is not exemplified by martyrs who, with their suffering, have seized the heavenly crown. The same argument is found for example in Hopkins’s sonnet, ‘St Alphonsus Rodriguez’, which celebrates the unseen and unsung sanctity of the daily routine of a doorkeeper. Crashaw’s opposition, however, is between the ‘great and tall’ soldiers of the faith, and the little girl, Teresa, who feels that divine love may be given and witnessed also with and through death. In the self-sacrificial impulse checked by a voice within (‘Wise Heav’n’), counselling ‘a milder martyrdom’, Crashaw may be alluding to his own inability to die a martyr’s death, although he might have desired it. A different end, a funeral described with a splendid oxymoron, as ‘still-surviving’, was reserved for the saint instead of the blood of martyrdom. Halfway through the poem, Crashaw portrays Teresa melting into death in the arms of Christ/Love, and her slow ascent to bliss. However, he becomes his true self again and reels off an unprecedented string of pathetic fallacies, fast and furious, and morbid, the central ‘conceit’ of which is that Teresa, the Teresa of Bernini,13 has been pierced by a dart, not one, however, wielded 13
Crashaw could not actually have been inspired by the statue by Bernini in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, which Bernini began in 1647, but the iconographic and erotic theme of the poem is plainly anticipated in an episode of the saint’s autobiography. A second hymn, ‘The Flaming Heart’, was inspired by the ‘book’ of St Teresa, and hinges on a different metamorphosis of Cupid: the saint is not pierced by the dart, but, instead, wields it in order to inflame the onlooker. The slightly repetitive argument ends with a grand litany-like coda that rings with anaphoras resembling the chords of a late Romantic symphony.
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by an angel, but a kind of spiritual phallus belonging to Christ himself, that fecundates not the womb but the soul of the saint, who takes deep pleasure in the wounding and would like it to go on forever; the dart, ‘sweetlykilling’, makes ‘delicious wounds’, which, self-healing, ‘weep / Balsam’ on themselves. With her coronation in heaven, she achieves the same goal as martyrs do with their more spectacular deaths. The Hymn ends with the saint who, like the Magdalene with her tears, accompanies Christ in his heavenly walks, crowned by the very souls she herself has helped to save and transform into stars. The reader is reminded of Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’, which is, however, austere and restrained in comparison. Closer, but still lagging behind, is the dream assumption into Heaven of the nun in Hopkins’s ‘Deutschland’. § 18. Vaughan* Crashaw may be considered unusual, even unique, among the religious and devotional poets of the seventeenth century, in that he is extremely 1
*
Works, ed. L. C. Martin, 2 vols, Oxford 1914, and, in one vol., 1957; other editions of the complete poems, ed. F. Fogle, Garden City, NY 1964, and A. Rudrum, Harmondsworth 1976; Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. L. C. Martin, Oxford 1963; Henry Vaughan, ed. L. L. Martz, Oxford 1995. E. Blunden, On the Poetry of Henry Vaughan, London 1927; E. Holmes, Henry Vaughan and the Hermetic Philosophy, Oxford 1932; F. E. Hutchinson, Henry Vaughan: A Life and Interpretation, Oxford 1947; F. Kermode, ‘The Private Imagery of Henry Vaughan’, in Review of English Studies, N. S., I (1950), 206–25; M. M. Mahood, Poetry and Humanism, London 1950; R. Garner, Henry Vaughan: Experience and the Tradition, Chicago, IL 1959; E. C. Pettet, Of Paradise and Light: A Study of Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans, Cambridge 1960; R. A. Durr, On the Mystical Poetry of Henry Vaughan, Cambridge, MA 1962; J. Bennett, ‘Henry Vaughan’, in Five Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Marvell, Cambridge 1964, 71–89; L. L. Martz, ‘Henry Vaughan: The Caves of Memory’, in The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton, New Haven, CT 1964, 1–31; M. Leardi, La poesia di Henry Vaughan, Firenze 1967; J. D. Simmonds, Masques of God: Form and Theme in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan, Pittsburgh, PA 1972; T. O. Calhoun, Henry Vaughan: The Achievement of ‘Silex Scintillans’, Newark, DE 1981; J. F. S. Post, Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision, Princeton, NJ 1982; Essential Articles for the Study of Henry Vaughan, ed. A. Rudrum, Hamden, CT 1987; J. N. Wall, Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan, Athens, GA 1988; A. L.
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reticent about himself and not, therefore, a lyric poet, but a writer of hymns who euphorically celebrates his complete possession of God and a universe possessed by God. With Henry Vaughan (1622–1695) we are back to a poet who laments, falls into fits of melancholy, and is forever exclaiming ‘Oh dear!’ and ‘Alas!’; an eternal, discontented exile, he suffers any life which is not the heavenly one, and feels deeply and bewails the absence of God. Yet these two poets, though so different, proclaim themselves sons of the same father, testifying to and increasing the already enormous influence of Herbert after 1633.1 Vaughan used for his principal collection of poems, Silex scintillans2 (in two books, 1650–1656), the same subtitle – ‘sacred poems and personal outpourings’ – as in Herbert’s The Temple, but literal echoes and blatant copying are scattered everywhere. Vaughan’s theology is different from Herbert’s: since he was not a minister of the church, the author of Silex found God not in ecclesiastical institutions but especially, though not uniquely, in nature, which has been compromised by original sin and by a kind of degenerative drift of human history; the veil can only be lifted in rare moments of epiphanic ecstasy. This is the same veil the Victorians3 saw as coming between man and awareness of eternity. More precisely, Vaughan is a poet who instinctively ‘looks back’, to quote the Clements, Poetry of Contemplation: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and the Modern Period, Albany, NY 1990; S. Davis, Henry Vaughan, Bridgend 1995; J. Manning, The Swan of Usk: The Poetry of Henry Vaughan, Lampeter 2008. 1
Faintly similar in style to Crashaw is ‘The Lamp’, which weaves a confused and not entirely successful Baroque parallel between a candle that gutters and weeps human tears, and inner suffering. The candle and the lamp remain what they are, mere objects, while man does not end with death, but continues existing in an afterlife. The accompanying emblem, too, in Silex (reproduced in Martz 1964, between pages 4 and 5), evokes Baroque reminiscences: it is, in fact, Herbert’s ‘heart of stone’ and, at the same time, the crying, flaming heart of Crashaw. It is also the human heart, which is about to be pierced by a spear held in the hand of God, or rather, by two arrows or darts, in the form of snakes. 2 ‘Scintillans’ as in the verb ‘to shine’, much used by Vaughan to refer to a new-born creature, before its brightness is dimmed as it moves further from its origin and deeper into the world. 3 Volume 4, § 5.3.
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title of one of his poem: back towards the origin of life, or even before the beginning of life, towards a point that can be reached by means of the end, that is, death, which will reintegrate being in eternity. Changing his metaphor, Vaughan describes life as a fog that hides, or veils, the sun, a fog that must be pierced for the rays of the sun to shine forth. In short, he harks back to some ideal time in the past, which may be the biblical period of the Covenant, when God spoke to his prophets face to face, unlike today (his ‘Religion’ closely echoes ‘Nondum’ by Hopkins, and ‘Corruption’ covers the same conceptual journey). 2. One peak that Vaughan did climb, and from which he could survey men and events, was the Civil War; he saw an England no longer felix, an England that can be seen in Lovelace’s writings too. Vaughan’s theology contains Platonic elements from the Pauline and Augustinian tradition – to the effect that life is the gradual pollution of a pure spring water – as well as from Hermetic and occult texts. The bugbear of literary criticism up to the 1970s was what seemed to be the antithetic, alternative character of Vaughan’s Hermetism with respect to orthodox Christianity, so much so that many critics took it upon themselves to reconcile Hermetism with Catholic patristics, up to and including the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mystics. Vaughan’s twin brother, Thomas,4 a minister of the Anglican church, was an alchemist versed in the works of Cornelius Agrippa; some of his lines were incorporated by Henry, who outlived him. Vaughan’s poems can be read without the support of this cultural background, which, in reality, amounts to a series of vague references often based on hearsay. Vaughan is no Blake, no Yeats, who never mentions him.5 In Vaughan’s syncretism, orthodox as well as Hermetic Platonism 4 5
The author of numerous philosophical tracts, satirized by Samuel Butler in Hudibras and by Swift, he is said to have died following some outlandish alchemistic experiment. According to Kermode 1950 (in what is a rather debatable critique) Vaughan’s religious conversion was ‘exclusively poetic’, and his poetry a mere game of ‘terms’ organized (by a ‘pure and simple’ poet) ‘into a pattern that has its effect on their specific meanings’, in other words a verbal exercise stripped of real personal or authentically transcendental experience. The antithesis or concordance of orthodox mysticism and heterodox Hermetism dominated critical readings from the time of Holmes 1933, where the question (51 n. 1) was posed whether Vaughan’s poetry was not, like that
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merges with the animism and visionary imagination traditionally linked to Celtic culture. Silex scintillans was signed ‘Henry Vaughan Silurist’, an epithet used by Tacitus to refer to the Silures, a tribe of South Wales. Dylan Thomas did not number Vaughan among the forefathers of the twentiethcentury revival of Welsh poetry.6 Welsh may have been his mother tongue, or he may have been bilingual; it is a fact that he studied at Jesus College, Oxford, traditionally frequented by Welsh students, where he read Classics. He then moved to London to study law, but finally opted to be a doctor in his home country. During the Civil War he served in the royalist army, and also spent some time in prison. He wrote little in the second half of his life. The language of his poetry is the standard English of his time, without regional variations or particular elaboration of the signifiers: he avoids excessive alliteration and daring acrobatics involving interplay of vowels and consonants, and shuns overabundance in rhetorical tropes and or that magical rhythm designated as cynghanedd. The carmen figuratum remains the province of that other almost Welsh poet, Herbert. The only ‘Celtic element’ in Vaughan is the ‘faerie’ in nature and its humanization, constituting more than a mere hint of pantheism. 3. Vaughan was re-introduced to the English in a reprint published in 1847, after almost two centuries since the first appearance of his work. His most famous poem had already been appreciated by Wordsworth, and a small number of poems found their way into anthologies and had, too, their admirers. He is still popular for scraps of poetry, extrapolated from longer poems, superb fragments or incipits worthy of a great poet, easily remembered, but soon declining into prolixity. Critical reaction has often been one of superiority or impatience. Vaughan is not a craftsman of verse;
6
of Traherne, ‘distinctly animistic, with Christianity grafted on’. The debate continued with Garner 1959, 46–91, and Durr 1962, 22–6. ‘Cock-crowning’, a poem clearly moved by an unusual fit of impatience for the manifestation of and empathy with the divine, brings together many conventional Hermetic elements, like the divine seed, which is light but also present in flora and, especially, fauna, a ‘magnetism’ that announces the coming dawn and dispels the shades of night; or like the alchemic ‘tincture’ instilled in material objects, or the ‘veil’ that hides the blinding vision of the divine. However, biblical sources for all of these elements can be found. Cf. Volume 8, § 69.2.
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his poetry often ‘stumbles into prose’. Yet, unknowingly, or even through poetic incompetence, he inaugurates the fashion of the picturesque and the sentimental well ahead of their time. You might even call him a preRomantic, his eyes firmly fixed on Nature, capable of communicating a sense of place together with authentic real life experiences. Minimal plots are used as correlatives, but may be read as an end in themselves; several poems begin like naïve, ingenuous fables, sometimes very ordinary, always a bit too didactic. Vaughan always comes back to a series of recurring themes – man standing apart and mirroring himself in Nature as flora and fauna; the human condition, awaiting that eternity with which man will be reunited through death after being thrust into time when created; man’s imperfect knowledge of God and the divine; life as a fog, cloud, or subdued rays of sunlight; a sense of expectancy that foreshadows the end of the world and the Apocalypse. In an early collection of non-religious poems,7 his wife-to-be is given the Petrarchan/Spenserian name of Amoret. ‘To Amoret gone from him’, theoretically about the typical Donne theme of separation, contains stylistic elements which will later be used in his religious verse, like the suspension between ‘vision’ (personified by Fantasy, sometimes implying fear) and concrete, verifiable experience. Real pathos arises from the contemplation of Nature personified, who appears sad and discontent, and is probed by delicate, almost feminine observation. Nor should we forget that here the poet mourns the setting sun and the approaching shadows that darken most lives. At the same time, Vaughan implies the existence of universal concord on the basis of the tenuous connecting force of ‘influence’. ‘I walked the other day’ opens with one of those narrative introductions that appear casual and quite ordinary, but are really spellbinding. The poet is looking for a flower in a field, and, as he cannot find it, he decides to dig a hole in the ground; this introduces
7
Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646). This was followed in 1651 by another non-religious collection, Olor Iscanus, or The Swan of Usk, the river near his native town. It is said that Vaughan’s conversion to religious verse was occasioned by a serious illness. He translated, somewhat erratically, various tracts of minor Latin authors, and wrote a biography of one Paulinus, bishop of Nola. Thalia Rediviva, published in 1678, is his fourth collection of non-religious poems.
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the allegory of a ‘warm recluse’ who takes shelter during the winter, thus limiting the damage incurred ‘in this air’. The allegorical references are to man in his earthly existence, as well as to the poet, in his Welsh retreat, preparing himself to return whence he came: life as a tomb, or as winter; so perhaps this poem by Vaughan should be added to the list of influences that helped shape the opening lines of Eliot’s Waste Land. The poet envies the flower: it is not excessively impatient for spring to arrive, and indeed is quite comfortable in its underground retreat. In ‘The Bird’, too, the creature of the title takes refuge in the warmth of the nest against thunderstorms and lightning, which are more suited to human obstinacy, and joins in the chorus of Nature in thanking God for the end of the storm. ‘The World’ begins with the most famous lines in all of Vaughan’s works: ‘I saw Eternity the other night / Like a great ring of pure and endless light’, and this bright ring has in train the world full of suffering represented by allegorical settings reminiscent of Langland or Bunyan: the lover, the politician, the miser. The poor and wretched are contrasted with the poor but devout, who ascend to the ring of eternity. So, Vaughan presents a kind of apocalypse, in which the world is caught up and hurled towards the Last Judgement in the poet’s visionary vortex.8 ‘The Waterfall’ illustrates clearly Vaughan’s typical poetic method: an initial descriptive scene is followed by an anagogic coda, which perhaps the poet intended to be the most important part, but which appears forced, so that one prefers, as in some poems by Leopardi, the descriptive scene without coda. In these pre-Romantic and even Romantic poems written in or from a certain place only this specific indication is missing; but the poet has lingered ‘pensive’ by the waterfall. This adjective, ‘pensive’, was to be dear to Wordsworth, and the Vaughan poem he no doubt remembered was ‘The Retreat’, yet another nostalgic meditation on lost innocence, symbolized by the light of archetypal purity now found only in Nature, ‘weaker glories’, that is a faint reflexion of eternity. ‘The Night’ is an equally enigmatic inquiry into divine knowledge, now more difficult than at the time of Nicodemus, 8
In the last enigmatic stanza some lingering penitents do not join in the upward movement and, lazy and sluggish, stay in ‘the night’, whispering that the ring is reserved by the groom for his bride.
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who sought out Jesus at night in the Gospel of John. Indefatigable poet of light, the light of the sun, synonymous and homophonous with the Son of God, Vaughan intones a passionate, exceptional, Novalis-like hymn to night, the Romantic time of fancy, of rhapsody, of creative imagination. The poet yearns for the night, the ‘dazzling darkness’, to become the way to a panic fusion, in contrast with the ‘ill guiding’ light of day. § 19. Traherne* I: A foretaste of Paradise The events which led, after more than a century, to the discovery, or rediscovery, of the works of Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) could well be the plot of a literary thriller or puzzle, in the manner of The Aspern Papers by Henry James, Possession by A. S. Byatt, or the films that have been made of them. Mild, seraphic Traherne’s only publication while still living was a work of theological controversy, Roman Forgeries, in the form of a dialogue – passionate and all-out, with an adversary who is more imagined than real – on the ‘false historical guarantees’ of the Catholic Church. A Christian Ethics was published (1675) just after his death, followed, twenty-four years later, by Thanksgivings (1699), a collection of paraphrases and imitations of the Psalms. Another minor prose work appeared at the
*
Works, ed. J. Ross, 6 vols of 8, Cambridge 2005–, will replace earlier editions including the vast number of unpublished manuscript material available; the edition by H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols, Oxford 1958, is still useful, and prints on opposite pages the poems that were not amended by Philip Traherne. A recent anthology is Happiness and Holiness: Thomas Traherne and His Writings, ed. D. Inge, London 2009. Q. Iredale, Traherne, Oxford 1935; G. I. Wade, Thomas Traherne, Princeton, NJ 1944; L. L. Martz, ‘Thomas Traherne: Confessions of Paradise’, in The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton, New Haven, CT and London 1964, 33–102; K. W. Salter, Thomas Traherne: Mystic and Poet, London 1964; A. L. Clements, The Mystical Poetry of Thomas Traherne, Cambridge, MA 1969; A. Rizzardi, La poesia di Thomas Traherne, Urbino 1969; S. Stewart, The Expanded Voice: The Art of Thomas Traherne, San Marino, CA 1970; R. D. Jordan, The Temple of Eternity: Thomas Traherne’s Philosophy of Time, Port Washington, NY and London 1972; M. M. Day, Thomas Traherne, Boston, MA 1982; A. L. DeNeef, Traherne in Dialogue: Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida, Durham, NC and London 1988; G. Dowell, Enjoying the World: The Rediscovery of Thomas Traherne, London 1990.
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beginning of the new century. The problems revolving round the two works for which Traherne is famous today began much later, when, in 1896, a bibliophile spotted, on a London bookstall, two manuscript volumes of prose and poetry, and bought them for a few pennies. This discovery was little less momentous and significant than Browning’s coming across the records of the trial that were to inspire him to write The Ring and the Book. The lucky bibliophile entrusted the manuscripts to the editor Grosart, who attributed them to Henry Vaughan, and was about to include them in a new edition of Vaughan’s works. Providentially, he died before he could do so; he had made a great mistake. The MS volumes were handed to another editor, Bertram Dobell, who realized that the author was not Vaughan but Traherne; his conclusion was based on such strong evidence that the volume of poems was published in 1903 and that of the prose in 1908, both as the authentic work of Thomas Traherne. But that was not the end of the story: two years later a manuscript deposited at the British Museum was published under the title of Poems of Felicity. Thomas Traherne, like Vaughan, had a brother, Philip, younger than him and, like him, a minister. Philip copied out some of Thomas’s poems in this manuscript, which was meant to be published but, for unknown reasons, never was. So in 1910 the poetic corpus of Traherne consisted of the amalgam of these two subtexts, presented as a co-production by Thomas and Philip, whose interventions were to be forever deplored by subsequent editors determined to establish the original intentions of Thomas. Traherne really does deserve to be considered the most ‘rediscovered’ and most belatedly canonized writer in English literature, given that the textual saga was given a further twist in 1967 when another manuscript (Commentaries of Heaven) was discovered just in time to avoid being burned. It was published in 1989. Until not long ago, an enormous number of manuscripts was known to be held by various libraries; the Cambridge University Press is preparing to publish the complete works of Traherne, bringing to an end, it is believed, this intricate, centuries-long editorial adventure. 2. It was worth looking in some detail at the various stages of the ‘discovery’ of Traherne not only because it is a strange, intriguing story in itself, but because of the repercussions as regards the evolving idea and identity of this writer. Having access to the complete corpus has meant
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jettisoning many constructions and reconstructions built on the basis of an incomplete corpus, and shifting the centre of attention to works that were previously absent from the Traherne canon.1 So, for example, it was always thought that the three polemical pamphlets, already known, were negligible, only to discover, in the light of the ‘new’ documents, that they are, instead, rich in foreshadowings and signals of things to come, so much so that they deserve to take their place in the field of English Protestant theology. After 1908, Traherne as a poet was considered a lesser Vaughan, and seemed destined to grow in stature as a prose writer and mystic by virtue of his principal prose collection, Centuries of Meditations. When it appears, the complete edition of his works will no doubt change received ideas. While his poetry has by now been catalogued, and is not likely to vary much, Traherne’s reputation as a theologian and religious thinker will be enhanced, and he will be recognized as a forerunner of twentiethcentury psychology and psychoanalysis, and even of certain aspects of poststructuralism. For now, his poetry is that of an anonymous precursor of various mystic-visionary poets. Vaughan and Traherne seemed interchangeable and looked upon as twins because both were Welsh and both wrote visionary religious verse. Traherne, however, came from a poor family – his father was a shoemaker. He graduated in theology at Oxford, was a frequenter of the community of Susanna Hopton (similar to that of Little Gidding or to the future Wesleyan cells), parish priest and then, from 1669, chaplain to an eminent politician. It should be recalled, at this point, that Vaughan and Traherne owed their celebration of the divine in Nature to the Puritans’ savage pruning of religious ritual: the Church expands and becomes the whole of creation, consecrated by union with the divine. For years, Vaughan and Traherne lived about twenty-five miles from one another; but they may never have actually met.2 As an Anglican priest,
1 2
Cf. the opinion of the reviewer of Ross 2005 in TLS (25 March 2011, 23), that Commentaries of Heaven, a huge treatise of systematic logic, is destined to be considered the author’s most important work. However, literal echoes suggest that Traherne had read Silex: see, for example, the ‘herbs and trees’ that end ‘Walking’, a phrase that is also found in line 23 of Vaughan’s ‘The Night’. Cf. also Rizzardi 1969, 59.
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Traherne was very attentive to ritual, and in this resembled Herbert and the country vicar of his handbook. He looks ahead to Blake, Wordsworth, Hopkins, even Whitman and Joyce. It is immediately obvious that he celebrates the innocence of the child as against the experience of the grown-up; this essential opposition reminds just about everyone of Blake. Traherne’s poetic voice is adult, but it merges with that of the wondering child who still lives within him – a celebration of original innocence that can be recovered, and must always be jealously guarded like a priceless treasure. Traherne, the Anglican priest who at first found favour with the Puritans, challenges and overturns Calvinist positions on predestination and original sin. Joyce intermingled at lightning speed authors that had just been discovered, and that he had read there and then, digesting and assimilating them, like Traherne3 whose poetry is, at bottom, just about one thing: the certainty that God is good and dwells in Nature, whose duty it is to praise Him, take what was made for His creatures, use it, and give it back more beautiful than ever. One of the poems is appropriately titled ‘The Circulation’. ‘Antepast of Paradise’ is a phrase used in the poem ‘Innocence’, in an involuntarily ambiguous sense (I believe) or with a dual semantic charge: it is the foretaste of Heaven reserved to children (the image brings to mind Crashaw’s metaphors in ‘The Weeper’); but ‘ante past’ is also that antecedent state of Adam in the earthly paradise before the Fall, and that the child enjoys for as long as he is a child. This kind of poetics, with such a concrete and simple message, carries with it certain risks, of which the poet was aware. He seems not to care about traditional poetic grace, rhythm, refined diction or varied imagery. If Vaughan is on the edge of the Welsh koinè, Traherne is outside it, cut off from the host of precursors of a Dylan Thomas.4 In his prose, Traherne is creative and innovative in his language, while as a poet his vocabulary appears limited.
3
4
Echoes of Traherne (the third number of the third Century) are found in a passage describing Stephen’s walk in the third episode of Ulysses. As was pointed out above, Traherne was published in 1903 and in 1908, the very time when Joyce was working on his novel. The allusion to ‘Walking’ is significant, since Traherne’s optimistic theology is not far from that of Joyce. But cf. Salter 1964, 92, and Rizzardi 1969, 102.
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His store of adjectives is confined to a few conventional, well-worn terms like ‘fine’, ‘splendid’, ‘great’ or ‘glorious’. His most obvious defect is the close repetition of the same word, even if it is at times a case of polyptoton. Conceptual repetition is required by the aim of the poem, whether it be to preach or to teach, and the corresponding rhetorical techniques are the appeal and the apostrophe, an abstract statement or exhortation being reinforced by various concrete examples, and exclamations which affirm that his belief is spotless. ‘The Rapture’5 both expresses and dissembles Traherne’s eminently laudatory vein. Strangely enough, Traherne is unfamiliar with the idea of reticence, or understatement, or doubt tout court, and sounds fearlessly affirmative. Creation is always marvellous, Nature wonderful, with no intermediate states. 3. In the long run, Traherne tires: he is a relentless retailer of theological tracts and Marlovian rodomontades. His weakness lies in the risk of monotony: all the poems sooner or later merge to form a relatively small nucleus of simple statements that ring with the silver sounds of hymns of praise to the beauty of creation. ‘The Salutation’ is particularly effective in expressing the message that birth, every birth, and therefore creation itself, corresponds to an awakening to the wonders of nature; this is what the child exclaims when he becomes aware of the marvel of his body – the various limbs miraculously connected to his trunk – and of creation as a whole – the stars, the oceans, and all the rest like a treasure, a ‘prize’, to use a word and a concept dear to Hopkins, especially in his ‘The Starlight Night’. As from now, Traherne announces the finalism of a cosmos created for the benefit of man, who takes possession of it and subdues it. ‘Amendment’ confirms that God’s gifts are even more resplendent when man makes use of them. The divine works are boundless, and man, made in God’s image, becomes divine.6 But the world, created for man, God’s image, must be returned to God. ‘Wonder’ takes its title from a state of 5 6
By chance, or by polemical design, this poem inverts its erotic namesake – apart from the article – by Carew (§ 10.4). For example, in ‘Innocence’ Traherne goes dangerously close to the Pelagian heresy believing and stating that man is born ‘without the stain of sin’ – and so remains, at least as long as he is a child. Cf. at greater length Salter 1964, 130–5.
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mind that is constant and pervasive in Traherne: absolute, ecstatic wonder at the beauty of creation. ‘Walking’ goes beyond and against Wordsworth and all those poets who exalt childhood and the child’s intuitive knowledge: Traherne states that intuition is not sufficient, and it is necessary to live ‘in thought’. The child is not nearer to the source of knowledge, but is simply unaware: the basic idea is the mobility of the adult mind as against the passive perceptivity of the child (of the cart, or wheel, or the puppet). Fortunately the poet at times makes us privy to his fears, and of the rare moments when his optimism falters, giving way to bouts of cosmic existentialist solitude. Traherne calls the fall from childish wonder ‘apostasy’; in other words, Carlyle’s ‘everlasting yea’ is replaced by a growing ‘no’, which is not eternal, but temporary, when the adult succumbs to worldly vanity. In ‘Shadows in the Waters’, a prelude states that the child tends to mistake appearance for reality; in actual fact the appearances are not false but partly true suggestions and ‘intimations’. The poet goes on to tell of his imagining another possible world under the surface of the water he is leaning over. This is not, therefore, a devout or ecstatic poem, or even indirectly religious, although it does suggest the theological question of whether God has created other worlds besides ours. Traherne wonders who those ghosts are under the surface, and he identifies them as his ‘second beings’. In ‘Solitude’ he confesses to a passing moment of despair; the surrounding sights are invited in vain to give him joy, and the poem ends without his search – perhaps for a new Eden on earth – meeting with success. In the end, modern taste chooses these existentialist interruptions, however short-lived, of the usual songs of praise for man and the beauties of creation. § 20. Traherne II: ‘Centuries of Meditations’ In Centuries of Meditations, too, the dazzling, ever-shining light can become dim, and the vision fade, not because innocence is lost definitively, but because it has been lost sight of, overwhelmed by experience and habit, and the routine of everyday life. The basic concept here is the infinite love of God and the unshakeable belief that everything was created for a purpose. Anyone looking for parallels with Ignatian meditation will find that Traherne accentuates and repeats the opening sentence of Ignatius’
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Spiritual Exercises. The purpose is to use the world, indeed to enjoy the gift of life to the full – to ‘prize’ it. This is the key point of the Ignatian creed that was to prove so problematical for Hopkins, whose Jesuitism was weakened and his doubts multiplied by this invitation.7 From beginning to end of the meditations the same thought is found in repeated anaphoric paraphrases. The first ‘century’ focuses on the paradisiacal state of human life, and on the opposing forces that prevent us from perceiving and reliving it. In the second, the theme is human love extended to all creatures, not only to one person. In the third, which comprises the author’s spiritual autobiography together with valuable circumstantial information, Traherne admits that innocence is lost as one grows up, but affirms that it may be recovered through meditation. Here, he identifies with David, the singer and author of the Psalms. In the fourth he exalts love turned into action through good works. Four hundred meditations numbered from one to 100 are distributed in four ‘centuries’, arranged according to a mystical progression or irradiation; a fifth is unfinished, and contains only ten meditations. The title was not decided by the author; there is a theory that he wanted to call it The Way to Happiness and composed the meditations along with his poems as two interactive, interdependent bodies of work. They were written for a friend, perhaps Susanna Hopton, to instruct and encourage her; hence the uninterrupted use of the entreaty form. The last pages were left blank, to be filled with thoughts that might arise from a reading of the meditations. The style of Centuries is aphorismatic, the average length not exceeding half a page: each is therefore an often paratactic chain of a few short paragraphs. § 21. Quarles Francis Quarles (1592–1644) was a truly versatile and prolific writer. After completing his education, he became part of the royal court, and 7
Martz 1964 finds and discusses other references to several sources of Catholic meditation, from Augustine (in reality, more argued against than followed) to St Bonaventure, the Platonism of Hermes and Pico della Mirandola, and the Cambridge Platonists. Others have found echoes and hints of Julian of Norwich, with whom Traherne could hardly be familiar.
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travelled to Germany in Princess Elizabeth’s retinue. Subsequently he became secretary to the Primate of Ireland and ended his career as a courtier in the position of ‘chronologist’. He began as a writer of biblical paraphrases and admonitory verses which reminded readers that they were dust and to dust would return. He then composed a romance in the manner of Sidney’s Arcadia. These, and other minor works, are surpassed by Emblems, published in 1635 and extended in 1639 under the title of Emblems and Hieroglyphics. Enchiridion, a collection of aphorisms, was published in 1640. The first English emblem texts were by Geoffrey Whitney (1586) and Henry Peacham (1612), followed in 1633 by Partheneia sacra, signed only by the initials H. A., in all probability an English Jesuit.1 George Wither, too, played an important role in bringing to England and helping to establish a genre that originated in Venice with Alciati in 1531, and which the Counter-Reformation had made its own. Quarles, however, remains the background, the atmosphere and reference point of late Metaphysical religious poets like Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan. A specially created emblem often served as a mise en abyme and conveyed the overall tone of the various collections of these poets; indeed, their poetic texts invite and evoke an emblem even if no such emblem is present in the book: a certain way of thinking, of composing and of reading a written text had by this time become consolidated. Frontispieces gave rise to a literary and visual genre in the form of union and symbiosis. Bearing in mind this valuable intermediary role played by emblems, those by Quarles in themselves have been and still are victims of a categorically dismissive verdict based on a concettismo which is mechanical, amateur and unrefined, and aimed at an audience that is no longer the elite readership of Donne and his followers. Quarles is responsible for one of many transplants in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, in that the engravings were taken from two Jesuit emblem books – Typus Mundi (1627) and Pia Desideria by the Dutch author Herman Hugo. Basically, these are books of meditations, inevitably so, given their Jesuit lineage: in other words, yet another
1
PSL, 257 n. 1.
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example of a successful model being explicitly rejected and at the same time surreptitiously adapted and used for different ends. The Latin of the original is replaced by English to ensure understanding by a wider public, and new, more striking, rhetorical devices are employed.2 The emblem is composed of an engraving on the left hand page with, on the right hand, a phrase or sentence from the Bible, followed by a text in various poetic forms, and ending with quotations from various religious authorities and a four-line epigram. It is an example of composite, progressive hermeneutics, as Quarles implied when he termed the emblem ‘a silent parable’, pointing out that God himself spoke in olden days by signs, images, and even through hieroglyphics. The engravings are contained in five books each with fifteen emblems. Beginning with the temptation and Fall, they tell the story of Man’s folly and obstinacy. ‘Man’ for Quarles is the same incorrigible creature we find in Langland, Barclay and Bunyan; his stupidity, indifference, gullibility and neglect of the spiritual dimension are accentuated by the engravings which are sometimes horrific, spectral and monstrous, at other times caricatural and verging on the humorous. It is, perhaps, surprising, that this much maligned, unexceptional emblemist, not extremely popular, widely unread, was one of the favourite authors of Lamb, Browning and Thoreau. Quarles was popular in America among the descendants of Puritan exiles, though he himself suffered not a little at the hands of zealots, who seized and burned his manuscripts, accusing him of writing a pamphlet in favour of the king. § 22. King Only non-Protestants could possibly be surprised by the fact that, before the eighteenth century with its libertine abbés, a bishop could write and publish, without scandal, frivolous lyrics like ‘Tell me no more how
2
Jesuit iconography based on tears, hearts, wings and de-sensualized Cupids (§ 17) was replaced in Protestant tradition by scenes illustrating proverbial verses from the Bible. Quarles is somewhere in the middle, given the frequency with which he portrays chubby cherubs next to hearts pierced by Love’s arrows.
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fair she is’1 (and other Cavalier-like offerings) by Henry King (1592–1669), son of the Bishop of London, educated at Oxford, Anglican primate of Winchester, removed by the Puritans, reinstated at the Restoration, and appointed by Charles II court preacher. England’s history and tradition are not those of Catholic Europe: English bishops and cardinals, like Newman and Wiseman, were to venture into the territory of non-religious writing aimed not only at pleasing but also at edifying the reader.2 King’s rather small poetic oeuvre includes occasional verse written for specific events, such as his elegies on John Donne, Sir Walter Ralegh and Charles I. In 1624, the death of his twenty-four-year-old wife, Anne Berkeley, inspired him to write ‘The Exequy’, his most professional poem, so to speak, but nonetheless touching in its pathos, expressed not as form and ritual, but directly and passionately. Donne’s extravagant concettism gives way to the sober classicism of Jonson. This extraordinary, unique poem is one of a small number of seventeenth-century funeral orations in memory of the deceased wives of famous poets, and such is its fervour and power to move, so universal its appeal, that it is easy to imagine it still being read as a farewell to loved ones in England today. Grief is shown and avowed by the bereaved in the tears he sheds, but the ode, divided into numerically irregular groups of rhyming octosyllabic lines, is controlled, at times mimetic, never incoherent. Of course, a future bishop must play down the human protest against a God who cuts short the life of a young woman of twenty-four; he cannot remonstrate, and so, like Hopkins – using the same words that Hopkins uses in his sonnet, ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’ – he gently contests, and ends up by accepting, the divine will. King defines his poem a funeral complaint rather than a dirge; this is the first of a series of oppositions and corrections: the poet places on the grave a wreath, not of flowers, but of ‘weeping verse’. The semantic axis, in turn, represents time and its double
1 2
Entitled ‘a sonnet’, though it has three six-line stanzas; it is therefore a sonnet only in the loose sense often found in English usage. The first edition of King’s English poems (he also wrote in Greek and Latin) appeared in 1657. Another bishop (of Oxford and of Norwich), with a curriculum similar to that of King, Richard Corbett (1582–1635), wrote even more unusual verse: his Iter Boreale, for example, recounts the journey of four ‘clerks of Oxford’ to the north of England.
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measurement – from the viewpoint of the deceased, then of the bereaved. The loved one’s death was ‘untimely’ while for the poet his own death and consequent reunion with his wife is exasperatingly slow in coming. Not only does time seem to stand still; ‘preposterous’, it goes backwards. Little by little, associations build up in layers, or alternate, cross-fertilizing naturally and without ostentation. The dear departed is a book, or rather a whole library, read with ‘wet glasses’; then she becomes the light of the stars or of the sun for the bereaved, who now finds himself the sleepless prisoner of the night. He begins to fantasize, like Admetus bereaved of Alcestis: if her absence were limited in time, it would be bearable; but then he is brought back to reality and must accept the fact that the light of his life is gone forever. All that remains is to await patiently the glorious though distant day when, echoing Donne’s ‘The Relique’, ‘our bodies shall aspire / To our soules bliss’. His appeal passes temporarily to the earth, to which the poet’s pain and loss will bring joy and benefits (the earth will receive the interest that he could not keep). The final prayer is one of the high points of emotion in English elegiac verse, and returns to the reflection on the two perceptions of time I have mentioned above, and to the fervent hope for reunion with the beloved, a reunion which is slow in coming despite the poet’s attempts to accelerate it. The road towards reunion is expressed in seafaring terms at first; then the metaphor changes and becomes military – the vanguard seizing the victory that should by rights have belonged to the older of the two soldiers. Victory, here, is death – the defeat of life. § 23. Cowley No evanescent figure, this: an outstanding personality, a far from anonymous voice, one of the possible alternatives and intermediate links of English literature before and after the Restoration – Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) is all of these. If we except Milton and, possibly, Marvell, this period is characterized by a lack of intellectual giants, or even bizarre geniuses, while having an abundance of skilful purveyors of pleasing verses. For this very reason, Cowley was from the start the beneficiary of an extraordinary, meteoric rise to fame. In 1692, he is recorded as being the most popular and most read poet in English,1 whereas only fifty years later, Pope 1
According to the diarist Evelyn, his funeral was second only to that of Sidney in pomp and the number of mourners.
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is to be found wondering who on earth still read him. Since then his fame has plummeted, so that nowadays he is read in drastically reduced form, the emphasis being placed more and more on his highly readable essays, the laconic style of which is redolent of Bacon, rather than on his poetry, which elicits faint praise expressed in adjectives like ‘bland’, ‘precise’, ‘dry’, even ‘arid’, and consequently not ‘moving’ or ‘musical’.2 The extent to which Cowley stands out in the seventeenth-century landscape is clear in the light of the salient facts of his literary biography: first of all, reactions to his work are split; some are subjective, dramatic and positive, others objective and uncompromisingly negative. Cowley found himself caught between the massive literary personalities of Donne and Milton, and was squashed by them. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Metaphysical poetics had all but crumbled, leaving ruins here and there to be ransacked. Donne’s amalgam of reason and imagination was no longer tenable. However, while still tending towards the ideal of rationalism, Cowley was subject to the tug of tradition. Dr Johnson begins his Lives (arranged in chronological, not alphabetical order) with this, the ‘last and greatest Metaphysical poet’ in what is the first modern critique and assessment of Cowley. Saintsbury describes him affectionately as a ‘Janus’, looking both forwards and backwards, and T. S. Eliot saw him as the last Metaphysical and first Augustan.3 Others have mocked the Don Abbondio in him, a spineless mediocrity, forever vulnerable and unprepared in the face of the fatal summons of history in the mid-seventeenth century.4 2. Cowley stands out among his contemporaries as an enfant prodige, a son, not of the Church or the aristocracy, but of the educated, enquiring 2
3 4
The modern edition of Cowley’s collected works appeared, at a leisurely pace, in 1989, in six volumes, ed. T. O. Calhoun et al., Newark, DE and London. To date, the bibliography amounts to one biography, fewer than five critical works, and a handful of essays. An excellent selection is to be found in Poetry and Prose, ed. L. C. Martin, Oxford 1949, which includes the seventeenth-century biography by T. Sprat, and a number of contemporary evaluations. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Note on Two Odes of Cowley’, in J. Dover Wilson et al., Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson, Oxford 1938, 235–42. A portrait by Lely in the National Portrait Gallery shows a plump gentleman, already eighteenth-century, in flowing robes, clean-shaven, with an abundant head of shoulder-length auburn hair parted in the middle; the face is full and slightly swollen, with a hint of shadows under the eyes, which are large and with a lost look in them.
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middle class (his father was a bookseller in London). While still a child he showed signs of ambition, talent and versatility, and by the age of twentyfive he had already debuted in almost every literary genre, from poetry to prose and on to drama. In 1644, on the threshold of an academic career at Cambridge, he decided, instead, to accompany the queen to Paris as her secretary; his duties included deciphering coded messages and spying. He returned for a while to Cromwell’s England in 1654, and was imprisoned for several months on suspicion of plotting against the Protector’s life. His preface to the 1656 edition of his poetry contains ambiguous, perhaps opportunistic, statements recognizing the need for political equidistance. The queen (by now, ex-queen) suspected no duplicity, and, after the Restoration, reinstated him in his Cambridge fellowship, allowing him to assume the long-desired role of mild-mannered, reclusive country squire. Thus Cowley abandoned the fray and dedicated himself to meditation and his garden. He spoke out generously in favour of Crashaw,5 unaware that by doing so he was thrusting him into the savage maw of Rome and, in effect, shortening his life. Attentive to the march of time, fervently progressive, as Eliot pointed out, he welcomed the rise of scientific thought, and was one of the founders of the Royal Society. He wrote verses in praise of Hobbes and Bacon, and took a personal and active interest in medicine, botany and herbalism. Judged purely as a poet, Cowley can be credited with far-reaching innovations in contemporary poetry. He expresses the entire gamut of literature in the seventeenth century, beginning as a young ‘Spenserian’, then going through a Jonsonian phase with Latin and Greek verse and satirical plays; then comes a Cavalier period, with ‘metaphysicality’ purged of passion and transformed into cold, verbal wit. Like many others, he divided his attention between the serious and the frivolous, and wrote, in later life, not one but two long historical epics, besides relaunching the Pindaric ode, a form that was to be taken up and perfected by the Victorians and Decadents. 3. Cowley decided to become a poet after finding in his home a copy of The Faerie Queene. So the author of Poetical Blossoms (1633) should be
5
§ 16.3, and see below for the ode in honour of Crashaw.
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included among the Spenserians a generation, or two, older than him. In his second collection (Sylvae), published when he was only eighteen, he had already become ‘Metaphysical’. The Mistress (1647), which contains many of his most famous love poems, appears to be a traditional post-Petrarchan cycle, in which a highborn lady spurns the love of the poet, who pleads with her, berates her for her resistance, but in the end is resigned to the never-ending nature of his suit. Commenting on Cowley’s unconvincing handling of the subject of love, Johnson wields one of his most stinging similes, saying that Cowley looked like a hermit or rhyming philosopher whose only knowledge of women is from hearsay. Donne is present in the subject matter, the strange, contorted metaphors6 and especially in particular stylistic features and the colloquial tone of his openings and interjections, much in the manner of ‘The Good Morrow’. His imitations, or Anacreontic paraphrases, display an eighteenth-century precision and wit. ‘Chronicle’, perhaps overrated by critics, is a lively ballad in which Cowley the poet pokes fun at himself, passing in review all the women he has loved and lost. ‘The Account’, along the same lines, reads like Leporello’s catalogue. The 1656 Poems was divided into four quite heterogeneous sections preceded by a preface (and followed by a hefty commentary) and constitutes practically the entire canon of Cowley’s work, with the exception of minor later additions. ‘Ode. Of Wit’7 is his most famous, and most quoted, poem, and is based on the essential characteristic of a, by now, dying poetics. It is, therefore, a metapoetic ode, and as such defines and displays the elusive, intangible nature of that ingredient which at first can only be described by contraries and exclusion – by what it is not: so, wit is not fleeting or aleatory; it is not some superficial fad, but a highly refined ability to impose order and discipline; it is not the typical Marlovian hyperbole, or the farfetched, startling metaphor. In short, it is the equivalent of the classical discordia concors, unity in variety, in other words the poetic faculty itself, seen as a the intellectual capacity for the dominion of mind over matter; 6 7
In ‘Resolved to Be Beloved’, the image of the compass needle that trembles before finding magnetic north, is taken from an emblem by Quarles (the fourth of Book V). Date unknown. In the form of an address to an unidentified person.
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or a kind of anti-conceit wit. Cowley’s great poem on the present, on the Civil War, was begun only in 1643, and for more than 300 years it was thought he had written only one book of it, until, in 1973, a second and then a third were discovered. The inspiration for Davideis came to him in prison in 1655. Like its model, the Aeneid, it was to comprise twelve books, of which only four were actually written. The allegorical framework is the confrontation between David and Saul, presenting Charles and Cromwell respectively. The opening scene of Lucifer in hell is Miltonic, like Crashaw’s analogous translation of Marino’s Strage degli innocenti (The Slaughter of the Innocents). Then the poem collapses, and Cowley wisely abandons it, perhaps aware of the contradiction between the subject matter and the poetic medium, the heroic couplet. The fifteen rhymed Pindaric odes celebrate both historical figures (mainly Hobbes) and abstract ideas like destiny, or light; there is even one dedicated to the Royal Society. Assigning dates to works is always problematical in Cowley’s case,8 but 1642 and 1649 saw the deaths of friend and fellow student William Hervey and of the poet Richard Crashaw; only to them did Cowley dedicate elegies that vibrate with feeling. The one he wrote for Crashaw is a masterpiece. ‘On the Death of Mr William Hervey’ opens with the grief felt by the poet on hearing of the death of his friend, and continues with a series of oppositions that are not Metaphysical but neoclassical. In his elegy ‘On the Death of Mr Crashaw’ the most theologically ingenious, but also most affectionate, part is the end, where Cowley, a fervent Anglican, apologizes for praising so highly someone who had left his (Cowley’s) ‘mother Church’: he states that there is no danger in heresy if there is also true devotion, as in Crashaw’s case; perhaps Crashaw was wrong, but his life was ‘in the right’. Cowley’s poems show the same leanings towards dematerialization as are found in Crashaw. § 24. Cleveland A graduate of Cambridge, where he became professor of rhetoric while still young, John Cleveland (1613–1658), historically the most ill-treated of 8
He himself says that the Pindaric odes were composed during a visit to Jersey in 1651 while on a mission on behalf of the queen.
§ 24. Cleveland
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the later Metaphysicals, is remembered as the author of an ‘undistinguished’ elegy dedicated to the Edward King immortalized by Milton in Lycidas, and a tribute contained in a volume in memory of Ben Jonson, Jonsonus Virbius.1 In 1642 he joined the royalist party and as a result was expelled from the university. He defended Charles with both the pen and the sword. He paid the price of his hostility to Cromwell, and disappeared without trace for ten years. We next see him in Norwich, hunted down and imprisoned; released after petitioning Cromwell, he died almost immediately after his release. Available figures point to his enormous popularity – more than twenty reprints of his poems, originally collected and published in 1647.2 He defended the king and attacked his Puritan enemies in violent, biting satires, some directed against specific, named targets; they are a far cry from the measured tones of Marvell’s later works, and can still be read with gusto today. As in Byron and Browning, as well as his near contemporary, Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras, Cleveland abounds in neologisms taken from science and other fields hitherto ignored by poetry.3 Just as remarkable are his love poems, in which sexual allusion, though graceful, cannot hide a hint of cynicism, and, sometimes, misogyny. ‘Mark Anthony’ is a title that promises some serious historical work, but Cleveland, a master of the art of titling, manages to produce a new and unconventional reading of the well-worn theme of poet meets Venus in ‘a fragrant field with roses crowned’. Only a real poet could have written ‘Mark Anthony’, such is the metrical skill and variation seen here as in other works by Cleveland. But the tide soon turned and by the early years of the following century we find Dryden inveighing against what he scornfully calls ‘Clevelandisms’, by which he meant far-fetched conceits, and long, drawn-out exploits of wit. Take, for example, the image of the bee (reminiscent of Donne’s flea)
1 2
3
Volume 1, § 115.1 n. 4. Poetical Works, ed. J. E. Berdan, New Haven, CT and London 1911, today superseded by The Poems of John Cleveland, ed. B. Morris and E. Withington, Oxford 1967. Leaving aside those of uncertain authorship, Cleveland’s poems amount to a modest total of about 3,000 lines. The reader might be interested to know that words like ‘hydrography’ and ‘hemorrhoids’ appear in poetry for the first – and probably only – time in Cleveland.
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that buzzes about the arm of the fair Fuscara in the poem of that name, its flight a tour-de-force of apiary acrobatics mirrored in the language of the text. Because of these extravagances, Cleveland was considered the prime example of corruptio optimi pessima, representing the terminal stage of the degeneration of the conceit as used by Donne: the metaphor becomes self-referential and merely eccentric. Since Dryden, Cleveland’s reputation has never recovered, despite various attempts to rehabilitate him on the grounds of his influence on an admittedly small number of followers, and, in particular, because of his mastery of prosody. In extenuation, it might be said that he brings to his metaphors the same Baroque gusto, or the same bad taste, as Crashaw. He was not a Catholic, but was a target of the same accusation levelled at Crashaw, his contemporary, and, like him, the son of a curate and passionately anti-Cromwellian. In both are to be found clear traces of Marinism. § 25. Marvell* I: Cromwell’s regime. Justification and nostalgia The life of Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) is full of gaps, shadowy, poorly documented events and circumstances and, consequently, hearsay, riddles, 1
*
The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols, Oxford 1927, 1952, and, revised by P. Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones, Oxford 1971; Andrew Marvell, ed. F. Kermode and K. Walker, Oxford 1990; Poems, ed. N. Smith, London 2003. Prose Works, ed. A. Patterson et al., 2 vols, New Haven, CT 2003. The 1921 essay by T. S. Eliot, ‘Andrew Marvell’, which started the revival and was considered the best modern appraisal, is included in ESE, 292–304; W. Empson’s ‘Marvell’s Garden’, in Some Versions of Pastoral, London 1935, 117–45, itself calls for interpretation, and is more referred to than actually read. A. Birrell, Andrew Marvell, London 1905; V. Sackville-West, Andrew Marvell, London 1929; M. C. Bradbrook and M. C. Lloyd Thomas, Andrew Marvell, Cambridge 1940; J. Leishman, Andrew Marvell, London 1958, and The Art of Marvell’s Poetry, London 1966 and 1968; J. Press, Andrew Marvell, London 1958; D. Davison, The Poetry of Andrew Marvell, London 1964; L. W. Hyman, Andrew Marvell, New York 1964; P. Legouis, Andrew Marvell, Poet, Puritan, Patriot, Oxford 1965 (1st French edn Paris and Oxford 1925); H. E. Toliver, Marvell’s Ironic Vision, New Haven, CT and London 1965; P. Gullì Pugliatti, Andrew Marvell, Bari 1968; Andrew Marvell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. G. deF. Lord, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968; J. M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell, Cambridge 1968; L. L. Martz, ‘Andrew Marvell: The Mind’s Happiness’, in The Wit
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suspicions, and, at the end, a juicy legal titbit. Like his life, Marvell’s work fascinates: he is without doubt one of the great English poets. His poems are at first sight simple, straightforward and clear, but a closer look reveals layers of often puzzling allusions that have for years led a number of critics to interpretations beyond the expected complexity of traditional poetic language, so that Marvell has become the benchmark of irresolvable poetic ambiguity, of systematic riddling and of absolutized deconstruction. These critics, inspired first by Empson and then by Derrida, have been accused by their more traditionalist colleagues of wanting to read into the poems complexities and conundrums that are present only in their minds, and are in no way justified by the text itself. Marvell’s poems were first published in 1681, three years after his death, with the title Miscellaneous Poems. Before that, little or nothing had appeared in print under his name. The person responsible for bringing about the publication was, curiously enough, a woman professing to be his widow, but who was in all likelihood his maid. At the time of his death, Marvell was known as the probable author of prose and verse satires and as the Member of Parliament for Hull. The foremost modern editor of Marvell, H. M. Margoliouth, has observed that it is to this self-styled Mary Palmer Marvell that we owe the survival of poems that of Love, Notre Dame, IN 1969, 151–90; A. E. Berthoff, The Resolved Soul: A Study of Marvell’s Major Poems, Princeton, NJ 1970; R. L. Colie, ‘My Echoing Song’: Andrew Marvell, Princeton, NJ 1970; D. F. Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art, Berkeley, CA 1970; Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell, ed. K. R. Friedenreich, Hamden, CT 1978; J. D. Hunt, Andrew Marvell: His Life and Writings, Ithaca, NY 1978; Approaches to Andrew Marvell: The York Tercentenary Essays, ed. C. A. Patrides, London 1978; A. Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown, Princeton, NJ 1978 (reprinted as Marvell: The Writer in Public Life, Harlow 1999), and Andrew Marvell, Plymouth 1994; CRHE, ed. E. Story Donno, London 1978; M. Craze, The Life and Lyrics of Andrew Marvell, London 1979; W. L. Chernaik, The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell, Cambridge 1983; Andrew Marvell: Modern Critical Views, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1989; C. Rees, The Judgment of Marvell, London 1989; T. Wheeler, Andrew Marvell Revisited, New York 1996; Andrew Marvell, ed. T. Healy, London 1998; N. Murray, Life Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell, London 1999; N. McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit, Oxford 2008; N. Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, New Haven, CT 2010.
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might well have otherwise been lost forever, or been rediscovered by chance centuries later, as in the case of Traherne. The story of the maid who passes herself off as the widow on the strength of a secret marriage with the poet reads like something out of Wilkie Collins, and was, at first, discounted as pure fiction: was it not well known that Marvell was a confirmed bachelor? Later biographers, however, were less dismissive, and Empson himself swore by the authenticity of the ‘widow’s’ claim. The circumstances of Marvell’s death, too, are shrouded in mystery: the immediate cause of death was a neglected fever, but since until then he had always enjoyed excellent health, rumours spread that he had been poisoned by his enemies, identified by some as the Jesuits who had recruited him for a short time while a student, before he shook off their chains, becoming a fierce and lifelong adversary of the Catholic Church.1 2. The 1681 volume contained fifty-eight poems arranged in order perhaps by the author himself. Three of the most important poems were, however, removed before printing or expunged manually from the printed copies, because they touched on a sensitive subject involving a person considered controversial, especially after 1660. These three odes to Cromwell, reinstated in the canon more than 100 years later,2 remind us that Marvell is also, and for some, especially today, a public poet, militant and political, and even, it might be said, a defender of the regime, as is proved by his activity as a supporter of Cromwell and the Parliamentarians, and as an official of the Protectorate and member of Parliament for many years, both before and after the Restoration. Other poems show a clear distinction between the public and the private sphere, and between poems of topical interest on the one hand and others that go beyond the present and become timeless. A list would include dialogues between body and soul accompanied by other compositions that might be described as reflective, 1 2
The year before he died Marvell wrote another prose pamphlet attacking papistry and the ‘arbitrary government’ of Charles II. 1776, in three vols. Had he wished to, it would have been easy to find a publisher for his poems in London, where he resided during parliamentary sessions after 1660. He obviously considered his poetry a private pastime, though it must have circulated in manuscript, as was usual at the time. His ‘widow’ sold them to make money. A single copy of the 1681 edition (British Museum C. 59. i. 8) contained the three Cromwellian odes; a second edition including MS pages is the Bodleian MS Eng. Poet. D. 49.
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philosophical, dianoetic or dialectic; country house poems; in particular, rhapsodic poems on the world of nature in its flora and fauna, as seen in sub-groups of fantastical variations, like the short ‘mower’ series; above all, there are pseudo-traditional love poems on such well-worn post-Petrarchan themes as carpe diem. All the groups of poems listed above are homogeneous, although the dates of individual pieces are generally unknown. 1660 is a watershed year for Marvell as for England; for the poet, it is accompanied by a change of pace and a huge change of direction. Marvell was now officially a representative of the Opposition: he ceased to be the urbane love poet, and threw himself into the composition of satires in prose and verse, as befitted the scourge of the new regime of immorality and corruption that characterized Charles II’s court. 3. Given that ‘An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return From Ireland’ refers to a specific fact that happened in 1650, it is natural to suppose it was written in the heat of the moment or shortly after. According to authoritative Marvell scholars, most of the poems date from 1650–1653, making this ode one of the first works of fundamental and central importance in the whole canon. Together with two other statements of principle – odes of political balance and historical assessment on important, symbolic occasions – it forms a natural triptych, and, with a few other additions, embodies the political and public sub-canon of the Cromwellian Puritan poet. The two other occasions I refer to are the anniversary of Cromwell’s appointment as Lord Protector and his death. Taken as a whole, the triptych reinforces a single political idea and vision of recent events, albeit with different nuances and perspectives. It has been pointed out, quite obviously, that in 1650 Marvell did not know Cromwell personally, and had only recently begun to lean towards the Parliamentarians and Puritans. The background to Marvell’s subsequent glorification of Cromwell is to be found in the previous twenty-nine years of the poet’s life. Born and raised in the port town of Hull, Marvell, like Crashaw, was the son of an Anglican minister with moderate Calvinist tendencies. This father figure looms large, and was to have an important retroactive effect on the son.3 It seems certain that Marvell, at the age of eighteen, while still a student at Cambridge, was 3
Marvell’s father died by drowning in the river in Hull, leading to a permanent aversion in the poet for all rivers.
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attracted to Catholicism, and may even have been converted by clandestine Jesuits. According to this version of events, he abandoned his studies and was only brought back to the Anglican fold thanks to the intervention of his father. His biographers tell us that Marvell had no regrets or remorse; he had no secret urge to become a Catholic, and felt shame and a desire for revenge as far as Catholics were concerned. After graduating and completing a grand tour from 1642 to 1646 in the retinue of a nobleman (the experience enabled him to master four languages)4 he entered the service of Lord Fairfax at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire in 1650, no doubt on the recommendation of some unknown benefactor. The three years spent as tutor to Fairfax’s twelve-year-old daughter were crucial to the development of his political ideas and his poetic inspiration. It was here that he began his ascent to ever more prestigious administrative positions. He was tutor to Cromwell’s future son-in-law, a colleague of Milton, whom he defended at his trial in 1660, in the Secretariat of the Commonwealth, and, finally, Member of Parliament for his native Hull. After 1660, he made peace with the government of the restored monarchy, and travelled to Russia, Denmark and Scandinavia as secretary to the British ambassador. During his three years at Nun Appleton, Marvell was in the employ of the commander in chief of the parliamentarian forces in the Civil War – Fairfax – at the very moment when he gave up his command in disagreement with the decision to undertake military action against the Scots. At Nun Appleton, Marvell was able to construct and develop his political vision while at the same time flirting platonically with his young pupil – in other words, living delicate, elusive emotional experiences that later gave rise to some of his most digressive and evanescent verse. He also worked out a philosophy and allegory of nature in the carefully tended gardens of Appleton House, and what was at that time untouched and remote countryside. 4. Marvell comes across as a Puritan poet and politician untainted by the prevailing, widespread fanaticism of the time; endowed with tolerance and intellectual balance, he could praise Cromwell without railing 4
In Rome he met the Catholic Irish poet, Richard Flecknoe, whom Dryden was to pillory in his satire against Shadwell (§ 51.3). Marvell himself wrote an equally ferocious attack on Flecknoe.
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at Charles I.5 To the dismay of those who came immediately after him, he was at first a royalist, then a supporter of the Protector, and after 1660 a critical voice within the apparatus of the restored monarchy. Like Cowley, he wanted to cover his back should the Stuarts regain power. This explains the caution and prudence – the balancing act, even – that impede the full flight of the 1650 panegyric. Speaking of Cowley, it should be said that Marvell’s ode is ‘Horatian’ but with something of the Pindaric odes of his predecessor; the adjective ‘Horatian’ suggests sober, controlled precision as against the overwhelming flow of emotion and imagery. Written in May 1650, it was, as I have said, expunged from all the copies of the 1681 edition, and was not restored until 1776. The ode consists of several stanzas with a innovative metrical form of four rhyming couplets of eight- and ten-syllable lines. The opening – ‘The forward youth that would appear’ – at once creates an impression of parody, even of satire, almost as if to suggest that Cromwell was moved purely by foolish, worldly ambition. A humanist, intellectually endowed, dedicated to the Muses, Cromwell has ceased to ‘languish’ in the ‘shade’ – terms indicating values dear to the classicist in Marvell, as we shall see – and has been summoned by the dramatic events unfolding to clean the rust from his arms. Marvell experiments a dichotomy on which he often has conflicting ideas: in other poems he states that it is useless to toil and fight for glory; here he makes an exception because circumstances demand it, and praises the man who prepares himself for action. A few stanzas later, he repeats that Cromwell would have preferred to cultivate the bergamot in his ‘private gardens’! At the same time, one senses an element of veiled criticism of his employer, Fairfax, who had done just the opposite, removing his armour and withdrawing from action in the field. Cromwell’s entry in the fray is described in the same terms as the rapture imagined – or urged upon the lovers – in ‘To His Coy Mistress’: a wild tearing and destruction, smoke and fire. There is something orgasmic about it. He is possessed by the fierce flame of ‘angry Heaven’. The reference to Caesar (and, therefore, Brutus) creates a link between Cromwell and those who were ‘forced’ to commit regicide, for self-defence, as it were. 5
The famous disagreement between Cleanth Brooks and Douglas Bush over Marvell’s position as regards Cromwell rumbled on from 1947 to 1952.
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A note of caution is introduced with the allegorical figures of Justice and Fate debating briefly the claims of those who wish to preserve the ‘ancient rights’ of monarchy. With a ‘metaphysical’ appeal to horror vacui and the law that states that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time, Marvell pronounces his verdict: Cromwell is justified in removing the king, adding that only the strong must lead the nation. The trap that Cromwell has laid to capture the king and charge him with manifest untrustworthiness is a double-edged sword: the scene of the execution is presented in flashes, a performance of some surreal tragedy by a spectator – Charles at the court masques – who has become the leading actor in the play, applauded by the clapping of ‘bloody hands’. It is tempting to see an allusion to Macbeth here. Marvell chooses to go against the expectations of the mob. Charles is portrayed as no trembling coward: his demeanour is noble when he lowers his head, as on a pillow, in order to receive ‘the axe’s edge’. The subject announced in the title appears only half way through the ode, with the Irish tamed and forced to acknowledge Cromwell’s magnanimity and justice; Marvell reminds himself and the reader that Cromwell has not become proud but is ‘still in the republic’s hand’,6 and is therefore at its service. The tone becomes openly triumphant only in the last twenty of the 120 lines, when it asserts that Cromwell will be not only ruthless towards the Scots and the other British rebels, but that he will spur the other European nations forward in their fight for freedom. It is difficult to think of anything more Machiavellian, even pre-Darwinian, than the ending of the ode: he who has taken power by force, must hold on to it by force; might is right. The other two Cromwellian odes are preceded or accompanied by Latin mottos and epigrams to the effect that Cromwell is the hand that carries out the orders of a people born to be free. The ode on the first anniversary of Cromwell’s appointment as Protector expresses the wish that he will become king, possessed of boundless energy as he is, while the rest of the world sinks into lethargy. Cromwell is lightning, like
6
The simile of the falcon which, after causing havoc in the sky, lands on a bough and is under the complete control of the falconer reinforces the idea that Cromwell is still a tool of the republic.
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Napoleon for Manzoni.7 At lightning speed he has built a new constitution, as Amphion with his magic lute laid the bricks for the walls of Thebes. Marvell, too, falls prey to the mirage of the ‘Fifth Monarchy’, a sect that saw in Cromwell a prophet of Christ who would usher in the new millennium.8 The third ode, on Cromwell’s death, greets his son, Richard, as his heir; the republican regime has been strengthened by the desired creation of a dynasty. 5. ‘Upon Appleton House’ occupies a special place in the Marvell canon for the following reasons: it is long – at almost 100 stanzas it is his longest work with the exception of the political satires; it is part private, part public, and as such is a trait d’union between the political poet and the contemplative, pastoral, erotic and nature poet, coordinating the relative antinomies; and, finally, because its diction is anti-Marvellian, repudiating Horace and the terse sobriety of the Cromwellian ode, and, at the same time, contradicting the absolute Apollonian sharpness of outline which is the poet’s defining stylistic trait. A kind of stream of consciousness ante litteram takes the form here of a syntax which is often approximate, halting, and jerky, giving the impression of something deliberately sloppy. The fruit of the three years Marvell lived there as tutor to Fairfax’s daughter, it presents in a loose structure both scenes of contemporary life and a little of the history of the priory which became the residence of the former general. All internal order disappears in a weave of episodes that flash upon the reader like memories of a dream or trance, a series of amazing overlapping visions, past and present in counterpoint, a kaleidoscope of shimmering, colourful images. The description of the history and the everyday life of Appleton House, albeit realistic, responds to symbolic, ritualistic rhythms, sometimes anagogic and typological; reality on the one hand becomes more rarefied, on the other becomes once more the solid, contemporary England of 1650. Some symbolic components of the poet’s mental and allusive geography are recurrent, like the pastoral peace of the garden, withdrawal in solitude as opposed to joining the fray, the joyful mowing of the grass and its unexpected aftermath, and the arrival 7 8
Or ‘demonic’, like Napoleon for Goethe (Leishman 1968, 13). § 1.6.
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of a tutelary goddess who will ensure the continuation of the line. Since the house was a former convent, Marvell remarks that those bars segregated the nuns from the world in an unnatural fashion. Fairfax’s ancestor had kidnapped his bride-to-be from the convent to reunite her with the world outside and its pleasures. The deconsecrating of the convent had been decreed by the just king, Henry VIII. Using a technique of dissolving visual planes, Marvell overlaps the mowing with the biblical story of the crossing of the Red Sea, then conflates this episode with the mower who massacres a rail hiding in the grass, but immediately regrets having done so. The reader familiar with Marvell automatically links this event with the killing of a fawn in a poem to be discussed later. The reference here is to the generalized violence of the seventeenth-century world: the killing of this bird (a forerunner of Coleridge’s albatross?) weighs so little on the conscience of the mower that his first thought is to cook and eat it. On the other hand, Marvell may be commenting on the mad innocence of a re-Edenized world. As always in Marvell, poles may be inverted: a primary value may become secondary; history will decide. Everything is relative.9 The game of evocation continues: the newly mown field, cleansed of the old yellow grass, evokes the Levellers. The narrator finally enters a kind of Noah’s Ark. The ode uses a photographic technique of the negative: it is as if Appleton House was an upside down world, a photographic negative – or, rather, as if the world outside were in the negative. This peculiar vision is reinforced by the reference to man as an inverted tree. The final stanza is surprising in its eccentricity: the salmon fishers, like Antipodean creatures, ‘have shod their Heads in their Canoos’. T. S. Eliot thought this image a Baroque extravagance that undermined Marvell’s ‘reasonableness’. 6. As might be expected, after 1660 Marvell wrote only scathing satires against the restored Stuart regime, aware that the country had gone back to the status quo, that Cromwell had not completed the regeneration of England, and that the longed-for palingenesis was left half done. ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’ (1667), written after the Dutch fleet sailed into 9
It is significant that in the first Cromwellian ode the bloody head of the king is presented as auspicious on the basis of Roman mythology and superstition, while here, in stanza 50, this ‘flesh untimely mow’d’ bodes ill.
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the river Medway, leading to the impeachment of the Lord Chancellor and his escape to France, is a blistering attack on influential members of the court, using a stratagem first found in Busenello and borrowed by the poet Edmund Waller. The prose pamphlet, ‘The Rehearsal Transprosed’ (1672–1673), targets Bishop Samuel Parker and argues the case for freedom of speech and conscience. These and other works were published anonymously and were attributed to Marvell, not always with general consent. § 26. Marvell II: Return to Eden The political odes and the various poems addressed to public figures on special occasions are, in general, quite long – sometimes hundreds of lines – and are usually in rhymed couplets. Marvell’s other poems are stanzaic, quite short, and terse. Though modern criticism, immersed in the political side of the poet, is, generally speaking, intent on dissecting the former, Marvell’s basic canon remains the one proposed, with excessive severity, by T. S. Eliot, consisting of one or two poems that are among the highest expressions of English poetry of all time. Apart from these, says Eliot, Marvell must be considered a minor poet. It is difficult to place Marvell in the context of seventeenth-century literature because he is a diachronic poet, as well as being, above all, synchronic. At one time, reading Marvell meant reconstructing his literary network – the allusions to and borrowings from texts he had read and that ‘buzzed in his ears’ as he wrote.10 Such investigations show that Marvell is less innovative, and prove that he was above all a supreme ‘arranger’. By the middle of the century, the Metaphysical mode was dying if not dead. Marvell resuscitated it and in doing so wrote some of his best later work. His contemporary, Cowley, took a different direction, towards a ‘metaphysicism’ that is dry, empty, cold and based on logic and mathematics. Marvell is also compared to Crashaw in his rare inability to keep his wit under the control of his classical ‘reasonableness’. Defining him ‘Cavalier’ means basing this judgement on the premise that metaphysicism is classically controlled, like a mixture of the best of Herrick with the best of Jonson. Eliot also reminds his readers that 10
Leishman carries out this kind of meticulous analysis in his, by now outdated critique published in 1968.
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Marvell was raised on the classics, and on Horace in particular, and that he became the most measured, economical and laconic of poets, more so than even Donne. The process of gradual draining of the poetic text begins in Marvell with the choice of his favourite metre, the octosyllabic verse; the poetic discourse is proportionally contracted in brachylogy, ellipses, and omissions of links in an argument. His objective seems to be to use the fewest words and phrases possible. He is therefore the paratactic poet par excellence, whose poems contain not an ounce of waste or ornament; what we have is pure essence.11 Each line has few words, and his entire poetic vocabulary has relatively few words because the number of monosyllables – usually high in English poetry as is obvious – is low in Marvell, while two- and three-syllable words, and those of Latin origin, are more frequent. The semantic fall-out is greater in words of Latin origin and often provokes a chain reaction of meanings. Marvell is an adjectival poet in the sense that he prefers to link a substantive with an adjective, which, with its own semantic range, extends the field of resonance of the noun, often through incongruous, enigmatic or provocative associations, as in the case of ‘curious’ or ‘vegetable’, which even a historical dictionary cannot completely illuminate. The highest examples of Marvell’s poetic art consist of a thought that is born, discussed and concluded, or a confrontation or clash between polar positions in the form of dialogues, ending sharply after a brief development. When Marvell stretches out, or simply tells a story, he is not infallible: even the delirious complaint of the nymph whose fawn has been killed is disappointingly unconvincing. 2. Marvell’s laconic style, it should be remembered, is reinforced by the fact that his is a poetry that stands alone, without manifestos or authorial declarations of intent – in short, without any kind of paratext. Marvell’s letters are extant and may be consulted, but they are purely factual and addressed to his Hull constituents. The suspension of sense is, however, a mainly internal factor and involves consolidated artistic strategies. The
11
However, Leishman 1968, 289 and passim, deplores the ‘irritating’ habit of the emphatic use of the verb ‘to do’ and redundant words purely for rhyme, which makes Marvell sound paradoxically amateurish at times.
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external author splits into a succession of voices, as in a dramatic monologue, and the ideas put forward by one conflict with those of the others. The technique is typical of twentieth-century verse. In ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’, the soul uses the same argument to reject the advances of the body as the lover in ‘To His Coy Mistress’ puts forward to tempt his mistress to sexual pleasure: time flies. Marvell is a dramatic poet, or at least a dialogic one; the voices of his poems are not his own but belong to the dramatis personae, like that of the nymph with the fawn. In the pastoral context, not all his female figures are retiring and plaintive like this nymph; the shepherds are often victims of proud, ‘cutting’ women, symbolized by the sickle or scythe. Indeed, ‘The Garden’ is a response to ‘To His Coy Mistress’, since, after ‘the heat of passion’, nothing remains but to withdraw into the country and look forward to another form of panic fusion. Nature, in ‘The Garden’, is yielding, spontaneously rewarding, and the narrating voice sounds less impersonal than usual, and more passionate. Is a synthesis possible? Can Marvell’s Weltanschauung be reconstructed? To answer requires an evaluation of the two original opposing vectors, the Platonic and the Pauline, of the body and the soul. Quietly and humbly, the soul parries the attacks of the body, and God approves. However, hostilities break out on other fronts and the result hangs in the balance. Eros is frustrating and Marvell describes it as condemned to unfulfilment, especially in ‘The Definition of Love’. In other poems, however, like his most famous one, the body argues its way through to victory, not so much over the soul itself, as over a virginity that wishes to remain chaste in the face of assaults carried out on pragmatic or non-masochistic grounds, given that denial imposed by an inhuman religion is too hard to bear. ‘The Garden’ chooses an alternative fusion, no longer erotic, between man and nature, the dissolution of man in nature, a theme that will intrigue the Neo-Apocalyptics of the twentieth century, like Ted Hughes and Dylan Thomas. 3. In a general sense Marvell looks back with nostalgia to Eden and pre-lapsarian innocence, perhaps before Eros existed, when desire was unknown and procreation asexual. The dewdrop longs to return to where it came from, afraid it will be sullied (‘On a Drop of Dew’); Christ is called upon to crush the serpent again (‘The Coronet’). Marvell goes further than any other pre-lapsarian because he envies the solitary Adam, before
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Eve was given to him as his partner. Edenic solitude is ‘two Paradises in one’. He captures and describes ipso facto the post-lapsarian state – raging passions and the rule of discord. This world after the Fall sees the rise of a Hobbesian – and Machiavellian – urge that takes the concrete form of a thirst for power, otherwise expressed as homo homini lupus. What remedies are possible? Exile in unspoilt paradises like the Bermudas is an extreme option that must be put to the test: will not the same passions one is escaping from raise their head there? Within the status quo the most feasible palingenesis is Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Such is the messianic meaning of the lines from the ‘Horatian Ode’, ‘And cast the kingdom old / Into another mould’. Alternatively, a possible surrogate is the child’s innocence as found in Traherne, or the nymph that finds fulfilment in the love for her fawn, only to be brutally awoken from her trance. The world governed and devoured by Eros is transmitted mimetically in the language that reflects it in the form of Freudian slips or anagrams.12 4. As I mentioned, Marvell’s corpus, excluding the political odes and the satires, can be divided into areas and subgenres, and discussion of them limited to this criterion. Such a division, however, does not reveal any common thread, so that we are forced to conclude that Marvell is a changeable, moody, inconsistent or simply contradictory poet who says opposing things in poems in different moments of his development, or even more or less at the same time. A chronological reading is impossible, and would in any case be brief, so little do we know of Marvell’s life and thoughts. Certain background events are clear, but a complete psychological picture is lacking. For example, though he grew up in Hull, Marvell never speaks of the port and the sea. The short dramatic monologue of the nymph13 wavers between the naïf and Romantic-Victorian pathos, and exudes a strange airiness foreshadowing the atmospheres of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande: the justice that in ‘Cromwell’ fought with Fate over the head of the king now demands that animals too should be killed with justice. Within ‘A
12 13
The word ‘coitus’ can be anagrammed from ‘To His Coy Mistress’; ‘quaint’ is seen to echo ‘queynte’, a medieval word for the female genital organ. ‘A Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun’.
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Dialogue Between The Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure’ lies a much debated theological problem: does nature lead to God, is it a means for man to achieve sainthood? Or is it, instead, an evil source of distraction, indeed, of sin? As in a poem by Herbert, Pleasure invites the soul to feast at nature’s banquet, provoking the reply that the real banquet is held in heaven. The resulting opposition hinges on the choice between stretching out on the soft grass of this earth, and the peacefulness of a mind intent on God and duty. Each temptation by Pleasure is overturned by the soul – taken and transferred on to a level of sublimation and renunciation. At the same time, Pleasure tempts in quatrains and sestets, while the soul replies more roundly in couplets. Analogies with the temptation of Christ in the desert become more explicit when Pleasure adds, inviting: ‘thou shalt know the hidden cause, / And see the future time: / Try what depth the centre draws; / And then to heaven climb’, to which the soul responds that the way to heaven lies not through knowledge but through humility. It is possible to see here a parody of the seven deadly sins that besiege man, who is free to resist or give in. The soul is anxious to ascend to heaven, and answers the lengthy speeches of the tempter with two short lines. Both soul and body are aware of how fleeting time is. Marvell usually writes and re-writes what he has written. ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body’ is one of these re-writings, in which neither side wins: the soul denounces the body’s yoke and the body the tyranny of the soul; the poet, or narrator, is silent, offering no word of explanation or guidance. ‘The Mower to the Glow Worms’ and the other ‘mower’ poems are problematized eclogues thick with biblical reminiscences, disagreements, dark visions of the Fall and lost innocence. In the first of the series, the stanzas address the glow-worms with a Shelleyan list of characteristics, effects and functions. The glow-worms have guided the lady to the tryst, but the man loses his way. In ‘The Mower’s Song’, in five six-line stanzas that suggest the circular movement of the scythe and close with a bitter refrain, the mower is metaphorically mown down by his ungrateful lover. Marvell introduces an unidentifiable Juliana, a type of the cruel woman already with touches of Keats’s belle dame sans merci. Love is experienced above all in what is, at times, its only aspect – frustration, and fulfilment suspended or delayed. ‘Mower against Gardens’ is an attack on lust, which defiles the innocence of the first garden, turning it into a brothel.
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The obsession with mowing, not only grass but also, inadvertently, human beings, or of chopping down, is obviously mixed, in Marvell’s imagination, with the bloody horrors of the Civil War and the death of the king. 5. ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is a ‘Metaphysical’ poem, and, more precisely, a Donnian one, in so far as it is based on a three-stage argument: 1) a hypothesis put forward but not accepted; 2) a denial of the hypothesis; 3) a suggested, operative solution. The first phase of the argument states at length what is impossible for the two lovers, given the limits of time and space that obtain in the post-lapsarian world. Courtship is extended to paradoxical and hyperbolic extremes, as suggested by the references to the Last Judgement and the conversion of the Jews – the last things. Then the narrating voice tries to imagine the huge stretches of time in which – in this hypothesis, time is slowed down – he could praise the various parts of the woman’s body. The second part of his appeal is the awareness of the passing of time. For the first time the materialistic, sensual narrator calls into question the attractiveness of eternal life. Eternity is bare, desolate, empty, and monotonous – ‘deserts of vast eternity’ where, unlike what Herbert of Cherbury believed, love does not last, and beauty fades. Love, far from surviving, will turn to dust. Marvell’s materialistic cynicism, or dark humour, is on a par with, if not superior to, that of Donne in his two funeral poems: ‘The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace’,14 where phallic worms penetrate with ease the woman’s much defended virginity. The third phase is the moment of decisions, not based on vague idealization. While youth lasts, it is important to gather the flower of love; the idea is driven home by a daring image of wild beasts tearing at life through the bars of their cage. Sexual enjoyment should be wild and violent (see the verbs ‘devour’ and ‘tear’ and the adjective ‘rough’). Softness must merge with force, as suggested by the strange metaphor of the ‘ball’ at the end of the poem. 6. The other two most famous poems by Marvell, though at first sight very different, are linked by the intuition of a natural world where the innocence and abundance of Eden have been restored. In ‘Bermudas’ God
14
‘Embrace’ is clearly a euphemism, possibly influenced by the French ‘s’embrasser’.
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guides the Puritan pilgrims to ‘an isle so long unknown’, ‘kinder’ and more tolerant and generous than the one they have left.15 The centre of the poem is the expectation of a friendly, bountiful Nature, where the birds make daily visits, the trees give fruit in greater abundance than anywhere in the old world: figs, melons, pineapples, limes – all erotic fruits, all round and plump. Another exotic product they have access to with almost miraculous ease, given the difficulty of extraction, is ambergris, which comes from deep inside the sperm whale.16 Of course, in its magical simplicity, ‘Bermudas’ teems with more or less disguised references to the Scriptures. Base appetites will find no satisfaction in these islands, which house a temple already built in which to sing the praises of the Lord. Marvell fires a parting shot at the end of the poem: the songs of praise must rebound from the vault of Heaven and echo in the Gulf of Mexico as a challenge to the Papist colonizers there.17 ‘The Garden’18 invokes a purifying contact with nature and a sublimation – one might say transubstantiation – of the erotic instinct, bearing in mind that the gods, too, ended their pursuit of a beautiful nymph by turning her into some kind of plant prior to ravishing her. This is the poem that most clearly expresses Marvell’s desire to withdraw from the world and to take refuge in the peace of the senses and of the mind. In line 9 he addresses the personification of Quiet, which is not to be found in the busy haunts of men, but in the country. The allurements of women, represented by the colours red and white, give way to green, symbolizing nature. Lovers carve their names on the barks of trees, but do not realize that female beauty is far inferior to that of the natural world. Finally, sexual abstinence is praised in favour of the pleasure deriving from 15 16 17
18
These striking details were probably taken from the account of a British traveller to Bermuda with whom Marvell had stayed in 1653. On the debt to Waller see § 27.3. The trembling of the Bermuda islands on the ‘bosom’ of the ocean makes them look vaguely like nipples. Two hundred and fifty years later this pattern was to be used, and inverted, by Hopkins when he commemorated in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ a different exile, that of five German nuns, expelled from Germany because Catholic. Even clearer echoes are found in ‘Heaven-Haven’, where the nun who takes the veil emigrates to a place where there are no snowstorms or hailstorms, but, as in Marvell, an ‘eternal spring’. A Latin version, Hortus, is earlier.
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a union with nature: lines 47 and 48, as famous and proverbial as some of Shakespeare’s couplets, synthesize the essence of Marvell in the wished for annihilation of ‘all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade’. The description of the garden leads to the deposing of erotic love and the beginning of vegetable love. In ever more fable-like tones, Marvell transforms it into an exotic Eden, with an obvious allusion to the tropical world of ‘Bermudas’. In a kind of hallucination, fruits fall like manna or hang from the trees like the pineapples, melons and vines. But, as in ‘Bermudas’, the pleasures of this paradise are not only sensual and gastronomic, but, and above all, spiritual, and pertain to the mind as a creative, productive and synthesizing force. As in the philosophy of Bruno and Schelling, the soul is naturized and nature animized, turning into a bird poised for flight. Marvell states explicitly that this was Adam’s state before Eve, suggesting that perhaps Adam did not really need a helpmate. In this Eden, a wise gardener has made a sun dial of herbs and flowers – a new, alternative way of measuring time. § 27. Waller To call him ‘immoral’ is putting it lightly. Edmund Waller (1606–1687) combined flagrant, flamboyant political opportunism with a degree of self-possession that permitted him to ride the waves of the stormy midseventeenth century. Born into a wealthy family, highly articulate, destined from an early age to a parliamentary career, Waller was not a full time poet; indeed he was not particularly prolific (though he was precocious), and judging from the small number of his works, he must have spent a large part of his sixty-year career without putting pen to paper. Cromwell was a distant relative, so naturally his first political leanings were towards the Parliamentarians. However, by 1642 he had already gone over to the other side, and later dedicated to the queen his volume of poems, which had been circulating in MS for some time, and had been set to music by William Lawes. A great number of these were panegyrics, complimentary verses, and other forms of flattery peculiar to the career-minded courtier. Waller made his mark in history by organizing and leading the royalist plot that bears his name, the purpose of which was to liberate London and make it the stronghold of the king. Waller was arrested, but saved his skin by
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revealing the names of his accomplices. Bailed out for a huge amount, he went to the queen’s court in exile in Paris, where he held a salon by selling off the jewels of his second wife. He was pardoned, and returned to England, where he duly adulated Cromwell in a panegyric which, as far as contents and political stance are concerned, is very similar to that of Marvell, except that Waller’s praise of the dictator is even more fulsome. His volume of poems was added to after the Restoration when, with yet another change of loyalty, Waller began to sing the praises of the new king, who, however, was offended by receiving less exaggerated applause than Cromwell. Waller got out of the embarrassing situation thanks to an excellent quip. Charles II was celebrated by Waller as a practical, down to earth monarch, who repaired crumbling buildings, re-ordered the parks, and embellished nature. Right up to his death, he livened up the sessions of Parliament with his brand of sparkling humour with which he hailed the new-found tolerance. 2. His epitaph salutes him as a facile princeps among contemporary poets, a sign of how much he was read, respected and even imitated. Shortly after, Dryden was to acknowledge him publicly as the poet who had restored excellence and dignity to English verse; Pope identified the defining character of his poetry in smoothness; and Johnson included him in his Lives. Waller is the father, or at least the first famous practitioner of the heroic couplet, which was to become the standard form of Augustan poetry (though he was preceded by the translators George Sandys [1578–1644], with his Ovid, and Edward Fairfax [1580?–1635],1 with his Tasso). With him seventeenth-century wit practically dies; the attention of the poet shifts to grace, precision and fluency. Carew might have competed with Waller, but to do so he would have needed the forty more years of life that Waller was lucky enough to enjoy. He is, therefore, the trait d’union in an arc that spans nearly 100 years, his birth symptomatically coinciding with the performances of Shakespeare’s penultimate plays, and his death with 1
Half-brother to Thomas Fairfax of Appleton House (translator of Solitude by Saint Amant), where Marvell was a tutor (§ 25.3). It is odd that critics do not include among the pioneers of this verse form the name of Cleveland (§ 24), whose famous elegy on Edward King is in heroic couplets.
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the first literary steps of Dryden and Pope. He first came to the attention of the public with an ode dedicated to Prince Charles’s escape from shipwreck near Santander, in which he already displayed a mastery of the heroic couplet. The most significant poems of the collection are those addressed to Sacharissa, the far from promising name of an idealization of a young descendant of Sir Philip Sidney. This cruel beauty spurned Waller and married a lord instead. The beautiful ‘Go Lovely Rose’ is an admonitory poem on the transience of life addressed to his reluctant lover; another famous one, ‘On a Girdle’, tells of the fetish of a girdle that once surrounded the slim waist of the loved one. In reality the book is something of a hotchpotch, the love poems punctuated by various kinds of occasional compositions, proving once more that poetry for Waller is not the solemn celebration of heroic deeds; instead, he seeks out and sings of the trivial and curious, and makes the insignificant meaningful. When he praises the king, it is because he has repaired St Paul’s Cathedral, or improved a park, and the queen is extolled for popularizing the taking of tea. Waller’s historical merits proved insufficient to guarantee a lasting fame, and the Romantics dismissed him for being bereft of true passion. Waller remains a marginal poet, largely unread, seldom reprinted, and, on the whole, ignored, save by a restricted number of specialists.2 3. However, the time has come, perhaps, to reconsider this poet – according to common opinion, intellectually not very challenging, and acknowledged as being ‘a skilful versifier’,3 readable, though somewhat obtuse – who belongs to the category of English poets loved by the undiscriminating. To begin with, curiously enough, Waller and Marvell seem to be almost a duo. Leishman put together quite a collection of borrowings and links between the two, suggesting that the more one reads Waller the clearer it becomes that Marvell perfects and polishes what Waller only hints at, and sometimes echoes him explicitly. For example, Waller writes of Apollo chasing Daphne, and describes the nymph transformed into a laurel bush, just as in ‘The Garden’. The adjective, ‘coy’, too, recurs, with 2 3
The poetic works are collected in the two volumes of Poems, ed. G. Thorn Drury, London 1903. PSL, 262.
§ 28. Denham
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a closing coup de théâtre of the god left grasping only laurel leaves in his hand. Sacharissa’s realm is a very Edenic garden; in the same poem, there is a reference to the myth of Amphion, with the same words and details as in Marvell’s second Cromwell ode. ‘To Phyllis’ reads like a rough draft of ‘To His Coy Mistress’. One of the possible sources of ‘Bermudas’ is Waller’s ‘Battle of the Summer Islands’, a short, highly enjoyable, mock-heroic poem about the capture of two whales, which contains a similar list of exotic fruits and plants found in these tropical islands. With ‘Instructions to a Painter’ Waller provided Marvell with a suggestive framework for satire. Finally, in his ‘Envoi’, Ezra Pound seems to parody Waller’s song ‘Go Lovely Rose’.4 Pound recognized that Waller was moved by special ‘elevating’ inspiration when he wrote for music, and pronounced him to be a good poet at a time when the two arts were not yet dissociated, unlike in the days of stolid Mauberley. § 28. Denham Born in Dublin, of an Irish mother and an English father, who was Lord Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer, John Denham (1615–1669) studied law at Lincoln’s Inn. He became known as a valiant translator of Virgil and all-round classicist, as well as the author of an exotic play which was performed in record time, in 1641, just before the theatres were closed. During the Civil War, he worked for the king’s cause by bearing coded messages to his supporters. When this secret activity was discovered by the Parliamentarians he was forced, like so many others, to take refuge in France. On his return to England after the Restoration, he was rewarded by being appointed Surveyor of the King’s Works. Denham had no qualifications for the post, which was practically that of an architect, so he was at first flanked and then replaced by Christopher Wren. A member of Parliament and of the Royal Society, in his later years he suffered briefly from dementia, perhaps owing to his wife’s affair with a duke. With Waller, he formed an avant-garde of Augustan classicism; the two were later joined by Cowley. One of the very few unrhymed poems by Denham (excluding imitations, 4
Cf. H. Witemeyer, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles 1969, 190–5, for comments on various claims contained in The ABC of Reading.
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paraphrases and translations)1 is an ode to Cowley, who is represented as standing on the very peak of English poetry. Denham is also credited with the sensational discovery of Milton’s Paradise Lost. 2. Denham’s use of the rhymed couplet begins with the translation, or rather, paraphrase, of the first six books of the Aeneid, the last of the many English translations to appear since the fifteenth century. Later, he tried his hand at translating the Psalms. The first edition of Cooper’s Hill was published in 1643, and was an instant success. Nowadays it is the only poem by Denham that is still remembered, especially the 1655 edition, which contains the addition of two couplets on the stately flowing of the River Thames. The panorama of places and sights celebrates the cultural, political, and literary civilization of England. The places revisited evoke associations and memories and reinforce the patriotic spirit; ancient myths are re-enacted, past and present mingle in the account of the king’s stag hunt, which fades into the historical event of the ‘Magna Carta’ wrested by the barons from King John and still fraught with meaning. Cooper’s Hill established what was to become a popular poetic genre, the topographical or ‘loco-descriptive’ poem (Dr Johnson called it ‘local poetry’), taken up by Pope and Prior and much favoured up to the time of Wordsworth. The solemn, even tone, though verging on the monotonous, caused Dryden to exclaim in wonder that Denham’s majestic style could be taken as the paragon of fine writing. The description of the Thames flowing deep and clear, ‘strong without rage / Without o’er flowing full’, became a metaphor of eighteenth-century poetry and prose. Such high esteem did not last, despite the pre-Romantic frisson of the union between man and a humanized nature and a foreshadowing of Ruskin’s ‘pathetic fallacy’. After the Augustan period, Denham was considered careless, slipshod, morally solid but lacking in imagination, and poetically inferior to Waller. § 29. The homilists. Andrewes, Taylor The lasting fame of the homilists and divines of the seventeenth century, unchanged throughout the years, is due largely to the influence of what
1
Poetical works, ed. T. H. Banks, New Haven, CT and London 1928.
§ 29. The homilists. Andrewes, Taylor
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might loosely be called Puritanism on the religious beliefs and practices of the English. The Puritans put the sermon at the centre of the religious service once the trappings of Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism had been abolished, leaving the way for the Scriptures as the only valid mediation between man and God and the foundation of the religious life. The divines chosen here for analysis are two from a large number of religious figures (bishops, curates or Anglican monks, and authors of both sacred and secular works) some of whom have already been dealt with, or at least mentioned, insofar as connected with some important writer, or because they possess the polyvalence typical of seventeenth-century England, like Joseph Hall, Donne, Herbert or Nicholas Ferrar. Archbishop Laud, who tried to impose a single Anglican liturgy during the reign of Charles I, and failed catastrophically, left nothing that has survived in print. Yet, for the historian, the problem posed by seventeenth-century homiletic literature, or polemical or theological tracts, is the ever-shifting boundary between the propagandistic and the purely literary use of words. Seventeenth-century homilist literature was read for centuries for edification and at the same time as literature, and until recently its cultural relevance was palpable: for example the detailed analysis and description of the works of Jeremy Taylor to be found in the early handbooks of English literary history are witness to a culture that had different values compared to those of today. The rise of secularism and laicism has eliminated one of the reasons for including homilies ex officio in the count of literary genres; or at least, the sermon has been shifted so far down the literary table as to disappear entirely, resurfacing only in textbooks of ecclesiological history. 2. Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), the favourite chaplain of the queen, one of the translators of the Authorized Version (as we shall see), holder of three prestigious bishoprics, and a pious man mourned in elegies by Milton and Crashaw,1 shot suddenly from anonymity to fame in 1926 thanks to an essay in which T. S. Eliot2 cited him as an example of the unification of sensibility and intellect, the chief characteristic of the great period of 1 2
A volume of private devotions, written in Greek and translated into Latin with the title of Preces privatae, was translated into English in 1647. ‘Lancelot Andrewes’, in ESE, 341–53.
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Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. Andrewes, said Eliot, was even more endowed with ‘unified sensibility’ than Donne himself. Eliot was intrigued by Andrewes’s idiosyncratic, staccato style of writing – Evelyn the diarist notes that he was famous for ‘crumbling his text’ and Eliot himself observed that ‘no one is more master of the short sentence than Andrewes’. Andrewes adopted a curious procedure that entailed successive reformulations of the same concept, as if he wanted to squeeze out all the meaning hidden in every biblical verse. Of the ninety-six sermons, published posthumously in 1627, Eliot singled out those of Christmas and Easter, and was to insert fragments from them into his poems. The homilies should be read bearing in mind that they were intended not for the public at large, but for the elite audience of the Jacobean court. Andrewes was said to have been as accomplished a speaker as he was a writer, but disastrously inept in questions concerning ecclesiastical policy. The formula of a sermon by Andrewes is similar to one by Donne: a biblical quotation is followed by a subtle analysis of the text aimed at bringing to light hidden meanings verging on the paradoxical. Pedantic, precise, he dissects the text like a modern day hermeneutist who counts syllables and sounds, analyses syntax and syntagmas, and constructs tables of discourse functions. The praxes of explication de texte are anticipated by the recurrent use of enumeration, schematization and identification. This means that – euphemistically speaking – if an Andrewes rhetoric does exist, it pertains to ‘ethos’ rather than ‘pathos’: the emotional effect is nil. 3. The title of stella predicantium belongs, in reality, not to Andrewes, to whom it was awarded, but to Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667). Son of a lowly barber, ‘spotted’ by Laud, the successor of Donne as preacher in St Paul’s, by the age of twenty-five he was chaplain of the royal army. His ecclesiastical career was interrupted by the Civil War and the Protectorate. At the return of the monarchy, he received from Charles II the unwelcome gift of a bishopric in Ireland, which he held until his death. It is obvious at first reading that, as a homilist, Taylor is the diametrical opposite of Andrewes: his style is rich and imaginative; he writes with joy and fantasy, like Spenser and Shakespeare, to whom he has, indeed, been likened, or Daniello Bartoli, to mention a Catholic equivalent. Andrewes’s strict logic is replaced by observation of life in order to find out objective correlatives. He was idolized
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in the eighteenth century and almost deified by the Romantics (led by Coleridge), and, eventually, judged to be a true glory of English literary style. Behind these hyperbolic assessments lay the enjoyment deriving from the flow of passionate rhetoric, the masterly, memorable Homeric similes morally interpreted, like daybreak or the river’s rush, the flight of a lark or the crawling of the worm – the same wonder we find in Traherne, fine miniatures and imaginative exploits that would fit quite nicely in any anthology, even without any specific reference to religion or morality. Taylor always makes for pleasant reading, although he can be verbose and elementary in the examples he chooses; and, indeed, he was addressing the general public, not an intellectual elite. In recent years, he has lost in importance, and his name appears more and more rarely in textbooks and anthologies, if at all. Eliot was aware of this as early as 1927, when he stated that Andrewes was second to none in his contribution to the spiritual formation of the Anglican Church. Taylor, on the other hand, serene and accommodating, never aggressive or threatening, made tolerance the new standard of Anglicanism after fifty years of persecution of Dissent. In 1647, he wrote an extensive apology based on the admission that the Scriptures are ambiguous and the ideas of theologians fallacious. He published his collected sermons in 1651 and compiled two popular handbooks on holy living and holy dying (1650 and 1651), besides Ductor Dubitantium (1660), a densely casuistic study of cases of conscience. § 30. The ‘Authorized Version’ The 1611 Bible, which I introduce now because its assimilation happened gradually during the seventeenth century, was commissioned seven years earlier by James I, who entrusted the translation to a team of fortyseven divines whose identities are known, and seven others who have remained anonymous. Bishop Lancelot Andrewes was appointed supervisor of the project. Divided into six committees, two each working at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, they formed a modern, efficient équipe, exchanging their work in the intermediate stages of translation for discussion and coordination. The individual parts were then submitted to a central committee for final approval. Contrary to most works written by several authors – in this case a large number of scholars from different
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backgrounds – an almost miraculous uniformity, not only of interpretation, but of style, too, was reached. It is normally stressed that this version was not a translation of the Scriptures ex nihilo, but, rather, a revision of previous English translations. It came as the conclusion of a work in progress that stretched back to Bede through the milestones of Wyclif, Tyndale, Coverdale, the ‘Geneva Bible’ of 1560 and the ‘Bishops’ Bible’ of 1568. One of the wisest, most far-reaching and dynamic decisions taken by the weak and much-criticized James I, was, in fact, forced upon him by increasing Puritan aggressiveness during the ecclesiastical conference held in 1604 at Hampton Court. Another historical generalization is that this translation of the Bible marks a kind of year zero, a terminus a quo of English literary culture. The concept of the ‘life’ of a text is debatable, but this King James’s Bible set a record of longevity, becoming the official, ‘authorized’ version, without revision or correction, up to 1881–1885. First of all, it was an instrument of national cohesion, both because for three centuries it united the tastes, aims, objectives and theological positions of the whole range of Protestant sects and confessions, and because it became a reading book for the newly literate classes. It was an essential part of every home in England, a ‘first aid kit’ and infallible guide through all of life’s difficulties, an oracle providing answers to every question. 2. The focus of the translation was undeniably on the Old, rather than New Testament. One common exegetical error, which this version sanctioned, was that, after the Jews, it was the English who were to be considered ‘the chosen people’ – more precisely, the Puritans saw themselves as inspired by God to overturn tyrants and the governments of the wicked, and in general to usher in a new world. Linguistically and lexically, the translators reached a compromise, avoiding the most obvious archaisms of the previous versions – but as the first statistics showed, preserving 93 per cent of the words of Anglo-Saxon origin.1 Reacting against the end of the century’s delight in euphuisms, the translators were scrupulously faithful to the diction of the original Hebrew – solemn, anaphoric, repetitive, chant-like. For the professional writers of the time, the 1611 Bible was 1
CHI, vol. IV, 37.
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§ 31. Milton I: The uncreated idiom
something between a tool and a text, as shown by the fact that almost all of them attempted translations from the Scriptures, especially the Psalms. The cultural spin-off of the Authorized Version was immense, not only in England (some masterpieces, like those of Milton and Bunyan, would have been unthinkable and impossible without it, and its influence extends to Carlyle, Ruskin and Browning), but, to an even greater degree, in the American colonies. The cadenced, unrhymed prose of the Authorised Version is the backbone of most subsequent prose writing. Like all sweeping generalizations, the one that maintains that the 1611 Bible helped forge the unique character of the literature that followed it, is suggestive. The Hebrew original expressed an oriental mentality alien to and irreproducible in other languages, and the English text itself is dotted with cruces that were tackled with the limited critical tools available at the time. Right from the first seventeenth-century biblical exegesis, scholars threw themselves into the hunt for allegorical interpretations that gave rise to misunderstandings, equivocation, pseudo-ideology and, at worst, the absolutization of individual verses, and the attribution of literal meaning to expressions that are, probably, metaphorical or symbolic. This kind of esoterism, this creeping prophetic tone, this sabotaging of logic are responsible, joined with other influences, for various examples of Romantic and post-Romantic mythopoiesis like Blake’s and Yeats’s. The Bible was to remain the paladin and guardian of ‘poetry’, while the Royal Society and the ‘new philosophy’ undertook a road that ran parallel, promising no final convergence. § 31. Milton* I: The uncreated idiom In the middle of the seventeenth century it would have been impossible to even think of becoming the greatest English poet of all time, and 1
*
The Works, ed. F. A. Patterson et al., 20 vols, New York 1931–1940; Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. M. A. Hughes, New York 1957; The Poems, ed. A. Fowler and J. Carey, 2 vols, London 1980; Complete Prose Works, ed. M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols, New Haven, CT 1953–1982; John Milton, ed. S. Orgel and J. Goldberg, Oxford 1991. The Sonnets of Milton, ed. J. S. Smart, Oxford 1921. A new complete edition in several volumes is in course of publication by Oxford University Press from 2008. Italian translations of Paradise Lost include those of R. Rolli (eighteenth-century), A. Maffei and
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L. Papi (nineteenth-century), A. Muccioli (Firenze 1933), D. Pettoello (Torino 1950), R. Sanesi (2 vols, Milano 1984 and 1987, with a partial translation of F. Kermode’s essay ‘Adam Unparadised’, published in Renaissance Essays, London 1973, 260–97, and with an excellent bibliography until its date). Areopagitica, ed. G. Giorello, Bari 1987, contains a very useful introduction. Life. D. Masson, The Life of John Milton: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time, 7 vols, Cambridge and London 1859–1894; The Early Lives of Milton, ed. H. Darbishire, London 1932, 1966; The Life Records of John Milton, ed. J. M. French, 5 vols, New Brunswick, NJ 1949–1958; J. H. Hanford, John Milton, Englishman, New York 1949; W. R. Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2 vols, Oxford 1968; C. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, London 1977; A. N. Wilson, The Life of John Milton, New York 1983; C. C. Brown, John Milton: A Literary Life, Basingstoke 1995; B. K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton, Malden, MA 2001; A. Beer, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot, London 2008. Criticism. Critical evaluation begins with Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets. Overviews in A. J. Waldock, ‘Paradise Lost’ and its Critics, Cambridge 1947; Milton Criticism: Selections from Four Centuries, ed. J. Thorpe, New York 1950; R. M. Adams, Ikon: John Milton and the Modern Critics, Ithaca, NY 1966. The bibliography is immense and is growing by the day. Here are some of the essential books and articles, starting from the early twentieth century. D. Saurat, Milton, Man and Thinker, Eng. trans., London 1925, 1944; E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton, London 1930, 1956, 1961, and Studies in Milton, London 1951; F. R. Leavis, ‘Milton’s Verse’, in Revaluation, London 1936, Harmondsworth 1978, 46–67, and ‘Mr Eliot and Milton’ together with ‘In Defence of Milton’, in The Common Pursuit, London 1952, Harmondsworth 1962, 9–32 and 33–43; A. Guidi, Milton, Milano 1940; G. McColley, Paradise Lost: An Account of Its Growth and Major Origins, Chicago, IL 1940; C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, Oxford 1942, 1960; C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton, London 1945; T. S. Eliot, Milton, London 1947, and ‘Milton’, in On Poetry and Poets, London 1957; E. M. Pope, Paradise Regained: The Tradition and the Poem, Baltimore, MD 1947; B. Rajan, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Seventeenth-Century Reader, London 1947, and The Lofty Rhyme: A Study of Milton’s Major Poetry, London 1970; H. Darbishire, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Oxford 1951; A. Stein, Answerable Style: Essays on ‘Paradise Lost’, Seattle, WA 1953, and The Art of Presence: The Poet and ‘Paradise Lost’, Berkeley, CA 1977; K. Muir, John Milton, London 1955; H. F. Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2 vols, Urbana, IL 1956, 1962; D. Bush, Paradise Lost in Our Time: Some Comments, New York 1957, and John Milton, New York 1964; E. Chinol, Il dramma divino e il drama umano nel Paradiso perduto, Napoli 1957; D. Daiches, Milton, London 1957, 1966 (republished in DAI, vol. I, 390–457, one of the best general introductions to be found in any textbook of literary history); R. Tuve, Images and Themes in Five Poems by
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Milton, Cambridge, MA 1957; J. S. Diekhoff, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’: A Commentary on the Argument, New York 1958; I. G. MacCaffrey, ‘Paradise Lost’ as Myth, Cambridge, MA 1959; M. Praz, ‘Milton e Poussin’, in Gusto neoclassico, Napoli 1959; The Living Milton, ed. F. Kermode, London 1960; W. Empson, Milton’s God, London 1961, 1965, Cambridge 1981; A. Davidson Ferry, Milton’s Epic Voice: The Narrator in Paradise Lost, Cambridge, MA 1963; C. Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style, Oxford 1963; D. M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution, New York 1963; L. L. Martz, The Paradise Within, New Haven, CT 1964, and Poet of Exile: A Study of Milton’s Poetry, New Haven, CT 1980; N. Frye, The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics, Toronto 1965; H. Gardner, A Reading of ‘Paradise Lost’, Oxford 1965; E. A. J. Honigmann, Milton’s Sonnets, New York 1966; B. Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of ‘Paradise Regained’, Providence, RI 1966, and ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, Princeton, NJ 1985; C. A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition, Oxford 1966, Milton’s Epic Poetry, Harmondsworth 1967, and, as editor, Milton’s Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem, Columbia, MO 1983; B. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject: An Essay on ‘Paradise Lost’, London 1967; S. Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in ‘Paradise Lost’, New York 1967, and How Milton Works, Cambridge, MA and London 2001; P. Murray, Milton, The Modern Phase, London 1967; Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Samson Agonistes’, ed. G. M. Crump, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968; J. Carey, Milton, London 1969; J. B. Leishman, Milton’s Minor Poems, London 1969; CRHE, ed. J. T. Shawcross, 2 vols, London 1970 and 1971, also the author of With Mortal Voice: The Creation of ‘Paradise Lost’, Lexington, KY 1982, and John Milton: The Self and the World, Lexington, KY 1993; H. Blamires, Milton’s Creation: A Guide Through ‘Paradise Lost’, London 1971; L. Potter, A Preface to Milton, London 1971; M. Cappuzzo, Il ‘Paradise Lost’ di John Milton, Bari 1972; W. Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton, Charlottesville, VA 1974, and The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of ‘Paradise Lost’, Cambridge, MA 1983; R. M. Frye, Milton’s Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the Epic Poems, Princeton, NJ 1978; A Milton Encyclopedia, ed. W. B. Hunter, 9 vols, Lewisburg, PA 1978–1983; M. A. Radzinowicz, Toward ‘Samson Agonistes’: The Growth of Milton’s Mind, Princeton, NJ 1978, and Milton Epics and the Book of Psalms, Princeton, NJ 1989; F. C. Blessington, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Classical Epic, London 1979; A. K. Nardo, Milton’s Sonnets and the Ideal Community, Lincoln, NE 1979; J. M. Webber, Milton and His Epic Tradition, Seattle, WA 1979; J. Wittreich, Jr, Visionary Poetics: Milton’s Tradition and His Legacy, San Marino, CA 1979, and Feminist Milton, Ithaca, NY 1987; G. K. Hunter, Paradise Lost, London 1980; S. P. Revard, The War in Heaven: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Tradition of Satan’s Rebellion, Ithaca, NY 1980; A. Burnett, Milton’s Style, London 1981; T. N. Corns, The Development of Milton’s Prose Style, Oxford 1982; D. R. Danielson, Milton’s Good God, Cambridge 1982; D. K. McColley, Milton’s Eve, Urbana, IL 1983; Milton’s Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem,
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of holding on to the title for hundreds of years (with the exception of the early twentieth century), without a significant leap in technical skill and the concept of an important project – one might call it a ‘mission’. Various other contemporary poets possessed, if not genius, then something close to genius, but have handed down works of indifferent quality that were often left to fend for themselves, so to speak. Some high-ranking dilettantes – princes, even – wrote with scrupulous care and commitment, but were too taken up with court or diplomatic duties, or the demands imposed by ecclesiastical office. Sometimes, death came before they could write their masterpiece. John Milton (1608–1674) risked a similar fate, but the Restoration was to be his fortune in disguise. From 1640, the promising poet decided to serve his country by using his pen to defend the new-born Commonwealth. As a consequence, for the next considerable number of years he wrote little poetry and a lot of prose, especially in the militant genre of the pamphlet, which is by nature extemporary and short-lived. If no great changes had taken place, we would speak of Milton today as an upgraded Marvell. Instead, the events of 1660 made Milton free to become Milton. For years he had nurtured great ambitions of writing an English epic in the manner of Spenser, and had laid out and examined ideas, plots, themes, and had even composed a few fragments of dramatic verse.
ed. C. A. Patrides, Columbia, MO 1983; S. Budick, The Dividing Muse, New Haven, CT 1985; C. Kendrik, Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form, New York and London 1986; Re-Membering Milton, ed. M. Nyquist and M. W. Ferguson, New York and London 1987; M. Sestito, L’illusione perduta: saggio su John Milton, Roma 1987; C. Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power, Oxford and New York 1988; J. S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems, Cambridge, MA 1989; The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. D. Danielson, Cambridge 1989, 1992, radically revised in 2013; D. Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, Cambridge 1990; M. Di Cesare, Milton in Italy, Binghamton, NY 1991; L. L. Knoppers, Historicizing Milton, Athens, GA 1994; J. M. Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic, Ithaca, NY 1996; Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. B. Rajan and E. Sauer, Pittsburgh, PA 1999; M. Jordan, Milton and Modernity: Politics, Masculinity, and ‘Paradise Lost’, Houndmills 2001; D. Hawkes, John Milton: A Hero of Our Time, London and New York 2010; G. Teskey, The Poetry of John Milton, Cambridge, MA 2015.
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In little less than fifteen years he completed and published the three classicalbiblical works that identify and define him. Milton is a solitary writer, a unique, isolated, gigantic genius worlds away from rapture and effusion – as Taine portrayed him – and one who goes his own way with no need of fellowship. When young, he had followed the customary path of any aspiring writer in seventeenth-century England: educated first at one of several famous public schools, then at either Oxford or Cambridge; but already his career was punctuated by demurrals and extraordinary refusals: he turned down a position at court, and the prospect of becoming a curate or country vicar, or even, eventually, a bishop. According to some, after a certain date, he stopped attending any kind of place of worship, and belonged to no church. In short, an anti-clerical, like Dante. At the end of his course of studies, the young Milton possessed a vast humanistic culture that enabled him to write poetry in Italian, Latin and Greek, as well as to open all the doors of classical learning. He also wondered what use to make of all this knowledge. 2. The Milton of 1640 was not very different from other postReformation poets. Like them, but more than them, he was a literary and ideological oxymoron: he is often defined as a Puritan humanist, which is, after all, a contradiction in terms; he is a monist, but only after realizing that he is a binarist; his moods swing from cheerfulness to pensiveness – a spontaneous attraction to the joys of life followed by rejection dictated by reason. In heuristic terms, Milton attempts to unify and harmonize centrifugal with centripetal forces – classical paganism and Renaissance humanism, to be reconciled with Puritanism by a kind of spasmodic mediation. The young Milton wrote imitations of Ovid and translations of the Psalms, and acknowledged what he was to deny after 1660 – that is, that he ‘followed Spenser’. Critics have by now amply documented his relationship to various different, and conflicting, ideologies: Hermetic occultism, mid-century sectarianism, radical fringes like Socinianism, Anabaptism and Millennialism – an extreme eclecticism that throws light on Milton’s controversial theological positions, many of which are enigmatic, not to say heretical. There are very early signs that Milton ‘studied’ to become the new prophet of a regenerated England, and the author of a national epic, which he began about fifty years later, and made into, not a national,
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but a supranational, poem, beyond the dramatic, beyond the celebratory. Paradise Lost unsuccessfully attempts a synthesis between, on the one hand, the theological vision of humanity that has fallen but is capable of rising again and re-creating an ‘inner paradise’, now that Eden has been lost, and, on the other, Milton’s personal drama expressed in the coolly reasoned allegory representing the end of the aspirations of the English revolution. Milton preparing himself to take on the role of national bard brings to mind the future protagonists of two novels by George Eliot, Latimer and Daniel Deronda, who discover they have lived blindly through the various steps that lead to the epiphany of their investiture as mouthpieces of their race. The only difference is that in Milton’s case, this supernatural call to arms was heard and understood immediately. 3. Though he already had clear in his mind the symbolic contents and the end of the epic, Milton still had to find the appropriate language in which to express them. In the following sections, I shall examine the linguistic and stylistic aspects of Paradise Lost, as well as looking at the implications inherent in the choice of poetic genres. Initially Milton used Latin in both poetry and prose; he then attempted to express in his native tongue – less compromised, but still compromised – ‘some graver subject’. His aim was to reconcile diverging signifier and signified. The English he had at his disposal was the same used by poets who before him had written about completely different things. So Milton’s career might be summarized, like Joyce’s, as the search for an adequate poetic language – a style. As it happened, Joyce, like Milton, was blind, or partially blind. Now, Milton wrote in Latin so as to reach and be understood by the whole of Europe. Latin was the tongue of Catullus and Ovid, but also, bivalently, the language of the Vulgate and the Fathers of the Church, close to and immersed in religion, therefore. When Milton girded himself to forge a new language in Paradise Lost, he rejected the graceful, reassuring manner of his early poems and fashioned a style that would come to be defined as ‘Latinate’. He could do no more. At the same time, there is no contemporary poetic genre that Milton does not use and bend to his needs – the eclogue, the sacred ode, the pastoral, elegy and sonnet, up to the epic itself. 4. Ever since 1667 Paradise Lost, in its theology and language, has represented, understandably, a clear dividing line in English poetry, and
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its popularity has increased or decreased in accordance with taste and the epistemic climate of the period. The controversy initiated by Johnson and lasting well into the last century saw interventions by all the great names of English literary criticism. After the two main seventeenth-century testimonials of Marvell and Dryden, and the lukewarm interest shown by Addison, the eighteenth century labelled him ‘sublime’, and the heroic epic found its expression in the heroic couplet; but the period was hostile to battles of ideas, and Milton left the centre stage. All the great Romantics, however, had something to say about him, and two schools of thought emerged which were to wage war for the best part of 100 years: the Satanic school, led by Blake, who claimed that Milton was on Satan’s side without knowing it;1 and the ‘non-ideological’, which read Milton only for the ‘sublime music’ of his verse and ignored his ideas. Blake and Fuseli illustrated the poem, depicting Satan, not as a repulsive monster, but with the powerful beauty of a figure by Michelangelo. Blake was obsessed, and indeed wrote part of a poem entitled Milton, while Shelley, inspired by the Satan of Paradise Lost, wrote one on Prometheus. ‘Musical Milton’ was compared with ‘visual Dante’ by Coleridge, Macaulay and Carlyle.2 The first dissenting voice was that of Hippolyte Taine, who praised the superlative early poems but considered Paradise Lost uneven and dry, with God presented as a kind of schoolmaster, and the happiness of Adam and Eve before the Fall not suited to an epic. At the end of the nineteenth century – for example, in the Hopkins-Bridges-Patmore correspondence – earnest, meticulous, academic attention was paid to Milton’s prosody, while his subject matter was almost completely ignored.3 In the twentieth century, Ezra Pound weighed in with exaggeratedly iconoclastic comments, followed in 1936 by the more refined Eliot, then by Leavis,4 advocating that Milton be removed from the canon 1 2 3 4
Dryden had already used these very words in his 1693 essay on Virgil and the Aeneid: that Milton might be considered to have written a great heroic poem ‘if the Devil had not been his hero, instead of Adam’. Cf. my essay, ‘Alcune considerazioni sul ritrattismo letterario’, now in IDM, 69–81. Hopkins maintained that Milton was ‘a scoundrel’, but only because he approved of divorce. Kermode 1973, 297, who mentions Robert Graves’s ‘great dislike’ of Milton.
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on the grounds of being a ‘bookish’ poet with no sense of the particular, incapable of studying nature, and, above all, the initiator of the famous, and deplorable, dissociation of sensibility, in direct opposition to Donne. The charge levelled by the two poets was, in short, that for 200 years Milton had imposed his excessively Latinate English as the language of poetry, instead of favouring the creation of a new literary language suitable to all kinds of poetry, not only epic. British critical sensitivity was offended by such disrespect and disparagement, especially coming from two Americans, and reacted at first with a murmured – though sometimes hysterical – sentimental and chauvinist overestimation of Milton. The appreciative comments on the early poetry were often tautological, or purely exclamatory, and were limited to extolling their excellence compared with contemporary poetry, without offering any reason as to why this excellence should be taken for granted. In 1971 Frank Kermode called for the ‘liberation’ of Milton – in other words, his reinstatement in the English canon. It was rather as if Greek literature had first eliminated then re-admitted the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Kermode pronounced Paradise Lost ‘the most intricately beautiful poem in the world’,5 a risky and excessive encomium. In the last fifty years, things have gone as expected: critics have modulated their tones according to fashion and convenience, sometimes influenced by the discovery of previously unknown documents, or by new research into various aspects of Milton’s opus, historical, juridical, theological or political. Milton is still not a best-seller, and cannot be said to ‘influence’ contemporary English poetry; but he does provoke passionate discussion, and is a primary subject of academic research. Already as long ago as 1969, one critic began by saying that ‘Milton [was] an industry’,6 adding some impressive data to prove his point. Twenty years later, in 1992, the number of books and articles dedicated to him probably equalled the annual bibliographies of Shakespeare and Dickens.7 Today there is a vast worldwide family of ‘Miltonists’, who through the years have produced scores of books, articles and conference speeches, fostering a critical debate that has become 5 6 7
KRI, 181. Carey 1969, 7. Cf. D. Griffin, ‘Milton’s Literary Influence’, in Danielson 1992, 258–9.
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so highly specialized as to be precluded to the common reader. The difficulty of finding a common thread in the tangle of readings peppered by an infinite number of cross-references is compounded by the bitter, jealous rivalry among renowned critics, each anxious to assert a kind of monopoly on the poet, as if he were a tailor’s dummy, or a clone to which the critic attributes his own ideas, fixations, and fears.8 § 32. Milton II: Early works Milton’s work matures with time and comprehends several quite different poetic genres. After the twenty years spent as secretary to the Commonwealth, and the prose works resulting from them, the poet reemerges, and strikes out for new poetic destinations. His poetic career runs parallel to the distinct periods of his life: self-contained biographical blocks (traditionally three) mirror quite clearly as many phases in his intellectual and aesthetic development. His praxis is based on his biography, and Milton designs and shapes reality like a philosopher, in the image and likeness of his Erlebnis. In other words, the events of his life form an indispensable background to his work; I shall be examining the unique one-to-one relationship between the two in the following sections. Milton’s work is teleological but also, above all, dialectical. The collection of early poetry – published in 1645 under the title of Poems – is curious: it is clearly too ‘slender’ for a thirty-seven-year-old with Milton’s ambitions; it almost suggested ‘writer’s cramp’ and might be taken not as a first step but as the closing stage of the brief career of some post-Elizabethan poet – the end of an experience with which the author was far from satisfied, as he himself admitted in a note appended to the collection. Even though Poems contains some of the most famous, most accomplished, and most musical of Milton’s compositions, they may nonetheless ‘jar’: they are too full of pagan echoes, or compromises, to be the kind of sacred poetry that Milton aspired to write. In reality, he was passing through a prolonged phase of waiting, as he was to admit in his sonnet on his blindness. He was preparing himself. As in the case of Jesus at Cana, his time had not yet 8
Cf., for example, in TLS (31 August 2001, 3–5), A. Fowler’s invective against S. Fish and his 2001 book.
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come, but any moment might be his moment. There is an allusion to this moment of transition in the last line of Lycidas. 2. Milton was born in 1608 in London’s Cheapside. His father is usually referred to as a ‘scrivener’ (the profession is now extinct), a kind of lawyer, though the exact nature of his work is not clear. What is certain is that he was well off.9 His interests were wide-ranging, and included music, of which he was a gifted performer and composer; indeed, many of his works were present in the musical repertoires of the time. He encouraged his son’s great expectations by appointing a tutor, then enrolling him in St Paul’s, the best school in London. Milton then went on to Cambridge, where he developed a distrust of rhetoric, and inveighed in his Latin prolusions against Scholasticism. He gave a demonstration of character when he took issue with his tutor and was ‘rusticated’ as a result. During his suspension from the university he wrote Latin poems in praise of ‘otium’ and enjoyment, as well as one on the Gunpowder Plot. While still at university he acquired the reputation of being upright, passionate and fiercely independent, but was also chaffed as ‘the Lady of Christ’s’ because of his good looks, his aversion to sports, and his bookishness (from an early age he was in the habit of reading and studying until past midnight, doing his eyesight no good). After receiving his M. A. he spent six years (1632–1638) in the pleasant country retreat of Horton in Buckinghamshire, during which he began, by himself, an intense apprenticeship for his poetic career. So it might be said that at thirty Milton, as Johnson remarked, had not yet experienced real life.10 He could be taken as a model for a well-known psychiatric dyscrasia to be found in many intellectuals: he was a forceful individualist, displaying a hypertrophic super-ego, victim of an over-extended anal phase.11 In spite
9 10 11
He was also, on the side, a moneylender. Hawkes 2010 has much to say on Milton Sr’s links with this ‘Satanic sect’. Johnson’s pithy definition is too good to omit: ‘Milton […] was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones’ (13.6.1784 in Boswell’s Life). B. Lewalski (MAR, vol. I, 889 n. 5) calls Kerrigan’s 1983 study ‘the most impressive application of psychological criticism to Milton’s work’. Shawcross 1993 is an example of Jungian psychobiography.
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or because of this, he accepted without demur his father’s wishes (it was he who wanted him to become a paragon of learning), though they were not too demanding for his son to write a Latin ode to him, ‘Ad patrem’. He had taken a vow of chastity but suffered from his suppressed sexual urges; he longed for the pleasures of life, and immediately withdrew when they were offered.12 After graduating, he decided against taking orders, put off by the pro-Catholic tendencies imposed on the clergy by Archbishop Laud. However, his violent disgust at the corruption of the Church did not lead to atheism or loss of faith, but stimulated his search for truth in freedom, and strengthened his lay intransigence. 3. In the poetry written in the first thirty years of his life, published, as I mentioned, in 1645, Milton appears to be searching for a nexus between paganism and Christianity. At the same time, he shows more affinity to late Renaissance Italian poetry than other contemporary English poets. Above all, the young Milton is the last of the Spenserians. Nor should it be forgotten that the subject matter of the English poems is present in a seminal stage in the Latin, more specifically, Ovidian elegies of the late 1620s.13 ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’,14 the first truly ‘Miltonic’ poem, consists of a proem in rhyme royal followed by a ‘hymn’ of twenty-seven stanzas of eight lines, the last of which is an alexandrine. The individual stanzas are like a rosary of visual and conceptual images principally on the meaning of Christmas, but digressing at times. In the proem a series of oxymora and antitheses anticipate the mystery of the Incarnation. In the ‘Hymn’ the reader is surprised by the daring image of a guilty nature that must undress, dress again, and hide her shame: she wished to ‘wanton with the sun’ and instead covers herself with snow to placate her desire – the antithesis is one that was painfully relevant for Milton at that stage of his life. Right from
12 13 14
He is reported to have exclaimed when in Venice: ‘I would like to die here and be buried beneath the velvet of these canals’. Translated into English verse by Cowper in 1808. The first of a series of poems on the liturgical calendar, of which only a fragment on the Passion survives. The general opinion is that this poem is unfinished because the Puritan in Milton venerated the heroic, triumphant Christ rather than the suffering figure on the Cross.
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the first stanza, we are presented with ideas and conceits common to the religious poetry of the time: not much separates these lines from the song of the shepherds in Crashaw,15 though Milton elevates what are, in effect, commonplaces thanks to an element of gracefulness and sobriety. The birth of Christ is accompanied by a hitherto unheard music of the spheres, which brings back the Golden Age, with Christ’s abolition of original sin, of vanity, and, above all, of hell. Euphorically, as in a kind of day dream, the hymnist announces the institution of the reign of Justice, and the opening of the gates of Heaven, but then stops, remembering that first Christ will have to undergo the Passion, which appears, lit up by a photographic flash, followed at once by the vision of the irate, defeated Satan, a vision which is naturally proleptic, since the young poet grasps immediately the connection between sin, fall, corruption, the closing of the doors of salvation, their re-opening by virtue of the incarnation, suffering and death of the son of God, whose coming coincides with the rout of those pagan divinities who will re-appear as Satan’s companions of misadventure in Paradise Lost. Milton, however, seems to follow the flight of the fleeing gods with something like nostalgia. 4. ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’16 are, in fact, a single poem in two parts, which in the end appear to suggest that the poet is destined to become the prophetic interpreter of sacramental nature. Perhaps there is an allusion to Milton’s rejection of the religious life, though in that case the order of the two poems should be inverted. ‘Il Penseroso’ does affirm the need for meditation in the peace of a shady garden, like Marvell’s, a church without a structure of brick or stone. The two titles point to Milton’s assimilation of 15 16
§ 17.2. Possibly a contemptuous allusion to Crashaw is ‘any lay Papist of Loretto (sic)’ at the end of Areopagitica. IZZ, 529–30, finds echoes from Tasso’s ‘Per il presepio di Nostro Signore’ (‘For our Saviour’s crib’). As, for example, Izzo says, in IZZ, 526–7, they were first written in Latin prose and were part of the academic exercises at Cambridge that consisted in arguing for and against a motion. Izzo also speaks of major and minor versions of the same piece of music. In the field of pictorial art, too, it was common practice to juxtapose two opposing allegorical figures. Many have been reminded of the opening lines of Burton’s Anatomy or of Shakespeare’s Passionate Pilgrim. The offspring of these poems are Gray and the pre-Romantics and Romantics with their scenes of country life.
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Italian culture, both in the sense that the poems are a pictorial or sculptural paraphrase, like Michelangelo’s statues in the Sagrestia Nuova, and because the first title is the indication, by means of a metaphor or synecdoche, of musical ‘tempo’ – like ‘arioso’ or ‘serioso’ (Baroque music gave hundreds of pieces the title of ‘Folly’). Conceptually, the poems present two conflicting points of view or moods, the second excluding the first. So, thesis and antithesis, but no synthesis. Melancholy or pensiveness are incompatible with cheerfulness. Milton’s poetry already proposes the model of spontaneous joy mellowing into reflection. In ‘L’Allegro’, Melancholy is banished to a dark, damp, stinking cave to make way for the daughter of Venus, Euphrosyne, whose birth is described in some detail. The poet formulates the invitation to carpe diem in the great trochaic mimesis. Gradually, the joyful sight of dawn gives way to a pastoral cliché, with a pageant of country feasts and whirling dances, medieval castles with knights and ladies, then London theatres and, finally, soft, sensuous music. In ‘Il Penseroso’ the word ‘melancholy’ never completely loses its Burtonian association of ‘madness’, as suggested by the mythological comparisons of humans who, like Prometheus, have defied the gods, or have had incestuous relations, or have suffered rape (Vesta, Philomela). The nightingale is silent, however, and the poet wanders in the night lit by the moon ‘Like one that had been led astray / Through the heaven’s wide pathless way’, imagining he is in some Gothic or pre-Romantic cell poring over occult tomes. Milton is reflected in the figure of a misanthropist, begging Aurora, who has taken the place of Night, to lead him to some shady grove where he can dream and forget; on awakening, he asks again to be allowed to withdraw to some quiet cloister; anything to avoid the real world. If this is not prophetic, it is not far from it. 5. Lycidas, overtly a public funeral ode, and therefore an objective composition, is, in reality, a subjective de te fabula. The poem mourns the death by drowning, in the Irish Sea, of Edward King, a contemporary of Milton’s at Cambridge, though not a close friend, and, at the time of his death, set to enter the priesthood. He was also a poet.17 The elegy is in fact 17
King has already been mentioned in the section on Cleveland (§ 24), who was among the many contributors to a volume of commemorative verse. Edward King is unrelated to Bishop Henry King (§ 22).
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a wide-ranging reflexion, rhapsodic and visionary, on the prospects open to Milton at the time (1638): he had just lost his mother; he had said no to the religious life, and had, instead, chosen a literary career, without, however, the illusions of immortality he had once nurtured. He may have intended to go to Italy, finding in extremis, at the end of this poem, a way out of his predicament. This is why, in ‘Il Penseroso’, he appears as the melancholy man who has lost his way. Lycidas has always been considered the most perfect poem in English of all time, at least of its kind – the elegy – and dimensions – about 200 lines. What might seem to be an excessive assessment is due, in part, to its central theme, particularly dear to the English: undeserved and untimely death (King was only twenty-five when he died). Dozens, if not hundreds, of these elegies were to be written by English poets, culminating in a whole book of elegies like that of Ted Hughes for Sylvia Plath. Behind every single exemplar of this genre lies the question Milton embodies in Paradise Lost: how to justify the ways of God – or fate, for the non-believer – to man; how to explain and accept the premature death of innocent and promising people. If we look at the indentations, Lycidas divides into eleven sections of tortuous internal argument, often becoming rhapsodic in its flow and sometimes obscure. The form is the pastoral elegy and references to mythology pervade the whole poem. Lycidas, too, was a poet, and deserves a funeral poem; it is right that he should be mourned and sung of by the Muses. Curiously, the poem begins with an objection to some previous, non-existent, assertion, and closes with another enigmatic allusion, almost an extract of some meditation or dialogue the poet is holding with himself. The conjunctions ‘since’, ‘but’ and ‘yet’ initiate the central part of the argument, which is that the nymphs could have saved the drowning man. This fantasy is silenced by the voice of reason: they could have done little. Of these two typical Miltonic reactions to the events of life, it is always cold, down-to-earth rationality that wins the day. The comparison with Orpheus fits, because Orpheus too was a poet, who ended up dead in the water. Cynical concreteness wins, but only for a moment, also because the poet asks himself what good it is to cry and complain – Lycidas is dead now; would it not be better to have a good time with the nymphs? In short, to do what ‘L’Allegro’ advocates? An inner voice objects in what becomes a dramatic monologue:
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the desire for fame makes a man give up meaner delights, and yet he dies all the same; the second voice rebuts that the reward for one’s actions will be given after death, and it will be an eternal, heavenly reward. The poetic voice is hopeful and sceptical at the same time; it raises objections and answers them by itself. We are left in doubt as to who utters the words in brackets ‘(The last infirmity of noble mind)’; maybe it is an aside by the first voice. The account of the shipwreck by the ‘Herald of the Sea’ comes late; and suddenly, called by the metaphor of the sailor and fisherman, St Peter arrives on the scene and proceeds to denounce the corrupt clergy in prophetic tones, using obscure and esoteric images. The ‘blind mouths’ and, especially, the mysterious ‘two-handed engine’18 have a Dantesque ring. The elegy ends with the return of the fantastic; we have wept for Lycidas, but must weep no more; Lycidas lives, a soul in heaven, and as such will be the protector of those who sail in the sea where he was drowned. Most importantly, in the last section there is a grammatical change of person, from the first to the third, so that the poem turns into an unexpected dramatic monologue ending in a couplet that suggests Milton has succeeded in objectifying himself and his predicament, and has found the strength to continue his journey. § 33. Milton III: ‘Comus’ Two court masques, ‘Arcades’ (incomplete) and Comus (performed at Ludlow Castle in 1634 in honour of the newly elected Lord President of Wales, with music by Henry Lawes, who also acted in and directed the performance; the text was first published in 1637), are the last poetic works in English by Milton before Paradise Lost, apart from a handful of sonnets. It is often pointed out that Milton was unsuited to write these masques, in which the theme of chastity was in stark contrast to the usual subjects of the genre (and Comus does not include an antimasque), and that therefore his ‘product’ took his ‘clients’ by surprise. Comus is the first ambiguous tempter, and the chaste Lady the first defender of virtue and good. It is, in this light, an anticipation, with variations, and set in the world of fantasy,
18
Perhaps an axe.
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of the theme of Paradise Lost. That the victim of Comus should be referred to simply as the ‘Lady’ is significant: it is tempting to see here an allusion to the soubriquet Milton was given at Cambridge owing to his apparently effeminate looks and unassailable chastity (today’s equivalent might be something like ‘girlie’). Comus is also the first and, almost, only sortie by Milton into a genre he wanted to experiment and had the technical ability for – indeed, he goes well beyond its accepted code of expression. Of course, the pastoral drama is an Elizabethan genre based on a symbolic, archetypal place. The masque required a host of images and decorative elements to be conveyed with flowing ease. Later, the theme of the girl tempted by a magician, and fighting him off, will become the basic ingredient of the Gothic tale. In the prologue, the Attendant spirit informs the audience of Comus’ method: he offers wayfarers a ‘liquor’ that transforms them into beasts, an obsessive allusion to diabolic temptation in the form of juices or fruits that destroy what is divine in a man and reduce him to the level of a beast. This Genius of the wood, subsequently disguised as the shepherd Thyrsis, rescues maidens and all those in danger of falling. Comus announces the beginning of the night’s orgy, and takes the Lady, who has lost her way, into his ‘lowly cottage’. Enter her two brothers, one of whom praises this sister’s chastity, while the other is more elastic – two opposing views of human life. In Comus’ palace, the Lady refuses to drink the potion and treats her seducer with scorn, demonstrating considerable powers of argument. Comus echoes Marvell in inviting the Lady not to be ‘coy’ and to yield her virginity to him. The brothers chase the sorcerer away, but the Lady is left ‘spellbound’ and calls on Sabrina, a river nymph, to free her, which she does. § 34. Milton IV: The enslaved voice Between 1638 and 1639 Milton – who in the meantime had suffered the loss of his mother, as well as of Edward King and his childhood friend, Charles Diodati (twin deaths, both honoured by elegies, Diodati’s obviously in Latin)19 – travelled through France, Switzerland and Italy for a total of 19
Diodati’s uncle, whom Milton visited in Geneva on his way back in 1639, was a Protestant theologian and translator of the Bible. John Florio, too, was the son of an
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fifteen months. In Florence he participated, quite nonchalantly, in meetings of a neo-Platonic accademia, met Galileo (blind, and a prisoner of the Inquisition), aroused liking and interest in the people he met, though his strait-laced morality was the target of malicious comments from the ‘svogliato’ Malatesti.20 In Rome, he listened to the singing of the ‘divine’ Adriana Baroni, was treated with enormous respect by Cardinal Barberini, and feted in vain by the Jesuits, leaving him with the strengthened conviction that the English Church should never resemble that of Rome. In Naples, he struck up a friendship with the marquis, Giovanni Battista Manso, to whom he dedicated ‘Mansus’, a complimentary poem in Latin hexameters.21 In his belated grand tour, in short, Milton was carrying out a necessary cultural exploration, with plans to visit the places that had seen the birth of poetry. As a poet himself, he felt bound to go on this long literary pilgrimage to Rome, Florence, the Sicily of Theocritus, the Greece of the orators, philosophers, historians and tragedians. However, on receiving news from England of the worsening political situation there, he gave up the plan to go further south, and set off for home. For the next nine years he became a freelance polemicist, and in 1649 was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues in Cromwell’s directorate. The end of his career as a polemicist coincided with the fall of the Commonwealth. Milton was forced into hiding, then arrested, fined, pardoned and freed. His decision in 1640 to put aside his poetic ambitions was a heroic gesture of self-sacrifice for the public good.22 In number and intensity, the pamphlets written between Italian Protestant, and is remembered mainly for his connection with Shakespeare. The diaspora seems to have been extremely productive. Diodati’s father, Theodore, helped Florio in his translation of Montaigne’s Essais. 20 One of the members of the Accademia degli Svogliati [Academy of the Listless]. 21 In Venice, from where he sent copies of Monteverdi’s music to England, Milton may even have met the composer. On the possible echoes of Monteverdi’s Orfeo in Lycidas see Muir 1955, 46–7. 22 The only poetry written in these twenty years is represented by eighteen English sonnets, plus a tailed sonnet against the Presbyterians and in favour of the freedom of conscience. Taken together, they show a return to the Italian form (more precisely, that of Della Casa), consisting of two quatrains and two tercets with enjambments (‘the breaking of the verses’ is Tasso’s name for it). This is an aesthetic choice that
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1640 and 1660 might be remotely compared to the eye-witness accounts written by Orwell during the Spanish Civil War in 1936: articles throbbing with invective, infamy, lies, accusations and retorts, shot through by the restless spirit of ideological transformation, when political positions seemed to shatter into numberless factions within the same party or movement. The corpus of Milton’s prose is, for the most part, the province of political scientists, historians of the English Civil War, or students of the evolution of Milton’s political ideas. However, it throws light on his life and literary technique, belonging, as it does, to a further period of incubation (this time, like Eliot’s Latimer and Deronda, without being aware of it) and frustration: Milton suffers because he is unable to write poetry, but secretly he is getting ready to undertake the composition of a national epic. Hence, his prose is objective and argumentative, but curiously pierced and illuminated by scraps of autobiography, ever present in today’s anthologies. These autobiographical fragments often allude to the ‘poem of poems’ that is struggling for form inside his head; or they contain flashbacks, confessions concerning his recent past, prophesies and explanations of the magnum opus to come. Above all, Milton used a radically different style (of course, he had never written in prose before), that connects with the poetic language of Paradise Lost and represents an intermediate stage in the search for an epic style. His prose style is heavy, teeming with subordinate clauses; the tone is prophetic, solemn, apocalyptic, and already rich in Latinate words and constructions, archaisms and coinages; and, as he was to do more and more, he addresses the ‘reader’. In a way, you would almost think Carlyle is just round the corner.
moves the sonnet out of the love convention and frees it up for occasional use instead of the usual cycle of appeals addressed to real or mythological women. They are also composed in a slightly different style to that of his other poems – and are usually more stringent and sometimes stentorian. The three most famous ones are: a public denouncement of the massacre of the Waldensian Protestants in 1655, with its stern biblical overtones of wrath; and two private reflections, one on his blindness, and the other on a vision of his dead wife – it is not sure whether the first or the second. Obviously, this latter was written when Milton was already blind.
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2. In 1642 Milton married seventeen-year-old Mary Powell, the daughter of an Oxford royalist family. This marriage was similar to that of Ruskin, or Cecil’s to Lucy in Forster’s A Room with a View. A month after the wedding Mary went back to her parents, but then returned to her husband, reconciled to such an extent that she bore him three daughters before dying in childbirth in 1652.23 This experience led Milton to reflect on the sense of marriage and on the need for divorce in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), followed by other pamphlets in 1644 and 1645, in which he argued his support for the dissolution of marriage in the case of physical impediments or mental incompatibility. His ‘journalistic’ skills had already been put to good use in 1641 after his return from Italy, when he lodged with his nephews (sons of his sister, Anne): his first pamphlets and books were in defence of the parliamentarian forces opposing the absolutism of the king, and in favour of the abolition of episcopacy. Among others were the so-called Apology for Smectymnuus (an acronym formed by the initials of the surnames of an influential group of prominent Puritan divines).24 In Of Reformation in England and The Reason of Church Government (1642) he openly advocated a Presbyterian form of church government. Most of the prose works (twenty-five, including tracts and pamphlets) are ephemeral. Milton himself admitted prose was a ‘cold element’, fit only, so he thought, for his ‘left hand’. Two have survived the test of time and are still read today because they are early examples of liberal enlightenment, and so address less contingent subjects. They are also surprisingly anti-Puritan (at least in the sense of a repressive, or compressive movement), one propounding the freedom of the press, the other the freedom of divorce. In 1644, Milton published Areopagitica, in reaction to a law approved by Parliament authorizing pre-publication censorship of material containing anti-Presbyterian
23
Their resentment of Milton is proverbial (but perhaps legendary) for obliging them to read to him in languages (Greek and Hebrew) of which they hardly knew the alphabet. 24 Milton wrote first a post-scriptum, then a rebuttal of Bishop Hall’s rebuttal of Smectymnuus. The name recalls another famous acronym, Marprelate, a cover for one or more Puritan polemicists at the end of the sixteenth century (see Volume 1, § 159).
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opinions. Milton argued that freedom of the press encourages virtue, which exists only to fight and defeat the forces of evil. Sceptics said then, and still say, that the real reason for Areopagitica was Puritan opposition to his divorce pamphlets. Milton discovers the relativism of truth 200 years before its nineteenth-century heyday: absolute truth cannot emerge – even as the consequence of ‘one apple tasted’ by our first parents; truth can only be grasped partially, and then by means of ‘untruth’; in other words, the road to good lies through evil, or rather, the knowledge of evil. Of Education presents a valid pedagogic theory, which, essentially, goes back to Dante.25 It is not greatly different from sixteenth-century English treatises from Elyot on, which focus on how to form a ‘gentleman’, the pedagogic tools being literature, art, the use of weapons, physical exercise, as well as an interest in religion, ethics, philosophy, and, above all, the new science. Milton’s political pamphlets became more frequent with the intensification of the Civil War, and show greater or smaller adjustments in his way of thinking, with an initial, myopic Presbyterianism gradually shifting towards the positions of the Independents (in reality, a small group of regicides close to Cromwell). Reformation was to be completed – in Milton’s opinion it was urgent to ‘reform the Reformation’. He equated the foundation of the Commonwealth with the Second Coming, and in messianic tones acclaimed the destiny of England. Cromwell nominated him Latin Secretary in the State Council, and he in turn supported the legitimacy of the capture and execution of Charles, arguing, indeed, that there was a moral obligation to do so, in Eikonoklastes, in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651), and in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (1654). The first of these was an answer to Eikon Basilike, a defence of Charles ‘the saint’,
25
According to another explanation, after the deaths of the Apostles, Truth was dismembered like the body of Osiris. After recalling sporadic cases of censorship in Greek and Roman times, Milton sees it spread and become institutionalized with the Inquisition. He goes on to address the problem of whether the thing in itself is good even if the inventors are evil. Even if censorship were admissible, it would be impractical to censor every book believed to be dangerous. That Milton was preaching to deaf ears is proved by the burning of his ‘seditious’ books in 1661.
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erroneously thought to be the work of the king himself;26 the other two were attacks on Salmasius (the Frenchman, Claude Saumaise), who had published an indictment of the regicides that was widely read throughout Europe, and was triumphantly refuted by Milton; the other target was fellow Englishman, Alexander More, whom Milton believed, wrongly, to be the author of a public denunciation of the ‘English parricides’ and consequently reviled and insulted by Milton, who was, however, repaid in like coin. The last four pamphlets in chronological order were: a juridical tract; a proposal for the abolition of stipends for the clergy (1658); a half-hearted second proposal to found a free republic; much later (1673) yet another petition in favour of religious freedom. In the massive, antiTrinitarian and Arminian De Doctrina Christiana he espoused other heresies, like the belief in the death of the soul as well as that of the body.27 It was prudently withdrawn from circulation after 1660, and rediscovered, and published, only in 1825.28 § 35. Milton V: ‘Paradise Lost’ I. Genesis, allegory and theology of the poem After 1660 Milton went to live with his third wife in an unpretentious house in London. He had married Elizabeth Minshull in 1663. Relations with his daughters from his first marriage were strained: now blind, he was forced to dictate to amanuenses (often his daughters) what he had composed, usually during the night. He would rise early in the morning, pray, and listen to readings from the Bible (either the 1611 version or the Hebrew text). He would play the harmonium, and spend hours walking in his garden. He usually went to bed at nine o’clock. He led a far from ascetic life – he smoked his pipe, drank good wine, was tolerant and sociable, and got along well with his brother, who was a royalist during the Civil War and who may later have converted to Catholicism. He died of
26 § 1.4. 27 A heresy argued against by Thomas Browne at the beginning of § 7 and in § 37 (part I) of Religio Medici. 28 His huge History of Britain (1670), begun in the 1640s, gets as far as the Norman Conquest. This is perhaps what is left of Milton’s early aspiration to write a celebratory history of his country.
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cardiac complications arising from gout. Like many other classic poems, Paradise Lost underwent a long period of gestation, and appeared in two versions; a kind of Ur-Paradise Lost has been discovered, which I will discuss later. Milton began the actual writing of the poem, it would seem, in the mid-1650s, with daily batches of forty lines. He finished it some time before 1667. This first version was in ten books, while the second edition, in twelve books, was published in 1674,29 just before his death. The first seeds of the poem go back to at least the 1640s. A manuscript preserved in Trinity College, Cambridge, lists about 100 subjects,30 allowing us to believe that Milton at first had in mind a poem on King Arthur. After 1660, however, a poem celebrating the monarchy by a recent supporter of the Commonwealth would have been out of place. Together with the Arthurian subject, Milton abandoned the idea of using the dramatic form: the London theatres, which had just re-opened, were full of the new fashion of frivolity and amorous escapades. Milton wanted no part of this. His notes on the Book of Genesis are more detailed than the others, and contain an outline of a drama on Adam with the title of Adam Unparadised. Milton’s nephew affirmed he had seen with his own eyes a soliloquy by Satan that may have gone to form part of the fourth book of the epic poem. Paradise Lost comes about, seventy years later, as the second greatest English epic. Yet comparison with the Faerie Queene reveals several important differences, mainly because the Faerie Queene may be considered the most ‘poetic’ work of English poetry, which cannot be said for Paradise Lost. With respect to other contemporary, earlier or later poems, not only in English, based on the Bible, the Creation, the Fall, and other religious themes,31 Milton 29 Between the first edition (in ten books, equivalent to two five-act plays) and the second, books VII and X were divided into two in order to reach the Virgilian total of twelve. The change was ‘small but not insignificant’ (Orgel and Goldberg 1991, 853). 30 The precise number is ninety-eight, of which sixty were biblical and thirty-eight ‘British’. 31 As might be imagined, numerous sources have been discovered, amongst which are Andreini’s Adamo (1613), which Milton may have seen acted in Italy; Adamo caduto by Salandra (1647), Tasso’s Sette giornate del mondo creato (unrhymed), as noted by Praz (PSL, 273 and n. 2, excluding Salandra, however). The account by Milton’s nephew mentions other Italian sources, some of them improbable. The biblical book of Genesis
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stands by himself; only Dante is in the same class of poets at whose works ‘poser mano cielo e terra’ [‘Heaven and earth joined hands in building’]. It is not certain how much Milton knew of Dante, or whether he was influenced by him, although dozens of critics have compared them. Nor is it clear whether Milton knew the Commedia,32 and meant deliberately to imitate it, albeit from a distance. Books VI, VII and VIII are indeed very similar to Dante’s doctrinal cantos, with the Archangel Raphael taking the place of Virgil, and instructing Adam, like Dante, eager to learn, on what can be revealed – ‘not surpassing human knowledge’ – of the divine plan of creation. 2. The idea of writing a poem in blank verse, and above all, to divide the material up into twelve books, without stanzaic divisions of any type, represents an aesthetic choice for handling the large dimensions of the intended work. The first step had led Milton close to the dramatic genre, with a superdrama in ten acts. He rejected this option and turned, definitively, to the poem in blank verse. The long-running debate on the kind of verse used in his three epic works has equivocated, in my opinion, on the words ‘musical’ and ‘rhythmic’. Paradise Lost cannot be called a poem that prioritizes ‘verbal music’ – a rather vague concept, by the way. If by ‘verbal music’ we mean rhyme, internal rhyme, refrains, onomatopoeia, alliteration and other phonological ploys, then Milton’s poem is actually deficient in musicality. Milton plays with sound only occasionally and fortuitously. In fact, he avoids all unnecessary euphonic embellishment. He never seems to look for alliteration, and when he bumps into it, it is by pure chance.33 Nor is there any leaning towards pure song, lulling sounds and soft melody.
32
33
was at the centre of seventeenth-century theological exegesis. Among forerunners in English one might cite Cowley’s Davideis (§ 23.3), David and Bethsabe by Peele (see Volume 1, § 94.3), and the poem on Christ Triumphant by the elder Fletcher (§ 7.1), together with other minor works. Later, Milton became famous especially in Germany, with Klopstock, and the librettos for Haydn’s and Handel’s oratorios. Bush 1964, 59, brings our attention to half a dozen notes on Dante in the Commonplace Book. In a lecture on Defoe, Joyce spoke of Paradise Lost as a ‘Puritanical transcription of the Divine Comedy’. Joseph Warton was in no doubt: ‘Milton was particularly fond of this writer’ (quoted in CHI, vol. X, 240). GSM, 166, points to assonance, which is, however, only used ‘now and then’.
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Enjambment is the norm, not the exception. In his short preface to the poem, Milton seems intent on reducing all marks of poetic diction. The idea that Paradise Lost is an eminently musical work was handed down by Tennyson, who spoke of Milton’s ‘organ voice’. Merging music with architecture, Milton is seen as an organist who creates vast cathedrals of sounds, whose long naves are lined by majestic columns. If it were not for obvious syntactic and lexical markers – long, winding sentences, inversions of subject and verb and noun and adjective, periphrases, elaborate similes, Latinisms – the verse of Paradise Lost might be called ‘rhythmic prose’ in mainly iambic pentameters (Saintsbury thought that blank verse always risks slipping into prose).34 In this case, the verse of Milton’s epic is very close to the prose of the pamphlets, and thus very far from the language of the early poems. More precisely, the prose of the early 1640s should be seen together with the poetry he had already written, or was soon to write – or much later, when he began to compose Paradise Lost. In other words, it can truly be said that ‘Milton wrote his least attractive prose at the very time he was composing his greatest poetry’. His creative urge was re-directed to the prose when an immediate poetic destination was lacking.35 3. In Paradise Lost, epithets and synonyms are repeated at length – while Dante is an unfailing source of coinages and neologisms. The sharp, startling visual, or auditory, image is not part of Milton’s stylistic repertoire, which abounds, instead, with words like the ever-present ‘sovran’ or ‘erect’, an adjective used by Sidney, as will be remembered, to indicate the man in whom reason is fully vigilant. Similes are compulsory in the epic, and are used to underline crucial events in the plot. It is debatable whether Milton is on the same level as Homer or Dante in the use of this rhetorical device. His similes are often weak, unfocused or forced, as
34
35
Hopkins admired Milton for his ‘rhythm and metre’, with no reference to other kinds of musicality. Dryden wrote in heroic couplets, but in some works of an argumentative nature he also showed that ‘there was no impassable gulf between eloquent prose and poetry’ (BAUGH, vol. III, 728). T. N. Corn, ‘Milton’s Prose’, in Danielson 1992, 183–96 (192). Corn finds no explanation for the change in the prose after 1644 – terser, sharper, and less imaginative. Bush 1964, 175–6, suggests a similar comparison.
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T. S. Eliot remarked. Many times they are far-fetched, even self-defeating, as they complicate and obscure rather than clarify and illuminate, with their recondite references to mythology and geography. Often the end result is one of involuntary parody. Proof of strict control over the poetic material, as well as of a ‘metanarrative’ instruction, is found in a number of paratextual elements: a poem in heroic couplets by Marvell (present in all editions after 1674), preceded by one in Latin by Milton’s friend, Dr Samuel Barrow; a brief prose introduction by Milton himself, as I mentioned, on the controversial choice of blank verse: rhyme is a barbarous invention and a form of ‘modern bondage’. Each book is then introduced by an ‘Argument’ in prose, similar, in a sense, to the rough drafts recommended to would-be novelists. Paradise Lost, therefore, is a guided poem, carefully managed by a narrator super partes, who already knows the story of the temptation, of which the characters of the poem are, as yet, oblivious, but which is familiar to the contemporary reader. This superior knowledge, or omniscience, is disguised by the rhetorical device known as the protasis, in this case the Holy Spirit, or the Muses, called upon to inspire and lead the poet in his task. The extradiegetic narrator signals his presence in the sometimes excessive mythological or subsequent historical references, and makes no mystery of the fact that this is a story that is told with hindsight. A reader of Milton must therefore be well-versed in the western heroic tradition – Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Ovid, Spenser, Ariosto, Tasso, Du Bartas – as well as in the science, or pseudo-science, of the day.36 Books VI and VII abound in examples of phatic speech: Raphael’s récit may be taken for one of the poetic ‘I’, whereas he is a character inside the story. Milton shows he is familiar with the whole range of rhetorical devices available to traditional epic poets and to the first novelists fifty years on. On the basis of Book VI, it is clear that the poem begins in medias res, and that the Ulysses of the situation is the Archangel Raphael, who recounts what has happened before. The second part of Book V is analeptic – it tells, from a different angle, the story of the rout of the rebel angels with which the poem begins. Book VI is entirely dedicated to the war in Heaven. In almost every book, the point 36 Milton’s descriptions of the planets, as Praz never tires of saying, would have been impossible before the age of the telescope.
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of view of the narration splits and, like a ‘fade to’ or with a ‘meanwhile’, opens on a different scenario. The reader would be gripped by suspense if he did not already know the outcome of the imminent temptation: there is Satan lying in wait, while the Archangel prolongs his account of preceding events, postponing the climax until Book IX. The biblical subtext is present in concentrated form: not many events are narrated, but those that are, are considerably expanded and enriched with detail. The techniques peculiar to poetry, the novel, and drama are interwoven in Paradise Lost. The blank verse is here the last development of a prosodic practice beginning with Marlowe. The more one reads, the more one finds places where the text, in single lines, imitates Elizabethan drama in the succession of addresses and speeches. This is a poem full of dialogues and debates, and above all, of monologues, like the monumental soliloquies of Satan. There is overwhelming evidence that Milton superimposed on the biblical Satan the huge number of portrayals – from Marlowe and Shakespeare onwards – of the Elizabethan ‘villain’, damned but tortured by doubt, free to do what he now ‘justly’ deplores and bemoans. 4. Paradise Lost is one great paraphrase: the ninety-odd verses contained in three chapters of the biblical Genesis are expanded to fill more than 10,000 lines of poetry, the bare biblical account amplified by ‘voices’ that critics, following Bakhtin and Bloom, have defined as ‘polyphonic’ and ‘aporetic’. It is a useful exercise to open Genesis and see how Milton has disassembled, then re-assembled the text, and in what, perhaps distorting, way he has read and re-written the story.37 Milton is aware that the biblical Word is sacred, but it is man’s prerogative to break its seals; there is a touch of irony, if not of blasphemy, in the often repeated refrain, found also in Paradise Regained, ‘to compare great things with small’. The action begins with the rout of Satan and his rebel angels: in Book IV, after an extra-narrative proem, we see Satan in the garden of Eden; in the last book, the action comes full circle with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the earthly paradise; an angel with a sword is set to guard the gates, but not before the Archangel Michael has presented Adam with a pageant of human history up to the 37
See, as an example, the close reading carried out by Carey, with continuous references to Genesis, in Carey 1969, 75–122.
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Last Judgement. It was no bad thing that the poem was begun so late, as Milton was thus able to mould into a kind of only half-extinguished sphere (in part still red hot, that is) his whole spiritual and physical life, as well as the public events of the last twenty years, and place this fiery ball, or bolus, inside the work he was sitting down to write. Anyone tempted to reduce Paradise Lost to a precise political allegory, or, in a strictly biblical sense, to see in Genesis a ‘typological’ prophecy of events in England between 1640 and 1660, will be faced with the fact that things do not ‘add up’: if there is such an allegory, it has become ‘unhinged’. Two preliminary facts need to be borne in mind: the poem, whenever ‘conceived’, was certainly begun in its written form in the second half of the century; it was started, that is, at the height of the Protectorate, and coincided with the climax of Milton’s messianic ecstasy. The second fact is that the biblical story had its own internal diegesis to be respected, and that Milton could have used it as a vehicle for his political, or messianic vision only by re-modelling the biblical story in modern, or indeed modernistic or even postmodern terms.38 The most immediate allegorical interpretation is to see Satan as Cromwell,39 the unfallen Adam and Eve as the English people under the Protectorate, and God the Father as Charles I. However, this reading would suggest that Cromwell destroyed a perfect political regime instead of healing the nation. Logically, the pre- and post-lapsarian chronology should be inverted, Cromwell transformed into an angel, and God the Father deposed or decapitated. Only by means of an extreme and unconvincing deconstruction can Milton be accused of deploring Cromwell’s role in the death of Charles, and singing the praises of a prosperous and peaceful country ruined by the Commonwealth. It is easier to identify an allegorical meaning in the end of the poem: England resumes its journey after 1660, wounded, humbled, but ready to buckle under, in the knowledge that all is not lost. Nevertheless, after more than fifteen years of Civil War, Milton 38
Which is what Dryden did when he turned the poem into an opera libretto with the title of The State of Innocence, in 1674, when Milton was still alive. 39 Muir 1955, 129, observes that this identification was made by Chateaubriand but dismisses it as ‘absurd’, forgetting that, at about the same time, Dryden uses biblical figures to represent real people in Absalom and Achitophel.
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cannot but interpret reality in military terms: God the Father, the Son, and Satan are commanders of armies; the battles they fight are planetary, and modelled on episodes of war that Milton, like the rest of the population, had seen and could still see in their imagination. 5. The meaning of Paradise Lost, in the sense of the reasons behind that particular choice of subject, and its relation to the Arthuriad Milton thought of writing in the 1640s: this seems to me to be crucial and more worth debating than other more evanescent questions that trouble the sleep of today’s critics. Strangely enough, only E. M. W. Tillyard, in his Milton (1930), followed by another study eight years later, has come to grips with this problem. Tillyard’s essay is pertinent, though it was written in 1938,40 because it attempts to explain how a planned tragedy on King Arthur became one on Alfred the Great, and then, many years later, a poem on the Fall (the subject is, however, in the Trinity MS list). Milton gradually abandoned the idea of a patriotic poem that he envisaged in the early 1640s, says Tillyard, and began to contemplate a poem that in some way would reflect his disappointment with the parliamentary revolution. This would explain the deconstruction of Satan as Cromwell and God the Father as King Charles: a kind of punitive allegory, according to the critic, a bitter attack rather than a celebration. Yet Tillyard ends by saying that the question remains: why did Milton choose the Genesis story? Two facts go against the theory expounded in the 1938 essay: first, the Fall was a rather obvious choice and was at the top of the list right from 1640; second, the poem was begun when Milton was still an enthusiastic supporter of Cromwell, so much so that he was his Secretary. So the conceptual foundations of the work were laid a long time before the actual composition of Paradise Lost. At this point it becomes more reasonable to think that Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained should be read together, as complementary and interrelated, with the second as anything but a mere appendix to the first. However, it seems that this was not Milton’s intention. The
40 E. M. W. Tillyard, ‘Milton and the English Epic Tradition’, in Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson, Oxford 1938, 211–34.
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suggestion for Paradise Regained came from one Ellwood.41 According to this theory, Paradise Lost was meant to be the prelude to a greater poem on Paradise, regained in England through the victory of Parliament.42 As I said above, there is no great interest today in Milton’s intention at the time of writing the poem, but there is a general consensus that he changed his mind completely, passing from the idea of a celebratory poem to the exact opposite. Other critics see in the poem not a surrender or withdrawal into a strait-laced theodicy but a direct involvement in the political debate.43 In this hypothesis, Satan is not, for Milton, the political hero, but the symbol of those forces that brought about the collapse of the ‘good old cause’. In short, we are back to the demonization of Cromwell. 6. From a purely theological point of view, Paradise Lost is an outright denial of Puritan predestination. In this light, Satan is less black and God less bright – indeed, a bit more ‘Satanic’. The Trinity is left in the shadows, while Milton’s heaven is ruled by the efficient partnership of a father who can talk to his son without a quarrel breaking out. On the other hand, Milton had become, or had always been, an anti-Trinitarian.44 Intermittent, very formal exchanges – sometimes mellifluous, always respectful – resolve any possible tiny difference of opinion between father and son, the former severe and implacable, the latter obedient but merciful. The council in Heaven, during which the Father explains his actions to the angelic host, gives the impression of a democratic regime. Christ is the real antagonist of Satan, and vice versa. The ideal conclusion of the story lies outside the poem: Mary and Jesus together will crush Satan (Milton uses the understatement ‘bruise’ to convey this drastic final action). The end of the poem is serenely optimistic, and anti-Calvinist: Eve is aware of her sin and her
41 The essence of the two poems is contained in the matching readings of Catholic liturgy for the first Sunday of Lent: Gen. 2, 7–9 and 3, 1–7 + Rom. 5, 12–19 + Matt. 4, 1–11. 42 Tillyard 1961, 107. 43 Cf. the volumes reviewed in TLS (2 February 1996, 4–5). 44 On English anti-Trinitarianism in Milton, cf. Hill 1977.
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responsibility in condemning humanity for centuries to come,45 and begins her exile. Adam is comforted, and literally exhilarated that from his seed the Redeemer will be born. 7. The comments I have already made on the reception of Milton tout court may be applied to Paradise Lost, too, because in the past he has been judged, almost exclusively, on the strength of this poem. The work has been attacked mainly on the basis of antithetical aesthetic convictions and moral values – in short, owing to epistemic disagreements. To the secularism prevailing in western society until very recently may be ascribed the lack of interest in the poem for the intelligentsia, especially on the Continent. In the middle of the nineteenth century the positivist Taine mocked Milton’s representation of our domesticated forebears, and their formal, polite dialogues in line with the etiquette of married life. The twentieth century and Modernism, which were sceptical and atheist (notably Empson) found great difficulty in attuning to Milton’s ideological and theological earnestness, but every time it has been the figure of Satan that has saved the day. Milton exalts ‘fighters’, so it was alleged; his portrayal of the ‘agonistes’ convinces because the poet identifies with them. On the contrary, God the Father and the Son, especially the Son, are colourless and anonymous. Apart from Satan, critics in the past have found some good things to say about Adam, and, on occasions, Eve. The opinion, first expressed by Dryden and repeated by Johnson, still carries weight: that Paradise Lost is uneven and patchy; the first two books are required reading, mainly because of Satan; the third and fourth are disappointing, mainly because of God the Father; Raphael’s account of ‘the story so far’ is too long; the farewell to Eden is sublime. At the present time, Paradise Lost does not seem to be caught up in a surge in popularity; it has little appeal for the postmodern, which has often resuscitated literary mummies thanks to remakes and various transformations, transpositions, transfusions and parodies. The poem has undergone almost no remakes for cinema or the theatre, music, cabaret or
45 Not even professional theologians have been able to explain why the Father waited 1,500 years before sending his Son into the unredeemed world.
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comics. Yet it contains the seeds of a great work of romance.46 The ‘star wars’ between angels and demons might be the basis for an SF version; a strip cartoon or Beckettian pièce might provide a platform for Eve’s flightiness, countered by the cautious stolidity of her husband. § 36. Milton VI: ‘Paradise Lost’ II. Satan’s dynamism and God’s response The first distinguishing feature of the poem is the opening long shot on Satan’s army as it lies, beaten and exhausted, on the burning lake of Hell. It may symbolize that Satan is at the heart of the poem, and is the centre of interest, and sympathy, for the poet, though tempered by the incontestable claims of theology. The first two books, in a sort of prologue, contain a detailed, in-depth study of the psychology of the demonic characters. Milton uses the overall metaphor of an army with its divisions of roles and duties according to a strict hierarchy. Satan is the commander; below him come all the others in descending order, right down to the ‘foot soldiers’. The pyramidal structure is never questioned.47 The council of war is taken from Homer, no doubt, but in Milton is coloured by the recent events of the Civil War that were still very much alive in the collective imagination. The great leader, with a mission to carry out, however evil, has an iron fist and great courage. As I have said before, there is not a little of Cromwell in this Satan. Two points should be borne in mind: regret at having forfeited Heaven and the aspiration to return; the realization on Satan’s part that he can never compete with the Almighty, but will be defeated again should a second war be fought. Yet, ‘hope springs eternal’, and not just in human breasts: the fallen angels’ hope is based on an indomitable urge to sabotage God’s plans: the war has been lost, but the defeated can still disturb and vex the Victor, and frustrate his plans; they can alleviate their pain by
46 Cf. B. Kiefer Lewalski, ‘The Genres of Paradise Lost’, in Danielson 1992, 79–95, especially 85–6. 47 Regarding the plurality of opinions, see Belial’s intervention in the war council, in which he openly declares in favour of resignation and immobilism. Critics have, of course, had a field day identifying the real, English, people behind Moloch, Mammon, Belial and Beelzebub (who persuades Satan to resume the war).
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retaliating. The war council of Book II debates the various answers to the usual revolutionary question, ‘What is to be done?’ What emerges is the fact that Milton’s Satan is essentially pure, inexhaustible energy, even in the face of certain defeat, so that the energy is in itself a victory, whatever the actual outcome of a battle might be. The opening of the poem clarifies once and for all the text’s discursive strategies. Milton initiates a diction which is characterized by his so called ‘hammer blows’; he exploits the gamut of the ‘terrible’; he heaps up apocalyptic hyperboles and facile similes involving the sun, winds and sea; he merges Hebrew mythology with Greek and Latin. In two cases he refers to facts that are disautomatizing insofar as contemporary: the ‘earth’ and the ‘garden of God’ are compared to the ‘imagined lands and regions of the moon’ seen through Galileo’s telescope, and Satan’s legions to the dead leaves by ‘the brooks / In Vallombrosa’. We are disillusioned about Milton being an auditory poet, as if often stated:48 the devils unsheathing their glinting swords is only one of the many examples of the Dantesque in Milton (though they differ in that Milton’s cosmos is unlimited and its boundaries vague, while Dante’s is more circumscribed, and his eyes pick out the smallest details). The scene of Satan’s egress from Hell is an inversion of Aeneas’ or Dante’s entry into the underworld. Satan is stopped by one who calls him ‘father’, and introduces herself as ‘Sin’; the son born from Sin rapes her, generating other hellish monsters. Milton still believes that God created the human race to take the place of the fallen angels, but with the intention of ‘settling’ them on some distant planet, to avoid ‘new broils’. Through the gates of hell, once a bridge has been built connecting it with the Earth, Sin and Death will pass on their way to wreak havoc on post-lapsarian man. Immediately outside the gates, Satan finds himself in Chaos, described in such a way as to recall the defeat and rout of the rebel angels. 2. In Books III and IV, God the Father, together with the Son,49 observes the unfolding of events, but cannot – or rather, will not – interfere: he has given man free will. But there is a way out: man will not fall by 48 DAI, vol. I, 441. 49 Milton never uses the name ‘Jesus’, but only ‘the Son’; and ‘paradise’ is always the earthly paradise of Eden. The heavenly paradise is ‘Heaven’.
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himself, but will be seduced, unlike Satan, whose freedom of choice was absolute. Contesting the doctrine of predestination, Milton repeats that God’s plan was to replace the rebel angels with an angel-like race, mankind. The harmony between Father and Son contrasts with the relationship between Sin and Death in Book II. God informs his Son that justice demands that He punish man’s sin of pride by death. The Son at once offers to die for the sake of the fallen humans. So far, so good, but for the suspicion that God could have stopped Satan, but didn’t, as if to create the premise for some huge epic event, a megagalactic battle in which the Son takes on Satan – see Paradise Regained – with this Baroque pageant, then brought to an end by the crucifixion, death, resurrection and ascension of this same Son. Vindictive and possessive, God the Father will tolerate no sharing of his creature, man. Not all of Book III is about God: halfway through, Satan is seen nearing Limbo after flying a vast distance through interstellar space towards the Earth, which he sees in the far distance, and is overcome by wonder and a sensation of dizziness. He takes the form of a cherub and lands, meets the Archangel Uriel, and asks him for information. Book IV, too, is divided between two spheres of action: in the first, Satan reconnoitres Eden and its human inhabitants; in the second, Uriel reports to Gabriel. In the first part of the book, a humanized Satan wonders whether to turn back or go on; he even seems to have a conscience!50 He persists, however, and arrives at the gates of Eden. He describes the scents of the garden, leaps over the wall, and finds himself in front of the trees of Life and of Knowledge. § 37. Milton VII: ‘Paradise Lost’ III. Man’s redemption Through Satan’s eyes, the human pair are presented, naked and innocent, at their table, surrounded by friendly animals. Satan hears Adam speak of their happiness and of the only thing they are forbidden to do, and witnesses their demonstrations of endearment. He then comes down 50
The angel, Abdiel, at first convinced by Satan to join the rebels, changes his allegiance, and returns to the army of God. Here he attempts to talk Satan into changing his mind. So he is a potential Satan, whose function is not entirely understood by DAI, vol. I, 443.
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from the tree of Life, where he was perched in the likeness of a cormorant. Eavesdropping is a typical device of the Elizabethan theatre, with the villain often hiding and listening in order to gather information that will help him to his goal. In the evening, Adam and Eve withdraw to the marriage bed, and join in sinless union. Several times Milton inveighs, in an aside, against hypocrisy: sex is no sin inside marriage. From now on there are various changes of scene: first of all, in the middle of the night, Gabriel orders his soldiers to apprehend the intruder; Satan is captured and taken to him. Book V deals entirely with the Archangel Raphael’s warning to the human pair: he tells them of Satan’s expulsion from Heaven, which the reader will remember from Book I. Before that, Eve tells of her dream, in which she has seen Satan eating the forbidden fruit. She says she woke up with a start; Adam explains that imagination often imitates reality, creating fears and sinful thoughts. The theological interrogative returns: God the Father sees what is happening and tries to stop it, knowing quite well that he cannot; he realizes he will have to resolve an even more serious situation than before to obtain the same result – to open the gates of Heaven to man; and all for what? For the ‘diabolical’ pleasure of staging some impressive theatrical action. At this point, it is difficult not to think of Shakespeare’s The Tempest: God is a kind of Prospero who will ensure a happy end to the story, but could have done it sooner. A parallel can also be seen between the two pairs of innocents, Adam and Eve, and Miranda and Ferdinand. God speaks to ‘fulfil / All justice’; that is, he carries out, dispassionately, like Pontius Pilate, what his own plan requires. Raphael is Milton’s mouthpiece when he tells Adam that God has left the pair free to choose between good and evil, distinguishing between voluntary and necessary service. From Raphael’s account we learn that the name of Lucifer has been abolished in Heaven, and that Satan rebelled because he was envious of the ‘more beloved’ Son. 2. To continue the Archangel’s account: after ejecting the rebel angels from Heaven, God created another world, and creatures to inhabit it. It seems like an arbitrary extra that He should have sent the Son to carry out the creation in six days, after which he returns to Heaven. Raphael’s analepsis continues, putting off the temptation. Adam, naïvely innocent, must be instructed as to his own creation; until then he has lived in a kind
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of blissful state of ignorance. God created the world and everything in it under the delusion that he could tie it to himself, ‘under long obedience tried’,51 and establish a binding union of earth and Heaven. Book VIII might be called ‘pleonastic’, inserted only to reach the required total of twelve. In it, Adam takes on a tone which is alien to him – that of the learned inquisitor – and ventures into quite abstruse territory; this may, however, be an example of Miltonic irony. Raphael explains patiently and, like Virgil to Dante, conjures him to ‘più non dimandare’ [‘ask no more’] about secrets that must remain so for him. There is even a certain humour here, for Raphael was absent when Adam was created, and Adam thinks he himself can fill in the missing parts of the narrative. Adam’s waking, the request for a mate, and Eve’s creation are, in fact, some of the most inspired episodes of the whole poem. The next book, the ninth, represents the climax and turning point: it is morning, and Adam accompanies Eve to the ‘easy’ tasks of the garden. He decides not to leave her alone, as he has been warned of lurking danger. Eve objects that she is quite sure of herself, and wants to prove it; Adam gives in. In what is, in effect, a scene of ordinary married life, Eve bridles at the idea that Adam should doubt her and think she might yield to temptation. She gives some anachronistic examples of female resistance, to which Adam replies that reason may deceive the will with false appearances. One of the key biblical premises that Milton does not contest is that God created woman frailer than man. Satan reappears after a long absence, and, seeing the delights he can never have, again states that he is an ‘outsider’. He targets Eve rather than Adam. When he sees Eve surrounded by uncontaminated nature, he is filled with doubt, and hesitates for a moment before pulling his evil self together. Besieged by Satan, Eve does not understand that the death threatened by the divine command is, above all, symbolic. In fact, the serpent has not died through eating the apple; he has a better life. ‘Look at me’, says the satanic snake. Eve’s reasoning is faulty, but then, she is naïve and not prepared for this. Eve’s 51
The creation by the Son is a hyperbolic show with images of storms and winds rising up from the depths. Then the Son takes a pair of compasses and draws a circle indicating the bounds of creation. The spirit breathes, and day and night are created. This is practically a paraphrase of the account in Genesis.
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soliloquy has a decidedly Elizabethan framework: she debates with herself whether to hide from Adam what she has done – and become superior to him – or share the pain. Adam’s first reaction is to wonder if God has just been pretending: would he really destroy what he has created? One of the first consequences of eating the forbidden fruit is lust: Adam and Eve go out into the fields to satisfy the novel sexual desire, and immediately after break out into recrimination and mutual blame. Remembering that he had once wanted to write of King Arthur, Milton perhaps sees Adam as a kind of Tristram, who drinks the philtre for love of Iseult. 3. God again affirms his foreknowledge of the Fall, but also his condemnation. The Son descends from Heaven, ordered by the Father to carry out the punishment once the pair have been tried. The Son, too, places the man above the woman in the hierarchy of creation, and assigns the leadership to Adam. He is, however, more merciful than the Father, and ‘disdain[s] not to begin / Thenceforth the form of servant to assume’, in the words of St Paul. The Son returns to Heaven, and Sin and Death join Satan, their great creator. Earth and Hell are now linked by a gigantic bridge to facilitate the future transport of souls. The children of Satan, Sin and Death, are sent to rule the Earth as plenipotentiaries. Satan goes back to Pandemonium, and is given a rapturous reception by his followers. The forces of evil have found a place to live; they will colonize the Earth. Satan recounts the temptation of Adam and Eve with considerable dramatic skill, playing down the future threats of the Almighty. Then the whole host of devils is transformed into hissing snakes, and, with a device worthy of Dante, a grove of apples brings forth, not sweet-smelling fruit, but dust and ashes. Adam delivers a long lament, feeling he bears the guilt of the whole of humanity, and rails against Eve, and the creation of faithless women. Subdued, Eve nobly offers to ask God to punish only her, to spare all their future offspring, while for her only suicide is left. Adam cuts a better figure because he is proactive: let us procreate, he says to her, and one of our descendants will crush the head of the serpent; we will be avenged and life afterwards will be not so hard. The last scene of the poem shows the descent of the Archangel Michael in the form of a warrior. He has come to drive the human pair out of Eden. They bewail their departure. Michael leads Adam to the top of a hill and reels off an endless
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list of distant and remote places, to give an idea of the dimensions of the planet God has created. Adam is shown the consequences of his original sin on posterity. This is another Dantesque moment: from the top of a hill a ‘Virgilian’ Archangel reveals the future to Adam, and makes a prophecy. History as told in the Bible is acted out in synthesis. From Cain and Abel, and Noah’s Ark, to Abraham and Joshua. At the end, Adam is reminded that it is his sin that has brought about the dissociation of reason and liberty. The sting in the tail is that, once the apostles are dead, they will be succeeded by ‘wolves’, who will bring with them avarice and ambition; truth will be corrupted by superstition, and secular power will merge with the spiritual until the final, purifying Day of Judgement. § 38. Milton VIII: ‘Paradise Regained’. The new Adam Paradise Regained (1671), in four books,52 and Paradise Lost may be seen as yet another of those frequent antithetical pairings in Milton, like ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’; this is not just a linguistic or conceptual antithesis, but a theological and eschatological one, too. Milton focuses on the eternal, all-out battle between Satan and Jesus, as we have seen. The gospels, in particular that of Luke, provide the narrative material of the three temptations in the desert. The suspicion I have mentioned before as being latent in Paradise Lost now emerges in full force: in Book III of this second epic, Satan accuses the Father of seeking glory for himself by exacting adoration, obedience and praise from the beings he has created for this very purpose. This suspicion, is, however, quashed by Jesus who argues that God asks only for gratitude from his creatures, whom he has made out of his goodness. So the temptation scene in Paradise Lost re-appears, transformed: Jesus is Adam (and Eve) put to the test. In the middle of the second book, the sumptuous banquet stands for the forbidden fruit, which Jesus does not taste. Several times he speaks of the ‘holy king’ who never thinks of himself; worldly fame is worthless, and the great figures of the Bible have more glory in Heaven than the warriors of Greece and Rome. Satan’s tone seems to change, however, when he begs Jesus, while he was
52
Lewalski 1966 writes at length on previous four-book short epics.
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more self-assured and arrogant with Adam. Satan is shown to be totally powerless, relying on Jesus’ taking pity on him and giving him a second chance. In the end he is almost comical, like a soldier who has run out of ammunition, and admits it. 2. Both Satan and Milton find it impossible to say no to a council: here, the Arch-fiend again complains that Jesus has been favoured above him. Satan is amazed that the fabled Messiah should be similar in countenance to the Father; he seems a new Adam, which, in fact, he is. God announces a second test for man, but already knows that Satan’s threat will be foiled, and he will be driven back down to Hell. While still a boy, Jesus realized who he was by reading the Bible. The reader of Paradise Regained may be pleasantly deceived when a venerable shepherd – Satan in disguise – meets Jesus in the desert and asks him who he is, while the apostles are looking for him and his mother worries. When the first temptation fails, Satan holds another council, in which Belial suggests sexual temptation. Satan rejects this impatiently, and yet Belial has given voice to a theme that will be further developed by the Decadents: the love life, or sex life, of Christ with Mary Magdalene, or that of John the Baptist with Salome. In the second temptation (Satan takes the form of a courtier), Jesus refuses gold and precious stones, and draws the portrait of the model earthly king as one who acts only for the public good. This second temptation spills over into Book III, where Satan continues obstinately to offer Jesus worldly power and fame: he might even, says Satan, become the liberator of Israel from the Roman yoke. Finally, he takes him to the top of a mountain and points out the richest and most famous places in human history in the plain below them, where armies march in glinting, clanging rows. The third book ends in medias res; Book IV resumes with the scene on the mountain top. As through a telescope, Jesus sees Rome, caput mundi, an empire without heirs, and a feeble emperor. Satan continues to offer earthly principalities; Jesus resists. Then he shows him Athens, the symbol of ancient philosophy, which Jesus judges far inferior to the wisdom of the Bible.53 After a final attempt in the form of terrifying dreams and a huge thunderstorm, comes
53
‘The humanist in Milton has succumbed to the Puritan’ (GSM, 168).
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Satan’s contemptuous invitation to Jesus to throw himself down from the pinnacle on which Satan has placed him, and Jesus’ lapidary reply: ‘Tempt not the Lord thy God’. 3. Why is Paradise Regained judged to be inferior to Paradise Lost by just about everyone except its author? The first reason is that Christ is by definition and by nature incorruptible; he never doubts, never budges, so there can be no repeat of the nail-biting duel between Adam and Satan. The second reason is that Paradise Regained simmers but never boils: it contains no sensational coup de théâtre. Satan has become a ‘poor devil’, with none of the air of mystery and menace of the first epic; and Jesus has been despoiled of his divinity and subjected to kenosis. Milton’s style is drier, plainer, and less magniloquent – we have to wait until the beginning of the fourth book for a simile, as if the author had just remembered that this figure of speech has proved invaluable in Paradise Lost, and so he inserts two more straight away for good measure. Besides, the clash between Jesus and the Evil One is conducted on an academic and doctoral level: they argue mainly over theoretical problems, debate the various civilizations of history, and weigh up different ideas of culture (Roman decadence, the limits of Greek culture, which is surpassed by the Hebrew). In short, there is no real dramatic struggle. § 39. Milton IX: ‘Samson Agonistes’ Milton called this ‘a dramatic poem’, evidently to emphasize that it was not intended for performance, especially at a time when drama was raising again its head by putting on plays of questionable morality. Samson Agonistes is not divided, but is one long act consisting of 1,758 lines in various metres. The action takes place within the statutory twenty-four hours, and the scene is practically unchanged throughout.54 Samson is blind, and a
54 There is still no agreement on whether Samson, published with Paradise Regained in 1671, is really his last work, or whether it belongs to some period before the two epics, as suggested by the occasional use of rhyme. It is worth remembering the famous passage in Areopagitica (1644) where Milton pictures England rising up ‘like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks […] kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam’. Samson also echoes, up to almost the very end of the
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prisoner of the Philistines. A chorus of friends, including his father, come to listen to his lament and commiserate with him. Faced with Dalila and the boasting Harapha, Samson gives rein to recriminations, recollections, verbal attacks, dreams and fantasies. The biblical climax is recounted by a messenger, in the style of Seneca. In this, Milton’s last work, Samson is an alter ego: behind, or within him, we can make out the author of the sonnet on his blindness, who protests against God, but in the end accepts his misfortune. God, however, remains incomprehensible in the unequal distribution of his gifts. The chorus points to Samson’s double imprisonment – his chains and his lack of sight. Once again, woman is the temptress, and is execrated, just as Adam blames Eve when he learns she has been seduced by Satan. Samson has had two wives, as against Milton’s three, and the second has conquered him by means of her sensuality. Of course, here the marriage relationship is different to the one between Adam and Eve, but the common denominator is that neither reflects Milton’s ideal of harmony between the two partners. In Samson, there are echoes of Satan scorned and frustrated, and, at the same time, of Christ in Gethsemane, weighed down by his fate and almost unwilling to accept it. Samson Agonistes is considered by some to be Milton’s masterpiece; Dr Johnson expressed doubts, and today it is generally seen as a mixture of sublime dramatic verse and parts that are tired and dull. Samson’s first speech, in which he commiserates with himself by means of harrowing anaphoras, is great poetry, and we cannot but agree with Johnson in finding the epilogue, too, highly effective: Samson exits, summoned to Dagon’s feast to be the sport of the Philistines; a roar shakes the sky. While his father, Manoa, expresses his hope that Samson will be freed, a messenger appears and tells the astonished bystanders of the hero’s last, self-destructive exploit.55 The play loses somewhat in the furious quarrel between Samson and Dalila, complete with colloquialisms, which is on
55
poem, the grieving meditation of the sonnet on Milton’s blindness, where the poet, who ‘stands and waits’ curbs his remonstrances, and accepts, however, unwillingly, his total loss of sight, which he suffered in 1652. Though Milton in no way accuses Samson of suicide. The poem enjoyed a new vogue after the attack on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001.
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the same level as the argument between Adam and Eve. Dalila goes on and on, in order to defend her honour in the eyes of her fellow-Philistines, claiming she married Samson only to neutralize him; she compares herself to Jael who thrust a sword into the forehead of General Sisera, a simile which was to reappear in the poem ‘March 1821’ by Alessandro Manzoni. Harapha enters and challenges Samson. The only significance of this figure is to give a third-party voice to one aspect of Samson’s mental torment: his God has apparently abandoned him. § 40. Minor poets up to 1660 Milton left no heirs and founded no school. Mid-seventeenth-century and Restoration poetry can boast imitators and lookalikes of the Cavalier and Metaphysical, as well as of Anglican and Catholic religious poets, like Herbert, Donne and Crashaw. Poets who also happened to be soldiers could look to Lovelace and Suckling for inspiration. Likewise no school of Marvell arose, and Puritan poetry – almost a contradiction in terms – is on the whole non-existent. Others looked to the past and tried their hand at neo-Platonic philosophical poetry; some turned out yet more imitations of the Faerie Queene. The occasional poet did both: Sir Francis Kynaston (1587–1642) is the author of a Latin Chaucer (1642), as well as a masque full of Spenserian echoes, and a few poems that rival Carew in their blatant Caroline paganism. Aurelian Townshend (1583?–1642 or 1643) wrote masques that were performed at court, and a poem in which he enthused at having heard the queen sing. That William Cartwright (1611–1643), playwright and author of complimentary verse, should find an admirer in Coleridge explains why modern critics have revived some of these minor poets and not others: in other words, if they were appreciated by great poets, then they must be worth reading. It helps if they have some exploit to their name. Sidney Godolphin (1610–1643), who died young while fighting for the king, wrote love poems that are almost comparable to those by Lovelace. He also translated Virgil. Unfortunately, he is remembered mainly because Hobbes dedicated his Leviathan to his brother Francis Godolphin, then governor of the Isles of Scilly. The prose and poetry of John Hoskins (1566–1638) were for centuries attributed to Jonson and Donne respectively. The Catholic William Habington
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(1605–1653) glorifies chaste love, and sings of the bride in a Castara published in 1634. Henry More (1614–1687), a Cambridge Platonist, as a poet borrowed extensively from Spenser, and also wrote various tracts with strange, impenetrable titles, redeemed by lively portraits of contemporary theologians and divines. 2. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673 or 1674), and Katherine Philips (1632–1664) were two outstanding, multi-faceted literary figures, who may, in a way, be considered proto-feminists. The former was much admired by Lamb and Virginia Woolf,1 who hailed her as a courageous fighter against current female stereotypes and against the widespread opinion, exemplified by Pepys, that it was unbecoming and ridiculous for a well-born lady to reveal herself in poetry and to soil her hands with prose. She acquired a reputation for her cutting tongue, and stood out for the eccentricity of her way of dressing. Her behaviour, too, was often calculated to shock. Her most readable book is a lively biography of her husband, the Duke, and a General, thirty years her senior. They had met in Paris, where he was in exile (later compensated at the Restoration). Before that, in 1653, she had published a book of poetical and philosophical ‘fantasies’, containing also scientific essays of great eccentricity. As a philosopher, she was ambitious and presumptuous, as an author, prolific and varied.2 Her verses are run-of-the-mill, but clear, as are her prose prefaces, in which she expounds questions that were to prove vital for the birth and development of women’s literature. However, Katherine Philips is probably the most important female poet of any period up to the date of her death. The daughter of a merchant, she first debuted with poems that were included in Henry Vaughan’s first collection. She translated Corneille into rhymed verse. She came from a Presbyterian family, but became a supporter of the king. By the time she died, she was famous, and praised by all the most authoritative critics. The first edition of her complete poems was published in 1667, most of them being addressed to two women with whom she had a neo-Platonic lesbian relationship. For many years it was 1 2
‘The Duchess of Newcastle’, TCR, First Series, 78–87. Her utopian novel, The Blazing World, is, quite frankly, a narcissistic hotchpotch.
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thought that she held a salon frequented by Cowley, Vaughan, and Jeremy Taylor the preacher, to whom she was ‘the matchless Orinda’. This hypothesis is now discredited, as the salon in question was actually only a series of literary exchanges. Her poetry, arranged in a cycle with a story, follows the tradition of aliases, or poetic names; but in the sonnet sequences of 1590 and beyond, Delia and Celia and other pseudonyms were used by a male lover to address his female counterpart; in Phillips’s poetry, Orinda speaks passionately to Lucasia – an echo of Lucasta – and Rosania, who represents the historian Aubrey’s cousin Mary. § 41. Bacon* After William of Ockham, and almost 300 years of silence, an Englishman, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), steps into the limelight in the theatre of European philosophy and leaves his mark. The reverence with which he is treated on the Continent, however, is not matched in his home country: the English were the first to dampen the enthusiasm for his achievements, and still today he is praised grudgingly, with emphasis laid on his limitations – human, moral, ideological, even heuristic, not to mention the purely literary.1 Bacon, his detractors say, was an abject human being, guilty of a political crime that at the time was judged to be the worst possible, and causes even greater indignation nowadays. Furthermore, his philosophy ‘is in many ways unsatisfactory’,2 and is often *
The Oxford Francis Bacon, various eds, 15 vols, Oxford, which replaces the worthy nineteenth-century edition by J. Spedding (14 vols, London 1857–1864), has been appearing since 1996 (7 vols published up to 2012) in non-chronological order. The following are a few examples of modern literary criticism on Bacon: N. Orsini, Bacone e Machiavelli, Genova 1936; B. Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose, Cambridge 1968, and Francis Bacon, Harlow 1978; L. Jardine, Francis Bacon, Discovery and the Art of Discourse, London 1974; J. C. Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature, Cambridge 1989; L. Jardine and A. Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon, London 1998.
1
Leibniz and the Encyclopaedists (Voltaire, D’Alembert) thought him ‘matchless’, and Kant took the epigraph of his Critique of Pure Reason from the Instauratio. From Goethe to Nietzsche, German reaction to Bacon is benevolent, if not enthusiastic. HWP, 526.
2
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flagrantly out-dated. His aesthetics is plagued by obstinacy and error, and short-sighted, to say the least, for not having realized the potential of English as a literary – and scientific – language. It is true that his Essays are a monument to English prose, but, everyone agrees, Montaigne’s will bear comparison, different as they are. Everything else by Bacon – except his philosophical treatises and one work of history3 – that attempts to be inventive and adventurous is a failure. Before embarking on, not a defence, but an objective examination of Bacon, it must be remembered that he was forty-two when Elizabeth died, and that in 1626, the year of his death, many of the writers I have discussed above were still children. Bacon’s place is here because his works, all published in the first thirty years of the seventeenth century, have little of the Elizabethan, and look at ‘the thing as it really is’. He occupies a niche carved between Elizabethan abundance and extravagance, and the rich convoluted style of Burton and Browne, which died with the dawn of Augustanism – the latter was just an off-shoot of Bacon’s prose. In purely literary terms, Bacon is the author of two works of capital importance, at least in intention if not actual result (the second work): these are, a collection of essays on various subjects, and a new ‘utopia’ that draws on More’s Utopia and provided the model for eighteenth-century imitations. Since Bacon was also a poet, though not a very good one, this fact gave rise to the preposterous theory that he was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare being almost the same age as Bacon. 2. Bacon’s criminal record is not as bad as Waller’s, but he was no saint. Consequently he has had bad press, as is seen by the sometimes extremely negative comments handed down through the centuries. His political and moral code was based on his declared Machiavellianism, which was his ruin in a century like the seventeenth when Machiavelli was unfashionable and Il Principe considered a pernicious work of mischief.4 The son 3 4
A study of the reign of Henry VII (1622), by far the best historical work to the date of writing, after More’s history of Richard III (Volume 1, § 39.2). On Bacon and Machiavelli, and Machiavelli and Harvey, cf. N. Orsini in bibliography, and the distinctions made in PMI, 106–9.
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of Elizabeth’s Keeper of the Seal, member of Parliament, and counsellor under Elizabeth, Bacon was, surprisingly, appointed to the prosecution in the trial of the Earl of Essex, who had been his protector before the plot to overthrow the queen and seize power. This ‘betrayal’ was to dog him: Bertrand Russell recalls that in Elizabeth and Essex Lytton Strachey paints him as a ‘monster of ingratitude’, though Russell allows him the mitigating circumstance that ‘continued loyalty to him would have been treasonable’. Under James I, Bacon became Attorney General, then Lord Chancellor, and was covered with honours and titles. In 1621, however, he was charged with corruption and tried. He confessed, adding, unconvincingly, that the illicit payments made to him had never influenced any decision he made. He was barred in perpetuity from holding public office, fined 40,000 pounds, and sent to the Tower. The two latter punishments were condoned or changed, while the exclusion from public service lasted until his death, so that he spent the rest of his days on his country estate, writing. Russell’s debunking closes with a reference to the terrible irony of his death – the inventor of experimental science died because of an experiment: he is said to have caught pneumonia when trying to stuff a chicken with snow – to invent, in other words, the refrigerator. This anecdote is a humorous confirmation of the motto of Baconian speculative thought, that ‘knowledge is power’. The ‘natural philosopher’ benefits society through his discoveries and inventions aimed at controlling the forces of nature;5 knowledge is not an end in itself, but has a pragmatic aim. Taine, as a positivist, hailed Bacon as a benefactor of mankind, and saw in him a precursor of Bentham. For Bacon, knowledge is no longer to be sought in the Platonic world of ideas, or the partial and fallacious inductions of Aristotle. The existence of God can be demonstrated through reason, but all other theological truths are revealed, he maintained, indicating the possibility of two kinds of truth. Like Pierre Bayle during the Enlightenment, he extolled the ‘triumph of faith’, which is to say, he was amazed that faith managed to survive in spite of all the proofs against it put forward by reason. Everything was to be
5
Bacon believed that control over nature was lost owing to the Fall.
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explained on the basis of the law of cause and effect. Aristotle and his followers had not ignored or underestimated induction, but theirs had been an ‘induction by simple enumeration’.6 Bacon’s method entailed precise observation and measurement leading to the identification of successive degrees of overall applicability of physical laws, so as to obtain ever greater margins of safety by means of supplementary systems of guarantee.7 His great reform of learning, Instauratio magna, originally conceived in six books, was never completed. He wrote the pars destruens, or rather, the status quaestionis, but only a preface to the intermediate and final parts of the project. Though not intended as such, Advancement of Learning8 (1605) is the first part of this opus magnum, and is an attack on the medieval logic and rhetoric, formalism and nominalism still taught in universities (‘the degeneration of knowledge’). He also takes issue with pseudo-sciences like alchemy and astrology. The second complete volume, Novum Organum (1620), in Latin, lays out his experimental method – the title is an obvious allusion to Aristotle’s Organon – and contains the famous theory of the four idols. The effects and repercussions of Bacon’s reform were not felt for fifty years; in fact, the king, to whom the work was dedicated, was not impressed by it, remarking that it was like divine beatitude – beyond understanding. According to Taine, Cowley thought of Bacon as a kind of Moses, who never set foot in the Promised Land. Future scholars were to criticize Bacon for spending too much time collecting public offices and titles and not enough on his studies. Many objections have been raised in the context of Bacon’s empiricism: he had no time for mathematics; above all, he was an enemy of deduction, which, for positivists, is complementary to induction, because it is a preliminary for the classification of phenomena,
6 7 8
Cf. in HWP, 527–8, the perceptive demonstration of how this logical procedure works. The cognitive process ends with the discovery of what Bacon calls ‘the forms of things’, a mysterious expression that brings to mind the haecceitas of Duns Scotus. Translated into Latin and revised in 1623 as De Augmentis Scientiarum. It is not clear why Bacon decided, in 1605, to write in English rather than Latin, contrary to his convictions.
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which is in turn based on a hypothesis of relevance. On Bacon’s other shortcomings, Bertrand Russell is drastic: ‘He missed most of what was being done in science in his day’; he was indifferent to Copernicus and Kepler, and ignorant of Vesalius’ anatomy and Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood. Harvey joined the chorus of detractors, saying he wrote about philosophy ‘like a Lord Chancellor’.9 3. The first edition of Essays (1597) contained ten reflections written in a terse, aphoristic style, made more flowing, and enriched with quotations and interpolations, in the following two editions, 1612 and 1625, in which the total number of essays was raised to thirty-eight (1612) and fifty-eight (1625). What has become known as ‘the Baconian style’ – anti-Baroque, anti-Ciceronian, anti-Senecan, and vaguely euphuistic (though very different to Thomas Browne’s) – was, for the author, a kind of second best: Bacon wrote mostly in Latin, and translated into Latin works originally written in English, like New Atlantis. The style of the Essays is the chance coinage of a concise, effective language that looks ahead to the aseptic clarity recommended by the Royal Society. Tacitus is present, syntactically, in the short, balanced phrases, and, stylistically, in the frequent use of rhetorical figures like anaphora, epistrophe, antimetabole and climax. The essay ‘Of Studies’ can be taken as an illustration both of the stylistic differences between the three versions, and of a recurrent ternary structure which serves to classify, modify, or contradict opening statements: ‘Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability’. The structure and rhythm is repeated continuously to the very end. Compared to Montaigne, who always seems to be speaking about himself, Bacon announces the early eclipse of the author, who withdraws to the wings without a whisper, and abstains from giving the slightest scrap of autobiographical information. In his Essays, Bacon transfers his experimental philosophy onto a literary plane: he lists situations and from them extracts the laws governing human behaviour. He collects data from the observation of reality in order to make generalizations, as can be seen by expressions like ‘it is often seen’ or ‘it is 9
Bacon believed that the left and right ventricles were in communication through small holes in a diaphragm. This error was corrected by Harvey in 1628.
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worthy the observing’. The titles of the essays refer to concrete phenomena and abstract virtues and vices, as well as to actions pertaining to work or leisure (gardening, negotiations). Bacon sometimes begins by stating the final result of his observations, and postulates human categories – for example, bad husbands or important personages – without telling us how he came to establish them and what logical procedure led him to make his generalization. In line with his experimental method and his search for truth, Bacon constructs a ‘dispensary’ of advice and admonitions; his verbs are therefore often in the imperative. It is implicitly understood that the writer has, or imagines, an audience, which he addresses, and to whom he dispenses instructions on the art of living, rather like Polonius, and at time just as obvious. His interlocutor is, however, always a candidate for public office, or the higher levels of the professions, or he is a cultured, though young, diplomat or courtier. It is obvious, therefore, that the advice meted out in the Essays is practical, and the traditional ethical code is often contradicted, and becomes unstable. Advice on religious or other spiritual concerns is non-existent, so that Saintsbury found in them a hint of philistinism.10 The New Atlantis (1624, published unfinished in 1627, perhaps a response to Campanella’s Città del sole [The City of the Sun]), tells of a group of English sailors, lost in the Pacific, who land on an island named Bensalem.11 Here, a ‘house of Solomon’ is a meeting place for all those who dedicate themselves to the improvement of mankind by implementing the criteria of experimental research, exploiting natural resources by ingenious means (too ingenious: some of the methods used are simply too fanciful and unproductive). The New Atlantis is yet another version of the perfect state, based on harmony, religious tolerance,12 and the family.
10 11 12
SAI, 379. Salem is the town of Melchizedek. In a sceptic like Bacon, the harmony that reigns in Bensalem between reason and religion may be suspected of masking insincere praise for the English crown.
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§ 42. Burton* The Anatomy of Melancholy is one of those books that outlive the author, in part because we know little of the Robert Burton (1577–1640) who wrote it, except for a few summary, general, external data; but above all because Burton, who took twenty years to write it, might well have exclaimed, à la Flaubert, ‘l’Anatomie c’est moi’. What other books, not counting the great epics of Proust and Joyce,1 contain, like this, the author’s whole life? Burton left his native Leicestershire to study at Oxford. He graduated and was ordained a minister of the Church of England, then spent the rest of his life as a member of Christ Church, and became an assiduous presence in the Bodleian Library, which had just been inaugurated.
*
The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. A. R. Shilleto and A. H. Bullen, 3 vols, London 1893, 1896, 1903 and 1923, New York 1973, an excellent edition with invaluable index of names, is joined today by the one edited by J. B. Bamborough, T. C. Faulkner, N. B. Kiesling and R. L. Blair, 4 vols, Oxford 1989–2000. Malinconia d’amore, Italian translation by A. Brilli and F. Marucci, with foreword (7–25) by A. Brilli, Milano 1981; only the preface ‘To the Reader’, wrongly entitled Anatomia della malinconia, was translated by G. Franci, with a scholarly introduction (7–43, originally published 1962) by J. Starobinski, Venezia 1983, 1994. L. Babb, Sanity in Bedlam: A Study of Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’, East Lansing, MI 1959, Westport, CT 1977; J.-R. Simon, Robert Burton (1577–1640) et l’Anatomie de la mélancolie, Paris 1964; M. O’Connell, Robert Burton, Boston, MA 1986; E. P. Vicari, The View from Minerva’s Tower: Learning and Imagination in ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’, Toronto 1989; G. Hill’s review, ‘Keeping to the Middle Way’, in TLS (23 December 1994, 3–6), is practically an essay on Burton, albeit rather digressive; S. Shirilan, Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy, Farnham 2015.
1 Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, another work that was twenty years in the making, and a ‘work in progress’ like Burton’s, appeared in 1939 in the tercentenary (minus a year) of the fifth edition of the Anatomy, published in 1638. Self-depreciation is present in both, in the form of clever, fantastic, picturesque synonyms of the work in hand (like Burton’s ‘this cento out of divers writers’, or ‘this confused company of notes’). Starobinski 1983, 11, defines Burton’s Anatomy a polyglot work or ‘banquet of Sardanapalus’, evoking the feast of languages that characterizes Joyce’s two masterpieces: he includes (20, n. 22) a poem by Beckett that begins with a literal quotation of Burton’s description of Democritus. The closest twentieth-century equivalent, in my opinion, is Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (Volume 7, § 69.3).
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His only other work, thematically linked to the Anatomy, is a play in Latin, Philosophaster,2 performed in 1617. It has been mooted that Burton himself suffered from ‘melancholy’, having been born in the sign of Saturn; or that he was ‘cyclothymic’, and that he objectified and exorcized his suffering by writing about it. Or maybe not: rumours said he committed suicide.3 It is natural to imagine him as someone like Browning’s ‘grammarian’ who suffered the consequences of a life he himself had chosen, who repressed his instincts, and, above all, had condemned himself to a life of celibacy. Traces of misogyny, a Swiftian obsession with retention, evacuation and menstruation, bouts of disgust – they all speak loud. The Anatomy verifies the proverb medice, cura te ipsum. But it is also true that Burton had the brilliant idea of saying everything possible on what was wrong with the England of his century or at least of his day – the reign of James I. At the same time, everything for Burton was melancholy, and he tended to see all of human history sub specie melancholiae. It is useful at this point to look at the etymology and meaning of the two words of the title. Anatomy: one thinks immediately of those of ‘wit’ of Lyly, or of the ‘absurdity’ of Nashe. The word, borrowed from the world of medicine,4 was fashionable, and many writers had used it. From this seventeenth-century use, and abuse, of the term comes the twentieth-century spate of ‘anatomies’ – like the famous critical work by Northrop Frye – to indicate a treatise organized and subdivided into numbered parts, sections, subsections, chapters and paragraphs. In the seventeenth century, ‘melancholy’, in its turn, was not a vague state of mind, but a disease that led to madness; indeed, the 2
3 4
An Andalusian, Desiderius, founds a university in Osuna, and invites the scholars of Europe. Various charlatans arrive, amongst whom an alchemist, perhaps inspired by Jonson’s comedy, a Jesuit, a poetaster, and a ‘theologaster’ (nouns ending in the derogatory ‘–aster’ were rife in Jacobean drama, as were those ending in ‘–ix’). In Burton’s play, the false scholars are unmasked, and true philosophy triumphs. This would explain another rumour, that he predicted the day, month and year of his death. The first partition of the Anatomy ends on a note of understanding for those who commit suicide. In the ninth of his Devotions Donne, who uses the term in ‘An Anatomy of the World’, applies it to the examination of conscience: ‘I have cut up mine Anatomy, dissected myself, and they are gon to read upon me’.
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two terms may be considered almost synonyms with the same range of meaning.5 Melancholy shatters the personality and paralyzes action. The only positive side, especially in cases of love melancholy, is that it may ennoble a human being. A survey of drama contemporary with Burton, like the one carried out by Vanna Gentili,6 shows how often melancholics appear as characters. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Milton’s Satan may be seen as the two poles. Hamlet hesitates, and all his plans fail; for ontological reasons, Milton’s Satan is possessed by a dynamic melancholy. The condition is not exactly the opposite of euphoria, but Traherne could be taken as the counterpart of the religious melancholy typified by Vaughan. Milton, too, presents a bi-polarity in ‘Il Penseroso’, which may have been inspired by the poetic epigraph of Burton’s Anatomy, and in ‘L’Allegro’. It is a well-known fact that John Ford, the Jacobean dramatist, had read the Anatomy of Melancholy, and borrowed heavily from it. So melancholy is a widespread seventeenth-century archetype in need of a theorizer, organizer, or, if you like, an ‘anatomizer’. A brief history of this pathology, with its many reflections in literature, would have to begin with the medieval ‘sloth’; after the seventeenth, comes a century untouched by the condition, if we except Swift; melancholy again becomes fashionable with the Romantics, and, later, is the ‘spleen’ of Decadent writers, Oblomov’s hypochondria, the alienation of the twentieth century and the depression of the twenty-first. 2. Burton wrote in English only because his publisher insisted on it, in what was one of the first examples of ‘marketing’ (Burton himself wanted to write in Latin). Sales of the book were high, but, as there was no copyright law at the time, Burton saw little of the proceeds of the five editions that appeared in quite rapid succession. The first, in 1621, was followed by four more in 1624, 1628, 1633, and 1638. The original intention of writing in Latin survives, surreptitiously, in the bilingual,
5 6
Starobinski 1983, 42. La recita della follia. Funzioni dell’insania nel teatro dell’età di Shakespeare, Torino 1978. About 100 examples from contemporary drama are examined in this book. Naturally, Marston’s ‘Malcontent’ stands out.
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sometimes trilingual text (English, Latin and Greek).7 Any great book, any ‘book of life’, will develop through several versions. Burton worked on the Anatomy in a manically concentric way. It was republished because there was a demand for it; it had become popular and people liked it. It reappeared, after the predictable, eighteenth-century eclipse, with Johnson and Sterne; the latter plagiarized parts of it after he discovered in himself an affinity with Burton. Lamb, too, wrote a Burtonian pastiche.8 Keats used him for ‘Lamia’ and, more obviously, for the ‘Ode to Melancholy’. Coleridge, Southey and Byron were all admirers of the Anatomy. Up to the Romantic period, Burton’s book was considered a bottomless well, a container, a ragbag collection of ideas, with quotations from all of 1,250 authors, many of them obscure medieval philosophers, others famous contemporaries of Burton. The Anatomy, therefore, was received, and read, as a pleasant, though disorganized compilation by an eccentric belated humanist, who seems to be incapable of sifting and sorting his material. More and more, he forgets where he is and what exactly he is doing; he lumps together references to important, authoritative authors and others that are insignificant and banal. So it is not so much a book, as a book of books. In the early twentieth century William Osler9 found that the Anatomy was, instead, a textbook of psychiatry, with all the trappings of the scientific method. Osler’s thesis was short-lived. In Burton we find the same problems as in Thomas Browne: to what extent are they ‘scientists’ as opposed to literary authors writing about science and pseudo-science? Burton goes far beyond Bacon in his ignorance or misunderstanding of issues which were at that very time being debated by ‘real scientists’. It is no use scoffing at a text that presumed to be scientific, and employing a method that would destroy even Dante, listing Burton’s howlers in the light of future, or even contemporary science. Burton anticipates the method of modern medicine in its stages of aetiology, prognosis (symptoms), and therapy. He might seem to be a trail-blazer, but he is not: in his aetiology he leans too much towards the supernatural – diseases are 7 8 9
Cf. the excellent comments by L. Sampietro, in MAR, vol. I, 711–13. § 224.2. Cf. CHI, vol. VI, 245.
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the work of devils, or witches with their spells and curses. In therapy, he is no forerunner either: he has only two remedies – always be busy and active, and avoid solitude. So he cannot rightly be called a thinker as such, but a man of letters. 3. By presenting himself to the reader as Democritus Junior, Burton initiates his operation of dismantling, varying and ‘undulating’ the objectivity of the scientific treatise. I use the word ‘undulate’ because Burton is not Bacon, who withdraws from the scene, disappearing into pure objectivity; he is more like Montaigne, and speaks to and of himself. The reader is often reminded that he is being addressed by the author, who leads the way, pointing out the landmarks, but just as often confessing he has lost his way in some digression or other; then he throws up his hands and returns to the subject. Another of Burton’s techniques is discontinuity, the interruption of the abstract, precise style of the scientific treatise by digressions and anecdotes. In his discussion of love melancholy, Burton becomes a novelist ante litteram, creating quite sharply defined characters and scenes, and retelling examples of neurosis from the literature of all ages. Mutatis mutandis, another author comes to mind, whom no one, not even Burton himself, quotes: tri-lingual Gower, who 300 years earlier had made his own compilation and called it Confessio Amantis. The time difference between the two explains why Gower has been forgotten and Burton is still read. The Anatomy is the last medieval ‘summa’, on the one hand anachronistic and impossible, on the other decidedly modern, with its ubiquitous relativism, and the sensation of being on a baroque, or manneristic, conceptual roller-coaster, capable of overturning all of a sudden – hence an effect of uncertainty, mobility, anxiety and precariousness.10 The reader witnesses the mimesis of a learned academic debate in which all the sources, and their authors, are present, and
10
The ingenious but far-fetched explanation by Starobinski 1983 is that Burton seeks and believes, unlike Democritus, who laughs alone, and is a non-melancholic nihilist (34). However, the utopia that Burton presents in his address to the reader – in which the disordered world is set aright – bears the signs of this very melancholy, as can be seen, according to Starobinski, by the pervading idea of ‘management’ and the presence of supervisors very like More’s syphogrants.
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have their say. Burton intervenes in the discussion; in fact he leads and orchestrates it. He weaves his blanket, unceasingly zigzagging from some hoary classic to yesterday’s gossip, from Greek mythology, and ancient history, including the mysterious Orient, to the events of contemporary life. All of these voices he controls with formidable skill, and the reader is surprised when, towards the end of the book, he finds Burton referring to a quotation by someone, and admitting, with false candour, ‘I know not what philosopher he was’. In the third part, especially, he becomes a kind of film director or editor of images, or flashes: his is verbal cinema, composed of lightning episodes evoked and re-created, various stories of licit and illicit love, seduction, and mad, head-over-heels falling in love. The essence of the Anatomy, however, lies in its unique style, an invention with no predecessors, and no followers, apart from Joyce. The publisher who insisted on English being the language used may be considered a coauthor of genius: if Burton had had his way, the Anatomy of Melancholy would have been left for centuries, gathering dust on the shelves of some library, practically inaccessible to future generations, like the scores of medieval and Renaissance treatises written in that language. Burton’s new language is a continuous interplay of English, Latin and Greek, conjuring up the image of the great Baroque organ, the instrument for which Bach wrote music: the discourse develops, passing from the upper keyboard to the lower and back again, with the addition of a third melodic line assigned to the pedal. 4. The introductory verses to the treatise describe its origin in terms that might be used by a lover to the lady who is fleeing him: Burton speaks of his ‘sweet’ but also ‘bitter melancholy’. It becomes clear that at least two of the three main prose writers of the seventeenth century, Burton and Browne, had fixations (Browne’s was the quincunx).11 They belong to the number of those men and women who have sworn lifelong allegiance to some overriding passion, some odd fetish, or idol, or mental deformation. From the outside, the Anatomy stands out clearly in its Byzantine structure, because Burton obviates a medieval-style labyrinthine, and confusing, 11
§ 43.
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construction by inserting detailed synoptic tables of the subjects dealt with. It is also true that Burton is carried away by sudden urges, and often digresses and transgresses, as I have said before. The three volumes, which in the edition by Shillito and Bullen number 1,300 pages, can be subdivided into four blocks: a long preface, prologue and apology to the reader of more than 100 pages, followed by three ‘partitions’, each occupying one volume. These ‘partitions’ are in turn divided into sections, ‘members’, and subsections. Much of what Burton says in his address to the reader, which he signs with the name of Democritus Junior, is paradoxical: the market is full of all kinds of books, and yet Burton writes a short encyclopaedia. Another leading paradox is dizzyingly Baroque, a Baroque dislocation of the axis, or discordia concors, most visible in the theatre – the inversion of the relation between wisdom and folly. It is no coincidence that Burton uses the metaphor of the world as theatre, indeed as a Shakespearean ‘comedy of errors’. From halfway through the address to the reader, Burton launches into an apocalyptic vision of a confused, chaotic, crumbling world. The very measurement of wisdom goes mad, and even the wisest man, like Socrates, may be judged a fool. Yet, all of a sudden, his country is praised while the rest of the cosmos precipitates. This is the first of many cases of the terrified closing of abysses that Burton himself has opened. The first partition, in fact, contains the following two as well, and starts by declaring the post-lapsarian state of mankind: no human being is totally sound, and melancholy is an incurable disease that can only be assuaged by various countermeasures. After examining the causes and symptoms, the second partition is dedicated to therapy; Burton rejects ‘magic’ cures like philtres, amulets, or potions. There follows an interminable digression on the purification of the air, which, if healthy, cures melancholy, or at least alleviates it. Burton also cites as antidotes pleasures and amusements, the very things he denied himself every day, but which he longed for in all their variety. The difference between positive, spiritual love, and destructive, diabolical, bodily love is dealt with at the beginning of the third partition. Both, if used inappropriately or excessively, may cause melancholy. Step by step, Burton examines the phenomena of desire – spiritual love, love for abstract things, desire for beauty, love of country, for family, for noble ideals, for friends and so on, down to sexual love, both perverted and natural. Having
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lingered a while on the circumference, he now defines the centre: the circumstances that favour the explosion of lust, and the female arts of seduction that cause the explosion. He furnishes titillating details and descriptions of physical attributes. He is particularly attentive to strange, exotic attractions, like that of women for black men, or aristocratic males for kitchen maids and fruit sellers. He notes instances of love sparked off by the fleeting vision of naked flesh, or words whispered and overheard. Alongside obscure anecdotes, Burton mentions famous stories – those of Dido, Abelard, Shakespeare’s Benedick and Beatrice. Having listed the causes of love, he now turns his attention to the therapies of dissuasion for the man who is tempted, but does not repent; there follows a pageant of all the repulsive filth of the female.12 These passages are all in italics in the text, and all in Latin, as if to hide them from tender eyes.13 Dissuasion from passion also takes the form of the Jesuit method of compositio loci: the ‘patient’ is invited to imagine the woman without all her finery, and in the most unpleasant circumstances – while she defecates, or urinates, or bleeds in her menstrual period. In two cases, Burton reverts to his method of the sudden shortcut. Lust is incurable and generates melancholy; if this is so, the only remedy is for the lover to win and satisfy his desire. As regards jealousy, for which, again, coquettish and adulterous women are to blame (Burton gives a fine analysis of the symptoms of jealousy), the only remedy is to laugh and accept it. The third partition deals with religious melancholy, by which is meant any kind of acritical fanaticism, ‘enthusiasm’, superstition or anti-humanism. Burton, an Anglican priest with liberal tendencies, attacks the loud Calvinistic rants of the Puritans that destroy happiness by threatening eternal damnation. He is on the side of all-out tolerance. The cure for all kinds of melancholy is exercise and company – the very opposite to what Burton himself practised.
12 13
As I have said, a whole parenthetical section is dedicated to the regenerating qualities of love. On Latin as the ‘lingua franca’ par excellence (and language of love) cf. Brilli 1981, 22.
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§ 43. Thomas Browne* It is easy to be captivated by Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), and, indeed, some recent critics have cast caution to the winds and declared him to be the greatest English prose stylist of all time in the non-narrative field.1 This is no doubt an exaggerated claim, justifiable only, maybe, up to 1850 or 1900, when the comparison would be with the likes of Lamb, Thackeray, Newman, Pater, or even, si parva licet, Alexander Smith. Despite the accolades, he has remained a minor author with a cult. Johnson did not care for him, and criticized him for the same post-Elizabethan farrago that irritated Pater. Browne’s reputation died with him; he was revived by Lamb and other Romantics. In America, he became an obsession for Melville and Emerson; in Italy, he was admired by D’Annunzio. Browne wrote the prose of a scientist, or pseudoscientist, but he looked upon himself and the world around him through the eyes of a poet.2 His works belong to that eternal genre, écriture artiste, rather than to the history of ideas. To praise a stylist qua stylist implies paying little or no attention to the contents. Can Browne be considered a great thinker? In Religio Medici he is certainly a *
Works, ed. G. L. Keynes, 6 vols, London 1928–1931; in 4 vols, London 1964; Thomas Browne, ed. J. Killeen, Oxford 2014. Selected Writings, ed. C. A. Patrides, Harmondsworth 1984, with excellent introduction and notes, and, in appendix, the biography by Johnson (1756). The essay, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, by Walter Pater (see Volume 6, § 184.1) was published in Appreciations, London 1889, 127–66. M. Praz, ‘L’investigatore Thomas Browne’, in SSI, vol. I, 15–31 (the Italian version of an essay in English published in 1929); O. Leroy, Le Chevalier Thomas Browne, Paris 1931; E. S. Merton, Science and Imagination in Sir Thomas Browne, New York 1949; W. P. Dunn, Sir Thomas Browne, Minneapolis, MN 1950; P. Green, Sir Thomas Browne, London 1959; J. Bennett, Sir Thomas Browne, Cambridge 1962; F. L. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne: A Biographical and Critical Study, Ann Arbor, MI 1962; L. Nathanson, The Strategy of Truth: A Study of Sir Thomas Browne, Chicago, IL 1967; Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne, ed. C. A. Patrides, Columbia, MO 1982; J. F. S. Post, Sir Thomas Browne, Boston, MA 1987; Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed, ed. R. Barbour and C. Preston, Oxford 2008; R. Barbour, Sir Thomas Browne: A Life, Oxford 2013.
1
For example, Saintsbury, in SAI, 449, at the beginning of one of his most detailed critiques. This is also Pater’s thesis.
2
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voice crying in the wilderness, preaching tolerance in the most intolerant of times, and ecumenical union instead of division. Religio is innocuous, silent, and meek when compared with the aggressive asperity of Milton’s thundering voice in the early 1640s. The idea of Browne as a heuristic thinker fades after the first few pages; the reader enters a reassuring, fantastic world in which the author tells us of his anxieties, his sweet fixations, his personal quarrels and Sternian hobbyhorses.3 When he abandons the memoirs genre, he seems to be someone from another planet, writing in a vacuum. Browne’s other four main works are similar excursions into the far-fetched, the bizarre, the abstruse; weird works of eccentric erudition. In his sortie into the occult and mysterious in The Garden of Cyrus, he is like Blake, though more controlled, or like Yeats, though less sinister. He is the first English writer to scan the life of the psyche and absent-mindedness. T. S. Eliot might have attributed to him a Metaphysical amalgam of thought and expression, almost the same thing as thought and sensibility. Browne’s thought, however, is never passionate, like Donne’s. 2. Browne was not the first English doctor with a writing habit, though he was a doctor who became a writer, rather than a writer turned doctor. He was born in London, the son of a cloth merchant. He studied at Oxford and at important medical schools on the Continent (Montpellier, Padua, Leiden). By 1636 he was back in England, in Norwich, where for fifty years he practised medicine with exemplary dedication. As an Anglican and royalist, he abstained from political involvement during Cromwell’s rule. Religio Medici, his first, miraculous, incomparable book, was followed by four more published at the leisurely pace of a patient craftsman. If Religio was written, as is believed, in 1635, then it was the work of a young man of thirty. Two pirate editions appeared in 1642 (one with a commentary by Kenelm Digby) after it had circulated in MS form. Browne decided to revise it the following year and published an authorized version. Before Browne died, it had been translated into French, German, Dutch and Latin. Browne’s aim is to reconcile religion with science, up until then considered antithetical 3
In reality, this champion of tolerance has some rather perverse idiosyncrasies: he is forever attacking the Koran and saying that the Jews are mad not to recognize the New Testament; what is more, they smell.
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by public opinion, which equated medicine with lack of belief. Browne rejects the accusation of apostasy or impiety, and examines the road which has led him, a doctor and scientist, to believe, and discusses the nature of this belief. There is a sharp contrast here with the contemporary climate in which every confession claimed to be the true religion, and denounced all the others as false (Browne’s tolerance includes Catholicism). I believe not enough has been said about the similarity between Religio and Traherne’s poetry and prose in Centuries of Meditations: the two authors did not know each other, and had different professions; Browne had the good fortune to see his works published while he was still alive, and enjoyed immediate fame; Traherne, on the contrary, was ‘discovered’ many years after his death, and is, in a way, recent for us.4 Both works are mosaics, made up of pieces that are independent or vaguely connected, about a page long, and numbered; but Browne is more rhapsodic, without any strict order (Pater twice uses the word ‘desultory’ to describe his style), and the two parts are asymmetric. The key point in both Browne and Traherne is that the spectacle of nature testifies to God as artist, architect, mathematician, and geometrician. Man views this hieroglyphic spectacle ‘asquint’, a reflection of God in things, and man’s mission is an investigation into the mystery of creation. Heaven is ineffable and indescribable, a dimension of total spiritual, not physical fulfilment; hell is fire, and above all, an inner, spiritual dimension. 3. Browne fell, temporarily, into several heresies: that the soul dies with the body, a belief held by Milton; those of Origen, an echo of which is found in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, on whether damnation is eternal; that of the prayer for the dead. He survived this heretical phase and emerged into the daylight of an unshakeable faith, pacific and tolerant, in the Anglican Church.5 At the end, reason ceases its search, and the believer exclaims oh altitudo, evoking Tertullian and his Certum est quia impossibile est. The first 4 5
§ 19.1. Browne was suspected of crypto-Catholicism by several contemporaries, but, nonetheless, Religio Medici was (incomprehensibly, according to Johnson) put on the Index by the Catholic Church, perhaps because of its possible deist slant, or because Browne, like Bacon, posited the existence of a ‘dual truth’ – rational and revealed.
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part is destruens in the sense that it faces and overcomes, at times with amazing ease, all the objections that the agnostic makes against faith. Some, for example, had envied the apostles for having been eye witnesses to Christ’s presence in Galilee. Browne objects that it is too easy to believe when one has seen; it is much more difficult to believe without seeing; indeed the triumph of faith is to believe what reason would deny. That ‘terrible word’, predestination, is a ‘trumpet call’ but not a prophecy of our future state. Fortune is an instrument of providence.6 He acknowledges there are slips and inconsistencies in the Bible, but on insignificant points, not on dogmas of faith, on which it is legitimate to have doubts and differences of opinion. The self-portrait achieves completion in the shorter second part which contains a self-confession while all theological issues are silenced. Narcissistic, notwithstanding all his declarations, Browne makes a show of listing his idiosyncrasies, so that his writing, passed off as objective, slides into the brash egotism, not to say mystical awareness, of one who is conscious of having been created in the image of God. 4. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646, and other editions enlarged in subsequent years), in a more phlegmatic, circumlocutory and Latinate style, Browne takes on the subject of ‘vulgar errors’, and to do so makes an encyclopaedic list of various superstitions and legends. He attempts to demonstrate that certain causes are not always followed by the effects expected by the common people. As an empiricist, he finds himself more and more denying that these effects actually take place. Browne here is Baconian up to a point, because he mixes scientific precision with a great deal of ingenuousness. Like Milton, he is almost the last of the followers of Ptolemy: he believes in astrology, alchemy, magic and miracles.7 Modern taste willingly applies a suspension of disbelief and follows with curiosity
6
7
In the essay in SSI cited in the bibliography, Praz affirms that Browne was the greatest authority on Dante of his time, and furnishes a long list of parallels in an attempt to prove, without really succeeding, that there is a profound affinity between the two. Like Dante, Browne believed that those philosophers who died before the revelation were excluded from Heaven. Two women suspected of witchcraft were tried and found guilty thanks to evidence given by Browne, who made no mystery of his belief in witches.
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the account of legendary wonders that Browne takes pleasure in reeling out rather than in debunking. There is bathos in the fact that, after telling off all the causes of human error,8 he concludes that the ‘secret promoter’ of these errors is the devil. Following the discovery in Norfolk of several Saxon burial sites (not Roman, as Browne believed), in 1658 he wrote a treatise on burial and cremation under the title of Hydriotaphia. A far from weighty tome, it consists of five short chapters, of which the fifth and last contains Browne’s most loved pages: a great symphony on the theme of death the leveller and destroyer of dreams of glory. This is the kind of subject that is found in Jacobean sermons, a Baroque depiction of the corruptibility of all earthly things. ‘Life is a pure flame’, Pater was to repeat, urging sensory experience, while Browne, instead, goes on: ‘and we live by an invisible Sun within us’. The Garden of Cyrus, published together with Hydriotaphia, traces the origin of plantations in the figure of the quincunx (like the black dots forming the number five on the dice) in the garden of Eden, and sees the same figure in other famous gardens of history. It soon turns into a semi-serious, staggering essay on medieval cosmology or oneiric fantasies, dedicated to the exposition and documentation of the ubiquity of what Browne calls ‘decussation’ (a neologism at the time). Were it not for the witty humour, one might think of mad Ruskin haunted by his ‘storm cloud’.9 The rhapsody ends with another highly imaginative section beginning: ‘But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and ’tis time to close the five ports of knowledge’, words much loved by English readers. Other works by Browne are a treatise on Christian morals (in Johnson’s edition it is preceded by a biography of the author); a letter to a recently bereaved friend; various short reflections by this curious writer, who might be defined a Linnaean cataloguer of the virtual10 – one who, for example, discusses the fish eaten by our Saviour with the disciples after the resurrection
8
Leopardi’s ‘Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi [‘An essay on the popular errors of the ancients’] seems to be modelled on the sixth chapter of the first part of this treatise. 9 Volume 6, § 48.3–4. 10 Pater compares him to Elias Ashmole, the collector and founder of the famous museum of the same name in Oxford.
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(listing all the different species of fish in the waters of Judea); or the author of the books of an imaginary library. § 44. Other prose writers In all the abundant production of prose works of the seventeenth century there is no sign of the novel: Lyly, Nashe and Deloney have left no direct heirs. Some of the reasons for this void are: the hostilities between the various Protestant sects, which leads to the predominance of political controversy, theological tracts, polemical literature, and homilies;1 the epidemic of classicism that imposes on the whole of Europe the figure of the erudite humanist, who uses Latin, the lingua franca, pushing English to one side; at least twenty years of real, not paper, war, between King and Parliament, which creates a ‘heroic’ version of history. In spite of, or owing to the Civil War, the English as a nation grow up, and are united; they need to survey the long history of their country from the origins to the present day. Ponderous works of history were written, along with others, more modest, showing the pleasure, sports, and hobbies of ordinary people. England in the seventeenth century was on the move, and wished to record its movements, look at itself in the mirror, show off; and, at the same time, it wished to know more about its past. The nation with such a long history was a tight mosaic of small regional and urban tiles, and one of the new emerging figures on the scene is the ‘local historian’, or ‘archivist’, or, to use the seventeenth-century term (which was almost a neologism), ‘antiquary’, a category that numbers many not-unimportant personages. All of a sudden, it was deemed necessary to have records of the lives of recent statesmen and illustrious thinkers, some of whom had given their lives to defend the freedom of conscience and thought, and others were shining examples of
1
Second only to Milton, Richard Baxter (1615–1691), amongst whose 170 works only Reliquiae and a few homilies are at all remembered, is a towering figure in the field of homilies and Puritan, or rather, Presbyterian apologetics. He was in favour of tolerance (but not for Catholics), and paid the price for this breadth of vision during the Protectorate. After the Restoration, too, his frankness and intransigence often landed him in trouble. He is admired for his noble rhetoric and fine style that place him just below Hooker in this category of writers.
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righteousness and genius. While Walton enlightened his fellow countrymen with his account of five exemplary lives, Aubrey took England off its pedestal of glory and showed its private, everyday side. This period also saw the rise of a very modern figure: the interviewer, or instant annotator of the boutades of the famous. Much like Drummond of Hawthornden and Ben Jonson, the celebrated jurist, John Selden, was immortalized by his note-taking secretary. From a sociological point of view, some of the works I shall mention below were commercial operations that benefited municipalities and publishers, while the rights of authors were as yet not protected, although Thomas Fuller is credited with being the first person to actually make a living through writing. Here I shall deal with only a few of the many prose writers of the time, most of whom are biographers, read for what they have to say about their more famous subjects. Some of them were extremely popular in their day, but were then forgotten, to be saved from oblivion by Lamb, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude. Today they await critical revaluation. 2. This said, we are getting remarkably close to fiction: there are ‘romances’, but in Latin, not realistic, but modelled on the most famous, indeed the only, romance in English, that of Sidney; prose creativity finds release in a fine translation of an eminent incunabulum of western fiction. This is the age of cranks like Burton and Browne, as we have seen. Thomas Urquhart (1611–1660), a Scot, published four unclassifiable treatises with incomprehensible Greek titles (a textbook of trigonometry, his family tree, a hotchpotch history of Scotland, a discourse on the universal language). These unreadable compendia, couched in a pedantic, artificial style, with frequent sprinklings of foreign words and phrases, are distant ancestors of Carroll’s nonsense and Joyce’s pastiches. As for translation, Urquhart provided the first English translation of the first two books of Rabelais’s novel, and managed to preserve the original creativity and joyful verve. John Owen (1563–1622) was the English Martial, with his Latin epigrams, which became popular in Germany and caught the attention of Lessing.2 John Barclay (1582–1621), a Scot with a French mother, was raised in Paris, and
2
John Owen (1616–1683) is also the name of a Puritan prose writer.
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died in Rome. He wrote the Latin Euphormionis Satyricon, a picaresque, satirical novel loosely based on Petronius’ Satyricon, in which he denigrated the Jesuits (who had tried to recruit him), and astrologers. The structure is provided by a political allegory with lots of imaginary characters representing real people. Barclay’s Argenis (1621), based on the Arcadia (the translation by Ben Jonson was lost in the fire that destroyed his house) is the name of a Sicilian maiden who marries one of five suitors. The fame of these two works resounds in the enthusiastic comments by eminent Latinists like Burton, Crashaw and Katherine Phillips.3 3. Anthony à Wood (1632–1695)4 was, like Burton, a lifelong resident at Oxford, and like him, but more so, a monk-like mover among manuscripts and bookshelves. Again like Burton, he was an ‘antiquary’ (the term limits Burton somewhat), and, ideally placed in the Bodleian, he wrote Athenae Oxonienses, the stories of illustrious members, compiled from written and oral sources. Unlike Burton, however, he was a cynical Heraclitus, not a laughing Democritus. Wood is quoted only because John Aubrey (1626–1697) furnished him with information for his vast compilation, and because his Brief Lives or Lives of Eminent Men were inserted in the form of additional notes (not completed, some of them of epigraphic brevity). Compared with Walton, Aubrey’s focus is not on pietas but the curious detail, the phobias and idiosyncrasies of his subjects; he loves a prurient anecdote, and a tasty bit of gossip. Thomas Fuller (1608–1661), priest and preacher, was a historian of the Anglican Church and the Crusades. Besides his historical works, he also wrote The Worthies of England, a collection of biographies, divided by counties, arranged in alphabetical order, and consisting of much first hand reporting. In a way, this is the first literary guidebook in English, and includes appendices and historical associations, among which an account of the contests of wit between Shakespeare and Jonson. Another intriguing work is The Holy State (1642), a miscellany of commonplaces, essays on various subjects, and ‘characters’, that is, types of people sharply defined and illustrated by a series of examples. Fuller was a favourite with some important Romantics, who were struck by the 3 4
CHI, vol. IV, 260. The ‘à’ of the surname was added as a whim by Wood himself.
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desecrating levity with which he treated both the sacred and profane. Various collections of his quips shot to fame on publication; today they appear obvious and uninspired.5 4. I have already had occasion to refer to the five biographies collected in the Lives6 of Izaak Walton (1593–1683), which he wrote without any direct acquaintance with the men in question, apart from Wotton and Donne. His sources were all second-hand, and his way of using them was to effect a ‘spontaneous’ deformation so that his subjects would comply with a model of integrity and abnegation; each biography is a masterpiece of occultation, and the presentation of each character suitably edited to fit the same ideal mould. Walton had no university education; in fact he was self-taught. He was a member of the London guild of merchants (perhaps dealing in cloth, or, more probably, metals). As well as his Lives, he is remembered for The Compleat Angler7 (1653). A comparison with The Anatomy of Melancholy is out of the question, and yet Walton’s book became a best-seller not long after Burton’s, and, while it cannot be defined a ‘book of life’, it was altered and added to through five editions before the author’s death, and set firmly on the road towards unprecedented popularity, just like Burton’s Anatomy.8 The Compleat Angler places Walton in the number of the fixated writers with ‘a bee in the bonnet’, ready to reduce everything to their own pet obsession. Right from the start, angling is used as a metaphor of the cosmos: the angler praises his favourite element and cites the history, wonders and historical associations of the sea; water is pronounced far superior to either air or land. Formally, The Compleat 5 6 7
8
As in M. Praz, ‘Biografie spicciole’, in SSI, vol. II, 104–7. Cf., for Herbert, § 12 in this volume, and for Donne, Wotton and Hooker the relative sections in Volume 1. The fifth is a biography of Bishop Robert Sanderson. The 1676 edition included an afterword by C. Cotton (1630–1687), a translator of Montaigne, author of burlesques, and above all, poems praised by Wordsworth for the freshness and grace with which they celebrate rural England and her natural beauty. As has often been wittily noticed, the link between Walton’s two main books is fishing: Donne, Wotton and Herbert were all anglers. It is just a little less encyclopaedic than the Anatomy, but he relies on the same sources as Burton (Seneca, Pliny, Elian, Du Bartas, Aldrovandus, etc.), and, like him, he quotes from them at random. The ‘melancholy’ fish is the pike.
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Angler partakes of the dramatic: it is divided into five ‘days’, rather than acts, and contains dialogue. There are no stage directions as such, but the dialogue gives details of what happens in the scene. The characters talk, and as they talk they walk – by river or pond, as they cast their line. The instructions imparted represent the future miracle of the English language in its ability to describe in great detail operations of which every part, and every necessary tool, has a name (fish are caught, but, above all, cooked). In the book, three healthy, witty gentlemen of means leave the town to take pleasure in their particular pastime in a countryside watered by clear, crystal rivers. After they have fished, they eat and drink, and sing old folk songs in spotless inns. The peace offered by the rivers and the lakes is enjoyed in the same seraphic way as in Traherne, and is borne to the reader by a neutral, unpolished language. The simplicity is charming, even naïve, but deceptive: the Angler is a deliberate and well-documented remake. This is a piscatorial pastoral, and it is hard not to think of the English Sannazarian variants of the genre. Walton’s book recalls Ascham’s Toxophilus and other lesserknown books of exercises and pastimes. Describing the dip into oblivion of three men of leisure in a kind of Eden was an indirect way to block out the clash of religious dispute and withdraw to an almost transcendent state of peace and quiet.9 ‘Angler’ and ‘Anglican’, after all, are linked in a paronomasia, and four of the apostles were fishermen. Walton’s merry trio can be traced back to Chaucer and Boccaccio, and forward to Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, Wells’s Mr Polly, Beckett’s Mercier and Camier and Last Orders by Graham Swift.
9
Cf. G. D’Elia, ‘Il pescatore perfetto e l’anglicano imperfetto di Izaak Walton’ [‘The Complete Angler and the Imperfect Anglican in Izaak Walton’], in Merope, IV, 1992, no. 7, 19–31.
Part II
The Restoration
§ 45. Restoration literature As a natural reaction to the preceding age of, not only austerity, but aesthetic conformity and religious dictatorship, England after 1660 was characterized by a certain permissiveness, not to say licence, in manners, indirectly curbed by Milton and openly challenged by Bunyan. One, if not the principal ‘character’ of the next twenty-five years was the ‘rake’, which gave rise to a libertine literature best represented by Rochester and Sedley. This was not an entirely new literary phenomenon, but a spin-off from the just slightly less libertine verses of the Cavalier poets; some critics have claimed to see an underlying pseudo-philosophy of the pleasures of gambling and the lust for power, and a connection with the theories of Hobbes and Machiavelli (according to Rochester, rakes were anti-rationalism). As the offspring of nobility, the works of the libertines were read by their own restricted circle and the court. Poetry and the theatre, the latter before 1642 very close to the ordinary people – a popular, indeed, universal commodity – now restricted their range of appeal and established a closed circuit of readers or audience. The common reader today is turned away by the burning heat of personal, political and literary rivalries. After more than 100 years, satire appeared once more, and became the foremost literary genre, with writers exchanging blows like boxers in the ring. Opposition to rationalism and deism (the theologian Toland claimed there was nothing mysterious or ‘unreasonable’ in the Gospels) was put forward timidly by the Quakers, who placed great store on a God who is immanent in man, and practised, and preached, an early form of ‘enthusiasm’. The Royal Society, too, which obtained the royal patent in 1662, was founded by men of faith (the chemist, Boyle, and John Ray; but Bacon was there too) with no subversive agenda; in questions of religion, the agreement was to ‘overlook’ controversies concerning dogma. The Society adopted and proposed, however, an epistemological norm which gave precedence and preference to things over words (a utopia later satirized by Swift), and looked askance on sterile, hair-splitting argument. It also declared war on purely superficial wit. All these, however, were tendencies that reached the fullness of their potential only after the Glorious Revolution of 1688; in fact, after the death of Queen Anne in 1714. The Royal Society also had a hand in formulating and imposing linguistic norms and guidelines, with the aim of favouring
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the rise of a more realistic, concrete style of writing. The Restoration period thus became the time of clear, sharp, rather than vague, ideas; in matters of style, synthetic, mnemonic forms were preferred, and in poetry the heroic couplet began its long age of sway. Up to Dryden, the dominating criteria in literature were simplicity, truth to nature, and rejection of imaginative eccentricity. Hobbes, too, insisted on the control of reason in art, as well as on that of the imagination. These and other similar aesthetic rules were codified by Thomas Rymer (1643–1713), notorious for his disparagement of Shakespeare, and by Sir William Temple. 2. Restoration theatre will be introduced in § 46: of all the literary genres, drama once again becomes the dominant one, leaving rival categories in the shade and devoid of significant merit, with the possible exception of Dryden. One sign of the crisis gripping poetry is in the number of verse translations of classical authors – only slightly fewer than during the Renaissance – and translations of contemporary writers like Boileau and Scarron. The popularity of satirical poetry1 can be explained by the fact that Cromwell’s rule had seen the birth of ideological anarchy, with a bitter polarization of positions, and the formation of fiercely antagonistic groups and sects. As in all dictatorships, dissent was expressed in the form of clandestine mockery, which, once the dictatorship died, erupted into the open.2 In other words, the Civil War destroyed the monolithic model, and the belief in shared values: each person could think as he or she pleased. Hence the birth of multitudes of religious and political sects. Leaving to one side the novel (with the exception of Aphra Behn), the Restoration period saw the beginnings of the diary genre; memoirs, too, became fashionable, like those of Colonel Hutchinson, written by his widow, Lucy, or those of Margaret Cavendish. New genres included literary criticism, historiography, political theory, philosophy and scientific prose. Rationalism in architecture produced the quasi-Palladian buildings of Wren; in painting
1 2
Cf. CHI, vol. VIII, 90ff. Marvell, so light and graceful as a poet, becomes, as a satirist, bitter and clumsy (see § 25.6).
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it gave Lely and Kneller, and in music, Locke and Purcell, before the rise of Italian opera with Handel.3 § 46. The re-opening of the theatres In 1642, the Puritans closed the theatres, temporarily, for five years; in 1649, they closed them definitively. They did not, however, ban the publication of plays (it is significant that this period saw the Folio editions, after the first one of 1623, of Shakespeare and Jonson, and, in 1647, that of Beaumont and Fletcher). They allowed the performance of plays and farces derived from Shakespeare and taken round the country by travelling companies of actors. Private performances were also permitted, and masques were authorized in the houses of the nobility. So the theatre was kept alive clandestinely, as if in hibernation, and the Puritan authorities were quick to bow to necessity and reach a compromise: from 1656 Cromwell finally agreed to the resumption of theatrical performances, provided they were accompanied by music; in this way he contributed, albeit unwittingly, to the birth of English opera. Eighteen years of forced inactivity had had however disastrous effects on theatrical life in England, or, at the very least, it had done it no good, so that in 1660 the whole theatrical machine had to start practically from scratch. The London theatres had been stripped or reduced to rubble, and needed to be restored if not completely rebuilt. The repertoire, too, had to be renewed; of course, the old ‘Elizabethan’ plays were salvaged and included in the new offering. Tastes had changed, however; indeed, after only twenty years, they were unrecognizable. The parameters to employ in order to map the new late seventeenth-century, or Restoration, theatre are the same as in any new theatrical period: first of all, which theatres were to house the performance of old and new plays; secondly, the building innovations and structural variants; thirdly, what was the incidence of the decentralization of dramatic activity, how large were audiences, and how they were made up in sociological terms. Last, but not least, which and how many theatrical companies were active, and what was the modus operandi of directors and actors. Christopher Wren
3
I shall use throughout this English form of his name, rather than Händel.
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set to work to build the Dorset Garden and Drury theatres based on a new architectural project that was to change radically the very concept of communication in the theatre: the U-shaped stalls sector sloped, and contained ten rows of benches. From the walls came two levels of boxes, surmounted by a gallery. The scenery was no longer fixed: sliding panels at the back of the stage created a context of surroundings, and an illusion of reality. This illusion of reality had up to now been left to the imagination of the audience, as Sidney had complained, and as Shakespeare famously acknowledged through the mouthpiece of the Chorus in Henry V. The scenic designers, with experience acquired in their work on masques, were well-equipped to come up with amazing sets. The most fundamental innovation, however, was the actress: for the first time female roles were assigned to real women, and no longer, as in Shakespeare’s time, to boys or young men. Restoration theatre was quick to mould the scripts to this novelty, which had been forbidden to the Elizabethans. Among the actresses that became famous were Nell Gwynn, the mistress of Charles II, and Anne Bracegirdle; among the actors, Thomas Betterton. Dublin became the next most important theatrical centre after London, with the construction, in 1662, of a completely new theatre. Immediately after the return of the king in 1660, three companies were active in London. One fell by the wayside, leaving two, the ‘King’s company’ and the ‘Duke’s company’. In 1682, these two merged. In terms of audience, it was a theatre of the elite, so that the rate of productions decreased. Apart from Dryden, for personal reasons the principal playwrights of the period wrote a quarter, or less, compared with Dryden himself, and much less than the late Caroline authors like Heywood and Shirley.1 Terms of contract were now
1
In forty years, over 400 completely new plays were written and staged, but, such was the abundance of theatrical works produced between 1590 and 1642 that the theatre seasons of the new regime depended heavily on the re-staging of masterpieces of the pre-Cromwellian past. The impresario Thomas Killigrew (1612–1683), who, like Davenant, was also a playwright, secured the rights of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher. Translations and adaptations were also rife: from Greek theatre, from Racine and Molière, and one or two Spanish writers. Seneca was definitively a thing of the past, and Shakespeare had to be revised to meet modern taste.
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radically different, and authors wrote for pleasure, not for sustenance. The growing licentiousness of the new theatre ended up by attracting the anathema of the self-righteous, and in 1698 not a Puritan like Prynne, but an Anglican vicar, Jeremy Collier (1650–1726), published his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, one result of which was the suspension of the performances of Congreve’s The Way of the World. In the long term, another was the introduction of preventive censorship which, among other things, put an end to Fielding’s career as a dramatist in 1737. The comedy of manners of the Restoration was a sturdy plant which, after lying dormant for 200 years, was to flower once more with Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward. Its roots were in the late Elizabethans and Jacobeans, like Shirley. It was a theatre of evasion, but succeeded in absorbing the life-blood of political events after 1660. Two such events stand out: the Popish Plot, and the Exclusion crisis.2 Henceforth, any play written and performed will be unequivocally Whig or Tory. At the same time, the names of characters are usually transparently allegorical, as in Langland’s ‘dream’ 300 years earlier. The playwright names his character with a witticism or a wink, challenging the audience to discover its appropriateness. The fop, second only to the rake in frequency and importance in this theatre, is often given a name ending in the suffix ‘-wit’; alternatively, his personality will be conveyed in short syntagmas like ‘Touchwood’ or ‘Fainall’. Many of the names end in ‘-mant’, like Dorimant or Millamant. The resurgence of Jonson’s theory of humours, with similar semantic charge in the characters’ names? 2. Sir William Davenant (1606–1668) was already active before the theatres were closed. He was imprisoned by the Puritans and released through the intercession of Milton. Not only was he the first theatre manager and impresario after 1660; he was also the first author of the new theatre, and staged adaptations of Shakespeare, giving rise to rumours that he, Davenant, was the illegitimate son of the Swan of Avon. The Siege of Rhodes is the first English opera. Davenant was also the author of a mediocre poem, Gondibert, with a foreword by Cowley and Waller, in cantos of
2
§ 1.10.
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quatrains ill-suited to the narrative, on an Italian theme (more precisely, a Venetian-Lombard one), in which the hero wavers between the love for two maidens, against the inevitable background of warfare and bloodshed. Shakespearean adaptations were to reach their highest point with Dryden. The only other survivor of pre-1642 theatre was James Shirley. The term ‘Restoration theatre’ covers more than forty years, from 1660 to 1707, the year of Farquhar’s last play, uninterrupted even by the hostility to the theatre of William of Orange (his wife, on the other hand, was a lover of plays). The repertoire was renewed in 1660 mainly because the theatre had become an elite genre, its audience composed of courtiers, aristocrats, and members of the upper-middle class. As such, it welcomed foreign fashions, especially French (and, to a lesser degree, Spanish), given that Charles II had spent his years in exile in France, and, once he returned to England, had favoured the popularity of French fashions and customs. Saintsbury and others after him tended to minimize the debt owed by the new theatre to French romances, and have emphasized a metrical factor – the predominance of the heroic couplet, which brought with it the heroic subject matter.3 Heroic tragedy, which meant the pursuit of ideals that were no longer viable, and unattainable levels of love and honour, was acted out in pompous, bombastic language largely aimed at disguising exotic plots that were loosely constructed, lacklustre and lazily generic. Its life was short, a mere ten years; its decline began with the satirical parody written by Buckingham, The Rehearsal;4 the comedy of manners lasted longer, no doubt fortified by the cynicism, elegance and wit with which it held the mirror up to the lack of morals of the court. The ‘rake’s comedy’ is a kind of subspecies in a scale which goes from the comic to the tragic, and on to sheer horror. The most brazen of amoral rakes is Shadwell’s Don Juan. Congreve led this character close to self-reformation, creating the variant of the reformed rake.
3 4
SAI, 485. § 50.3.
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§ 47. Dryden I: The re-consecration of Stuart civilization
§ 47. Dryden* I: The re-consecration of Stuart civilization The works of John Dryden (1631–1700) may be divided into five main areas: prose (literary criticism); tragedies; comedies; poetry; 1
*
Works, various eds, 20 vols, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles 1956–2002; Poetry, Prose and Plays, ed. D. Grant, London 1952. Separate editions: The Poems, ed. J. Kinsley, 4 vols, Oxford 1962; ed. P. Hammond and D. Hopkins, 4 vols, Harlow 1995–2005. Dramatic Works, ed. M. Summers, 6 vols, London 1931–1932, Gordian 1968 (textually inaccurate). Essays, ed. W. P. Ker, 2 vols, London 1900; ed. G. Watson, 2 vols, London 1962. Letters, ed. C. E. Ward, Durham, NC 1942. Life. A biography by Walter Scott opened the first volume of Works, ed. Scott himself, 18 vols, London 1808, 1921, rev. G. Saintsbury, London 1882–1893. K. Young, John Dryden: A Critical Biography, London 1954; C. E. Ward, The Life of John Dryden, Chapel Hill, NC 1961; J. M. Osborn, John Dryden: Some Biographical Facts and Problems, rev. edn, Gainesville, FL 1965; J. A. Winn, John Dryden and His World, New Haven, CT and London 1987; P. Hammond, John Dryden: A Literary Life, New York 1991. Criticism. G. Saintsbury, Dryden, London 1881; M. Van Doren, John Dryden: A Study of His Poetry, New York 1920, London 1946; T. S. Eliot, Homage to John Dryden, London 1924, and John Dryden: The Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic, New York 1932; L. I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden, Ann Arbor, MI 1934, 1956; W. Frost, Dryden and the Art of Translation, New Haven, CT 1955; A. M. Crinò, John Dryden, Firenze 1957, and John Dryden poeta satirico, Firenze 1958; B. N. Schilling, Dryden and the Conservative Myth: A Reading of Absalom and Achitophel, New Haven, CT 1961, and, as editor, Dryden: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1963; A. W. Hoffman, John Dryden’s Imagery, Gainesville, FL 1962; A. C. Kirsch, Dryden’s Heroic Drama, Princeton, NJ 1965; A. Roper, Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms, London 1965; Essential Articles for the Study of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Hamden, CT 1966; E. Miner, Dryden’s Poetry, Bloomington, IN 1967, and, as editor, John Dryden, Athens, OH 1972; P. Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought, Chicago, IL 1968, and Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda in Its Contexts, Princeton, NJ 1993; Dryden’s Mind and Art, ed. B. King, Edinburgh 1969; S. Budick, Dryden and the Abyss of Light: A Study of Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther, New Haven, CT 1970; CRHE, ed. J. and H. Kinsley, New York 1971; S. N. Zwicker, Dryden’s Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation, Providence, RI 1972, and Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: The Arts of Disguise, Princeton, NJ 1984; J. D. Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric, Berkeley, CA 1975; D. Wykes, A Preface to Dryden, London and New York 1977; G. McFadden, Dryden: The Public Writer, 1660–1685, Princeton, NJ 1978; J. M. Hall, John Dryden: A Reference Guide, Boston, MA 1984; J. Sloman, Dryden:
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translations1 (I have placed them, not in chronological order, but in a sequence that, in my personal opinion, reflects their relative merits and importance). Even a cursory survey of these works is sufficient for the reader to realize that this is literature made, essentially, of literature, with very little of real life experience. Dryden’s biography is short, and contains no sensational events or newsworthy gestures. The account of his life is full of assiduous reading and writing, attention to current cultural and political events, and, to a lesser extent, court duties. His existence is made up of habit, method, self-control; all attempts to scan his life using the lens of psychology, or psychoanalysis, all search for repressed passion, or carefully concealed peccadillos, would be destined to fail. Any piquancy would be the fruit of fantasy, speculation or manipulation.2 Dryden’s poetry, and The Poetics of Translation, Toronto 1985; D. Hopkins, John Dryden, Cambridge 1986, and John Dryden, Tavistock 2004; John Dryden, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1987; J. A. Winn, John Dryden and His World, New Haven, CT and London 1987; C. D. Reverand, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode: The ‘Fables’, Philadelphia, PA 1988; D. Bywaters, Dryden in Revolutionary England, Berkeley, CA 1991; M. Sestito, Creare imitando. Dryden e il teatro, Udine 1999; John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. P. Hammond and D. Hopkins, Oxford 2000; The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden, ed. S. N. Zwicker, Cambridge 2004; S. Battisti, Metamorfosi del teatro: gli adattamenti shakespeariani di John Dryden, Bari 2005. 1 2
The scale given by Eliot 1932 is the following: poet, playwright, critic; but (cf. 45, 65) the order should be seen as ascending, not descending. He never went abroad, perhaps not even outside the borders of England. His family belonged to the Puritan, anti-royalist landed gentry. He was sent to Westminster School, then Cambridge, where he graduated. At twenty, he settled in London and was given a post as secretary under Cromwell. He later made a name for himself as a writer of encomiastic verse and playwright. He was quick to swear allegiance to Charles II, and was appointed Poet Laureate in 1668. The misogyny that marks his comedies was not, it seems, a consequence of his unhappy marriage to the much talked-of daughter of an earl, who bore him numerous children, but rather is due to imitation; just as classical tragedy provided themes like incest and homosexuality. His days were proverbially spent at Will’s Coffee-House, where a place was reserved for him by the fire in winter and on the veranda in the summer. From 1668, as I have already mentioned, Dryden’s life identifies with his writing. Winn 1987 is almost certain that Dryden was the lover of the second-rate actress, Anne Reeves.
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even more so, his plays, may be called ideological in content, and literary, rather than imaginative, in their origin, albeit at times in a framework of analogy or allegory. Every play is based on one or more sources, and ‘contaminates’ them; plots are almost always filtered through their auctores; some of the early poems, and, later, the satires, are ferociously ad personam, their victims usually rival authors. Others extol their dedicatees in life or in death. Dryden then moves directly to imitation, not counting political poems, and verses written in answer to some book or other, or interventions in religious controversies; bearing in mind, too, that two thirds of his non-dramatic poetical works are translations – from Greek and Latin, old English or Italian (Boccaccio). The ‘figure in the carpet’ in the multifarious phenomenology of Dryden’s work is that the author’s aim is, first, to define and affirm his own supremacy on the literary scene of the late seventeenth century, and then to celebrate the reborn Stuart regime as the zenith of English civilization from the origins until the present time. For Dryden, the two are inextricably linked. 2. In the six ‘Lines on Milton’, prefaced to one of the editions of Milton’s works, Dryden proclaims the author of Paradise Lost the third greatest poet in the world after Homer and Virgil, in an order which is not hierarchical but consecutive, and, amazingly, makes no mention of either Dante or Shakespeare. Milton is not inferior to the first two of the list in majesty of thought; indeed, he is their equal, because nature ‘joined the former two’ to produce him. This short epigraph should be read in the light of Dryden’s own situation: the synchronic and geographical criterion (the three poets ‘adorn’ Greece, Rome, and England) conflicts with the temporal, since with Milton ‘Nature could no farther go’. Dryden’s career seems to deny this, as his secret ambition, and even certainty was to be the ‘fourth amid so learned a band’.3 The image of grafting is valid in another sense, too: Dryden’s is a literature of implantation and combination; not for nothing is he considered the monarch of rifacimento. All the poetry he wrote before he turned to the theatre, and after he stopped writing for the stage, is grafted on to actual current events. The final stage of his career
3 Dante, Inferno, IV.102, in H. F. Cary’s translation.
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was translation, and translation is the highest form of grafting. Through no fault of his own, Dryden found himself living and working and aspiring only fifty years after Shakespeare and Jonson, and only ten after Milton. He felt the burden of their genius, but could not avoid competition. One of his masterpieces is a reworking or ‘improvement’ on Shakespeare. All his life he attempted to write a great epic poem, without success, but he did turn Paradise Lost into an operatic masque entitled The State of Innocence, a work of no great merit. One small, but coveted, posthumous prize he did receive was to be buried in Westminster Abbey, next to Chaucer. A fitting collocation, given that Dryden had called Chaucer, in the introduction to one of his translations, the first great writer in English. 3. At the same time, Dryden must have been aware early on in his life, of a perfectly wonderful, unique synchronization between himself and the society he was born into. He did not know Leibniz, but thought the England of the restored Stuarts the best of all possible worlds. From 1603 to 1660 a large fleet of smallish craft had found a flagship in Milton; from 1660 until the end of the century, Dryden succeeded in dominating an artistic void, and looked down on minor geniuses from a vantage point of undisputed supremacy. In short, he discovered he had the essential requisites for the position of leader and could aspire to what in fact came about: the forty years of his productive life came to be known as ‘the age of Dryden’. In 1660 he was thirty, the right age to set off on a long period of activity which was to last until he was seventy. Critics have emphasized his arrogance and presumption. It is not surprising to find that many of his poems are reflections on the English literary canon, and the first examples of systematized literary criticism in English, with the aim of collocating the present period in the historical context. The premise is that he, Dryden, is at the cutting edge of contemporary literature. So he spent his life revising tables of literary merit, which he laid out in various critical essays, inserting the occasional variable, but keeping well in the forefront the twin towering figures of Homer and Virgil. Development, design and aims were all clear to Dryden, and his critical essays contain hundreds of indications, some great, some small, that, taken together, constitute certainty. Scores of long, dusty critical volumes have attempted to reconstruct the ideological context Dryden lived in: we know he was a member, or rather, an onlooker
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at the meetings of the Royal Society; that he was a Hobbesian, and above all, a ‘Pyrrhonist’ sceptic, though deep down one feels that he remained, philosophically speaking, something of an amateur.4 Vico was more than half a century ahead of him, but Dryden’s works contain hints of a cyclical view of culture. He used to say that his own genius lay in ‘improving an invention rather than inventing something new’, but the improvement was spurred on by pride and betrayed no little ambition. Dryden’s way of thinking is based on an evolutionism that is already optimistic, teleological and positivistic: in its ability to explore doubts, as well as to confirm certainties, English literature had reached its peak in and after 1660, its moment of greatest, irreversible splendour, and was experiencing the birth of a new Augustan age. Dryden – though not born in London – lived there practically all his life, and became the London writer by definition; since London was caput mundi, as he thought, where else could he live? If he was the representative poet of the age, he was, therefore, the apex of its ‘admirable’ literature. However, he needed to argue this and, above all, demonstrate it, but how? By writing – poetry, comedies and tragedies – and by provoking, then silencing, his adversaries, using as a weapon the prose essay and the verse satire.5 Dryden the lawmaker does not confine himself to his natural sphere of action, but takes it upon himself to lay down the law in religious matters, too (the Restoration is not only political, but religious as well). As a theologian, he orders purges and enforces orthodoxy. In prose, he preaches the Counter-Reformation, in that he celebrates the triumph of the Catholic faith as expressed in its political and secular arm. In this, his aesthetics is not Baroque, like Crashaw’s, but by now decidedly neoclassical, with a clear sense of dimension and proportion, conveyed heuristically, through argument, rather than on the wings of rapturous imagination. I, too, believe, like many other scholars, that Dryden trimmed 4 5
There are those today, who with the help of a good deal of imagination, see traces in Dryden of linguistic reflections à la Wittgenstein, or issues like the psychic instability of the subject, the limits of reason, the origin of human laws, and the afterlife. Dryden was the mildest, the most innocuous of legislators, but was once set upon by ruffians in the pay of Rochester because he had vilified the mediocre playwright, Elkanah Settle (see below, n. 20).
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his sail during the Civil War, Protectorate and Restoration, and ended up by drifting towards the Stuart Catholicism of Charles and James. It was written in his genes; he discovered his true vocation and ideals gradually, not on some road to Damascus. He did not convert back to Protestantism after the Glorious Revolution, and paid the price. His last years were spent under the shadow of disgrace and even, perhaps, indigence. By converting to Catholicism, he had forfeited the position of Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal, and now refused to pander to William of Orange by dedicating to him his translation of Virgil.6 4. In textbooks, Dryden’s work is usually divided by genres and dealt with in separate places or sections. I shall, instead, adopt a holistic approach, beginning with the essays, which are central to his entire production, and a general introduction to the pragmatics of literary composition at the time. The prose preface, or verse epilogue in his plays was the vehicle for setting out his critical opinions at a time when the critical essay or volume was not as yet widespread, although Dryden did publish two long essays – more than fifty pages each – that have all the characteristics of the critical essay: the first is on ‘dramatic poesy’, the second, one of his last works, written in 1697, is an academic dissertation on Virgil and the Aeneid, which he had translated in its entirety. His critical work spans thirty-three years, from 1667, when he was thirty-five years old, to three years before his death in 1700, and concentrates at first on drama and dramatic theory; this is followed by essays on poetry, the epic poem, the heroic, and, finally, on translation in its practical and theoretical aspects. Only the first essay is ‘free-standing’, so to speak; it is not, that is, a direct offshoot of external events. All the others are ‘militant’, and many are punctilious rebuttals of objections raised against his plays. Dryden’s prose is hard and biting, relentlessly argumentative. If he decides to accept a challenge, he usually lays hold of his adversary, and, in a vice-like grip, crushes him. An implacable application of Aristotelian logic breaks the bones of the strongest challengers: he uses syllogisms with consummate skill, accuses his victim of begging the question, and assembles an unanswerable, detailed chain of 6
The circumstances of Dryden’s death are a temptation for hagiographers in view of the stoicism with which he resisted the amputation of his gout-ridden leg.
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proof. It has often been said that only G. B. Shaw is comparable to Dryden as a writer of prefaces, but one might include Matthew Arnold in the number. Dryden, like Arnold, held to ‘rules’, and thought that the English language should be confined and crystallized by means of an Academy. In Dryden, the subjects are slightly different, but there is the same determination not to let go, the same fighting and apologetic spirit, and, above all, the hairsplitting precision of something like God and the Bible – which is, after all, like several of Dryden’s essays, a book of footnotes.7 Dryden always seems to be very objective and cautious, almost self-critical on principle. He keeps repeating that one of his qualities is objectiveness, and therefore blames himself, retroactively, for breaking his own dramatic rules. That is, he establishes a series of rules and regulations, and then admits he is the first to break them, but with due justification. Eventually, we are forced to recognize that the critical structure that is being built is made up of precepts that sooner or later will be set at naught by Dryden himself.8 Self-defence against charges of arrogance is always in the offing. Mellifluous, flattering in his judgements, he is often guilty of condescension, self-indulgence, even narcissism. Without appearing to contradict himself, he is capable of praising Shakespeare to the highest heavens one minute, and cutting him down the next. The truth is Dryden is without fear, or scruples. With regard to his All for Love, he expresses his amazement that the ‘illiterate’ Shakespeare could have written such a great work as Antony and Cleopatra. Its author has been imitated by Dryden, and in order to do this with greater freedom, the imitator has done away with rhyme. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is more unpolished, and Dryden explains that what he has done in his new version is to rectify and refine the original. 5. The generally accepted frame of reference of all Dryden’s critical pronouncements is one of cyclical development, in which the present age represents the zenith of art and literature, the end point of a long but steady upward movement. Anyone looking for examples of the stentorian certainty 7 8
Volume 6, § 28. Taine, who saw in Dryden a struggle between his English love of tradition and admiration for the French, noted that ‘it is dangerous for an artist to be excellent in theory’ (TAI, vol. III, 12).
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with which this concept is repeated, would end up with a long list of cut and dried statements, as for example, in the Epilogue to The Conquest of Granada: ‘If Love and Honour now are higher raised / ’Tis not the poet, but the Age is praised. / Wit’s now arriv’d to a more high degree; / Our native Language more refined and free’. So the great poet is the natural consequence of the cultural achievement of an age. The historical implication is that after a peak there will be a dip: this is borne out by Greek civilization (with Aeschylus, the Greek language reached ‘complete perfection’), and by the Romans (Claudian lived in a barbaric age – that is, after the end of the Augustan cycle). The Restoration age in England was the point of arrival of an uninterrupted process of improvement and refinement that began with ‘father Chaucer’. Dryden was obsessed by the comparison between Ancients and Moderns, and this, from beginning to end, is the theme of ‘The Dramatic Poetry of the Last Age’, a systematic and symptomatic attack on the imperfect language and patent linguistic-dramatic incongruities even in Shakespeare, and, more understandably, in Fletcher, who, à la Arnold, would have been better writers if they had lived in a more refined age. Jonson, on the other hand, is for Dryden the ‘most judicious’ playwright. No playwright, apart from Jonson, had any experience of court life, which is the school of taste and language. To his detriment, Charles had travelled in Europe, and, on his return to England as king, had ‘Frenchified’ his court. Dryden’s idea of the superiority of the present age, and of the English over the French, was repeated as late as 1693, but Dryden was by then less convinced: he feared the advent, perhaps not imminent, of a barbarian, or ‘iron’ age, during which there would be no further ‘improvement of our language’. By that year, his canon of heroic poetry had been reduced to three names, Homer, Virgil, and Tasso; all the others had been shown the door. 6. ‘An Essay of Dramatic Poesy’, written during the plague of 1665, and published in 1668, is a miniature history of English drama in the form of a conversation, during an idyllic boat trip on the Thames (in the far distance, the roar of Dutch cannon), involving four characters with fictitious Greek names. This early work is the first expression of Dryden’s conviction, supported by argument, that human history always progresses, and that the Ancients have been reached and overtaken by the Moderns. It is therefore axiomatic that dramatic poetry will grow and bud and flourish until it reaches its highest point of development. The comparison is not just vertical,
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between Ancients and Moderns, but also horizontal, between the English and the French, and there are good reasons, according to Dryden, for awarding the medal for dramatic poetry to his fellow countrymen. Naturalness is the criterion that decides the priority and excellence of rhyme in dramatic verse, in that rhyme is far from common speech, as it should be, and, so, is preferable to blank verse. He is in favour of the Aristotelian unities, with minor exceptions, and later will add that acceptance of the unities and other prescriptions does not diminish the surveillance of reason, which voluntarily turns a blind eye, but still exercises control over the imagination, as Coleridge might have put it. Comedy, too, was to be purged of all suggestion of farce – farce is unnatural – without there being anything immoral or debatable in the fact that not all those deserving punishment actually receive it in the end, since the faults of comic heroes are less serious than those of the heroes of tragedy. On the other hand, according to Aristotle, the tragic hero must be neither too bad nor too innocent, so as to make it possible for the audience to feel pity and sympathy for him. As to the construction of plays, Dryden advised against the use of subplots and even against a comic storyline to act as a counterweight to the main tragic plot. Once again, Dryden is preaching what he did not always practise. Imitation is raised to the dimension of a re-creating art. The real artist does not steal but takes and uses pre-existing material, moulding it into something different and new. The defence of this kind of imitation is based on Longinus, and the frequency with which this authority is invoked goes some way to explaining why Hopkins, a self-confessed practitioner of the motto, ‘imitate to diversify’, should have been such an admirer of the neoclassical Laureate. Dryden claimed he had invented the heroic drama, though admitting that the way had been prepared by Davenant, and indicating a range of possible subjects in the opening lines of Orlando furioso. Of course, it was not Ariosto’s Furioso, but Virgil’s Aeneid that became the model for the heroic poem. For both the heroic poem and play, tropes of grandiloquence and hyperbole were acceptable tools.9 Dryden’s essay on
9
Dryden did in fact dream of writing a great national epic in verse, but discarded various subjects (Arthur, the Black Prince), and ended up by never finding a suitable theme, or, perhaps, the time and motivation.
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Ovid and the art of translation begins by positing three possible ways of rendering the original: word for word translation; paraphrase; imitation, that is, free re-writing of the original text. Dryden views this last alternative as an updating of the translated text, a new version the author might have written had he lived in a later age.10 This is practically the equivalent to postulating the need for exceptional critical skill and empathy on the part of the translator. 7. Dryden’s greatness as a prose writer has been unanimously acknowledged throughout the centuries, but has compromised his reputation as a poet. He was unhesitatingly declared ‘the father of English prose’, and the most authoritative and learned critic of English literature. He was also considered a trait d’union without which eighteenth-century poetry would have been impossible. Johnson’s famous remark on Dryden’s contribution to English poetry is significant, if debatable: ‘he found it brick, and left it marble’. Scott, his first editor, awarded him third place among English poets of all time. That Dryden should preserve his primacy as a poet for long was unthinkable. His reputation has fluctuated according to the tastes and the aesthetic mood of the day. Readers soon realized that something was lacking in this otherwise polished and competent poet, and that something was the warmth of personality. Too much self-control can be fatal. He fell on deaf ears throughout all of the nineteenth century, which passed on to Matthew Arnold a long-lasting verdict, that he was a classic of prose rather than poetry, which is rooted in the heart and soul, not in the intellect only. Taine, the author of an introduction which is still worth reading, dug deep and took apart the plays, finding them full of unreal effects, grossness, vulgarity and immorality. He attacked the heroic couplet as a metre that contrasted meaning. So that generally speaking, Dryden marked a move towards barbarity, rather than refinement in taste. Saintsbury acquitted him: he ‘was not a prosaic poet, but he was the poet of a prosaic time’.11 It was up to T. S. Eliot in 1921 and again in 1932 – Pound, disgusted, refused to read one word of Dryden ever again – to rehabilitate him for writing, 10 11
The task was neglected by Dryden, according to Taine (TAI, vol. III, 64), who called this updating a falsification of the original. SAI, 477.
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after the excesses of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, a poetry that was clear and devoid of imagery, though also lacking in profundity. Eliot himself was a Dryden 300 years on. Dryden’s survival has often been achieved by means of easily digestible excerpts from his satires and short poems, which, taken whole, are not consonant with contemporary sensibility. Another ploy has been to pass him off as a writer of superb ‘beginnings’. In 1921 Eliot declared he was confident a revolution of taste would soon lead to a revaluation of ‘Dryden’s splendid verse’.12 However, at the present time Dryden remains something of a mummy, and a subject for academic debate. His primacy is a distant memory; his plays have only historical value, and are almost never performed. § 48. Dryden II: Early poetry. Elegiac, encomiastic, celebrative Dryden’s poetry stretches over two successive periods, and is of two kinds: first encomiastic, then, after fifteen years of theatrical activity, satirical and controversial. A third period sees Dryden engaged in large-scale verse translations (Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, Persius, Juvenal, and Theocritus). Dryden’s principal merit as a poet is metrical: he adopts and patents the heroic couplet. This form was then handed down to Pope and the Augustans, and dominated the eighteenth century, until it was shot down and left for dead by Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Lyrical Ballads. Whole libraries have been written on this choice of metre that brands English poetry from 1650, excluding Milton, and starting with Denham and Waller, the founding fathers. Dryden transformed the couplet into a prosodic-syntactic-conceptual unity, so that each single concept is concentrated, compressed and confined, like a clockwork mechanism, within the limits of two lines of verse. The chain of discourse becomes, in Dryden, an uninterrupted sequence of couplets (only once do we find quatrains), with an automatic and statistical increase in full stops, and a decrease in long propositions, and of hypotaxis in favour of parataxis. The heroic couplet naturally tends towards concision, but the unending succession of selfcontained microcircuits can result in monotony. Only a given number of
12
ESE, 315.
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syllables can be fitted into each couplet, so the poet finds himself having to eliminate as many superfluous words as possible. For example, Dryden never says ‘as if ’, but only ‘as’, thus saving a syllable. The tyranny of rhyme imposes various tropes: syntactic-grammatical reversals, principally, meaning the inversion of verb and object, so that often one is in some doubt as to which is the subject of the sentence and which the object.13 Another frequent elimination is that of the verb that rules two different objects, as in: ‘Thy tragic muse gives smiles, thy comic sleep’. All of this amounts to a meagre harvest as regards his pre-1667 verse, and if Dryden had written no more poetry, then this early work would be forgotten. 2. Dryden was inspired by Cowley, or, more likely, by Cleveland, in an early, academic elegy, similar to those by other Cambridge students (twelve years earlier, including Milton) for Edward King. These hundred lines of ‘metaphysical’ fireworks were in honour of young Lord Hastings, who died at twenty-one of smallpox. The endless display of often outlandish images aims to impress and shock; the following example is famous: ‘Each little pimple had a tear in it, /To wail the fault its rising did commit.’ An ode on the death of Cromwell in thirty-seven quatrains is the second of the two elegies with which Dryden made his debut on the literary scene; both are dedicated to someone outstanding in his field of action, and are themselves ‘outstanding’, but only in the sense of ‘exceeding the norm’, based as they are on high-flown language characterized by frequent resort to hyperbole. Both dedicatees held back thoughts of greatness that were ‘too precocious’. After Empson and the ‘new critics’ it was possible to look for and find hidden signs of subtle irony and dissent – conveyed, for example, by the choice of adverbs and even by metrical variations – and levelled at both Cromwell and Anglican theodicy. Dryden’s next important poem is a welcome extended to Charles II, Astraea Redux. One of the basic concepts is the return of a golden age, as frequently found in classical literature. Dryden ends the poem with the words: ‘Oh Happy Age! Oh times like those alone / By Fate reserv’d for Great Augustus Throne!’ Annus Mirabilis (1667) is the most accomplished work of this first phase; while the early works of a 13
Denounced as incorrect but inevitable in his essay, ‘Rhyme and Blank Verse’.
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poet are often too elliptical, overblown and exuberant, here the narration is linear and clear. This long ode contradicts my theory that Dryden wrote no excellent narrative poetry. It brings together two successive events that are apparently not connected in any way: the victorious war against the Low Countries, and the Great Fire of London. The informing principle is again the cyclical nature of history. Only recently the Dutch were masters of the sea, but now they are bowed and beaten, as Carthage was by Rome. An epic light is thrown on recent and contemporary events by means of a series of parallels with momentous historical or mythological happenings. According to Stuart historians, especially Fuller, the recent past had seen the spreading of a conviction that the Restoration had ushered in a new heroic age of unequalled glory. English society was gripped by a frenzy to which Dryden became mouthpiece. Quatrain 212 begins the second part with a ‘fade to’ the Fire of London. From now on the poem is punctuated by a number of purely narrative scenes, episodes that are described clearly, tersely and convincingly. In a crescendo of panic and confusion, the fire strikes at the heart of sleeping London, but the king is awake and among the first to come to the rescue. Innumerable scenes of fear, terror, desolation and pity (the one of the baby clutching its mother’s breast and finding a tear there, is famous; as is the king’s noble prayer). The angry God is placated, and with a pyramid of crystal creates a pump that extinguishes the fire! The extinguished fire in turn inspires the dream of a golden metropolis, which will rise from the ashes of the old city. It is no coincidence that Augusta is the ancient name of London. The fire has been a ritual of purification. § 49. Dryden III: The comedies Dryden’s works for the theatre number twenty-seven (or twenty-eight). He began with comedy, and for a while continued writing poetry at the same time. His comedies were staged at first by the re-constituted King’s Company, for which he agreed to write three plays a year, though he never managed to respect the agreement. Some of the plays were reviewed or ‘noticed’ in his inimitable, frank and idiosyncratic manner by the diarist, Samuel Pepys, with invaluable ‘live’ testimonies. The company had the foresight to cast the popular actress, Nell Gwynn, in many of the roles, as well as actor Thomas Betterton. Dryden continued to turn out plays
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at the same impressive rate as the various pre-1642 dramatists, at times outdoing them in number of works and approaching the overall totals, if not of Shirley or Heywood, at least of Massinger. Dryden’s comedies are apparently identical to the typical ‘romantic’ comedy in vogue thirty years earlier. He uses the well-tested structure of the double plot, one romantic, pathetic, or elegiac, and written in verse, the other a comic one, semi-serious, often vulgar and cynical, written in prose. The two distinct plots represent a class distinction, as the first, more noble, storyline involves aristocrats, while the comic plot is full of shepherds, peasants and servants. Dryden is especially good at creating a situation that risks exploding at any moment; and yet, in the end, the black cloud, full of poisonous and explosive gases, is transformed into a bubble of soap that bursts innocuously when pricked: the scare is over, normality returns. The ‘scare’ often concerns – as with the late Carolines, especially Shirley and Massinger – one or more adulteries that might be consummated on stage from one moment to the next; but Dryden is still more artificial: the characters seem to be on a cliff edge, able at any moment to step back from the precipice for reasons of self-interest or decorum. Without going to the root of the existence of desire, they prefer not to fight and resign themselves, with just a hint of bitterness, to married life. Taken all together, Dryden’s plays include some which are mediocre, or decidedly bad, and two or three others that are excellent, as lithe and graceful as swift antelopes, while much of Dryden’s later poetry plods along stolidly like a fully grown elephant. 2. Pepys found it difficult to identify the protagonist of the licentious prose play, The Wild Gallant (1663), taken from contemporary sources ( Jonson and Brome, a minor Jacobean playwright), and went back home somewhat perplexed. In The Rival Ladies (1664), in couplets alternating with prose, two girls disguised as pages contend for the favours of a fop. A much later comedy (1673) bore the eloquent subtitle of Love in a Nunnery. Walter Scott shrewdly observed that Dryden’s indelicacy is ‘like the forced impudence of a timid man’. Secret Love (1668), a tragicomedy, again in verse alternating with prose, titillates the audience by presenting a homosexual couple, with Nell Gwynn in the main role. The play was a huge success, and gained the plaudits of the king. These and other comedies, some of them re-workings of those by Molière, failed to become stable features of
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the repertoire, unlike Marriage à la Mode (1672–1673), a triumph of late seventeenth-century misogynistic wit, of which the prologue has become a proverbial statement on the evanescence of love and consequent absurdity of the presumed indissoluble union of wedlock – the same thesis, by the way, argued by Milton in his prose works, as already noted above. The main plot is vaguely reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale: the Sicilian setting, a usurper king, and two ingenuous, innocent foundlings, who are in love but cannot marry. Hermogenes tries to defend them and reveals partial truths concerning their past to the usurper; Leonidas takes courage and rebels against the tyrant. In the end, he marries Palmyra and becomes the rightful king of Sicily. The subplot weaves in and out of the main story, and revolves round two friends, one of whom is already betrothed, but pays court to the wife of his friend – a classic foursome. The stories overlap, in that the married friend of the subplot is a captain of the guard whom the king has ordered to look for the lost son or daughter, who will turn out to be Palmyra. Each of the two women in the subplot seems to enjoy to be courted, and there are numerous secret encounters that lead to nothing and are, therefore, extremely funny. In the end, ‘much ado about nothing’: all those that need to, pull themselves together, and adultery lowers its head and disappears. The virtuoso role belongs to the fiancée, Melantha, who is in the habit of seasoning her speeches with fashionable French words, and indeed has a vast store of new terms, so she never needs to use the same one twice. This comedy has aged well, thanks to several factors: the suspense created by Hermogenes, who reveals to the king, first, that he has found a boy, and then, a girl; the display of wit by the wife when she pretends to reject the suit of her husband’s friend while in reality encouraging it; the continuous alternation between the pathos of the young lovers and the verbal duelling of the foursome. As said before, the characters play with fire, but just as they are about to get burnt, everything goes back to what it was before. The message is that it is fun to play at virtual love-making, and pull back from the brink of consummation. After 1649, every stage usurper sparked a reaction in the audience, as did a restored king like Leonidas. The Spanish Friar (1681) marked a return to the theatre after a break of ten years. Dryden still mixes plots, the story of the pure, Platonic-romantic love of the queen of Aragon and General Torrismond, and the subplot
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of Lorenzo’s lust for the beautiful Elvira, wife of the Shylock-like Gomez, a surly old fellow who will end up by being cuckolded through the connivance of the friar of the title, a plump, pink-complexioned, paladin of (im)pure love. There are some fine comic moments, as when Gomez, the husband, discovers the lover disguised as a friar, and lifting his habit, is faced with his phallic sword. Dryden is already tragic here when he leads Torrismond to the discovery that his queen has commanded the death of his father, who lay imprisoned in a dungeon by orders of the usurper. The poor Jew, Gomez, is incapable of obtaining justice, and prostrates himself before the man he should denounce in public. The denouement two pages from the end is a bolt out of the blue, and Lorenzo discovers he is in love with his sister. The legitimate king lives, everyone is happy. 3. It is not fortuitous that Dryden’s best comedy is a rifacimento. So is his best tragedy. Naturally, Amphitryon (1690) has the advantage of a plot from Plautus through Molière, with a small number of characters that act out a straightforward story consisting of a few essential facts. The impression is one of rare perspicuity and great freshness, as if the author were still an enthusiastic young man, full of energy and inspiration, while in reality Dryden was already quite old, by the standards of the time. Some sharp, stinging darts are launched in the direction of the current regime in an ancient setting where everything is – as it had been for the Jacobeans – rutting, corruption and moral decadence. The opening of Amphitryon is magnificently blasphemous: the two gods, Mercury and Apollo, have descended to earth on a mission from Jupiter, but, ignorant of what the mission is, they are understandably bored and irritated. The premise is the usual one, that marriage, even between gods, is monotonous, and in the end, the man, and the god too, will look for other ‘game’. Enter Jupiter in the guise of a portentous, scheming libertine on the trail of Alcmena, who is waiting, all alone, for the valorous general Amphitryon to return to Thebes. Dryden splendidly domesticizes mythology; the three gods become mortals, and ordinary ones at that, as they exchange witticisms, and everyday life amalgamates with that of the gods. Jupiter goes in and out of his mythological role, and would reveal himself if only one knew he is disguised as Amphitryon. In the second act, Sosia duets at length
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with Mercury, and therefore, to his amazement, meets his double. Sosia and Bromia, with the flirty servant Phaedra (an invention of Dryden’s), constitute the accompaniment. Just when the reader is about to complain about the action being so fixed and unitary, Jupiter again plays the card of seduction. Misunderstandings are long and skilfully drawn out, and mix-ups are milked to the full. Listening to the real Sosia and the false Amphitryon is like travelling in time and sitting in on a scene from Mozart and Da Ponte’s version of the misdeeds of Don Giovanni and Leporello. There is real humour in the trial scene, in which an absurd judge (another invention of Dryden’s) is called on to decide which is the real Amphitryon; the two pretenders to the name differ only in temperament, one being calm, the other irascible. The double revelation of identity, of Mercury and Jupiter, ends the comedy, but announces the coming birth of Hercules, who – this is emphasized – will bring about a kind of Restoration: ‘the world wants a Hercules’, and Hercules will come bearing the gift of peace. A roundabout way of ending on a note of praise, and a confirmation of Dryden’s informing theme. § 50. Dryden IV: Genesis, development and limits of Dryden’s heroic tragedy If Davenant was the precursor of heroic tragedy, Dryden was the practitioner par excellence and unchallenged master of the genre in a time frame that goes from 1665 up to 1678 (with some later additions). In a rather off-hand statement, largely ignored by English critics, Praz, after saying that the main sources of heroic tragedy are French and Spanish romances, and Ariosto’s poems, went on to claim that Dryden anticipates Metastasio, despite being weighed down by the trappings of Spanish Baroque and French classical formalism. If it is true that heroic tragedy was to be the equivalent of the heroic poem – as Dryden defined it – then the model and source of inspiration is clearly Tasso. Praz was so convinced of this diagnosis that he repeated it verbatim three times, if not more, in his writings on Dryden. In an analogical fever, he adds that, while there was at the time a reflux of taste towards Shakespeare, a number of themes, like incest, the femme fatale and the bloody tyrant were handed down to the pre-Romantics and Decadent Romantics, so that Dryden could well be
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included in the casebook of the ‘Romantic Agony’.14 So, what exactly is Dryden’s heroic tragedy? The basic ingredients are the exotic setting, the psychological chiaroscuro that differentiates the characters, spectacular sets, dazzling costumes, amazing special scenic effects thanks to the latest advances in stage machinery, and, above all, an emphatic, bombastic, swaggering style. The scenarios are stretched: no longer the present, or the recent historical past of England (Dryden avoids this like the plague). They are no longer European, or even ancient Greece or Rome, or the Mediterranean basin; the stories now are set in the Americas and the Indies. The suggestive choice of the Moorish world is repeated after the occasional use made by Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. A complex weave of subtle political references appealed greatly to contemporary audiences, with, at the centre, the conflict between an implacable, unbending Realpolitik (represented by emperors, governors and generals), and the tyrannical rule of love (the irresistibly fascinating female mows down and paralyzes the sturdiest of heroes who would do anything for honour and military valour).15 When it comes to it, a similar dramatic formula is difficult to sustain, and gives no great results. The plots, hard to grasp, and stuffed full of characters with unlikely names, are brought to an end through resolutions that are usually wildly improbable. Furthermore, the heroic couplet is unsuitable for conveying passion; its discursive register is too regular, with no linguistic variants, or regional and personal differences in the manner of speaking. All this re-created world is avowedly false, and makes no pretence to realism or local colour – nor, to make up for it, is there the slightest hint of humour. After the fifth attempt at the genre, Dryden toned it down somewhat, and, in All for Love, abandoned it. 2. In The Indian Queen (1664) – written in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Howard – the Mexican emperor, Montezuma, wins the hand of Horatia; of the three rival suitors, two withdraw from the contest. The Indian Emperor (1665), a sequel of the previous play, is, instead, entirely by Dryden. In it, the Spaniards wish to conquer Mexico, while rebel Indians 14 All this is discussed, with abundant quotations, in ‘Il dramma inglese della Restaurazione e i suoi aspetti preromantici’, in SSI, vol. I, 153–69. 15 In 1680 the English possession of Tangiers was attacked by the Moors (ASH, 145).
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threaten Montezuma, who is intent on furthering his dynastic ambitions by assigning husbands to his daughters and wives to his sons. Montezuma proudly refuses to submit to the Spaniards, and negotiations fail, but Cortez falls in love with the emperor’s daughter. He captures the man who has been sent to kill him, and frees him. From the third act on, the story becomes confused: Almeria, the daughter of the Indian queen, captures Cortez and imprisons him. She falls in love with him, but Cortez is faithful to his first love. Dilemma follows dilemma, until Cortez, now free, resumes the battle, promising to save the father and brothers of his beloved. Here, perhaps for the first time, to close the tragedy Dryden uses a structural device which entails the self-elimination of all who hinder the re-establishing of the status quo: the two women who love Cortez kill themselves after betraying the demands of political necessity. Tyrannic Love (1670) centres on the persecution of St Catherine by the emperor Maximinus. In the torture scene several learned pagans are invited to lay snares for the martyr. Angels fly to her rescue – a Baroque stratagem – but cannot halt the tyrant. Catherine is martyred off-stage. The spectator, or more probably, reader, is reminded of Massinger’s first, vaguely Catholic, play on St Dorothea.16 Maximinus’ short speeches display what can only be called a parody of Satanism. The Conquest of Granada (1670), in two parts, totalling ten interminable acts, is penalized by its slow pace, and ends up by seeming static, weighed down by too many situations and characters. Here Dryden shows clearly the lack of those skills that enliven his comedies: heaviness replaces levity. Almanzor is the unwitting son of the enemy of the Arab army he serves heroically. A pillar of integrity, he breathes Marlovian honour and warmongering. At times, one might mistake him for Tamburlaine, with his stentorian voice and love of metaphor. He exudes energy and valour, until he is transfixed by Almahide, the Moorish queen. Almanzor asks the king, whom he has saved, for the bride he has promised, but instead is exiled. Almahide and Almanzor embody the proverbial conflict of honour, since one wants to die for the other, but both control their passion and are joined legitimately in the last act. The Arab king, too, is split: he knows that Almanzor might
16
Volume 1, § 141.3.
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well seduce his wife, but realizes that, from a military point of view, he cannot do without him. These inner doubts and fears make the second part superior to the first. In Aureng-Zebe (1675) the eponymous hero is in conflict with his aged father, who has fallen in love with the imprisoned Queen Indamora, betrothed to his own son. Other illicit or impossible loves pepper the plot, like that of the empress for Aureng-Zebe, her stepson; or the passion of Indamora for the governor of the town of Agra. This theme is the point on which all the main, interrelated characters converge. The fact that they are comparatively few makes the play more compact, besides being stylistically more direct. Aureng-Zebe’s stepbrother, too, falls in love with Indamora, and – a topos that Dryden evidently likes and uses frequently – offers to save Aureng-Zebe if she gives herself to him. AurengZebe is given famous lines of bitter recrimination. As always, in the end everything is sorted out, mainly thanks to self-elimination of characters or natural physical elimination. 3. The year 1670 saw the appearance of The Rehearsal, a ferocious, exhilarating parody, of joint authorship (Buckingham, Sprat, and others, including, perhaps, Samuel Butler). The play was written and ready nine years earlier but was kept in store, to be used against any exemplar of particularly excessive heroism. The main target was Dryden, his grandiloquent style and his often ridiculous scenic effects. It is reminiscent, in miniature, of several of the plays of the 1599 ‘war of the theatres’ between Marston, Chapman and Jonson. Possibly as a consequence of The Rehearsal, Dryden abandoned the heroic play, and turned once more to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, appropriately altered to fit his dramatic principles. All for Love (1677), significantly in blank verse, is the most accomplished and successful of his three Shakespearean adaptations.17 Even Dryden’s detractors refrain from criticism, and remain speechless before this masterpiece. Taine himself was forced to insert a parenthesis in his work of demolition. To present Dryden’s play as an ‘improvement’ on Shakespeare is not 17
In his Troilus Dryden reduces the number of characters, but adds Andromache, and has Cressida, no faithless hussy, commit suicide. In general, there is less imagery than in the original. In his adaptation of The Tempest, written with Davenant, the cast was literally revolutionized.
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inaccurate, but is incomplete as a definition. It is an independent work, the title of which in no way recalls Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. It inaugurates an age of re-workings of great myths and great works of the past, from the seventeenth century onwards. Dryden had already ransacked Plautus, and was soon to visit, in collaboration with others, other Greek tragedies.18 This masterpiece, an authentic pièce de résistance of Restoration tragedy, is in fact a long poem characterized by sumptuous rhetoric, great lyricism, and lofty, uninterrupted declamation. More than Shakespeare, it is Marlowe reborn. Right from the first scenes, the tragedy identifies with the psychological drama of Antony, who hears his conscience in the voices of Ventidius and Dolabella. It is, therefore, a static, if not motionless, drama, in which concrete incitements to action are undermined by recollections and free oneiric imaginings. Ventidius tries to rouse a dispirited Antony, mindful of the other, energetic Antony he used to know. Antony seems convinced and encouraged, then leaves the centre stage to Cleopatra, only to reclaim it to rail against the cold Octavian and be again pushed back towards inertia by the gifts and passionate messages of Cleopatra. Dryden celebrates the flow of the kind of breathless, passionate love that, in its relentless excessiveness, becomes the stuff of melodrama. Both lovers abandon themselves above all to recrimination, and the only moment in Dryden which suggests and, indeed, authorizes a comparison with Shakespeare is Dolabella’s account of Cleopatra’s majestic journey down the Cydnus, an evocation, as in Shakespeare, of oriental sensuality at its most dazzling. In the third and fourth acts, with further powerful tremors of repressed sexuality, Antony is awoken from his torpor and energized at the prospect that Cleopatra might no longer be his, but will find some other lover. He makes one final attempt at resistance, and Cleopatra hastens to him, only to find him dying. She places an asp to her arm and receives its deadly poison.
18
§ 52.1.
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§ 51. Dryden V: Satirical and theological poems In 1666 Dryden was a writer of celebratory, euphoric verse, convinced that the restored Stuart monarchy was in the process of building a new Golden Age. He believed, too, that some momentous historical event was at hand, some peak of achievement reached, or the prophecy of even greater heights. When he turned once again to poetry, however, Dryden was a different man: he was disappointed, dismayed, above all, by the possibility of a weakening or even a breakdown of the public order that had only recently been re-established. In the early 1680s, the model of civilization in which he had blindly laid his trust was vacillating; it needed to be either re-stated or re-formulated. The country was about to split apart again, and plunge into the abyss of ruin and, even, war. Dryden’s job now was no longer to defend and extol, but to offend and mend, but without ceasing to adorn the present with solemn heroic lays to testify to the cosmic battle in course. Two poems of this period, Absalom and Achitophel and The Hind and the Panther, stand out from the rest of his poetic works for their size, so that in general, readers and critics have admired them, but at the same time deplored the boredom generated by them. This does not, however, prevent the yawning reader from pronouncing the first to be the greatest political satire in the English language, and the second a brilliant exercise in the medieval genre of theological allegory. Dryden himself did not care to create the best atmosphere for posterity. Satire, which is, by nature, militant, requires in the reader a knowledge of too many contemporary references, references that fade with time: issues that are of primary importance in a given present, will naturally become less so as they recede further into the past. It is also true that Dryden formulates his political and theological ideas in complicated, cumbersome analogical frames, to which he gives the key – itself a sign of unnecessary, summary premises and rather uninteresting stratagems. It is an admission of failure to argue that Dryden lives on, thanks to a few episodes of pure narrative or static description. When he narrates or describes, Dryden is clear, crisp, and effective, as in various parts of Annus Mirabilis. 2. The background of Absalom and Achitophel (1681) was the choice and appointment of the successor to Charles II: the king favoured his brother, James, and the Whigs, his illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth. Public
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opinion was divided: some, mindful of the Popish Plot organized by the renegade Titus Oates, feared that the king meant to hand over the country to Catholicism with the help of France. For Dryden, the most important thing was to guarantee the legitimate dynastic succession, although at the beginning of the poem he criticizes Charles for being ‘Davidic’ in the great number of his concubines. The use of the biblical story of David to refer to Charles, and the analogy between Achitophel and the Earl of Shaftsbury, was far from original; on the contrary, it had been used almost to excess, but never with such careful skill in construction, never with such phenomenal use of the poetic pantograph. There is a description of a game that cannot fail to remind one of Middleton’s The Game at Chess. Yet, if similar correspondences occur, and if they are not absurd, then it means that for Joyce as for Dryden, who epicizes noting the precise historical recurrence, history does repeat itself. Dryden does not pursue an alienating objective: on the contrary, he disautomatizes by means of parentheses, disparaging between-the-lines comments, and sudden humorous boutades. In the second part (1682), Achitophel-Shaftesbury re-appears on the scene, and tries to persuade Absalom-Monmouth to lead the rebellion. This was written by his collaborator, Nahum Tate,19 though two particularly striking portraits, those of Og (Shadwell) and Doeg (Settle),20 are undoubtedly by 19
Nahum Tate (1652–1715), an Irishman. His fame as a second-rate poet is not dissimilar to that of Flecknoe himself. Nonetheless, he wrote the sober, restrained libretto for Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, translated a new version of the Psalms, and composed a number of popular Protestant hymns that earned him the nomination as Poet Laureate. He was also the author of the most successful (at the time) and most deplored (later) Shakespearean adaptations, apart from Dryden: in 1681 he eliminated the Fool from King Lear and introduced a love story between Edgar and Cordelia. He also ended the play with Lear, Gloucester and Cordelia all still alive. This mutilated version was the one staged until the end of the nineteenth century, when the great Victorian actor, Macready, reinstated the original. Tate was a friend of the miniaturist and uneven poet, Thomas Flatman (1635–1688), whose funereal, autumnal vein anticipates Young. Flatman was inserted by Rochester in his list of enemies. 20 Elkanah Settle (1648–1724), best known for his much admired The Empress of Morocco, but for many an example of the degeneration of taste at the court of Charles
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Dryden. The poem takes the form of a gallery of portraits, painted from stationary, not moving, models, much like the ones Chaucer created in the Prologue to his Canterbury Tales. In this same year of 1682, the Whigs had a medal struck to celebrate the acquittal of Shaftesbury, and Dryden responded with The Medal to an attack by Shadwell. Dryden’s jeremiad is full of obscure, impenetrable prophecies dominated by the image of a loathsome pestilence.21 3. Mac Flecknoe, an attack on the above-mentioned Shadwell, published in 1682 (but probably written earlier), is, in my opinion, the most enjoyable, effective, biting satire penned by Dryden, weighed down though it is by too many topical allusions that require notes to be appreciated (some references are still not understood today). This is the problem with all satires, whose darts pierce the living flesh of its victims, but become blunted by the passing of time. In the 1680s Dryden carried out a drastic purge of the contemporary literary canon: in a solemn ceremony and public denunciation, he weeded out the unworthy, the presumptuous, the infiltrators, and established an academy for the chosen few, nominated by Dryden himself. Mac Flecknoe is this very ceremony, this rite, this act of expulsion. Shadwell, as we shall see later, was a mediocre author who boasted of being the true heir of Jonson. In spite of this, he and Dryden got on well enough together, until something happened, we don’t know what, that infuriated Dryden, and out he came with this entertaining parody.22 Dryden begins with a statement – or epigram, or aphorism – that reverses his idea of the cyclical return and continuous evolution of history: ‘All humane things are subject to decay’, and when fate summons, all monarchs, both literal II. He specialized in ‘lurid’ scenes – oneiric seduction, ghosts that return to make love to the living (some such scene is also found in Ford), cruelty and torture. 21 Shaftesbury features among the characters of Dryden’s ‘masque’, Albion and Albanius (1680) – though in his Preface Dryden does not use the term – with devil’s wings and snakes coiled round his body, and lots of ‘fanatical rebel heads’ that suck the poison that flows like a spring from his side. This was a clear allegory of recent events, with the chromatic opposition between albus (white), and the black of the Puritans and those who created mischief by supporting separatism. 22 Unless the last straw was Shadwell’s appreciation of The Rehearsal, which, as said above (§ 50.3), satirized Dryden.
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and literary, must obey. It is also true that, in order to strike at his real target, Dryden chooses an intermediary, and thus kills two poets with one parody. The tirade against Shadwell is placed in the mouth of another poetaster, Flecknoe, an Irishman, who was visited in Rome by Marvell and mocked by him in a satire.23 Flecknoe was a man in whom presumption was second only to poetic incompetence. Self-assured and never before so fluent, Dryden attributes to the dying Flecknoe, prince and monarch – not of wit, but of nonsense – the choice of his successor: in an imaginary speech Dryden has him pick the poet that resembles him most – Shadwell. There is a lot of stupidity around but, brilliantly, ‘Shadwell never deviates into sense’. The biblical parody is at hand, and Flecknoe uses it, calling himself John the Baptist, whose mission is to announce the coming of one greater than he. Here the style of the poet behind the scenes takes on, parodistically, biblical tones and rhythms, with an abundance of archaic words and phrases. Flecknoe is the herald of the investiture and ennoblement of Shadwell. A little more than a third of the way through the poem, the satire has turned into a refined play of quotations and references, more or less overt, to Shadwell’s own plays, and others that similarly have sunk so far into obscurity as to be practically meaningless to the modern reader. Shadwell’s apotheosis is veined by imperceptible bathos, and subverted by subtle mockery. So, to avoid misunderstandings, Dryden divests Mac Flecknoe of overly obscure or esoteric allusions, which might be misconstrued – taken ‘seriously’, that is, not ironically – and speaks literally. Out of the three parts, the second, diatonically, is in the first person, with the poet’s voice giving a description of a school for actors covered in ridicule and filth, buried under scatological allusions and references to obscene practices. For the second time, Dryden mentions Augustus ironically, reminding readers that the ancient name of London was Augusta, a name sullied by Shadwell. This cradle of Shadwellian art, the acting school, borders on places of pollution and vice, images from a degraded dramatic tradition that must be marginalized. It is not the tradition of the Fletchers, but only of second-rate players and clowns, suitable companions for such
23
§ 51.3.
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low creatures as Shadwell. The third moment is the oneiric coronation of Shadwell in the streets of London, littered with pages torn from the publications of his peers: ‘Martyrs of pies, and reliques of the bum’.24 Mac Flecknoe hands over to his successor the symbols of his office, amongst which a tankard of beer (Shadwell was something of a drinker). The address closes with Mac Flecknoe’s augural greetings to his successor, whose mission is to instruct posterity in ignorance. Dryden promotes some militant playwrights, like Etherege, but expels others. The biblical symbolism returns in the last lines in the form of a peremptory seal, because, like Elijah, Mac Flecknoe sinks into a hole and leaves his mantle to his rightful heir. 4. Religio Laici (1682), the title of which clearly echoes Browne’s Religio Medici, deals with the relationship between Anglicans and Presbyterians. Another example of the militant Dryden, this verse pamphlet was occasioned by the publication of the English translation of the French theologian Richard Simon’s Critical History of the Old Testament, in which the author, seeing that the Bible could not be considered infallible, maintained the advisability of submitting to the ecclesiastical authority in matters of interpretation. This, of course, was unacceptable for a Protestant. Confutation of the opponent does not proceed through an amalgam of sensibility and intellect, as in Donne. As a legislator, Dryden seeks to establish parameters in religion, as in literature, and to declare certain propositions erroneous. His position is one of orthodox Anglicanism, according to which faith helps and succours reason; in short, revelation of the divine plan of creation. Dryden uses the heroic couplet to discuss subjects which are more suited to the medium of prose. He forces the poetic medium, risking failure, and attempts to prove that the couplet is the most pliant of all poetic metres. However, Dryden poses the problem of a Church that represents an authority for him too. For the moment, he rejects the hypothesis, but he reflects on it. The position he arrives at is one of centrality: the Bible is 24 That is, paper to wrap or cook pies, or toilet paper. Dryden plays on the fact that ‘shit and ‘Shadwell’ begin with the same consonantal sound. The parallel is activated whenever he mentions the name of his rival, which, conventionally, is contracted to ‘Sh–’. The scatological isotopy is closed at the end, with other subtle inferences based on phonological dissemination.
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the only source for the working out of one’s faith, but freedom of interpretation has led to a plethora of sects. So all extremism is to be avoided. The note is one of resistance against change and an invitation to quietism. The Hind and the Panther (1687) centres on the equation between the Catholic Church as a hind, and the Anglican as a Panther. Seven other characters on the scene are portrayed as various animals of the forest. Abstract theology and doctrine are mixed with fable and allegory, unlike in Religio Laici. Dryden continued his theological journey with the daring and ambitious choice of a medium that was not easily bent to fit the contents. The fine description of the hind, together with those of the other allegorical animals, soon gives way to a dissertation on the limits of reason, the necessity of faith and the importance of ecclesiastical tradition. Once again, Dryden does not indulge in illusion, and soon lifts the allegorical veil. He suspends the vehicle, to dedicate himself to the tenor in a tightly controlled game. This exuberant, intoxicated poem, though couched in brilliant formalized terms, is clearly a precursor of Browning’s interminable religious monologues, which often contain apparently simple frames and metaphorical vehicles. There is no lack of cutting satirical or descriptive verse, but it is stifled by theological discourse and a bewildering multiplicity of examples, definitions, and split hairs. In the final analysis, Dryden expresses complete confidence in the Pope and the councils, and rejects the possibility of free interpretation by the individual. The Church acts as censor and custodian of the correct interpretation, and corresponds to that uniforming agency that Dryden had always sought. There is, of course, total correspondence with the political vision of a constitutional monarchy. 5. With the ode on the death of Anne Killigrew, and another on the minor poet John Oldham, Dryden returns to the elegiac genre. Though these elegies display some slight hints of emotion, and the poet’s public voice seems to falter and break with grief, they are still products of the poetic legislator: in the poem for Oldham it is difficult not to hear a note of arrogance when the deceased poet is graciously admitted to the select Olympus, Dryden having discovered belatedly that he is ‘in the same poetic mould with mine’. He opens the gates to Oldham and promotes him there and then. Yet Oldham was lacking something too! Two assumptions are celebrated in ‘Anne Killigrew’: the heavenly one of the deceased into the
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family of singers of hymns and her admittance to the earthly sisterhood of famous painters and poets. The poem also presents clearly defined images inspired by Killigrew’s exceptional, miraculous birth. The fourth of its Pindaric stanzas even contains the expected negative hyperbole: the whole company of elected poets has been devalued in proportion to the immaculate purity of the female poet. Dryden includes himself in the number of these devalued poets. There is a return here of the rhyme ‘born / adorn’25 which for Dryden always indicates artistic excellence. In the seventh stanza the angels, hearing Anne’s divine music, mistake earth for heaven. Dryden’s ode to St Cecilia, set to music by Purcell, celebrates the power of music, which accompanied the Creation, awaking nature from death, and finally making man the supreme example of the harmony that subdues and dominates chaos. Music contains the numinous, as confirmed by the case of Jubal; each of the various instruments arouses a different emotion (Dryden subscribes to the semantic theory of music, which also assigns meanings to each instrument and tone colour). ‘Alexander’s Feast’26 is, instead, a narrative cantata, and a series of mythological scenes conjured up for the emperor by the sound of music, as if suggesting to the composer instrumentation and orchestration. Dionysian images are followed by that of Darius lying bleeding and defeated. Throughout, music, played by Timotheus, excites or calms the king. § 52. Lee Like Dryden, a student of Cambridge, the son of an eminent ecclesiastic (first Presbyterian, then monarchist), Nathaniel Lee (ca. 1653–1692) at an early age gave signs of mental instability, and died à la Marlowe, in a tavern brawl. A second version of his death has him escaping from Bedlam, and dying of cold. According to a third legend, he was run over by a coach and killed. A would-be actor – he had the physique du rôle and the voice as well – he was handicapped by stage fright. A bohemian alcoholic, he wrote, while still very young, seven tragedies, and only one 25 26
In his lines on Milton (§ 47.2) great poets are ‘born to adorn’. First set to music by the almost unknown Giovanni Battista Draghi, and much later by Handel.
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comedy. His first play, written when he was just over twenty, was Nero (1674), followed by Sophonisba (1675) and Gloriana (1676). The subject of his first play speaks volumes, but so does Gloriana, which does not refer to the Elizabethan epithet used for the queen, but draws a scandalous and desecrating picture of the Roman world, while at the same time suggesting an audacious parallel between the corrupt, spineless court of Augustus and that of Charles II. Lee’s plays are full of references, some veiled, others explicit, to contemporary politics. Dissolute, delirious kings on the verge of collapse became his speciality; his pessimism prevented him from lighting upon any alternative to despotic power and the determinism of emotions. After Hannibal, Massinissa and Alexander, it was the turn of Constantine to attract his attention. In this, his last work (Constantine the Great, 1683), the Roman emperor steps back at the last minute from the abyss of madness, and escapes from the conspiracies of the wicked counsellor, Arius. The Rival Queens (1677) was a great success at the time, and was still being performed well into the nineteenth century. The ‘rival queens’,1 who engage in high tension verbal exchanges marked by paroxysms of hyperbole, are the concubine, Roxana, and the queen consort, Statira. The former, a raging, bloodthirsty version of abandoned Dido, stabs to death the legitimate queen of Alexander, whose empire is tottering, undermined by favouritism, corruption and immorality, so that in the end he is poisoned by the conspirators. Semandra, in Mithridates (acted 1678), arouses the lust of the king of Pontus. Starting from the titles, an almost Marlovian tragic heroism is discernible, as well as reminiscences of the bloodier of the Elizabethan tragedies (there are traces of Marlowe in some of Dryden’s tragedies, too). Ipso facto Lee shows that he is willing and able to go back and exhume the old Senecan theatre.2 After using the heroic couplet he, like Dryden, wisely
1 2
An Alexander the Great philanderer but capable of keeping control of his erotic urges had already been presented by Lyly in his comedy, Campapse. The rejection of the aesthetics of Dryden’s heroic play is evinced by a growing fatalistic determinism, which leaves tyrants to their own devices, and condemns the righteous to passiveness. The abolition of poetic justice and of the optimistic epilogue also contributed to the demise of the form. Lee’s plays often end, like Webster’s, in a bloodbath.
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reverted to the master metre of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, blank verse. He collaborated with Dryden in Oedipus (1769), which some have found to be cold and artificial, while others call it a masterpiece,3 and in The Duke of Guise. Among the subjects of other plays of bloodshed are the massacre of St Bartholomew (like Marlowe),4 Cesare Borgia and Theodosius. The play by Madame de Lafayette, Princesse de Clèves, was revolutionized (The Princesse of Cleve, perhaps 1681), Nemours becoming a fashionable rake and possible stand-in for Rochester.5 The potential for drama and poetry offered by the Popish Plot and the exclusion of Monmouth from the throne can be seen in Lee’s Brutus (1680). The noble Roman – in one of the best examples of the heroic dilemma – sacrifices his children on the altar of the republican cause. With The Duke of Guise (1682) Lee returned to the Tory play, casting some doubts on Dryden’s ‘unbending’ consistence. 2. Unlike other playwrights who are better read than performed, Lee has always been at his most effective on the stage, as is proved by his longlasting place in theatrical repertoires (longer than Dryden). This has led to two differing assessments of his art: one positive, a revaluation; the other negative, branding him as an artificial, technically incompetent playwright. In fact, the commercial success of his plays, and those of Thomas Southerne,6 are, according to this school of thought, proof of the abysmal level of English tragedy at the time. The charges levelled are the usual ones: lack of dramatic continuity, the chiaroscuro quality of the text, with brilliant sequences, interventions and dialogues mixed in a jumble with others of very poor quality; the far-fetched plots punctuated by sudden, 3 4 5 6
For similar opposing interpretations, cf. C. Visser, in MAR, vol. II, 242, and the introduction to the Italian translation of the play, ed. M. Sestito, Venezia 2008. For obvious political reasons, The Massacre at Paris was blocked by censorship for ten years, and was not performed until 1689. SEL, 143–4. Thomas Southerne (1660–1746), Irish by birth, studied at the Inner Temple. He was a prolific author of comedies of the age of Queen Anne. Worthy of note are The Fatal Marriage and, above all, Oroonoko (1696), a romantic dramatization of Aphra Behn’s novel of the same name (§ 71.2). Southerne’s play differs from the original in the greater emphasis placed on the governor’s love for Imoinda, the daughter of a white European. Oroonoko commits suicide.
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meaningless twists; above all, the pervasive ‘hothouse’ atmosphere, and a dramatic language that is kept at the very highest pitch of exaltation and hysteria. Despite all this, many quotations from Lee’s works have become familiar – single lines, as if engraved in marble – thanks also to the metrical reinforcement provided by blank verse, as opposed to the heroic couplet, which is unsuited to the expression of wild, uncontrolled emotion. At a guess, anyone who reads Lee speculates and finds that he might become a cult author – like that of The Revenger’s Tragedy – destined to delight the likes of Swinburne, and, as a consequence, of Mario Praz too. After all, these plays written by a madman traversed by genius, exude sadism and masochism. Exaggerated, perverted, bloodthirsty, obsessed with incest, they are the natural forebears of the ‘Romantic Agony’.7 § 53. Otway Like other, less gifted, writers amongst whom Lee, Thomas Otway (1652–1685) throws on the table of late seventeenth-century drama a card which had never or only rarely been played. This is the adaptation of Shakespeare or other Jacobean authors, in blank verse – in itself no novelty – but quite unlike Dryden’s bombastic heroic genre, while remaining a tragedy of dilemmas. This kind of play is best described by the adjective ‘intimistic’. This revival was achieved by placing at the centre of the tragedy, not the subject of uncontrollable lust or adultery, and unscrupulous suitors who rape virgins before the wedding ceremony, but the happily married couple, with the devoted husband a slave to his wife, a paradigm of integrity and fidelity, and the chaste wife who would never even dream of betraying her husband. Naturally, a villain is at hand to put this exemplary display of chastity to the test; or else a former lover, while respecting her innocence,
7
For the parallel Lee-Otway-Swinburne cf. SSI, vol. I, 165. Not surprisingly, the essay containing these observations (for bibliographical details, cf. above, § 50.1 n. 14) is indicated as an ‘integration’ to Praz’s The Romantic Agony. Praz appears to follow very closely R. Ham, Otway and Lee, New Haven, CT 1931. With regard to Lee as yet another late Elizabethan dramatist, obsessed with the figure of the Machiavellian villain – and with the ‘gloomy Italian palace’ made fashionable by another Lee, Vernon – cf. PMI, 149, 377.
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tries desperately to satisfy a romantic, chivalric passion (not excluding the possibility of some sexual satisfaction), but in the end remains a Platonic adorer of the loved one, and chooses exile or death as the only solution of the dilemma. In another case, the model husband falls into a trap he himself has laid: he allows himself to be talked into a conspiracy to overthrow the government, but withdraws for love of his wife. The end of the play coincides almost always with a dramatic stalemate, whereby the couple must accept the consequences of the dilemma, and either die or go mad. A key scene in Otway, one that becomes his trademark, is when the two lovers reminisce and mourn past happiness, and in the very slow build-up to inevitable death exchange heart-wrenching avowals of eternal love in the life to come. In all of this, Otway seems to lean back towards Shakespeare (his chaste brides are all copies of Desdemona, Imogen, Hermione, even Juliet) by way of Ford, and grafting Ford onto Shakespeare. Before Otway, only Ford had written of married love in such delicate, tender tones; only Ford had dipped into the same repertoire of chaste, diaphanous images – like those of the sacrificial lamb or dove – to express the painful, draining languor of love.1 The stoic heroism of a Brutus, Catiline or Caesar is inversely evoked by Otway’s male protagonists, who bluster and boast but soon collapse, while the women are strong, and make the men bend the knee to them in obeisance. This picture might have been lifted straight from Otway’s life: life and art as communicating chambers. Otway was not, and could not be, a powerful tragedian, and in fact critics find no power in him, but they do find empathy and understanding. He is a subjective dramatist, not one of those who remain imperturbably behind the scenes. The son of an Anglican priest, he left Oxford without a degree, and went to London, where he took to acting despite suffering from stage fright. His writing for the theatre dates from when he was a mere twenty-three years
1
The comparison between Otway and Ford is made, for example, by B. Dobrée, ‘Thomas Otway’, in Restoration Tragedy 1660–1720, Oxford 1929, 132–48, with reference to the comic scenes in the tragedies, and to the tragedies themselves (138, 142). However, Otway has never been suspected of being a crypto-Catholic, as one might suppose from his evident belief in eternal life, and the extenuated mysticism of his female protagonists.
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old. His story seems, and is, a carbon copy of Nathaniel Lee’s: a short, sad life made more tragic by his love for the famous and coquettish actress, Elizabeth Barry, who bore his child but preferred Rochester. Six letters collected after his death have survived,2 and might provide the key to a tragedy that turns obsessively on morbid married love which is unceasing and therefore destructive. Psychotic, nomadic, a veteran soldier, a translator, anguished and existentialist, Otway might well have died in the same legendary circumstances as Marlowe and Lee – poverty, starvation, revenge for the murder of a friend. 2. Shakespeare was, by the end of the 1670s, so far in the past that he could be parodied. Indeed Dryden thought he should be. Otway’s two most important plays are a farrago of Shakespearean moments and motives, like the weakening of marital fidelity, the baleful consequences of remorse, or the poisonous working of jealousy. Significantly, one of his minor plays combines a story from Plutarch, the civil war between Marius and Sulla, with the transposition of the tragic love of Romeo and Juliet. I have already indicated the source figures for the female characters; Otway’s husbands vaguely resemble Othello, or Coriolanus, Brutus or Macbeth, but they are lesser, watered-down versions of their Shakespearean originals. As far as dimensions go, too, Otway reduces and compresses his source: his plays are brief and bare; the acts contain not many scenes; the dramatis personae are few. There is unity of action, and therefore no subplot. In terms of construction, dialogues alternate with soliloquies, the latter having both a psychological and informative function, such as when the hero announces his intentions, analyses his state of mind, remembers, dreams and imagines. Ward and Hazlitt considered Otway the greatest English dramatist after Shakespeare and up to Shelley. However, already in the eighteenth century, he was judged to be better in the reading than in the performing. Saintsbury concurred, accusing Otway of a ‘failure on the literary side’.3 Later, Praz
2 3
They can be found in an appendix to four plays by Otway, ed. R. Noel, London 1888. All later, collected editions are replaced by that edited by J. C. Ghosh, 2 vols, Oxford 1932. SAI, 500–1.
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put him on a par with Nathaniel Lee,4 and overstated the anticipations of Decadent Romanticism in the languid masochistic sensibility of his women. The Soldier’s Fortune (1680) is the most read, and therefore most famous, of Otway’s comedies, which, in the light of what I have just said, borders on the enigmatic: how could such a chaste and delicate writer of tragedies turn out such obscene and vulgar work as this? Mimicking quite blatantly Etherege, Otway tells the story of a soldier just home from the war in the Low Countries, who, using the booby as a go-between, cuckolds the husband of his childhood sweetheart, locked in a loveless marriage. The only explanation is that Otway the tragedian had to bow to the demands of the market, but simply was no good at writing comedies.5 3. Otway debuted by translating, or plagiarizing, Racine and Molière and dramas on Greek or Roman subjects. In 1678 he took part in the Dutch campaign, and published his first comedy. There followed the adaptation, or rather, the pastiche of Romeo and Juliet, encapsulated, as we have seen, in the account of the civil war between Marius and Sulla (Caius Marius); but his best work, richest in anticipations, before 1680, is Don Carlos (1676). On principle, a tragedy could not be contemporary, but from now on Otway will place his stories in a series of foreign courts where the political events of the time (including, of course, the Popish Plot and the Exclusion crisis) are present though masked in different guise. In perspective, this is a play in Drydenian couplets, and like Dryden, Otway too was to realize before long the greater agility of blank verse. The portrayal of the court, or the government, is always negative, and frankness and hypocrisy battle it out in a small arena. Anyone who accuses Otway of being an out-and-out Tory, or of siding with the Stuarts, is forgetting the weakness of King Philip, or the corruption of the Venetian senators, even taking into account the determination of Acasto and the incompetence of the conspirators. In Don Carlos the Shakespearean skeleton is Othello and Iago is Gomez who spreads the 4 5
Cf. the essay quoted in § 50.1 n. 14. The continuation of the comedy (The Atheist, also the subtitle of Shadwell’s The Libertine) has been found metadramatic, that is to say, a demonstration of the fragility, indeed futility, of the shotgun weddings that end libertine plays from Etherege onwards. The recent revaluation of Otway’s comedies is unconvincing.
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suspicion of the queen’s infidelity in the mind of the king of Spain, Philip II. The queen is a kind of Gertrude burning with passion, subsequently tamed, for the king’s son, Don Carlos, from whom she has been taken.6 It is impossible for the queen, and especially for Don Carlos, to repress this love. The king sees the awful spectre of incest, and banishes his son, despite the protests of Carlos and the queen that their love is innocent and Platonic. In the farewell scene Otway succeeds in communicating the intense suffering of two innocent but passionate souls, competing in the declarations of mutual devotion. Don Carlos shifts towards the revenge play transposed to relatively recent times, when the king loses his head and wants to eliminate the alleged adulteress and his son. Resembling Desdemona more and more, the queen learns she has been poisoned by the king, who has entered her chamber during the night, at first in disguise and then openly revealing his identity. The king has lost his reason as a result of the slanderous gossip spread by the Duchess of Eboli, who has been spurned by Carlos. By now it is too late to prevent the deaths of the two lovers, deaths which are slow and drawn-out: the poisoned queen continues to yearn for her ascent to heaven, while Carlos lies dying through loss of blood. The king wrings his hands in bitter repentance. It is the final sublimation. Not only Ford, but Crashaw too is echoed in the exalted tones of Baroque mysticism with which he hymns the saints of his Church. 4. The Orphan (1680), a slight chamber play, presents, in a Bohemian setting, prudently far from England, two twin brothers in love with the same woman, Monimia, a ward of their father’s. One of the brothers, Polydore, swaps places with the other, Castalio, in the marriage bed on their first night, and the real husband is turned away by the woman when he arrives. It sounds like a parody of Chaucer or Shakespeare. The Palamon and Arcite whose friendship was destroyed by their love for Emilia, were not brothers, but cousins. In reality, it is not a case of cold, deliberate, Machiavellian adultery, but a misunderstanding: Polydore did not know that Monimia had just married his brother in secret, and Monimia was unaware that the man who had lain with her during the night was not her husband, but his
6
Or it is as if Claudius were in love with Ophelia (SEL, 79).
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brother. Vaguely Oedipal, Polydore realizes he has seduced his sister-in-law. All three die, crushed by the weight of their errors and remorse. In Venice Preserv’d7 (1682), the only play by Otway still regularly performed in theatres round the world, Jaffier hatches a plot in Venice with his friend Pierre to overthrow the ducal regime, but his wife, Belvidera, persuades him to give himself up. The Senate’s promise to spare the conspirators is broken, and Pierre has Jaffier stab him to death on the scaffold. Jaffier then commits suicide. As in Macbeth, the epilogue centres on Belvidera besieged by the bleeding ghosts of her victims. One of the subplots, quite sketchy, but inserted by command of Charles II (who had also urged Dryden to write a poem with the same aim),8 contains explicit allusions to the Popish Plot of 1678 in the form of a senator, Antonio (representing the Earl of Shaftesbury) in a famous scene – Beckettian or Ionescan ante litteram – in which he pretends to be a yelping dog being roundly kicked by the courtesan, Aquilina. 5. Otway’s Shakespearean Venice is once again that of Othello. He omits the courtship and presents the already happily married couple, whose only problem is the opposition of the crusty old father-in-law. Otway perhaps portrayed himself in Jaffier, because this character is not only a fragile romantic, but also a hesitating anti-hero, plagued by bouts of panic. Only Pierre has a clear, unclouded political conscience (though it springs from a private grudge) and sounds like Shakespeare’s Ulysses describing the unhinged world. The plot into which Jaffier is drawn without conviction and real consent, is manoeuvred and controlled by the Spanish and the English, and takes place at night. At the beginning of Act III, the classic Otway dilemma is how much personal ties count compared with the demands of a political action aimed at bringing about a fairer society. For reasons of dramatic time and place, Jaffier must dissociate himself immediately from the plot, since a conspirator has attempted, during the night, to offend the honour of his wife. Wifely honour is more important than the claims of politics, which in any case are confused and presumptuous. Once again, Belvidera wields the power to enslave typical of Otway’s women, while Jaffier exemplifies the congenital weakness of the male. Immediately 7 8
Based on a French text by the Abbé de Saint-Réal. § 51.2.
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after, almost masochistically, Jaffier is ready to undergo all possible forms of punishment to compensate the conspirators for his betrayal. The final act closes with a repetition of Otway’s recurrent scene of the long farewell of the two lovers. § 54. Etherege It is common practice to speak of the ‘famous foursome’ of Restoration comedy, and there is general agreement that the founder of its best-known genre, the comedy of manners, is Sir George Etherege (1634–1691).1 Of course, one should remember the forerunners, first among whom is the often forgotten James Shirley, some of whose plays are equal in spirit and form, if not superior to those of Etherege and his followers. Dryden, too, contributed to the genre, but after Etherege, with Marriage à la Mode. Etherege was no great builder of plots; his great merit lies however in having given the world a number of proverbial characters that have taken their place among the immortals of English comedy: Frollick, Dorimant, Sir Fopling Flutter, Harriet Woodvill – not exactly Falstaffs, but on a par with Shakespeare’s Malvolio, Benedick or Beatrice. Etherege creates a whole new race of characters. Gone are the Jonsonian humours, replaced by real individuals constituting a visible subclass: fops and dandies, assertive ladies, the usual fools, each identified by a particular idiolect. His forte is dialogue, vivid and spirited, in part taken from Molière, in part directly from the streets and salons of the London of his time. Dryden was right: Etherege marks the birth of English dramatic prose. Unlike Dryden, who always sets his plays in exotic places, Etherege’s always take place in London. Can it be said of Etherege that castigat ridendo mores? His contemporaries called him ‘sweet’ and ‘jovial’, therefore innocuous and given to laughter. The rake, Dorimant, appears to repent at the end of his play, but it might be said that Etherege is a realist who limits himself to recording the reality he sees, but also that, ambiguously, his plays are a justification of his own life style and that of the court of which he was part, together with people like Sedley and, especially, Rochester. Faced with the hypocrisy of the self-righteous, the rake’s 1
A number of plays, among them the first theatrical work written by Wycherley, paraphrased the title of Etherege’s Love in a Tub.
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moral duty is to intervene; libertinism is a form of independence, autonomy and freedom. This is a charge of immorality, or amorality, that conditions, compromises and colours the, in general favourable, reception of Etherege up to the end of the nineteenth century. That he wrote only three plays is due, on the one hand, to his laziness, of which he was proud, and on the other, to the fact that he, like Suckling, was a high-class amateur.2 He was less prolific than others because he did not have to write for his supper. He became a diplomat, bringing grace to a profession that had not boasted a man of letters for many years, and spent long periods abroad, where he could write, if he wished, but could not have his plays performed; and comedies must not be left of the shelf to gather dust, but be transferred, piping hot, to the stage. In these foreign missions (France, Constantinople, Regensburg and, perhaps, Sweden) he scandalized the locals with his excesses in eating and drinking, his philandering, and other inappropriate behaviour. These experiences gave rise to a series of letters, and memoirs full of nostalgia and boredom, read in manuscript and first appreciated by Gosse.3 A few insignificant Cavalier-style poems complete his non-dramatic works. 2. Born outside London, and perhaps without a university education, Etherege entered the Inns of Court, a formidable nursery of theatrical talent. He certainly joined his father in Paris at the court in exile of Henrietta Maria, where he saw performances of Molière’s plays. Back in England after the Restoration, he became part of a company of rakes who lived their lives under the banner of levity and licence. At the not young age of forty-three Etherege, with other companions, was involved in a fight in Epsom which ended in a death. He married a rich heiress and was made a knight. In the early 1680s he left Regensburg for Paris, where he joined James II. This has led to conjectures that he may have become a Jacobite (documents kept in the Catholic convent of Regensburg are said to be proof of his conversion). He died in Paris. Four years separate his first from his second play, and eight more years were to pass before the third was ready for the stage. On account of this long gestation, there are clear signs of development in his trio of plays. The Comical Revenge: 2 3
The poet, Suckling, is referred to once by Dorimant, who more often speaks of Waller. The so-called Letterbook, edited by S. Rosenfeld, and published at Oxford in 1928.
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or Love in a Tub (1664) is the debut of a thirty-year-old: the author obviously found it difficult to co-ordinate all of four plots representing four social classes. The story involving the rake, Frollick, and his wooing of a widow, acts as a trait d’union. It is a wide-angle of the unsuspected side of Cromwell’s England (unambiguous allusions indicate that the time of the actions is before 1660). Ordinary people and the well-to-do, too, continue doing what they had done before – having a good time – and humanity is divided into the shrewd and the suckers. It is true that character types in comedy are ageless, and do not get old, but Etherege seems, in this first attempt, to be less than fresh, retailing worn clichés of city life. The search for a desirable wife (or husband), the con tricks, the disguises, the roles (the fop, the blushing maid, the widow, the sturdy captain, the flatterer, the couple of swindlers), and the episodes of knockabout farce,4 together with an elementary semantics of names,5 is all material previously used by Middleton, Jonson, Marston, even Heywood, all of them city playwrights. The valet Dufoy’s mishmash of French and English, an old joke that goes back to Dekker and, beyond, to Shakespeare, is funny, but not for long. The compartmentalization of the plots translates however into a continuous change of dramatic pace and metre, from couplets to extremely colloquial prose, with deliberately strident parodic effects. She Wou’d if She Cou’d (1668), entirely in prose, and much more unitary, has the further merit of having inside and outdoor scenes, as in some ground breaking comedies by Shirley, though the scenes in the gardens and parks of the Change are not particular vivid or realistic. The comedy is based on the obstinate, unrealistic, and therefore funny, attempts by a wealthy couple, the Cockwoods, from out of town, to satisfy their respective erotic appetites during their stay in London. They pretend to be fond of one another, but secretly set about to reach their objectives. The husband frequents pimps and prostitutes in taverns and other places, even when his wife, to punish him for his excesses, 4 5
The revenge of the title is that of the English servants against the supercilious French valet, Dufoy, who, since he has syphilis, is thrust into a special tub used for treating the ‘French disease’. The names of Frollick and Cully contain quite evident scurrilous associations in French and Italian.
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hides his clothes, forcing him to wear some ridiculous makeshift substitutes. At the same time, the two gallants the lady turns to for ‘satisfaction’ are playing a part, and would much rather ensnare two pert young girls who are playing hard to get. Cockwood is a chronic drunk; his wife nags him and punishes him, but, at bottom, puts up with him, making a virtue of necessity, and, reciting the part of the honoured wife, is on the same moral level as her husband. High farce, or melodrama, is reached when husband and wife find themselves at the same rendezvous to consummate their erotic chase. Cockwood, on being discovered, is forced to cover his head with ashes and beg his wife for forgiveness. He keeps on repeating that he is mortified, but as soon as the waters are calm, he sets about planning other ways and means for betraying his wife. Lady Cockwood’s adulteries, too, are always put off, and fail because of a series of problems. She is the first to come to her senses and try not be a slave to her lust, concentrating, instead, on unmasking the two-timing gallant. Just before the end of the play, the unmasker is about to be unmasked herself, and only manages to save herself by the skin of her teeth. The epilogue presents a precarious equilibrium, and leaves open many possible solutions. Etherege’s microcosm is ruled by determinism, a repeating mechanism that grinds both rake and mate. In the end, Lady Cockwood has only schemed to capture the second of the two gallants once she has understood the first one has flown the nest. It is a paradox that the two gallants promise to become the servants of the two sisters they have been courting, provided they agree to marry them. For the moment the two Cockwoods call a truce: but tomorrow? 3. The Man of Mode (1676) mirrors one particular aspect of the life of the time, the society of gallants whose sphere of action has come down to the practice of sexual promiscuity, with, as an accompaniment or sometimes substitute, gossip, banter and duels of wit between the sexes. As in Dryden, but more so, the real people behind the invented characters were easily identifiable by the contemporary audience, of which Etherege was one.6 The documentary value of the play, then, is enormous; it is a record
6
For the identifications of fictitious names see for instance the list given by V. Papetti in her excellent edition of the comedy, Milano 1993, 38–9.
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of late seventeenth-century customs and habits. It opens a window on a world symbolized and dominated by the rake, and provides a cursory, fleeting description of the rest of the society. The scene is not occupied totally by nobles and wealthy merchants; there are also valets, chairmen, prostitutes, ladies’ companions, menservants and maidservants, who obediently carry out the orders of masters who treat them without the least consideration. Right from the opening scene, in medias res, the arrival in Dorimant’s dressing-room of an orange-seller and a shoemaker introduces the second of the two social poles (nobility and labour). Dorimant addresses them in a brutal, bantering manner. The two consecutive scenes are not flattering in their portrayal of an irresponsible exploitation of the lower classes. These representatives of the working class are types, not individuals, and so are called by the name of their trade; abused by their masters, they are however not slow in answering back and intervene one after the other, with the slightest coordination of the voices: theirs is a suspended freedom of speech. Harriet Woodvill’s reason for coming to London is a mystery, or maybe an admission of the tentacular grip the city has on her straitlaced, old-fashioned mother. ‘Wood’ is an element of the surname of the married couple of She Wou’d if She Cou’d; now, a character that embodies the frivolities of the city bears a name in which is embedded the element ‘town’. At the end of the play, Harriet is resigned to going back to the country, to the boring life she led before she experienced the glamour and glitter of London. The second act is interlocutory, but is interesting for the great number of references, of great value for an understanding of English society in the decade 1670–1680: card games, pastimes, reading books, manuals, books of etiquette, and guides to good conversation. Sir Fopling is extraneous to the plot, enters late on in the play and is a kind of ornament. He is the typical Frenchified fop, slow thinking, and possessed of very thin-spread wit. He is a useful pawn for Dorimant in his plan to make his mistress, Loveit, burn with jealousy. True wit is a precious, even, rare, commodity, and not many characters can boast of it. The dialogue is laced with barbs and boutades that are so subtle that the reader has to pause and think in order to understand things that would have been immediately clear to the contemporary audience. Whole scenes are masterpieces of the art of verbal fencing, with the various characters vying in a non-stop sequence of thrusts and parries.
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4. In the previous play we saw an anticipatory semantics of names: a formalist debauchee was called Rakehell. Hogarth was fifty years in the future from Etherege, but The Man of Mode is a ‘Rake’s Progress’ in miniature, or at least ‘a day in the life of a rake’: early morning, enter in dressing gown and slippers; after breakfast and toilette, exit with his henchman, who is also his mediator, called Medley.7 His business today, like every day, is to ‘make a conquest’, or at least plan one. After the conquest, he abandons his prey in order to have the freedom to hunt again: a perfect example of the moral code of the role. With his mistresses, whom he strings along all at the same time, Dorimant implements the erotic policies of Don Juan: he sets one against the other when he wants to get rid of them. Naturally, Bellinda makes Loveit furious by retailing the rumour that Dorimant has been flirting with a fair, masked wench at the theatre. Dorimant explains: ‘We are not masters of our own affections, our inclinations daily alter […] human frailty will have it so’. If Waller is always on his lips, it is because he shares his philosophy, which is, if adorned with more maxims, the muchcelebrated carpe diem. Are there any honest people left in the world? Or in the city? Everything is relative, of course, and a few examples are to be found, but even they are tainted with compromise. Harry Bellair contemplates getting married and saying farewell to his libertine past – obviously a contradiction –, but his father attempts to lay his lewd hands on Emilia, the chaste betrothed of Harry. Harriet Woodvill seems not to be cowed by falsity; she protests and fights in the name of old, authentic values. She considers her rural exile a tomb, and declaims against it. These two authentic characters, Harriet and Harry, can lend one another support, hence the famous scene of the pretended marriage – a drawing room game, a fiction, in which everyone plays a part. Then, the coup de foudre: Harriet has just defamed Dorimant and Dorimant unmasks her and penetrates her armour of reticence. No doubt an unlikely scene, a too sudden, too unexpected rapprochement, but the play would die without a minimum of overlapping or yielding between the two opposing moral positions. It is no coincidence that the action takes place in Hyde Park, the scene of the 7
Easily identifiable as Sedley. It is commonly accepted that Dorimant = Rochester and Fopling = Etherege himself, and that the latter is therefore a benevolent self-portrait.
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glorious hullaballoo in Shirley’s Hyde Park, with the same merry-go-round of characters coming on and going off stage, pronouncing odd lines and bits of sentences. In the park, Dorimant has persuaded Fopling to court Loveit. He is helped in his plan by the very woman he, Dorimant, wishes to seduce, Bellinda. The hullaballoo is repeated in Act IV, the scene of the ball at the residence of Mrs Woodvill, the extoller of solid, traditional values. Here, Dorimant deliberately leads Harriet on; she resists, but not too much. This is part of a rapid succession of scenes with dialogues full of non sequiturs, that tell us much of contemporary society. Act V begins with a furious quarrel between the two neurotic mistresses that have been left by the same man, Dorimant, who ends up by saying a definitive goodbye to Loveit. A disguised sense of unease suggests that Dorimant does not approve of Fopling’s courting of Loveit. As often happens in comedies, the scenic chaos increases, instead of decreasing, owing to a series of misunderstandings: Bellinda thinks Dorimant is once more in love with Loveit when she finds him at her house, while swiftly, too swiftly, Dorimant and Harriet come closer together in the build-up to the unnatural marriage between the old lecher and the chaste Emilia. The positive signals are the same, sudden and short-lived, as those that end She Wou’d if She Cou’d – maybe even stronger, since, besides the solemn promises of faithfulness that Dorimant makes to Harriet, the aged philanderer is, at the last moment, robbed of his bride, who marries his son instead, as is natural. § 55. Wycherley* William Wycherley (1640–1716) differs from Etherege in his powerful personality that has often evoked, with some justification, the name of Jonathan Swift (in particular, with reference to the dramatic, anguished selfportrait of Captain Manly in The Plain Dealer). Wycherley visibly transfers 1
*
Complete Plays, ed. G. Weales, Garden City, NY 1966. E. McCarthy, William Wycherley: A Biography, Athens, GA 1979; J. Thompson, Language in Wycherley’s Plays: Seventeenth-Century Language Theory and Drama, Tuscaloosa, AL 1984; G. A. Marshall, A Great Stage of Fools: Theatricality and Madness on the Plays of William Wycherley, New York 1993; J. Vance, William Wycherley and the Comedy of Fear, Newark, DE 2000.
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into his plays his own personal struggles and doubts. It appears quite clear that there was in him a fracture that could not be made whole: he confessed himself prisoner of a world the immorality of which he denounced but could not disown. In him the humorist and the satirist diverged. He is often defined as ‘sardonic’; he rails and flails but feels he is part of the rot. Some knowledge of his background is indispensable. Like Housman, he was a ‘Shropshire lad’, and at the age of fifteen he spent some time in France in the home of the intelligent and cultured Duchess of Montausier, who shepherded him briefly into the Catholic flock. He enrolled in the University of Oxford (by this time he had reverted to Anglicanism) as a student of philosophy, but took no degree. He left the Inns of Court, likewise, without a profession, and proceeded to live a merry, carefree life. He found favour with the celebrated Duchess of Cleveland, who helped him to a commission in the navy (the Captain Manly connection) and subsequently in a cavalry regiment in 1672. He became tutor to the illegitimate son of Charles II, but was dismissed when it was discovered he had married an heiress, the Countess of Drogheda, whom he had met by chance in a bookshop as she was in the act of buying a copy of one of his plays. She made his life a living hell, subjecting him to exasperating controls. Like Etherege, he wrote at a leisurely, unhurried pace, so that his seventy-six years of life produced only four comedies. He had abandoned the theatre thirty years before, and had spent seven years in the Fleet prison for debt, when he made the acquaintance of the young Alexander Pope, and showed him the poems of his old age (1704). Pope corrected them, and their friendship was over. To tell the truth, every time Wycherley switches from prose to verse in his plays, he comes across as an amateur. It was Pope who claimed that Wycherley had become a Catholic again, while, according to Taine, he lived out the last years of his life a redundant, grey-haired, toothless rake. He received a generous pension from James II, and eleven days before dying, married a prostitute with the sole purpose of preventing his nephew from inheriting his money. 2. Nothing new under the sun, one might say: it’s Etherege all over again; and yet, at a closer look, completely different. Wycherley’s rake is an integral part of a condemned cosmos from which Etherege’s pure characters have fled. In him we have a copy of the hurly-burly of the time, underworlds,
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fashions, fads; Etherege’s transparent characters become more opaque and solid, chunkier and more veined with darkness. Satire is absent in Etherege; Wycherley neither softens nor sweetens, but plunges his knife deep into the wound. Dryden thought his frankness daring but healthy, before the manifest indecency (or such it was thought) of some parts of his plays led to his being ostracized until the early years of the twentieth century. Taine called him ‘the coarsest writer who ever polluted the stage’1 (but Middleton is just as scurrilous, if not more), adding anecdotes to prove his point. Taine pored over Wycherley’s plays and discharged his indignation in some of the most fiercely moralistic pages ever written on him. It must not be forgotten that this was the time when, for similar reasons, Matthew Arnold was busy demolishing Shelley and, with him, Romantic poetry in its entirety. It is an indication of what kind of man Wycherley was that he used to lower the age at which he had debuted and told Pope he had composed his dramas before their documented dates. His four comedies were, in fact, written and performed in the space of five years, but not in a steady crescendo. His masterpiece is the third, The Country Wife. These four plays should be divided into two pairs, the first representing experiment in the form, the second, realization and achievement. 3. Love in a Wood (1671), a situation comedy derived from Calderón,2 with the action moved to London, finds its unity of place in St James’s Park (as is clearly stated in the subtitle), which is the centre of movement, the crossroads, the point of exchange. In and from this open air stage, characters moved by desire for money or for sex hatch their various plots and intrigues, weaving a web of error and equivocation, favoured by the insidious fashion of the day of walking in the park with their faces hidden behind masks. As often happens with first plays, the comedy has too many characters, who, given the limited space and time provided by the conventional five acts, cannot be adequately drawn. Furthermore, the plot is far from clear, and loses itself in a maze of separate storylines. Echoes of some
1 2
TAI, vol. II, 357. Wycherley is thought by some to have had a position at the English embassy in Madrid in 1664–1665.
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of Jonson’s later comedies resonate not only in the satirical portrait of the hypocritical Puritan, who behind all his show of piety is a lecher, but also in the overt, Carnivalesque semantics of the names, which are even coarser than the average at the time. So that, to describe the play one might start from various points of view, and from one of the many characters, and end up by doubting whether there is, in fact, a main character, and whether, instead, this is not a choral work. The plot action in itself shows the various ways in which the female engages with the male, bearing in mind that interest, not love, is the driving force. We have the impression that chance presides over the coupling of the characters, hence the ambiguity inherent in the title (‘wood’ is an archaism meaning ‘mad’, and the title therefore also means ‘love in a state of confusion’). Widow Flippant, like Mrs Cockwood in Etherege, is desperately in search of any male whatsoever to satisfy her lust. The stratagems used are the same, and just as unsuccessful. A colourless ‘wit’, called, programmatically, Dapperwit, becomes the happy husband of a woman already six months pregnant, who does not know who the father is and marries only to save her ‘honour’. Gripe, a Puritan, marries a prostitute, convinced that a wife costs less to keep than a mistress. Two rakish friends play with fire, as usual, in a game of deceit, each attempting to seduce the other’s woman (see Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode), only to justify themselves at the end by saying it was all a misunderstanding, and praising marriage as the beginning, rather than the end, of their freedom. The cynical, mischievous duplicity of the procuresses, and the scheming dishonesty of the mothers, who pretend to care about their daughters’ honour and then sell their bodies to the highest bidder – all this takes us back half a century to the dark, grotesque world of a Middleton. The Gentleman Dancing Master (1671), again based on Calderón and Lope, shows little real advance on the first play, though construction and aims are so different as to argue a turnabout, however temporary. It is less fragmented, but more static; it turns a fixed lens on interiors that never change, except in one case. The scenes are few and very long (unlike the crowded, rapidly moving pictures of Love in a Wood), and consist largely of inconclusive dialogues. The leisurely pace is made even slower by the sudden lack of material, the reduction of the number of characters, and the elimination of the multiplot construction. Nor is it a second ‘rake’s comedy’, although
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it satirizes a certain kind of fop and two cases of ridiculous affectation. It is better defined as a rather implausible farce aimed at satirizing the infatuation with all things Spanish and French that had evidently become proverbial at the time. Act III presents the ludicrous argument between Don Diego – the alias of an Englishman with the eloquent name of James Formal – and another Englishman, who calls himself Monsieur de Paris, speaks his native tongue with a French accent, and is betrothed to the former’s daughter. Their disagreement is about which are superior, French or Spanish manners. The outcome is shown in Act IV, in a sort of pantomime, with Monsieur who enters in exaggeratedly Spanish garb, like another version of Malvolio. Both Don Diego and Monsieur are duped by Hippolita, Diego’s fourteen-year-old daughter who is meant to represent the essence of Englishness insofar as she is pragmatic, clear-thinking, enterprising, downto-earth, humorous and self-mocking. She is backed up by her maidservant, Prue, who is as positive and quick-thinking as her mistress. The plot of the astute Hippolita who refuses the hand of the murky Monsieur,3 and opens her door to suitor Gerrard, passing him off as a dancing master, reads like something from an eighteenth-century opera buffa fifty years before its time, in a period when music was dominated by the oratorio, or by operas on mythological and epic themes. The chaste, but codified, language used by pupil and counterfeit master in the presence of outsiders is a device that Wycherley has learnt and keeps up his sleeve. Aunt Caution realizes immediately what is going on (though she does not succeed in opening her stubborn brother’s eyes), and is therefore a true ‘wit’, for Wycherley part of an intellectual elite which, obviously, excludes all those fools who are blinded by self-worship. Marriage to Monsieur is avoided because he believes, to the very end, that he is the betrothed, while all the time he is furthering his rival and favouring his success, to his own detriment. He has always believed that Hippolita was playing a game with the fake dancing master. The wedding is celebrated with the accelerated speed of the farce, the wool pulled over the eyes of father and would-be groom as they argue
3
Hippolita protests against the cynical rule that it is unfashionable to be choosy, and ‘refuse a husband only because he is stupid’.
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about insignificant matters of etiquette. The priest blesses the union of Hyppolita and Gerrard, and the others are left open-mouthed, though Don Diego at the end claims to have understood everything and to have connived without saying anything. 4. To call The Country Wife (1675) simply ‘a comedy’ would be inadequate and misleading: there are no purely comic scenes; the whole play is pervaded by disquiet, and seems to be the product of a mind and a psyche that have only just attained the necessary capacity of objectivization. We must force the definition to include, at the very least, the label of ‘dark, powerful comedy’. Wycherley assimilates and personalizes Molière and Terence: the entire dramatic space is invaded and filled, obsessively, with the symbol of the cuckold – horns. The whole world is reduced to horns and cornification, starting with the name of Horner, the protagonist, or one of the protagonists. Curiously, in the title, Wycherley shifts the emphasis from the cuckolder, and the cuckold, to the country wife. From the point of view of the structure, we are back to closely knitted plots, and it is not altogether fanciful to think that Aldous Huxley may have had this play in mind as he sat down to write Point Counterpoint. Thanks to a particular stratagem, Horner obtains free access to the noble ladies of the town; Harcourt, a reformed, or repressed, rake, wins the hand of Alithea, betrothed to the fop, Sparkish, who is not, like Flutter, a wouldbe wit spurned by real wits, but a poor, pitiful, fumbling fool. So, there are many protagonists, though one might say that the foremost is the jealous Pinchwife, the most dramatic, suffering, deeply explored of all the characters in the play. This time, the interplay of the various plots is handled in a truly masterly fashion, and the switch from one to the other is smooth and confident, making this one of the most often performed works, right up to the present day, of the entire repertoire of English drama. While the barrage of wit can at times be overwhelming, there are several scenes and situations of pure, delightful theatre, as, for example, when Margery, the country wife, substitutes the letter, thus outwitting her husband, or the famous ‘china’ scene, a non-stop competition of sexual double-entendres.4 4
From behind the locked bedroom door comes the sound of a conversation, half-heard and completely misunderstood, between Horner and Lady Fidget, on the subject
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On the whole, The Country Wife is a paradoxical, perhaps exaggerated, study of behaviour in the capital in the 1670s. The curtain goes up on an apparent anomaly, Horner’s sexual impotence, a Butlerian disease out of Erewhon, that is a kind of inverted sin or moral misdemeanour, turning the bearer into a filthy, shunned creature, a monster, or devil that must be exorcised. The play may even be seen as a denunciation of gender discrimination, and of its psychoses, centuries ahead of its time. The women ought to pity Horner the eunuch, or be indifferent to him, but instead cry scandal and a general uprising is announced. The starting point is therefore paradoxical: the husbands rejoice in the belief that their wives and mistresses run no risk from Horner. Seduction is everywhere in this society, and husbands and wives keep a strict watch on one another. There is moral chaos, and a falsely cheerful air typical of desperate circumstances; throughout, one hears the toll of the bell signalling that their world has reached its terminus. The repartee whirls madly round in a system near collapse, misunderstood by both speaker and listener. In a world dominated by words, speech at times is not understood. In two clear cases, appearances win over reality, or characters fall into mind-boggling misconceptions. 5. Society in The Country Wife is divided into three categories: cuckolders, unfaithful wives, and jealous husbands, as in a well-balanced economic system of supply and demand. The play, as I said, might just as well be named after Pinchwife, a cuckold who thinks he can find himself a faithful wife in the country, and, on bringing her to London, tries in vain to keep her out of danger and temptation by locking her up.5 In Act IV, Pinchwife’s jealousy reaches a level of fury worthy of Othello.6 Jealousy is the death of reason, and it is typical of Wycherley that Margery’s compromising letter to Horner should be delivered by her husband, who also
5 6
of china, a euphemism for copulation. Similarly, in an earlier scene, Margery comes back down the path in the park, where she has had a tryst with Horner, carrying an orange in her hand. Pinchwife (lucus a non lucendo, that is a ‘robber of wives’) would not go along with Gripe in Love in a Wood, who thinks it better to have a mistress than a wife. Pinchwife threatens to disfigure his wife by carving the word ‘whore’ on her face with his knife.
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excogitates the plan to marry off his sister to Horner, telling himself ‘it is better have him as a brother-in-law than be cuckolded by him’. Sparkish’s delirium is the opposite of Pinchwife’s jealousy, because he authorizes his friend Harcourt’s unceasing assault on his fiancée, Alithea, and by dint of playing with fire, ends up by being well and truly burnt. Alithea is a clear example of the lack of opportunities, the predestination, or determinism, of Restoration society: only in the country, far from the city, is it possible to preserve conjugal chastity, but the country is so boring and the city so full of life. So The Country Wife is a play of crescendos – not so much of Horner’s lust, which is constant in its masked intensity to the very end, but of the psychopathology of Pinchwife and Sparkish. The character of Horner marks a return to the great theme of the rake. Horner strikes indiscriminately, like a caustic, atheist philosopher, an Epicurean or Sceptic, surrounded by a crowd of other rakes, who listen, and retort with mocking, sacrilegious quips, in a prodigious display of nonsense and antithesis. He is a bitter, sardonic intellectual, a cold, calculating sensualist, who at one point refers to himself as ‘a Machiavelli in love’. In Act V improbability raises its head when Pinchwife, blinded by jealousy, fails to recognize his wife disguised as Alithea, and personally hands her over to Horner, who is meant to think she is Alithea. Pinchwife is the only one who does not realize how things stand. Margery is really in love, and intends to leave her husband, whatever the consequences for her reputation and honour. She appeals to Horner, calling him her second husband. When, before the whole assembly of characters, Horner is once more confirmed as being a eunuch, Margery, the only one that, naïvely, wants to tell the truth, is silenced. The deception continues, and the play ends on the dance of the unwitting cuckolds. 6. When Wycherley wrote The Country Wife he was truly inspired; in The Plain Dealer7 (1676) inspiration is gone. The play struggles to take off, but is too slow and cumbersome to succeed. It is evidently a ‘play with a purpose’ but has no energy to sustain it. If previously Wycherley divided himself into a number of different characters, he now abandons this technique and 7
Wycherley dedicated the play to a famous procuress, causing quite some stir at the time.
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identifies with the sea captain, Manly. He has thrown down the mask, and, in order to implement his satirical agenda, opts for this single character, alone against the world, through whom he now attacks, not libertinism8 – unless one considers his betrothed, but faithless Olivia, a female rake – but hypocrisy. In The Country Wife, horns were the fundamental metaphor; here, hypocrisy is the obsession. In the meantime, Wycherley has felt surfacing within himself a previously unknown and aggressive misogyny. Olivia, too, complains that the world is ‘out of joint’, but her protest rings false: she preaches well against all forms of dishonesty, but in practice is guilty of the most ignoble actions, performed with great nonchalance. Manly plays a completely different tune to Horner: he does not exploit the dominant hypocrisy of society to satisfy his lust or greed, but bitterly denounces the very world Horner feels at home in. He execrates what Horner wallows in, a world of pimps, prostitutes, flatterers, fools and, especially, fops. We do not know what Horner’s profession is, if indeed he has one. Of Manly, instead, we know that he is just back from an unfortunate naval expedition against the Dutch, and has rendered a great service to his country. Horner is gloriously promiscuous, Manly monogamous, and it is only his monogamous love that compromises his unbending uprightness. Were it not for the love he has sworn Olivia, he would, once disillusioned, leave his native shores and sail off towards the Indies. He announces this much when he comes on, with short, peremptory statements expressing scorn and disgust, and giving brusque military orders. The second reason that prevents him from emigrating, and rekindles the flame of hope, is knowing he has a friend, a true friend (so he thinks), one Vernish, whose name conveys the idea of superficiality and falseness. To Vernish, Manly has entrusted his wealth and, above all, his future wife. The plot, essentially, recounts Manly’s discovery of both Olivia’s true nature – in his absence, she has seduced and married Vernish – and the treachery of his supposed friend. He decides to take revenge on both, and shame them in public. The denouement also involves the identity of a mysterious Fidelia, who follows the captain like 8
There is a scene in which a group of beau monde characters, who have just seen a performance of The Country Wife, discuss it briefly, and then proclaim that ‘china is out of fashion’!
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a devoted shadow, and is in fact a nobleman’s daughter who has fallen in love with Manly at first sight, having witnessed his heroism in action. In the last scene, the captain rewards the faithful love of his pretended page, and the couple set off for the new world. With this, the play, which began as an argumentative satire against the moral degeneration of the time, moves gradually towards the atmosphere of romance and even of Romanticism. Based, as we know, on Molière’s Le Misanthrope, the real model is, however, clearly Shakespearean: Fidelia dressed as a page, and determined to follow the captain in this disguise, takes us straight back to Twelfth Night. The name ‘Fidelia’, furthermore, reminds of the ‘Fidele’ in Cymbeline, while Olivia is, of course, another link with Twelfth Night. But it is obvious that Manly cites and resembles Timon of Athens, both because he deludes himself that he can act for the benefit of his fellow men, and because he entrusts all he owns to a faithless friend, and ends up in poverty. Like all good Elizabethan plays, The Plain Dealer alternates the main plot with a subplot, the latter being entrusted to the widow Blackacre, a character that churns out an endless stream of jokes in an insipid storyline that could well be suppressed without excessive damage to the integrity of the work.9 § 56. Congreve William Congreve (1670–1729) is, at least in my opinion, much overrated. It is true that he has been called the greatest writer of comedy in the whole of English drama, comparable to Shakespeare and Jonson. Such an assessment, however, is unjustified and is based on only five plays, four of them comedies. Of these, only the last one can in any way be considered a masterpiece, while of the others, two are mediocre, not to say poor, while 9
Acts IV and V come quite close to capturing the suspense of the Shakespearean ‘comedies of errors’. Fidelia, hiding her true feelings, tells Manly (who is desperately trying to win back Olivia, forgetting, or maybe even aware, that she is already married), that Olivia refuses him because she is in love with her, that is, Fidelia. A midnight meeting is arranged, during which Olivia, under the cloak of night, will be able to enjoy the company of Fidelia, who she believes is a man. If Olivia is deceptive, Vernish is no less: when he discovers that Fidelia is indeed a woman, he attempts to rape her. She is saved at the last moment. Manly avenges himself on Vernish by telling him that Olivia is having an affair with a man dressed as a woman, whereas it is the opposite.
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the third is a little better, though uneven. All four leave much to be desired in terms of plot construction; but it cannot be denied that Congreve gradually manages to create a number of unforgettable examples of ‘humours’, who express themselves through some of the most scintillating dialogue ever written for the stage. Congreve’s humour is, of course, far from obvious and vulgar. In short, there is no bar-room bawdy here. These qualities of Congreve’s art were widely acknowledged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. In the nineteenth he fell foul of Victorian moralism. While Lamb defended, Macaulay deplored. Byron and Swinburne1 liked him, declaring that he was the last outpost of English comedy before the desert of the eighteenth century. In the context of English drama, Congreve is seen essentially as a forerunner of Wilde, while in wider terms his name has been linked to Goldoni and Chekov, and from a stylistic point of view, Flaubert. Never much an object of study,2 his main works are regularly performed to this day, the principal roles coveted by important actors and actresses. With reference to Restoration comedy, Congreve is closer to Etherege than to Wycherley, though he himself recognized that he ought to be likened to the author of The Country Wife: his second play, in fact, can be read as a kind of parody of Wycherley’s fourth, The Plain Dealer, with Congreve intent on creating a semi-comic, and, therefore also semi-tragic, version of Manly. However, there is a marked difference in dramatic temperament between the two: Wycherley is rough and unpolished compared with Congreve, who, on the other hand, lacks all sense of scenic effects and depth of character. Wycherley’s Manly and Congreve’s Maskwell stand on opposite sides of a moral divide, but, given this, Manly dwarfs Maskwell in purely dramatic terms. In his first two plays, Congreve is a world-weary playwright who observes his puppets from the wings, detached and uncaring. He is careful not to cross the line of objectivization: as we have seen, Wycherley enters into one of his characters and uses it as a mouthpiece. Congreve builds plots which are never too long or over-elaborate, founded 1 2
A commemorative article written for the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The complete works have only recently been republished, edited by D. F. MacKenzie, 3 vols, Oxford 2011, reviewed at great length by C. Rawson in TLS (20 January 2012, 3–5).
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on elusive and exclusive wit, and aimed at a discerning audience of connoisseurs. He is clearly a playwright familiar with everything written for the theatre from Shakespeare onwards, and on this loom he weaves a web of echoes and allusions. To give only one example of this intertextuality, in Act IV Scene 1 of The Double-Dealer, Lord Touchwood threatens to carve the word ‘villain’ on his nephew’s face with the tip of his sword; this echoes a scene in The Country Wife, when Pinchwife threatens his wife in similar terms. One of the consequences of Congreve’s control of his material is that he avoids the excesses and hyperbole of melodrama: he is never ‘theatrical’ in the derogatory sense of the word. His comedies are remembered not so much for particular scenes as for certain dialogues, or individual lines – even single short sentences. His first two plays present minimal plots and very few events. Congreve is the most economical and least exploitative of playwrights, and yet the chain of events, few as they are, is forever being interrupted to follow secondary or collateral actions. Congreve’s humour is quite different to the hearty laughter of, say, Fielding, or even the smile of Sterne. We might call it detached, or dry, or deadpan. 2. Congreve was born in 1670, and was therefore spared the Civil War and deprived of the Restoration. His adolescence was out of the common way too: he was the son of an English soldier, who was sent to Ireland where William grew up. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, where he met fellow student Swift. He returned to England just before the Glorious Revolution. By this time he had abandoned his law studies and started writing. His first literary work was a short novel, Incognita, which has recently been revaluated as an interesting example of early prose fiction. His first play, written when he was only twenty-three, was actually performed some twenty years after his second and third, and therefore, strictly speaking, outside the time frame of Restoration theatre. The four successive plays straddle 1698 and Collier’s attack on the immorality of the stage, with evident effects on subsequent drama, especially The Way of the World. After 1700 Congreve was given various government sinecures, even though he was a Whig. He disappointed Voltaire by pretending not to care about his playwriting past (a ‘gentilhomme comme un autre’); he translated the classics, wrote another novel, several poems, and, above all, a libretto, Semele, which, years later, was set by Handel. Pope dedicated his Iliad to him. He
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died following a coach accident, like Lee.3 It is still not clear why he ended his career at the age of thirty, after giving such signs of promise in a mere five years. His last play was not exactly booed, but received a less than warm reception, although the author thought it was his best. Congreve was highly sensitive, touchy, even, and perhaps the cool response to his play played some part in his decision to abandon the stage; he may have realized that his kind of comedy had, by now, no future, or he may have had a crisis of conscience at having shone the spotlight on immorality. He had concentrated on destruction (of vice) rather than construction (of virtue). Dryden had adopted him and launched him on his career, pronouncing The Old Bachelor4 (1693) the best first play he had ever read. The cast, all Londoners, consists of eight main characters, of which two are rakes in search of fun and games before they get married (one of them exhibits prophetically existentialist traits); there is also a couple consisting of a jealous husband, excessively watchful of his wife and just as deceived, while the wife puts on saintly airs but is ready to cuckold him whenever she can; another female character has been abandoned by one of the two rakes, and is lusted after by the old bachelor of the title. The play ends with the celebration of various weddings, some of them bizarre but genuine, others false. The host of secondary characters includes valets, maids, lady companions, pimps, and above all, the odd duo of a knight and his squire, the very image of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, to whom they are explicitly compared in the course of the play. Congreve’s skill as a playwright emerges in the rapier thrust of the dialogue, which often alludes to real contemporary events, and in the lively, sometimes, extravagant style. The dialogue is based on lines openly addressed to other characters, usually full of high-minded sentiments and ideals, and others spoken aside, heard only by the audience, that reveal what the character is really thinking, and plotting. Starting with this first play, Congreve shows his firm control, both synthetic and 3
4
Congreve died unmarried. In his will he left 200 pounds to the actress, Anne Bracegirdle, and five times that amount to his mistress, the Duchess of Marlborough, from whom he had had a daughter. The Duchess revered his memory, and commissioned an ivory statue of him, which she considered endowed with life. Containing some songs set by Purcell.
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elliptic, over his material. The Old Bachelor is immensely readable, and is the first of the four that cuts by half the average length of previous plays, in particular, Wycherley’s. However, for all that, it is slight, schematic, and cold, only occasionally warmed by the occasional comic ploy.5 Though said to have been revised by Dryden, and fairly successful on stage, it remains a mediocre play. 3. The Double Dealer (1694), less well received by audiences, is based on the unities of place and time – Dryden’s twenty-four hours. The plot benefits from these restrictions, and is made slightly more dynamic and gripping by the intrigues of two villains. The pace is slowed by Congreve’s dwelling on various satirical figures and scenes: the foolishness of the idle, lazy rich – their fads, fashions, infatuations and foibles – is the same timeless vanity scourged by Dickens 100 and more years later; like him, Congreve targets snobbery and superciliousness, though in a less exuberant and imaginative manner. The love of Mellefont and Cynthia is opposed by Lady Touchwood and the villain, Maskwell, who wants Cynthia for himself, while her heart beats only for Mellefont, who is soon the victim of a vicious rumour that he is the lover of the wives of two lords. The play begins in medias res with the passionate love of an aunt for her nephew, who is betrothed to Cynthia. This promising, dynamic incipit soon gives way to static verbal duels with great display of the dry, intellectual, artificial wit that will become the trademark of Congreve from now on; but then he terminates the duel, and limits himself to hints which will be picked up by the discerning ear. The plot involving the mature married woman in the grip of passionate desire,
5
One of these involves the quixotic knight who is inveigled into handing over a large reward by a trickster, on the grounds that the evening before he had saved the knight who was being attacked by a gang of outlaws. His right-hand man is a kind of miles gloriosus, one of a rich tradition of such characters, not just in classical but in English literature too. He excels in braggadocio and linguistic blunders, but is in fact a miserable coward. The second comic situation is when Fondlewife’s young wife (her name is obviously meant to recall Wycherley’s Pinchwife) finds herself in bed with the fop, Bellmour, disguised as a priest. On the arrival of the husband, the seducer is hurriedly shoved into a cupboard. The wife is spared embarrassment, and the husband the knowledge that he has been, and will be, cuckolded.
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and her tool, Maskwell, progresses through a series of scenes parodying the darkest and bloodiest of Elizabethan tragedies, with the treacherous Maskwell resembling more and more the typical Machiavellian villain of Shakespeare. Farce undermines the accusation levelled at Mellefont by his future mother-in-law that he had attempted to molest her, thereby coming close to the dreadful sin of incest (though she is only Cynthia’s stepmother). The second act, too, is punctuated by interludes and scenes based on the figure of the feather-brained, conceited kind of woman who writes pastorals as a hobby, and leads her husband round on a leash. The betrothed couple, a feature to be found in the following plays as well, are ironic, indeed pessimistic regarding their prospects of marriage, and have a clear vision of the stupidity by which they are surrounded. In the course of the play, one finely crafted satirical portrait follows another. Maskwell’s villainy is tripled when he adds the lady to his victims by not revealing that his real aim is Cynthia’s hand; Mellefont accepts a trap that, as expected, discredits him with his uncle. In short, Maskwell adds victory to victory, and persuades Cynthia to marry him. In the end, he is unmasked, his murder by the lady is forestalled, and the happy ending is served up. 4. In Love for Love (1695) Congreve ‘the entertainer’ passively follows the chatter of a small group of characters representing London society at the end of the seventeenth century, with no attempt to hide its immorality, which is, indeed, treated with indulgence. There are no real villains in the play, with the possible exception of Valentine’s father, but the moral fragility is both incurable and, in some cases, quite charming. Some of the morally weak are foolish, others are intelligent, and this appears to be the true dividing line. In the middle, Congreve places once again two pure, or almost pure, characters, who really love one another. Valentine is a reformed rake with several illegitimate children. The dramatis personae are many and varied, each with an equally important role in the story, which is essentially about the poet-playwright, Valentine, and the heiress, Angelica. Like all poets, Valentine is a dreamer with little experience with money. When the curtain comes up, he is besieged by creditors and offered by his father just enough to pay his debts provided he accepts to make over his inheritance to his younger brother. He may possibly be seen as a reflection of Congreve himself, denouncing the muzzles on contemporary
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theatre and the restrictions on the freedom of expression. The initial phases resound with references to the theatrical practice of the day, and would have been immediately understood by the audience. In part, Valentine is the voice of truth, and as such, Congreve’s mouthpiece; himself immune and untouched, he speaks out against prevailing stupidity and hypocrisy. True love can only be crowned after various scenes in which all the other characters make great show of their several aims and obsessions. First of all, Valentine’s two friends: they, endowed with greater practicality, spend all they have on having a good time with the ladies, who are only too happy to go along with them. The pace is slow and leisurely, as proved by the space Congreve gives these secondary characters. Each has a bug, a fixation, an eccentricity, so much so that The Eccentrics might well be the subtitle, or alternative title, of this play. Foresight is so obsessed with astrology that he does not see that his wife is betraying him before his very eyes. However, the strength of Love for Love lies in its verbal, or stylistic, characterization: each character is identified by means of an idiolect formed of images, metaphors and expressions deriving from their respective fixations. The best example of this is Ben, Valentine’s brother, who has just come back from long sea journeys (another anticipation of Dickens). He is destined to inherit his father’s fortune, and is given a naïve Prue, who, completely devoid of the hypocrisy of society, and innocent compared with the other ladies of the beau monde, must be schooled in coyness and the art of flirtation. In Act IV, Valentine refuses to sign over their father’s fortune to his brother by means of an old Elizabethan ploy – he pretends to be mad, like Kyd’s Hieronimo, or Hamlet. The hypocritical father tries in vain to calm him down: Ben, true to himself as a real outsider, will take to the sea once again, in a symbolic, and concrete, rejection of the world of falsity and deception he has just experienced. Equally unexpected is the final scene, in which Valentine’s father expresses his desire to marry Angelica, and very nearly does. In the end, Congreve rewards the reformed Valentine’s altruistic love for Angelica, who manages to foil the father’s immoral plan. Congreve turns a blind eye on much that is wrong in the world, and with the other, good one, sees a society on the move again, redeemed by the two real lovers that represent honesty and authenticity.
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5. After The Mourning Bride6 (1697), an unconvincing post-Elizabethan tragedy, but appreciated at the time, and for many years a staple of theatrical repertoire, Congreve wrote The Way of the World (1700), his masterpiece and one of the great English comedies of all time. It was, however, neither appreciated nor understood by contemporary audiences. In other words, it was something of a flop, owing, it was generally believed, to the over-elaborate plot, and its refined, sophisticated literary tone. The title has become a byword, and conveys the ambitious idea of representing the society of the day. The Way of the World is programmatically realistic, or pseudo-realistic, and eavesdrops on a group of characters from the moneyed class, revealing their aspirations, habits and moral demeanour. Foremost in their thoughts are the intrigues and love affairs of fops and ladies, young and not so young. Vanity is shared by hot-blooded, though grey-haired, widows; love is no romantic passion but a calculating feeling combined with self-interest, that finds fulfilment only if accompanied by the handing over of a conspicuous sum of money. Under the magnifying glass of Congreve and his colleagues, the society of the time is revealed in its horizontal and vertical stratification: servants are important in the plot, and provide linguistic counterpoint with their witty lines, jokes, malapropisms (ante litteram), and the colourful turns of phrase typical of unsophisticated speech; the servants also lend their willing support in the various intrigues set in motion by their masters.7 For the second time, Congreve brings on stage an outsider, this time the rustic Sir Wilfull, who, under his unpolished exterior, hides many priceless qualities that point the difference in life, customs, and moral fibre between town and country. This is a repetition of the opposition between Ben and Valentine in the previous play, the band of merrymakers relativized by great, noisy gaffes. As in the other 6
7
Almeria, the daughter of King Manuel of Granada, has secretly married Alfonso, the son of the King of Valencia, his father’s enemy. The irate father and the rival lady, Zara, a Moorish queen (as in Dryden), are eliminated in the end. A soliloquy by the leading lady in Act II was highly praised by Johnson, and several trenchant aphorisms found in the dialogues have become famous. It is frankly hard to believe that the valet Waitwell should agree to marry Foible, the governess, only so as to play the part of Lady Wishfort’s suitor.
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plays, there are no sensational events here: the first scene, set in a chocolate house, presents a normal conversation among idle fops during a game of cards. There follows a long scene which illustrates the stratagems used by women to deceive their husbands, flirt and carry on, in what appears to be a war of attrition. Acts III, IV and V form a macro-sequence, marked by absolute unity of time and place, set in Lady Wishfort’s rooms. In one of the most memorable pieces of theatre in the English language, a great orchestra strikes up, in which the instruments are the various characters of the cast, who enter and exit in turn, giving rise to a dazzling display of verbal acrobatics aimed at illustrating, or hiding, legal designs and loopholes that are too complicated and contorted to be summarized. Mirabell tries to make her aunt consent to his marriage to Millamant by means of blackmail: his servant, Waitwell, pretends to be an aristocratic suitor; if she succumbs, she can hardly refuse Mirabell’s request. Lady Wishfort steals the stage as an incomparable portrait of female vanity and senile lasciviousness. In the final part, Congreve’s play is a closely woven web of intertextual references to the wealth of English comedy. Lady Marwood’s ‘aversion’ is the same interjection as used by Wycherley’s Olivia, and all the aristocratic characters, through their author, consciously or unconsciously quote works, passages, or single words from Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jonson, Suckling and Waller. In the light of this mise en abyme, one incidental annotation is a list of the most read and discussed books of the day (Bunyan, Collier, Quarles, Prynne), fresh from the printer’s and placed for consultation on the mantelpiece. The attentive audience would have recognized, after an allusion to Jonson’s Volpone, the veiled parody, or double parody, of Cleopatra’s barge on the Cydnus, as described by both Shakespeare and Dryden. All through the fourth act, Millamant sings songs by Suckling as she weighs up whether or not to accept the advances of Sir Wilfull. 6. Congreve’s play closes with the unmasking of the two main villains, the last-minute repentance of other minor characters, and the muted, almost forced, endorsement of current morality and resigned acceptance of the imperfections and peccadillos of society. Mirabell and Millamant are the usual exceptions: Mirabell is not a hypocrite, and knows full well that whoever does not indulge in dissimulation is destined to remain an outsider. The rules governing ‘polite society’ are the opposite of the rules
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of nature: one of Mirabell’s first speeches is centred on the efforts normally made to blacken a lady’s reputation, which are seen as an improvement. Mirabell and Millamant are positive characters given the conditions of the time: they love one another, but in a perfectly balanced way, like true seventeenth-century wits, without displays of overwhelming passion; cool and self-controlled, they are aware that if they lose 6,000 pounds, their marriage goes up in smoke. In Act II, too, in the park, the two embittered ladies who converse on men’s infidelity, put forward an unnatural code of ethics: let their modus operandi be, they say, deception; let their husbands believe they are being cuckolded, and suffer for it. The ‘proviso scene’ in Act IV, between Mirabell and Millamant, is rightly considered to be a locus classicus of this masterpiece: the two lovers negotiate the liberties they will enjoy once married, and Millamant, tired and sick of conventions, sketches a utopia of antithetic values, a new world, quite different to the present. Mirabell listens impassively, a detached, ironic participant in the game. Millamant’s famous closing comment, ‘These articles subscribed, […] I may by degrees dwindle into a wife’, must be the most unromantic acceptance of a proposal of marriage in the whole of English comedy. In Act V, cynicism is replaced by an urge for more authentic rules. The attempts at blackmail are foiled, the lecherous aunt foregoes her desire for revenge on the ungrateful lover who prefers the niece, and the one small coalition that risks blowing everything sky high is defused. With this, Congreve reaffirms that his society is not, after all, rotten to the very core. § 57. Shadwell* I: Farces against foreign fads Thomas Shadwell (1642–1692) is naturally remembered above all as Dryden’s number one enemy, so famously pilloried in Mac Flecknoe.1 Though elevated to the status of Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal (much to Dryden’s chagrin), Shadwell has never enjoyed much critical *
Complete Works, ed. M. Summers, 5 vols, London 1927. A. S. Borgman, Thomas Shadwell: His Life and Comedies, New York 1928; D. R. Kunz, The Drama of Thomas Shadwell, Salzburg 1972; A. Steiger, Thomas Shadwell ‘Libertine’, Hildesheim 1975.
1
§ 51.3.
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approval: indeed, he was, and is, generally considered less than mediocre as a playwright. So Dryden would seem to have been right in his estimation of his rival’s high quotient of ‘dullness’. Saintsbury saw in Shadwell three serious defects: scurrility of language, monotony, and insipid dialogues. We might add a fourth: the lack of variety and monotony of his plots, which he appears to repeat unendingly. The highest praise is that his best works – four or five, or a fifth of his total output – are on the same level as the worst of the best playwrights of the time. He is still not much read today, and his plays have not been republished recently, at least in their entirety.2 As a kind of natural reaction against this prevailing disparagement, Shadwell has had the occasional enthusiastic champion. That all is relative may be deduced from the very conferment of the Laureateship on such a presumed nullity, though one should take into account that between Wycherley’s last play and Congreve’s first (approximately from 1677 to 1692) the theatre, and literature in general, were in the doldrums: there were no exciting playwrights around, and no poets either, apart from the omnipresent Dryden. Born in Norfolk, educated at Cambridge and the Inns of Court, by the early 1680s Shadwell had become a professional playwright, not a gifted amateur.3 His temperament can be seen in his dislike and condemnation of every kind of foreign fashion and affectation, especially French, as opposed to genuine Englishness. The fop is everywhere in Shadwell, and is the object of unceasing attack by the playwright. Every play features one of them, and he is always fooled and mocked in the course of the action. Nor does the ‘wit’ fare better, unless he happens to be an ‘anti-wit’, in tacit polemic with Wycherley and (prophetically) Congreve. Another of Shadwell’s favourite butts is the fainting poet and his sugared sonnets. It is as though he had gradually built up a conservative bulwark
2
3
We learn from SAI, 487, n. 1, that many copies of the 1720 four-volume edition were destroyed in a fire. Saintsbury himself edited a selection of four plays, London 1903. The Libertine is included in Libertine Plays of the Restoration, ed. G. Manning, London 2001. Right from the very beginning of his career, Shadwell never wrote less than one play per year. In the course of his fifteen-year career he managed a total of seventeen or eighteen works for the stage.
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against the rising immorality that was undermining the nouveaux riches of the upper-middle class, intent on ineptly aping the (mis)ruling aristocracy. Shadwell often focuses on the lowest of society, sometimes even on the criminal underworld, but never on the aristocracy and the court. Almost every play of his can be seen as a debate on the relative merits of town and country, this latter described with a touch of nostalgia reminiscent of Walton, as the realm of innocent pleasures and the carefree, open-air life of healthy enjoyments and diversions (much as Gay will do some years hence). Shadwell does not generalize, however, nor does he paint in black and white: neither town nor country are perfect. Other plays revolve around the very English tradition of spa holidays, with appropriate mythology and etiquette; or racing at Epsom, or manias like astrology. With this typology he comes close to realist drama and the nineteenth-century ‘sketch’. From his prologues and the texts of the plays, it is evident that Jonson is his true inspiration,4 though Shadwell’s formula is even more blatant and unsophisticated. His plays are mostly set in London, though we are not told exactly where. His crowded casts contain a plethora of traditional types – the fop (sometimes two or three of them together), the brothel keeper, the alluring girl or downright whore, the poetaster, the miles gloriosus – their traits and idiosyncrasies proclaimed in preview at the outset, suggesting that the play is paradigmatic rather than syntagmatic; in other words, the plot is summary and static. Shadwell brings the whole host of characters on stage for entire acts at a time, and sets them talking and chaffing among themselves, allowing them to indulge in either brief, bombastic, well-crafted speeches, or, preferably, colourful contumely and insult. Twists and surprises in the plot are not totally lacking, but in the worst of his dramas the characters are always the same from beginning to end. Shadwell shares with Dryden (who begrudged it) the record of the greatest number of adaptations in his period. He wrote remakes of just about everything, from Shakespeare to Jonson to Molière. The Libertine can claim to be the first of a series of plays on the Don Juan theme that was to engulf Europe after the end of the seventeenth century. 4
Epsom Wells (1672) recalls Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, and had a significant influence on novelists after Shadwell.
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2. The form given to The Sullen Lovers (1668) seems to threaten the very existence of the play, in that Stanford, a misanthropist, and, above all, a neurotic, finds himself plagued from the very beginning of the action by a swarm of ‘impertinents’ (the subtitle of the play), who wish to talk and jest with him; but he only wants to be alone, and gets rid of them. Stanford is forever on the brink of withdrawing from the world, but never actually does it. Symptoms interlock, and two cases of melancholy drift together: after each has sworn their enmity to Eros, Stanford and Emilia discover they love one another, thanks to two merry go-betweens. So after fifty years, Burton’s Anatomy was still producing offspring, as seen in these two characters from The Sullen Lovers. Other characters include several fops, and the usual pretentious poet, or playwright. Above them all towers the figure of Sir Positive, who proclaims himself an expert in everything, and comes a cropper, mainly because he lacks those most English of gifts – common sense and humour.5 The other characters set in motion secondary plots that weave in and out, with a certain degree of repetition, and seize every opportunity to exchange insults and abuse. The betrothal of the sullen lovers proceeds slowly, until the girl’s father appears accompanied by a suitor in the person of a country bumpkin. The True Widow (1679) has a quite insignificant plot, and a gallery of stereotyped characters, who talk and talk, and launch barbed attacks against this person or that. The everpresent poetaster recites his insipid verses, and engages in stylistic sallies with other dilettante wits. Everyone speaks at the same time, discoursing of their own particular passions, like horse- or dog-racing, or cock-fighting. The widow of the title pretends to be rich, and persuades various fools to lend her money with the promise of conspicuous rates of interest. She has two quick-thinking daughters to marry off, whose rival suitors soon almost come to blows. The truth comes out when it is discovered that the contracts have been made out using delible ink. The bailiff will only be silenced if he is allowed to marry the widow, which he does in a fake ceremony (the pretend wedding is a recurring feature of the plays of this period). The most theatrically effective scene is that in which the whole cast of characters sits 5
Satirical rallying of scientists, especially the ‘unpractical’ kind reportedly numerous in the Royal Society, is central to The Virtuoso (1676).
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down to watch a play within the play, and the two plots interweave and overlap: a duet of sweet-nothings between the two cooing lovers ends in adultery, but in the stalls and boxes a fight breaks out for the hand of the two sisters. One of the characters is a Puritan who rails against the widow’s trickery. The marriages are reparatory, but it cannot be said that justice is done. Shadwell’s characters are rarely completely positive. 3. The source of The Squire of Alsatia (1688) is Terence. The Alsatia of the title was a disreputable part of London, the haunt of pimps, prostitutes and tricksters. One of the strengths of Shadwell’s play is the use of authentic slang in the dialogues. What has almost never been pointed out is the play’s resemblance to Chapman’s All Fools (1605).6 A father entrusts one of his sons to a brother who lives in the town, while the other is raised in the country: the outcome of this ‘experiment’ goes against all expectations. Once again, the play is contained in the cast of characters: Cheatly was the explicit name of the widow in the previous play, and is given now to the villainous figure who leads foolish young men to ruin; a former captain plays the boaster, and Shadwell self-ironizes in the name of Shamwell. In the two brothers, the older debauched, the younger virtuous, Shadwell symbolizes the sound academic education and liberal curriculum of tradition – echoing Elyot’s The Governor7 – as against the narrow vision of country dwellers and the rigidity that leads to transgression and vice. Like Congreve after him, Shadwell is forced to be indulgent, and indicates as the benchmark of morality the permissive behaviour that was current at the end of the seventeenth century. The play might be called a ‘comedy of errors’, because the father of the two brothers believes, to the very end, that the morally upright son is degenerate, and vice versa. Unusually, Shadwell ends the play declaring the vice-ridden part of town now reformed and restored to righteousness: ‘Farewell forever all the vice of the age’. Bury Fair (1689) stands out among Shadwell’s plays because of its witty dialogues and satire against two affected Frenchified ladies; a background is provided by the comic ploy of a barber pretending to be a French count, an idea invented by Etherege. One of the two parallel plots traces the courtship of 6 7
Volume 1, § 112.2. Volume 1, § 40.3–4.
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the ‘count’ by the mincing Mrs Fantast, while the other is the verbal duel, unusually refined for Shadwell, between the ever-grumbling Wildish and Gertrude, who, after never having had a good word to say about love and lovers, end up by getting married. § 58. Shadwell II: ‘The Libertine’ As I mentioned above, The Libertine is generally acknowledged to be the first of the English versions of the Don Juan story, or at least the first noteworthy exemplar. One might think, mutatis mutandis, of a similar relationship between Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus with respect to all the other successive versions of the Faustian myth. Despite this, Shadwell’s play has received little attention, and no in-depth analysis, from historians of seventeenth-century drama. In fact, most of them ignore it altogether. From a cursory and incomplete survey, The Libertine comes across as a ‘grammatical’ and unimaginative adaptation, displaying its unwavering adherence to one particular version of the myth. Byron’s is an extreme example of a free adaptation, while Browning’s – Fifine at the Fair – hides its origin so cleverly that many dedicated source-hunters have failed to realize it is, indeed, another version of the old story. Pushkin’s Donna Anna illustrates a case of hendiadys, while Shadwell, with his array of female victims, and three replicas of Don John himself, constitutes a hyperbolic gemination. In his prologue, the author apologizes for the liberties he has taken with the original.8 His play is an interesting example of dialogue with a tradition, in which certain elements are included and other omitted. Also in the prologue, Shadwell makes it clear that the character of the libertine is taken from Italian sources and French adaptations, but asserts, unconvincingly,
8
Among the main sources are: a Don Juan by Rosimond, performed in Paris in 1669 (from which Shadwell took the idea of the three merry libertine mates, one of whom is Don Juan himself, the rape of a nun, and other material); Cicognini’s Don Giovanni; and Dorimont’s Le festin de pierre, ou le fils criminel. Shadwell’s play was performed in 1675 to rapturous applause. Purcell wrote music for a revival in 1692. The play was repeated many times up to the first years of the new century. By 1750, performances had tailed off considerably. In 1782 it was turned into a pantomime, with Delpini as arranger.
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that he has tried to renovate the story and avoid servile repetition of his sources. The murder committed by Don John, for example, is not connected to the rape; or, rather, his father was an obstacle to other rapes, not excluding incestuous ones. At the end of Act II his ghost appears, threatening his son with eternal punishment, only to be scornfully dismissed by him. Don John rids himself of Leonora by poisoning her. It is specified that Don John’s father is the governor of Seville; and the worst rape was committed against his aunt. After the seduction of the two daughters of Don Francisco before their wedding, circumstances impose once again the flight of the dissolutes from the scene. The two ‘pilgrims’ end up among the shepherds of Arcadia, then turn up full circle in the church. There to meet them is the statue of Don Pedro, the father. True to Shadwell’s tendency to reiterate, the dinner scene is twofold: the invitation is reciprocated as in Tirso de Molina, but the final part is extremely well orchestrated. There is no Donna Anna, but as Maria is enamoured of Ottavio, she may be seen as a replacement. Other women appear in the roles of the daughters of the magistrate who gives hospitality to Don John after his shipwreck. The purpose of Shadwell’s rifacimento is to show up vice in order to castigate it. The Don Juan dramas, says Shadwell, were performed in churches as an act of devotion and dissuasion. In the prologue the audience, and the critics, are invited to watch ‘the most irregular Play upon the Stage, / As wild, and as extravagant as th’Age’. From Molière, Shadwell took a hero that speculated on libertinism and atheism (Act I Scene 1). Don John is a giant of Donjuanism, and takes on, at the same time, Faustian overtones. He is not merely, or only, a sexual predator, but a slave of his sexual needs. Only a figure of hyperbolic wickedness could convey the moral lesson with any degree of success. 2. The Libertine is divided into the statutory five acts, and is mostly in prose, with occasional parts in verse which is unrhymed except for the couplets that close the various scenes. There are no formal scene divisions, while within the scenes themselves there are evident changes of location. From the very beginning, the idea of multiplication is forced home: the eponymous libertine is in reality a chief libertine backed up by two followers, who are only slightly less dissolute than their leader. The valet, Jacomo, completes the criminal quartet. Shadwell’s Don John is the most debauched and relentless in the whole Don Juan tradition. The famous aria of the
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catalogue becomes a list of unspeakable crimes, ‘thirty […] murders, rapes innumerable, frequent sacrilege, parricide’. Gemination is present also in Act II Scene 4, where no fewer than six wives appear to claim Don John as their husband, making him swear eternal fidelity. He does, and they believe him. The first dialogue in the play introduces many elements that characterize this particular version of the myth: the libertine trots out specious justifications laced with pseudo-Enlightenment philosophy: sin and conscience, future punishment and life hereafter are superstitions, ‘idle tales’ told by priests. The only ‘true guide’ is nature, and nature means natural urges, which, as they exist, must be satisfied. By means of this ‘philosophy’, Don John has dispersed the ‘fog’ that obscured the vision of his two companions. Reason is the ally of nature, and reason counsels man to follow nature’s commands. It is ‘the senses’ that ‘to the mind all objects convey’. This reasoning is specious and false because it ennobles man when he is most like an animal, a prey to promiscuous lust, and calls him an animal when he is monogamous. Jacomo is the traditional pusillanimous valet, whose main characteristic, here much underlined, is the fear of ending up on the gallows because of the misdeeds of his master. While Don John displays not the slightest sense of humour, and unbendingly dispenses his gelid pronouncements, Jacomo shows something of Molière’s, and, looking forward, Da Ponte’s, comic verve. He is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Jachimo,9 and, at the same time, a surrogate of Molière’s believer, since he reminds Don John of the calls of his conscience, and begs him to heed them; in this context, Don John is the atheist (the ‘Atheisto Fulminato’) of the models. Yet when Leonora faints, Jacomo, too, is tempted (the flesh is weak) to resort to some ‘natural recipe’, and becomes a libertine in miniature. Many more horrors are shown, or, rather, recounted than in any of Shadwell’s models: we know from the preamble that Don John’s two fellow debauchees have
9
This is not the only Shakespearean ‘presence’: the storm in Act III mirrors the opening of The Tempest, complete with Jacomo’s amusing puns on the peril. At the same time, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, after being dispersed, all the characters look for each other, but to no avail. Furthermore, the first appearance of the father’s ghost turns the play into an intermittent parody of Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet is present, too, in the figure of the hermit.
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been guilty of incest and the murder of relatives. The first part of the story is told in the preamble: Don John has already committed the first murder, and now relives it. The curious thing is that he has killed, not the father of the woman or girl he lusts after, but his own father, who disapproved of his dissolute life, refused to sanction it by giving him money, and never left off lecturing him on his sins. In his famous essay on the Don Juan figure,10 Otto Rank makes no mention of this detail, which would have lent further support to his psychoanalytical interpretation. Don John has not only killed his father: he has also raped his aunt. 3. Leonora, who becomes Elvira in Mozart, keeps wondering how she can abhor his vices and yet still love him. Wildly hysterical, ‘operatic’, she abounds in canonical interjections directed at the seducer, like ‘barbarous’, ‘treacherous’, ‘inhuman’, and ‘cruel’. Jacomo pities her, and when she faints, attempts to rape her. Don John turns his attention to Maria, who is the Donna Anna of the models. She is waiting for her beloved, Don Ottavio, and is serenaded by Don John, who subsequently disguises himself as Don Ottavio. The representatives of the law look for the wrongdoers, but are scattered. Don John is discovered in Maria’s bedroom; her cries bring her brother onto the scene, and he is killed by Don John. Maria and her maid, Flora, dressed in male attire, set about to avenge Ottavio and her honour. The opening event of the source plays is therefore separated and doubled in two temporal sequences: on one side the murder of his father; on the other, Donna Anna ‘forced’, and Don Ottavio who leaps to avenge her but is killed before he can do so. In this scene Maria’s guards are forced to flee, Flora is killed by the three debauchees, and Maria is disarmed. Act III Scene 6 presents the first, sudden appearance of the father’s ghost, who enjoins his son to repent, but vanishes amid mocking laughter from him and his three henchmen, absolutely unmoved by the vision. Shadwell’s most obvious variation is the reintroduction of the shipwreck, following which the four castaways are rescued by an anchorite, and then by Don Francisco, of whom the first thing they ask is women. Don Francisco is, understandably, scandalized. The following day will see the weddings of his two daughters,
10
Die Don Juan Gestalt, Wien 1924.
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and he invites the survivors of the shipwreck to the ceremony. As in Mozart, the two women who have been raped or abandoned, join forces: one wishes to regain the man who has rejected her, the other to wreak vengeance on the man who has raped her. They are working at cross-purposes, therefore. With a move that we might call ‘Byronic’ ante litteram, Flavia and Clara, Don Francisco’s daughters, discuss the imminent ceremonies that will see them united with men they have never seen before, and express their envy of English women, who have greater freedom and independence. They have caught a glimpse of Don John, and desire him. Don John seduces Clara, and nearly does the same to Flavia. In the models, Là ci darem la mano was sung together with the fishwife or peasant girl. Leonora’s poisoning by Don John shows the ease with which Shadwell eliminates characters one after the other in the course of the action, only to bring them all together again as ghosts at the end of the play. 4. In the meantime, Maria appeals to Don Francisco, a magistrate, asking that the three dissolute knights be punished for their misdeeds. The magistrate, however, is unwilling to incriminate them, and limits himself to ejecting them from his house. In a scene of great comedy, each of the daughters claims to be betrothed to Don Juan. Maria and Don Francisco are killed, predictably, and Flavia and Clara decide to become nuns. While nymphs and shepherds sing the praises of pure love, the three debauchees turn up, believing they have found a safe refuge. Jacomo once again attempts a sexual rapprochement but is threatened with castration. At the centre of the church stands the equestrian statue of Don Pedro, who has been invited to dine by Jacomo. When Don John derides him in the dining room, the ghost tells him to repent, and threatens him with eternal damnation. Don John is untroubled, and proceeds to satisfy his lust on a nun. The other nuns, among whom are Clara and Flavia, resist the flattery and cajoling of the libertine. On the stroke of midnight, the four debauchees set out for the church and the statue, surrounded by the ghosts of all those who have been killed in the course of the play, lined up along the walls bearing torches in their hands. When the devils begin their chant announcing the vicinity of hell, the two followers are swallowed up, but Don John, fearless, continues to defy his father: ‘here I stand firm, and all thy threats contemn’. In a cloud of fire, he descends into hell, untouched by ‘the least remorse’.
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§ 59. Vanbrugh* John Vanbrugh (1664–1726), while not exactly a Leonardo da Vinci, was a gifted polymath who distinguished himself, not in different literary genres, but in two fields, not in themselves related: the theatre and architecture. His competence in both these walks of life make him one of the most significant artists of his day. Among his architectural achievements may be mentioned Castle Howard, the Haymarket Theatre, and Blenheim Palace, buildings of such stunning design that they place Vanbrugh among the three English architects who came closest to the concept of continental tridimensionality.1 Because of the duties incumbent upon him as an architect, and the highly remunerated commissions he was awarded, Vanbrugh remained a part time playwright, as proved by the fact that he was never contracted to any theatre company, and in forty years of writing life, put together a total of twelve plays, many of which adaptations, though not exact copies of originals; and that he wrote only two completely new plays, and left one unfinished at his death. What we have by this dilettante is of good, sometimes excellent, quality, and shows great, unfulfilled promise. Vanbrugh’s stature is not always acknowledged, and appreciation of his gifts is far from universal, but it seems to me that no one before him has produced such striking comic, and grotesque, characters, such as his sharpwitted servants who rarely fail, with their idiosyncratic speech; his country folk, too, are irresistible, fresh in town and dying to pick up city manners; or the exasperated husbands, and the flirtatious wives with a weakness for the card table; or the sly younger son who pulls a fast one on his older *
Complete Works, ed. B. Dobrée and J. Webb, 4 vols, London 1927; selection of main plays, ed. A. E. H. Swaen, London 1896 (four), ed. B. Hammond, Oxford 2004 (five). G. M. Berkowitz, Sir John Vanbrugh and the End of Restoration Comedy, Amsterdam 1981; M. Bingham, Masks and Façades: Sir John Vanbrugh, The Man and His Settings, London 1984; K. Downes, Sir John Vanbrugh: A Biography, London 1987; J. Bull, Vanbrugh and Farquhar, Basingstoke 1998.
1
Cf. M. Praz, ‘Barocco inglese’, in SSI, vol. II, 84–8, in which the critic attempts to demonstrate the scant correspondence between Vanbrugh the architect (who found inspiration in the palaces of the Rome of the Popes, and later, Palladianism) and Vanbrugh the playwright, who can be associated with no particular literary style.
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brother, and is rewarded according to the saying omnia munda mundis. A scourge of the foibles and fixations of the wealthy middle class, aped by the small landed gentry, Vanbrugh looks forward to the great novelists of the future, Fielding, Smollett, and Dickens. He knew Congreve, and collaborated with him in running the Italian theatre of the Haymarket; but the two are completely different as playwrights, for the simple reason that Congreve’s airy, evanescent plots and style are often the very things satirized by Vanbrugh. His favourite subject is the marriage crisis: every plot revolves round a married couple and their quarrels. In one play, a serving girl is asked how her master and mistress are getting on, and she answers: ‘Live! Why – like man and wife, generally out of humour, “quarrel often, seldom agree”, complain of one another; and perhaps, have both reason. In short, ’tis much as ’tis at your house’. Vanbrugh’s dramatic aesthetic consisted simply in amusing the wealthy bourgeois, ‘despite their wives and taxes’. His reply to Collier’s Short View was to assert the importance of the theatre as a mirror of the manners of the day. His therapy, however, is not all that different to Congreve’s: any reformation of manners must come about rebus sic stantibus, in other words, in total respect of what Congreve called ‘the way of the world’. Consequently, it is difficult not to think that the alternative to the chaotic world of the end of the seventeenth century – represented by the inevitable couples of whiter than white lovers – is a hurried remedy, a formal endorsement of the moralizing campaign announced and promoted by William of Orange, which was responsible for the rise of plays based on the figure of the reformed rake. 2. From Flemish stock based in Ghent, Vanbrugh’s father owned a sugar refinery. He sent his son, the future playwright, to study in France, where he was arrested for spying in 1691 and imprisoned in the Bastille. There he was treated as befitted a nobleman, and therefore had the leisure to think of and write, at least in part, not the first but what would be the second of his plays. For a short time he was a soldier, and on leaving the army dedicated to the theatre eight years packed with adaptations and original plays, of which The Relapse (1696) was his debut. Taking his cue from one of Cibber’s plays, Vanbrugh ‘deformed’ the reformed libertine, overturning the original premise. In turn the same plot was to be used in a moralized version a century later by Sheridan. In Cibber, the reformed libertine
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is reunited with his wife, whose attractions he rediscovers; Vanbrugh’s Loveless2 puts his determination to the test, and, too sure of himself, falls back into the fault of infidelity. His wife, Amanda, might, it seems, go down the same road. The London cosmos is modelled on that of Jonson or Middleton: nothing is done for nothing; everything has a price. Gone are pure, unsullied feelings, replaced by generalized material greed. The positive hero of the comedy remains, despite himself, Young Fashion, who, disinherited and penniless, steals from his older brother, Sir Novelty Fashion (he has just bought himself the title of Lord Foppington), the daughter of a wealthy country gentleman. The two plots are connected by the pretext that Foppington courts, unsuccessfully, Amanda, as well as his ‘official’ betrothed. The architect in Vanbrugh is able to alternate the plots, managing them with millimetric precision and bringing them together in the epilogue. The main plot soon becomes insipid, while the secondary one gains in vivacity. Young Fashion has a valet who comes out with the most outrageous but funny lines, and his master is just as witty. Foppington has been rightly described as the last and greatest in a line of fops originating in Etherege’s Flutter. Vanbrugh gives him a relatively new linguistic tick: he mispronounces his words, replacing the letter ‘a’ with ‘o’. In the story of the two brothers, one of the most agile and amusing plots ever written, a pimp talks Young Fashion into beating Foppington to it and marrying the fiery Miss Hoyden. So the play, in the manner of Etherege and Wycherley, becomes a comedy about the town as opposed to the country, two antithetical worlds and cultures, a subject loved by audiences. Young is good at heart, and twice asks his brother for money; the refusal by his miserly, brutal, insensitive sibling authorizes him, in his mind, to set a trap for him. The priest, too, who celebrates the secret wedding, thinks only of eating and making money. The betrothed bride consents to the wedding though she is not aware exactly who she is marrying. So, honestly but cunningly,
2
‘Etymological’ names for characters are common from Etherege onwards. Vanbrugh always chooses his with great care. Foppington obviously embodies ‘fop’, and his first name, Young Fashion, underlines the message. See also Coupler, a pimp, Serringe, a doctor, Friendly, and Clumsey.
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Young manages to solve this and other problems, and Foppington can only grin and bear it. 3. The Provoked Wife (1697), which some prefer to The Relapse and consider Vanbrugh’s masterpiece, is, in reality, inferior to the first play, except in those parts that feature the splendid Sir John Brute. These episodes are, however, too far apart, and the intervening spaces filled with uninteresting, slow-moving scenes dominated by caricatures in part déjà vu or sketchily drawn (Lady Fanciful, a female fop, is not in herself exciting, and her presence in the plot is somewhat forced). With all that, it remains a play full of startling effects and, at times, scintillating dialogues, but without staying power and continuity. Yet the bickering of the Brutes, almost a stichomythia, with wealth of insults given and received, is epochal. Sir Brute, the embittered husband, who opens the play with the words: ‘What cloying meat is love – when matrimony’s the sauce to it’, inaugurates a second archetype, which, perhaps springing from Jonson, can be traced down through the years to Thackeray’s Pitt Crawley. His grotesque behaviour when he gives vent to his ill-humour reminds one of the greatest adversary of the bond of wedlock after Vanbrugh – Thomas Hardy. In the subplot, slight compensation is offered by Heartfree and Belinda, after Constant has walked the tightrope between Platonic and sexual love in his courtship of Lady Brute. Vanbrugh continues his probing of the manners of the day in denouncing mutual marital connivance: wives know that their husbands are unfaithful, and vice versa, and ‘virtue’ is really only ‘discretion’, adultery under wraps. At the beginning of the play, Lady Brute appears patient and obliging towards her grumpy husband, but she, too, is dissatisfied and looks around for opportunities. She asks herself whether a wife would not do well to betray a husband like hers. Every time Brute appears on the scene, he utters lapidary statements oozing poison on the wretched life of any man who is married to a woman he does not love. Scenes 2 and 3 of Act III were censored for offending religious feeling, and Vanbrugh was forced to re-write them. In the original version – in which we are presented with the raw pathology, the deep-rooted schizophrenia, far from comic, caused by the tyranny of matrimony – Brute finds himself in the company of a crowd of blaspheming drunks; he dresses up as a priest, insults the guards, is hauled up before the magistrate, and released after some admonishment.
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In the ‘revised’ version, Brute dresses up as a woman, and impersonates Lady Brute. This episode, rendered apparently inoffensive,3 was the tour de force of the great actor, Garrick. The scenes in the park where Lady Brute and Belinda cover their faces with their masks, as in Etherege and Congreve, and the two ladies, in a heady mix of earnestness, fun, and sexual curiosity, meet their suitors, lie between the surreal and the absurd, and echo the japes and jokes of Antonio and Nacky in Otway’s Venetian tragedy. A dirty and dishevelled Brute returns home and finds in a closet the two gallants. He falls asleep, lulled by the knowledge that he has put his wife to shame. In order to ward off the consequences, the intuitive Belinda announces that she will marry Heartfree, whom she does not dislike. The next day, Brute is forced to accept the situation. With a great sense of theatre, Vanbrugh has the shrewd servant come on stage to throw light on all the plots, and show what a lot of fuss has been created over nothing. Brute perks up: ‘So that, after all,’ ‘’tis a moot point, whether I am a cuckold or not’. 4. In The Confederacy (1705), derived from a French source, we find another down-and-out called Dick, who, in false guise, skilfully courts a wealthy lady (the candid Corinna, who is aptly named a ‘plain-dealer’),4 against the background of a matrimonial crisis accepted by everyone as normal. The two rather foolish husbands, who attempt to seduce each other’s wife, are ably countered by the perspicuous Flippanta. The union of the young couple, uncertain to the very end, is approved and celebrated, thus providing the usual anchor against the moral drift. Vanbrugh wrote only four acts of A Journey to London; Cibber found them among his papers, and wrote the fifth and final act, calling the finished play The Provoked Husband (1728). As ever, intermittently, Vanbrugh has written a short but delightful satirical masterpiece, exploiting verbal and dialect caricature.5 Here the attack is aimed at wives: the three men have a clean enough record, though they are no paragons of intelligence. At their sides are three 3 4 5
Brute gives a satirical summary of the typical day of an idle lady, with many realistic details. § 55.6. And maybe the last, or penultimate, time that the pseudo-Italian exclamation ‘Cotso’ was heard on the English stage.
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wives, almost all quick-thinking and lecherous. Uncle Richard is the voice off that comments on the foolishness of his relatives from the country, because his nephew Sir Headpiece has bought a seat in Parliament, and is taking his wife and children to London. They cannot wait to take full advantage of every opportunity to enjoy themselves, enjoyment for them meaning permissiveness leading to the bottomless pit of vice, gaming, and, therefore, debts. The arrival of the family in London is described with an almost Dickensian flair, the coach pulling in to its destination chock-full of provisions. The play ends with a series of misunderstandings and blunders that throw a pitiless light on the stupidity of the Headpiece family. If the paterfamilias is a poor fool, the children are greedy, obese and malicious, and, had the play gone on for much longer, the wife would have flirted with someone, or even committed adultery, influenced by Lady Arabella, who, together with her husband, represents the classic dysfunctional couple in Vanbrugh. Lady Arabella, a ‘country wife’, exemplifies the way in which the town quickly ‘denaturalizes’ the country. § 60. Farquhar George Farquhar (1678–1707) is the first major true-blooded Irishman in the history of English literature, and was, obviously, a Protestant. His theatrical vocation in all likelihood is to be attributed to the fact that Dublin saw the foundation, in 1660, of the first theatre outside London, the so-called Smock Street,1 which was to cater for the cultural needs of the English landowners and administrative officials living ‘within the Pale’. Without that theatre, Farquhar the playwright would not have existed either. Born in Londonderry, the son of an impoverished vicar, he studied at Trinity, like Congreve some short time before him, but only for one or two years, before being expelled, or in any case, before taking his degree. He soon discovered he was not cut out for the religious life to which he had been destined: his true vocation was for the theatre. Like others before him, he began acting while young – about twenty years of age – but without great results. Having accidentally wounded a fellow actor, he was forced to 1
DEA begins his fifth chapter with Farquhar, the earliest of the Irish writers examined in that volume.
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emigrate to England, where he joined the army, first as a recruiting officer, then as a lieutenant in an Irish regiment. He failed to reach the theatre of war of the Spanish Succession. In the meantime, he had started writing for the stage, and not only in order to support his family. He had fallen into the net of a widow with children, and, believing her to be a wealthy heiress, had married her. It is rather like the plot of one of his plays. Like Lee and Otway, he died young, a victim to consumption before he was thirty. His ethnic origin is betrayed by the fact that in all of his plays there is at least one Irish character. There is, however, no trace of a political consciousness, however hard the students of Irish literature might look. Farquhar is not a political writer, but, all the same, Brecht read into The Recruiting Officer a satire against militarism, which he adapted in his Pauken und Trompeten.2 The truth is, the Irish are inserted in his plays to raise a laugh: they all possess the typical Irish trait of the ‘blarney’, or eloquence: they use the dialect of Irish English, get words wrong, are always hungry and thirsty, and are far from honest. One of his characters represents a ‘French’ chaplain who is suspected of plotting in favour of the Papists. 2. Farquhar wrote eight comedies, of which only two, the last works of his canon, are essential reading, far superior as they are to the others, and bearing the mark of Molière.3 Farquhar is a great entertainer whose realm is the superficial. In his Discourse on Comedy he states his brutally practical and uncomplicated aesthetics, which dispenses with the unities of Aristotle and Dryden, and elects the audience sole judge of the value and worth of a play. The audience rewarded him: his plays broke all records for numbers of performances, and for a considerable time – the first fifteen years of the new century – Farquhar stands out as the most popular and best loved playwright in English. His plots are not particularly good, nor ingeniously constructed; but they are full of things that happen, with lots of misunderstandings,
2 Brecht’s Puntila und Matti contains echoes of Sir Harry Wildair (1701), in which the hero of the title is a libertine when drunk, and a moralist when sober again (SES, 270). 3 Recent complete works: The Works of George Farquhar, ed. S. S. Kenny, 2 vols, Oxford 1988. The Mermaid edition of four comedies, ed. W. Archer, London 1906, contains an excellent introduction.
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women dressed up as men, and so on. The greatest attraction of his characters, it must be said, lies in ‘the gift of the gab’, the ability to speak flowingly, wittily and spontaneously. Their salacious humour and colourful expressions put them in a different league to the complicated, rarefied witticisms that fill the pages of Congreve and the mouths of his characters. Farquhar, too, however, aims at presenting the society of his time in microcosm. Some stereotypes still persisted, tottering on the stage on their last legs, so to speak, even if by now outdated and irrelevant, like the awful fop. Society could still be divided into blades and gulls, fools and fiddlers, the defrauded and the fraudsters, many of the latter dowry hunters who passed themselves off as noblemen fallen on hard times. Seen through Farquhar’s deforming lens, sex was a safety valve for the release of social and cultural tension. His plays are full of easy sexual conquests beckoning lovers and libertines, whose victims are guileless, disoriented country girls. Consequently, the plays are also full of illegitimate children who are usually entrusted to the care of the parish. The prevailing atmosphere can be gauged by the systematic use of sexual double-entendres in all conversations, as in Shakespeare or Middleton. The rules imposed on sexual behaviour in matrimony provokes, in Farquhar as in Vanbrugh, widespread marital crises. Farquhar’s last play is an exception, as it proposes a utopian future with a new divorce law, and equal rights for both partners in the marriage contract. In short, Farquhar savages the double standard that was, however, to be the norm well into the nineteenth century. His last two plays owed their success, in part, to the new ‘decentralized’ setting and the truly innovative choice of two occasions and two dramatic situations never before presented on stage – Shrewsbury and recruiting officers, Lichfield with the toing and froing between the inn and the squire’s house – simply because no playwright before Farquhar had been an army officer. Of course, in the end Farquhar conforms to the expectations of the time, and gives free rein to libertines, gulls and impostors, winding up the action with sudden and unexplained changes of heart. There are two main female types: one is the anxious, suffering lady who broods on the probable falsehoods of the man she loves, and finds some release for her unhappiness in turning away the various suitors she cannot but attract. Obviously, this is not a comic character, but a deeply serious one. The other type of female is the young, enterprising woman who attempts to redeem the libertine who is assailing her virtue. These ardent members of the gentle sex, who are not
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averse to wearing disguise if necessary, are the distant ancestors of Jane Eyre, because they sense that their various Rochesters can be saved, whatever their crimes, whatever the number of their sexual misdemeanours. On the strength of these female characters, Farquhar has been often considered the forerunner of eighteenth-century sentimental comedy. 3. Farquhar’s first play, performed at Drury Lane in 1698, revolves around an Irish libertine who is induced to change his ways by a female character. The fop, Wildair, is central to two comedies: the first is The Constant Couple (1699), where the author’s dramatic skills are still not fully developed. In itself, the plot is static, and is based on four suitors for the hand of Mrs Lurewell, Farquhar’s first passionate gentlewoman. She exerts complete control over the vying lovers, and sets one against the other, sometimes summoning them to come to her in embarrassing situations, from which she extricates herself by having them hide in a closet, or dressing them up. The rival suitors do all they can to trip one another up, but Lurewell is intelligent enough to see that the most worthy candidate for her favours is the serious, respected colonel. That Lurewell is already a romantic character can be seen clearly in the recital of her seduction, when she was fifteen, by an unnamed student. Since then, she has sworn never to marry. At the same time, Wildair clumsily attempts to seduce a coy prostitute, aptly called Angelica, who admonishes him on his morals with easy-flowing rhetoric. It is not only the respectable marriages that dispel the shades of squalor: in a final scene of recognition, the colonel is discovered to be the very student that had seduced the young Lurewell. With this reunion, her trauma is healed. In The Twin-Rivals (1702) there is a hint of tragedy, or tragicomedy; the hunchback, Wouldbe, is reminiscent of the stepbrothers in Shakespeare’s King Lear, as, with his underhand manoeuvres, he aims to eliminate his elder brother and steal his inheritance. Wouldbe is aided by a cunning midwife who likes a drink, and is a mixture of gushing sincerity and scoundrelry. Richmore, his parallel figure, is a great seducer of women, whom he then abandons, but not without finding willing husbands for them to hide their shame. Wouldbe’s master plan appears to be a copy of Young Fashion’s ruse to get the better of Foppington in Vanbrugh:4 in fact, 4
§ 59.2.
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as soon as he has secured the inheritance for himself, as well as the title of Lord, he is portrayed in the classic scene of the levee. By means of, or in spite of, a series of exhilarating adventures, justice is done, and Richmond the libertine is obliged to marry the woman he has deceived so often. 4. Both Farquhar’s masterpieces have great documental interest. The Recruiting Officer (1706) owes much to his brief career as such an officer in Shrewsbury. The two recruiters in the comedy, Plume and Kite, are philanderers with illegitimate children all over England. The name of their role, therefore, implies the ‘enrolment’ of women, who are then left everywhere pregnant with bastards. Yet Plume does love, in a non-mercenary way, the object of his affections being Sylvia, whose father, a judge, hides his lasciviousness beneath his wig and gown, and refuses his consent to their union because Plume is not wealthy enough. With Sylvia exiled by her father, Plume takes advantage of a poultrymaid, Rose, enticing her to a cottage, like Don Giovanni with Zerlina, and ‘pressing’ her (an obvious euphemism for rape). Rose leaves the cottage with dreams of the future but without her maidenhead. When Sylvia re-appears dressed as a soldier, and therefore, recruiting material, Plume fights a fellow officer for the right to sign her up. The surrealistic duel is like something out of Ariosto, and turns the contenders into the best of friends. Before the recognition, which is delayed in order to exploit the comic potential of the fact that the ladies see Sylvia as a handsome and desirable man, the play loses a bit of its verve: too much space is dedicated to Sergeant Kite, disguised as a fortune-teller, conning the countryfolk in a scene reminiscent of Jonson’s The Alchemist (and also the recruiting scene in 2 Henry IV). Plume is probably lying when he denies having laid a finger on Rose, and agrees to ‘unrecruit’ Sylvia, who is, after all, a woman. In The Beaux’ Stratagem5 the penniless Aimwell and Archer go from town to town trying to lay their hands on a rich heiress. They end up in an inn in Lichfield, where they pretend to be master and servant: the plan is to share the proceeds once their mission has been accomplished. The other, symmetrical, couple consists of the two 5
Written by Farquhar in 1707, by now reduced to poverty, in a garret, and in six weeks, commissioned by his close friend, the actor, Robert Wilkes or Wilks, who gave him twenty guineas to help him out.
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sisters-in-law, Dorinda and Mrs Sullen. The latter (see Shadwell’s The Sullen Lovers) is aptly named, as she is afflicted by bitter marital unhappiness, just like Vanbrugh’s Brutes. Diagnostically, splenetic husbands are a thing of the country, not the town.6 The link between the two plots appears clear when the two ladies see a stranger in church, the stranger being none other than Aimwell. They invite the ‘servant’, Archer, to their home. Two courtships commence and are carried on in parallel. Archer sweet-talks Sullen and is granted access to her bedroom, where a self-styled French priest is hiding out (an attempt by Farquhar to rekindle the now distant psychosis of the Popish Plot). Mrs Sullen gives voice to the average moral stance of the time: ‘I can’t swear I could resist the temptation; though I can safely promise to avoid it; and that’s as much as the best of us can do.’ The night scene of the seduction by Archer is a masterpiece within a masterpiece – high-flying rhetoric punctuated by sobs and sighs, false denials, hilarious faux pas, red herrings, ill-timed comments – all in a mounting spiral of confusion caused by an ongoing burglary. When everything appears to be coming to the foreseen conclusion, to wit, the actual act of adultery, Farquhar produces his deus ex machina, in the form of Sullen’s brother, who provides the play with the utopian ending mentioned above: the Sullens separate, Mrs Sullens gets back her dowry, and will marry Archer after her divorce. Aimwell, on his part, will lead Dorinda to the altar. § 61. Rochester The notorious John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647–1680), the epitome of the English libertine, was the son of a general who had materially helped the future Charles II to escape to France. His mother was, instead, a fervent Puritan. He was eleven when his father died, leaving him the title. After his university studies, he was granted a pension by the king. For three years he travelled widely in France and Italy, and visited, among other places, Venice and Padua. On his return to England, he became valetde-chambre and personal assistant to Charles II. His marriage to an heiress met with resistance from her family. In the meantime, Rochester, not yet 6
Ever the chameleon, Farquhar ‘borrows’ from Milton’s Areopagitica several propositions proving the legitimacy of divorce.
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twenty years of age, distinguished himself as a volunteer in the naval war against the Dutch in 1665–1666. He and his betrothed eloped, and were married in secret. After 1667 Rochester divided his time between his home in Oxfordshire (his wife had borne him four children) and the court. He died at the age of thirty-three, like Carew, probably of syphilis, with renal complications. His surprise deathbed repentance has been put in doubt, given that the only witness to the event was a court chaplain, Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury, with whom Rochester, by now desperately ill, had conversed at length on spiritual matters. If the last-minute change of heart did indeed take place, it means that Rochester chose not to end up like Don Juan, although he himself was the inspiration for many playwrights of the day, such as Etherege and his friend Shadwell, when they came to write their contributions to the Don Juan myth that was then sweeping Europe. Rochester was held to be the leader of a ‘merry gang’ of court wits, including Sedley,1 Etherege, Wycherley and others, that have been compared by some critics with the ‘bright young things’ of Waugh and Huxley.2 In the late seventeenth-century literary context, Rochester’s activity is fragmentary: he wrote occasional scenes for other playwrights, and a rather slavish adaptation of Fletcher’s Valentinian; he was also a theatrical producer, the patron of several dramatists, and an instructor of actors and actresses. 1
2
Sir Charles Sedley (1639–1701), when still a young man, was a bright court wit, but not immoral like Rochester. For the consolation of the English, when quite elderly, he served as a member of Parliament for thirty years during the reign of William and Mary. Flattered by Dryden in his dialogue on dramatic poetry, he was the author of at least two competent plays, The Mulberry Garden, in a mixture of prose and rhymed couplets, and Bellamira (1687), based on the Eunuch by Terence (also borrowed by Wycherley, see § 55.4). He was also an insignificant writer of tragedies, a polite essayist, a fine translator from Latin, and, above all, a pleasing, graceful writer of songs in the Cavalier style – exaltations of fidelity addressed to a Celia or a Chloris, by libertines to whom fidelity meant absolutely nothing. Charles Sackville (1638–1706), grandson of the Thomas Sackville who wrote the Induction (Volume 1, § 44.2), later Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, enjoyed enormous and undeserved fame thanks to Dryden’s praise of him. A biting satirist rather a love poet, he also wrote a dramatic account of a naval battle, ‘Written at Sea’. See PGU, vol. VI, 143, and D. M. Vieth, ‘Introduction’, in The Works of the Earl of Rochester, Ware 1995, xxxiv.
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Though at first a friend of Dryden’s, he later became one of his fiercest enemies.3 As I mentioned in my section on Dryden, he is said to have been behind the ambush that left him wounded, motivated by a satire that may not even have been by him at all. Rochester, however, is remembered for a handful of erotic, if not downright pornographic, poems not intended for publication, which were widely circulated in manuscript among friends and acquaintances. They were collected and published for the first time in a, possibly, posthumous edition in Antwerp in 1680. Throughout the eighteenth century his reputation as king of English libertines thrived, and more than fifty editions of his poems were published.4 After the turn of the century, however, and for the whole of the long Victorian period, Rochester became closet reading, and was only brought back into the drawing rooms and libraries at the beginning of the twentieth century. Before dying, he left instructions that his poems were to be destroyed, so it is impossible to know with any accuracy how many poems he wrote in his short lifetime, nor assign a date to any of the extant ones.5 2. Rochester’s personality was naturally aggressive, and sooner or later he quarrelled with his pupils or anyone in his care. Even the king was not exempt, and Rochester was often out of favour because of criticism levelled at the sovereign. If someone angered him, he would be challenged to a duel. Libertinism in him was elevated to the realm of metaphysics in the wake of Hobbes, the éminence grise who introduced him to sceptical materialism and the distrust of reason. Rochester and the other court rakes in his entourage put into practice the Hobbesian axiom that the purpose of life is the satisfaction of the senses, as demanded by the urgings of nature. Morality and religious inhibition were to be rejected. In the long run Rochester
3 4 5
‘An Allusion to Horace’, in rhymed couplets, consists of barbed attacks on the principal writers of the day, especially Dryden, all subjected to his mordacious wit. According to Vieth 1995, xxxiii, on the authority of a contemporary source. There are three classic editions, ed. D. M. Vieth, New Haven, CT and London 1968, and Ware 1995, mentioned above; ed. K. Walker, Oxford 1984; ed. H. Love, Oxford 1999, with, in the middle, the one ed. F. H. Ellis, Harmondsworth 1994. For the controversy over the authenticity of Rochester’s three most famous poems, cf. the review of a later edition, in TLS (3 September 2010, 7–8).
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regrets the villainies he celebrates; or it may be he deems them the necessary condition for a renunciation, or what he calls a ‘regeneration’, always put off because of relentless psychic determinism. He was a double-sided libertine who acted like a normal, staid family man when at his home in Oxfordshire, but when he went to London ‘the devil entered into him’.6 He was also a dipsomaniac who, under the influence of alcohol, was capable of deplorable faux pas and actions, and would come out with the most embarrassing opinions. Whether he was telling the truth or exaggerating, Bishop Burnet recalled hearing Rochester confess that for five whole years he had never once been sober. It is symptomatic that he should have had a mania for disguise. Once again, Burnet is the source of the story of Rochester dressing up as a porter, or chairman, or beggar, or other ‘strange figures’, like the quack, Alexander Bendo. One thinks of Browning’s many masks into which his personality was split. Rochester’s best poems show an inner struggle, at times a denunciation and renunciation of the life of pleasure he had thrown himself into. He sounds like certain great writers of today who are addicted to some form of drug and cannot break their dependence however hard they try. Significantly, in many poems, Rochester uses the word ‘slave’ to refer to himself, together with a host of synonyms. Women are seen as the ruin of men, so the libertine is at heart a misogynist, and his desire can never be satisfied because the possessed female requires more and more orgasms, and the libertine just ‘cannot swive’.7 3. Critical assessment of Rochester’s poetry has always been protean and controversial: for some he is a born poet with his own unmistakable style, second only to Dryden in contemporary terms; for others he is a mediocre amateur, an expression of the manners of the day, very little of whose verse is worth saving. The scandalized Victorians separated the inoffensive, neutral, poems from the pornographic ones, but they made the mistake of basing their judgement on moral reprobation.8 It must 6 7 8
John Aubrey’s words, quoted by Vieth 1995, xxvi. The verb, meaning to copulate, is one of the many slang terms used by Rochester, together with ‘frig’ (‘to masturbate’) and ‘tarse’ (the male member). Taine in particular gave a completely distorted idea of Rochester’s spiritual dimension (TAI, vol. II, 337–40).
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be admitted that Rochester makes great use in his poems of ‘four-letter words’, but they become part of a cold, controlled linguistic game – dry, epigrammatic, anti-Baroque, and Metaphysical. They do not, as in D. H. Lawrence, vibrate with the transcendent intensity of the erotic. Rochester is the other side of Restoration theatre: playwrights were forced to speak through allusion and metaphor, whereas the manuscript poet cared nothing about censorship and could be as outspoken as he wished. Both, however, provide a linguistic, auditory record of manners in the year of grace, 1680, and the following twenty or so years, up to 1698 and the arrival on the scene of Collier. Far from wanting to arouse his readers, Rochester wants them to feel disgust and nausea for the act of copulation. Any time-line of Rochester’s poetry is bound to be open to debate. The editor, Vieth, gave it a romantic, teleological slant by dividing the corpus into four phases: apprenticeship; early maturity; tragic maturity; disillusion and death. Rochester’s first poems read like leftovers from an outdated anthology, in which the women are given names like Olinda, Celia, Chloris and so on, and are possibly transfigurations and doubles of his future wife. Yet there are some very strong poems: ‘A Wish’ seems the bitter epitaph of an aged poet rather than the extraordinary experiment of a fifteen-year-old. It expresses the desire to convert heart and soul into sperm in order to conceive himself, then grow his soul for nine months in his own womb, after which the soul, by means of a second ejaculation, will leave the body, thus satisfying a primeval wish for ‘regeneration’. In the wide range of genres and moods of the poems, the pastoral is present in parodic form. From time to time, Rochester dons his mask and imitates the high-pitched voice of a ‘Platonic lady’, who spurns intercourse and makes do with erotic foreplay. The ‘Walk in St James’s Park’ begins with an unusually relaxed description of the kind of sexual activities that go on there, as seen in the plays of the time. It ends with an invective against ‘loose Corinna’, who prefers vacuous fops, and whose ‘devouring cunt’ is never satiated. ‘Signor Dildo’ is an obscene pronouncement on the female thirst for promiscuous sex. The colloquial openings are deliberately limping, but they rhyme, as in the ballad that recounts the wonders of Tunbridge Wells and other spas, where fops flourish and strut like peacocks down the streets. Towards the mid-1670s, Rochester, by now tired, sick and sarcastic, tried his hand at
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different forms and styles, like the dramatic dialogue, the mask, or a new kind of melancholy song. In his most famous poem, ‘A Satyr against Reason and Mankind’, he paints a shattered cosmos, a déluge which is also the alibi for the poet’s moral collapse when he asks himself what is the point of being virtuous and upright if it makes us no wiser, no nobler and no more hopeful. The construction of the poem is dialectical: a voice speaks out in support of reason, but justified reason does not lead to the renunciation of pleasure but to its enjoyment. Animals kill for necessity, men for self-interest, sometimes disloyally. In ‘Considerate, Considerandus’, Rochester affirms that stepmother nature gives little to mankind in the way of real, solid, lasting pleasure; man strives but does not thrive for long. The ‘Maimed Debauchee’ is forced by his various ailments to withdraw into indolence, but is compensated by remembering the pleasures he enjoyed while young, and the wild things he has done. Now, in his impotence, he spurs his acolytes on to vice. A different Rochester is behind the delightful verses of a town Artemisia to a country Chloe, a series of pictures of a life of pleasure expressed in breathlessly rapturous falsetto. § 62. Samuel Butler* Hudibras by Samuel Butler1 (1613–1680) is a work of enormous experimental value, extraordinary innovation, and considerable stylistic prowess. It also displays such metrical inventiveness, such rhyming skill, and such an extensive and revolutionary poetic vocabulary (unseen since John Donne), that is hard to understand why it has become one of the least read, but *
Poetical Works, introduced and annotated by G. Gilfillan, 2 vols, Edinburgh 1854; Works, ed. A. R. Waller and R. Lamar, 3 vols, Cambridge 1905–1928. Hudibras, ed. J. Wilders, Oxford 1967; Characters, ed. C. W. Daves, Cleveland, OH 1970; Prose Observations, ed. H. de Quehen, Oxford 1979. A. E. Richards, Hudibras in the Burlesque Tradition, New York 1937; G. Wasserman, Samuel ‘Hudibras’ Butler, Boston, MA 1989.
1
One of the many cases of homonymy of both Christian and surname in English literature, this Butler is distinguished from the Victorian author of satires and utopias by adding in brackets, in quotations, the title of their identifying works: Hudibras and Erewhon.
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most mentioned, books in the whole of English literature. The standard modern edition was published fifty years ago, and there is practically no critical bibliography to speak of, so that the common reader has only a vague idea of the kind of writing originated by Butler, which goes by the name of ‘Hudibrastic’. The poem itself has often been treated by experts with a kind of Crocian superciliousness, separating the defects (many) from the merits (few), without discussing or investigating the possibility that Hudibras might be an intertextual emulation, and, as such, the third greatest ‘epic’ poem in English2 after The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. It incorporates, summarizes, and re-elaborates all the highlights of the epic genre, from Homer and Virgil down to Spenser, whose Faerie Queene was already a bastardized version of the epic known as the mock-heroic. Butler was more ambitious, and composed a miniature history of recent history, desecrating the heroic tradition and a theocratic Weltanschauung that appeared to be inviolable, surrounded as it was by its aura of myth. The scarcity of events in the poem is part of the process of the trivialization of the heroic; as always, the comic element is the product of the disproportion between a fact and a character’s reaction to it. Butler reduces Cromwell’s twenty-year rule to a quixotic battle against windmills, such as the attempt to ban bear-baiting, the kind of bloody street fight involving dogs and bears that rivalled the theatre in popularity; a hero’s amatory prowess is compromised in his attempt to win over a shrewd widow, not for love, but for money; Puritan ‘saintliness’ scandalously dons the cloak of Jesuitical casuistry3 in order to get round the condition imposed by the widow for her consent. In the final analysis, the main reason behind such a clumsy and loose-structured plot is that Butler needed some sort of stage on which to
2
3
Butler perhaps was promised, by the king, a prize of 300 pounds, which he never actually received. Only Pepys found nothing funny or witty in the work, thus beginning a debate between admirers and detractors. Soon after, Voltaire was to say the exact opposite. As soon as it was published, Hudibras found numerous heirs and imitators, and was translated into French and German. Voltaire himself attempted an abridged version. In I.3, vv. 499–500, the widow says to Hudibras: ‘And shown your Presbyterian wits / Jump punctual with the Jesuits’.
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exhibit his boundless appetite for parody, and for linguistic and stylistic extravagance. For him one event was as good as another, and in stylistic superfetation lies the strength of Hudibras. It is misleading to reduce it to a satire against the Roundheads, the Puritans, Presbyterians, and the other factions of the Civil War. It is, instead, one of the great English textbooks of style, wayward and cyclical, and a real feast of languages and discourse. 2. The few, and in some cases, contradictory, biographical data in our possession go some way to illustrating the external genesis of the poem. Butler, the son of a wealthy Worcestershire gentleman, was tutored by a local classical scholar, but did not go on to university. He was given employment as a secretary to various J. P.s and members of the aristocracy, among whom a duchess, who gave him free access to her extensive library. This was around the same time that Robert Burton was doing something similar elsewhere, on his way to becoming the author of the encyclopaedic Anatomy;4 the similarity between these two literary personalities is significant. He then entered the service of a certain Luke, a colonel in Cromwell’s army, who became one of the models for Hudibras. After 1660 he lived a retired life for about twenty years, mostly in the service of the Lord Governor of Wales, whom he accompanied abroad on several diplomatic missions. Besides Hudibras, he is said to have collaborated, along with others, in the writing of The Rehearsal.5 He died in poverty, embittered by the lack of recognition for his merits. He had married a rich widow whose inheritance was swallowed up in a series of reckless speculations. The courting of a widow is the longest episode in Hudibras, so that at least a third real candidate helped to mould the character, besides the two other obvious ones: Butler himself (a similar operation was to be carried out by Joyce with Bloom and his other alter egos). The first part of Hudibras appeared in 1662, the second in 1663,6 and the third, after a long break, in 1678. Butler probably intended to write a fourth part, to bring the total number of books up to 4 5 6
On several occasions, Butler met here the humanist, John Selden, from whom he absorbed various sceptical and anti-clerical ideas. The countess died in 1651, and Butler took to frequenting Cleveland and the Inns of Court. § 50.3. The dates on the frontispiece were, however, 1663 and 1664.
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the Virgilian standard of twelve, but even in this incomplete form – an anticipation of the nineteenth-century serialization of novels – Hudibras was hugely successful among all strata of society, from court to courtyard. Its subject matter was still very much alive in people’s minds, and his treatment of it provided a welcome breath of fresh air after twenty years of Puritan fog. It has been said, and it is obviously true, that Hudibras is the very opposite of Pilgrim’s Progress, in that it is a satire against cant, or religious fanaticism, which obnubilated consciences by means of the manipulation of the language used in propaganda and sermons. So the ideological genesis of Hudibras is a Hobbesian negation of all teleology, and the arraignment of ‘humanity’, or Bacon’s ideological battle against the ‘idols’. Butler writes the great farcical epic of Puritanism at a time when it was at last permitted to laugh and make fun of that grim regime. 3. As I have suggested, Hudibras originates in literature itself. It is a mighty, unparalleled, unique experiment. The mock-heroic poem was not fashionable at the time, and Butler was influenced by, at the most, a couple of rare contemporary examples of the genre, like Cotton’s translations of Scarron’s Vergile travesti. Cervantes already belonged to the distant past, as did Spenser and Rabelais. In fact, the only English forerunner of Butler is Skelton. In contents, Butler precedes Dryden and his political satire based on the binary structure of contemporary events, expressed in terms of biblical history. His frame of reference is the continental mock-heroic canon, but his allusions are rapid and schematic, with no suggestion of rifacimento. Spenser lends Butler his Hudibras, who becomes Don Quixote as well, because Ralpho is the testy, awkward squire based on Sancho, though Ralpho is also derived from Fletcher’s Burning Pestle. It is uncertain how much Butler knew of the Italian ‘macaronic’ canon.7 Such impulses are part of the confused background of recent history. The octosyllabic couplet was the metre daringly chosen to point the lowness of the subject matter. From the very beginning we find a host of stylistic oddities, like the exorbitant use 7
The ‘sources’ indicated by CHI, vol. VIII, 58–9, are all from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries; it is undoubtedly true that Butler had first-hand knowledge of the literary tradition, especially the French one, and that there are many borrowings from Rabelais.
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of parentheses, serious comparisons ironically contrasting with the comic status of the characters (Hercules, Aeneas, Ajax …), the protasis being both delayed and defective. Butler’s text gleams with Latinisms and words from other languages, fresh coinages, sectorial lemmas, and his monosyllabic world is sometimes visited by a lumbering tetrasyllabic monster. Other words are used with an off-centre, playful semantic charge. All in all, his poetic lexicon is uniquely personal, with a great variety of registers: dreamily romantic and suggestive couplets topple over dizzy precipices into the downright ridiculous. As the editor Gilfillan remarked, Butler looks ahead to the Byron of Don Juan, as can be seen, if further proof were needed, in the false, cacophonic rhymes, and simple assonances and consonances, which, far from being a sign of approximation and carelessness, are a refined play of tension between apparently dissimilar objects and concepts.8 The first of the nine cantos making up the three parts begins with the static, Chaucerian description of the omniscient pedantry of Sir Hudibras; then the focus shifts to his physical appearance, his beard, paunch, buttocks, his weapons, his throat, representing his love of food. The portrait is Arcimboldesque in its wealth of surreal, monstrous details: his pantaloons are stuffed with provisions, and his sword sheath is full of broth. The defenders in the combat between dogs and bears have outlandish Italian or Spanish names like Crowdero, Magnano, Trulla, Orsin and Talgol, the latter – a butcher – maybe derived from ‘Tagliagola’, meaning a ‘cut-throat’. In the rest of the poem, as Johnson complained, ‘more is said than done’: Butler always excels in the static presentations (he was also a mediocre painter, whose canvases, according to Johnson, were used to keep out the draughts at the windows!) and in concerted dialogues, while he was less successful in handling a diegetic plot and as a narrator. Frequent metapoetic asides reveal the presence of the coordinator. There is a particularly Byronic tone in the beginning of the second canto, which, in the course of a critical discussion on genres, dismisses a swashbuckling, duelling solution, and opens the romantic parenthesis of the knight’s love affairs. The plot is based on improbability and unpredictability, and the knight is distrait, illogical and moody like the characters of Byron. In the long dialogue 8
To give a random example: ‘pug’ – ‘synagogue’ (III.3, ll. 166–7).
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between Hudibras in chains and the widow, after an exchange of promises and threats, snatches of poetry are heard, so parodistically authentic as to rival Marlowe’s lovers, and the widow quite rightly denounces a deliberate ‘poetic rapture’. The second canto of the second part, too, opens with a bizarre discussion about how oaths may be broken. The long debate between the knight and his squire is meant to parody legal slang as well as the language and slogans of Puritan tracts and theological writings. The never-ending discussion goes round in circles, like some of Browning’s monologues (or Joycean pastiches), with much use of specious and unsophisticated argument. The episode at the house of the astrologer, Sidrophel, where Hudibras goes for advice on how to obtain the widow’s consent, ends in yet another satirical tour de force, this time aimed at the cant used by astrologers. In the third part, Hudibras goes back to the widow and tells her he has kept his promise, and has flagellated himself. Then, quite unexpectedly, idealistic Hudibras rejects the concept that marriage is a form of torture, and attacks the cynical scepticism of the widow, who appears to have read Milton’s divorce pamphlets. Sidrophel’s supernatural agents, who arrive with the intention of whipping Hudibras for his lies, are in reality ‘heavies’ sent by the widow to make him confess his deception. Hudibras faces a barrage of questions, and answers them all with the most repulsive Puritan hypocrisy and selfrighteousness. The foundations of the Reformation crumble in the face of this surreal onslaught. The second canto of the third part is suspensive, and demonstrates the pessimistic degeneration of the revolutionary cause: the picture of Cromwell’s rule as drawn by Butler is one in which everyone has an opinion, and stands up to declare it and to put forward the most absurd proposals. What we have here is a fantastical account of the historical phenomenon of de-Cromwellianization. Lilburne’s long harangue is also the parody of a political speech. The third, and last, canto picks up the storyline again with the knight’s visit to a lawyer, followed by another bump in the narrative – the letter that Hudibras writes to the widow, who repudiates him, reminding him of how much she dislikes him, and how deeply she believes in the power women have in worldly affairs. It is an abrupt ending, which obviously leaves much to be desired. 4. Butler’s other main work, written quite some time after Hudibras, is Characters, a collection of more than 200 prose portraits of human types
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that amounts to a complete and thorough cross-section of Restoration society. All his other poetic writings were collected much later, in 1759, by a librarian in Manchester, under the title of Genuine Remains. In a series of satires, Butler launches a savage attack on the very foundations of late seventeenth-century society – poetry and drama, the ‘lascivious court of Charles’, ‘the weakness and misery of the human condition’, and, above all, in ‘The Elephant in the Moon,’ written in two different metrical forms, the Royal Society, which, in his opinion (and that of Swift) wasted its time and energy on absurd and unpractical projects. § 63. Oldham Samuel Butler and John Oldham (1653–1683) are usually mentioned together: both are satirists, and the only poets of any value, along with Dryden, in the last years of the century. In reality, in many ways they are quite different – according to some parameters, diametrically so. Both became famous between 1670 and 1680, although Butler was old enough to be Oldham’s father. It seems they never actually met. The heart of the matter is that one was in favour of Puritanism and the other against; they had different ideas on Catholicism, and on the political division represented by Tories and Whigs; one was progressive, the other, conservative. Above all, they differ in the colour and tone of their satire, resulting from that fact that one, Oldham, was a university-educated classicist, while the other, Butler, was in a sense a self-taught scholar who had had the opportunity to browse at will and at length in well-furnished libraries, reading and absorbing in complete freedom. However, the greatest difference between the two is that for Oldham the subject matter is more important than form, or, at least, the form is not particularly cultivated, while for Butler it is exactly the opposite. Oldham’s rhythm is too marked and monotonous, his rhymes are imprecise and truly cacophonic, and his style is sloppy and approximate. Butler places the filter of parody between himself and his subject, while Oldham throws his whole self into his loud and persistent perorations. It is superfluous to add that Butler audaciously chooses to write a mock-heroic poem, while Oldham, with few exceptions, follows the well-worn road of the panegyric, the elegy, ode, dedication, and paraphrase from Greek and Latin. On the other hand, it is precisely because his satire is more
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subjective, and his style so transparent, that nowadays Oldham is more popular than Butler, who fails to arouse interest, while Oldham’s works have been republished, and quite a number of critical essays and books written on him.1 His profile is that of an eccentric, though not exceptionally gifted, writer. He was the classic upright man who may be beaten but never cowed. He lived without flattery and without the theatre, a source of income for many, some of them part-time authors and actors. Naturally, his situation was aggravated by the fact that he was the son of a stubbornly Dissenting minister, a Presbyterian, to be precise (like Butler’s Hudibras), who after the Restoration was deprived of his living. He might have followed in his father’s footsteps, but decided not to. He accepted a post as schoolmaster, then tutor.2 He was said to be as thin as a rake, emaciated, quite ugly, his face always twisted into a grimace. He chose to be a satirist because he felt excluded, and for this reason was ambitious and wrote compulsively. For a poet who died at thirty, and while he lived was forced to work for his bread, Oldham, as though possessed by a demon, wrote an enormous number of works, the most important of which are the four Satyrs upon the Jesuits. No holds are barred in these and other satires, which attack their victims without mercy or respite. Oldham spurns the euphemistic softening of his blows, so much so that he was called the English Juvenal. In an elegy,3 Dryden discreetly suggested his limitations, saying, in short, that he did the best he could. Pope was the last of his admirers, after whom he slipped into oblivion. The current revival of interest is linked to two aspects of his work that have little to do with satire as such: he is a great impersonator, using a vaguely Browninguesque dramatic monologue; and
1 2
3
Poems, ed. H. F. Brooks and R. Selden, Oxford 1987, marked the beginning of a renewed interest, as proved also by various selections of his poems. The long title of this satire, addressed to a friend who is ‘about to leave the University, and come abroad into the world’, describes perfectly the lack of opportunities in the intellectual job market at the end of the seventeenth century. At the centre of the satire is the parable of the wolf who is attracted by the safer existence of the house dog, until – and this is symptomatic of Oldham’s unbounded pride – he sees the marks of the collar on the dog’s neck. § 51.5.
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he was a prolific translator/author of rifacimenti. His versions of Horace and Juvenal not only move the scene from Rome to London, changing the Latin names into English ones, and modifying appropriately the references to history and current events; they also succeed in containing and disciplining his apparently limitless flow of rhetoric, for the simple reason that the starting point is well-marked and unchangeable. One of his best works in this genre is a paraphrase of Horace’s Ars poetica, together with that of the ninth satire against the ‘impertinent button-holer’. 2. Oldham’s first work, at least as far as we know, was an elegy dedicated to a friend by the name of Morwent, who died young in 1674 or 1675. Forty-two twenty-line stanzas may well be a dimension expected of Cowley’s Pindaric ode (Cowley was the young Oldham’s guiding spirit), but seem excessive given the relative obscurity of the deceased, of whom we know little more than that he was a charitable, even Christ-like figure. Some have wished to see a self-portrait between the lines. The glorification of the subject becomes morbidly hysterical, and contains a magnificent attack on fops, accused of being a bad example to society. A later satirical poem ‘against virtue’, written in the style of Rochester, was misunderstood by readers, and taken as a defence of an immoral life style. Oldham set things right with an ‘apology’ and an ‘answer’. It is significant, however, that even after he became an unpaid teacher in a primary school in Croydon, with very little time for writing, Oldham continued to experiment in the impersonation of figures and voices that represent the opposite of what he really thought and fought for – a strange manifestation of weakness, or flirting with perversion, or maybe a vicarious and virtual search for thrills. The ambitious Oldham circulated his Croydon poems among friends; they came to the attention of Rochester, who liked the impersonation, deduced that Oldham was a ‘follower’ of his, and wished to enrol him in the ‘merry gang’ of libertines. Together with Sedley and Dorset, he went to Oldham’s school to meet him in person. Oldham then wrote a Sardanapalus and other erotic poems. In 1678, he left Croydon after teaching there for three years, and became the tutor of a nobleman’s son. He was about to change his register and write softer, more urbane satires, perhaps less arid and prosaic than those he had composed so far, when he fell into the whirlpool of the Popish Plot. His satires against the Jesuits appeared from 1679 to
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1681, when the whole series was collected. Nothing could have gone down better: the Jesuits had been a favourite target of writers since the days of Elizabeth, and many had been infected by this fashionable phobia. That there was a continuity, and that the Jesuits had a carefully prepared plan to extend their influence far and wide, is proved by the fact that Oldham draws parallels with the two Jesuit conspiracies of 1605 and 1678. In the first satire, the ghost of Garnett, the Jesuit provincial, executed in 1606, incites the supposed Jesuit conspirators of the present. After Oldham’s personal invective in the second satire, the third has St Ignatius pronouncing his last will and testament on his deathbed. The peak of Oldham’s poetry, from a visual and descriptive point of view, comes at the beginning of the saint’s speech, before the author is carried away by wordiness. Loyola quotes Milton’s Satan spurring on his fallen army. Oldham cannot but refer to the well-worn comparison between Loyola and Machiavelli, but, once again, he is revealed as a skilful prophetic impersonator reminiscent of Browning, drawn as he is by the curiosity to ‘become’ people he actually opposed and hated. In the fourth satire, the theme is an aspect of Catholic superstition that never failed to cause a sensation – miracles – obviously seen as tricks. Taken altogether, the anti-Jesuit satires are exaggerated and hysterical,4 and place great strain on the reader’s tolerance. Meanwhile, Oldham had arrived in London, and had become part of the court of Dryden, who, not yet a declared Catholic, respected and admired him. The Poems of 1681, significantly, bears no dedication. In the next collection, published in 1683, the ghost of Spenser advises the writer to give up poetry, as there is no money in it. § 64. Restoration historians. Clarendon, Burnet Seventeenth-century historiography begins in 1622 with Bacon’s History of the Reign of Henry VII, followed, in 1649, by Herbert of Cherbury’s study of Henry VIII. During and after the Civil War, and throughout the Restoration period, each historian attempted to defend one or other of the various opposing factions. The great histories of the Civil War were
4
SEL, 165.
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written while the war was taking place, but were published later, when the political temperature had cooled to more acceptable levels. The leading figure among late seventeenth-century historians was Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon (1609–1674). None were as qualified as him to speak from personal experience: he had been a counsellor to Charles I, and Lord Chancellor to Charles II after 1660; he was also the father-in-law of the future James II, and, therefore, grandfather of queens Mary and Anne. His ‘true and historical’ account of the Rebellion and Civil War in sixteen volumes was begun in 1646 in the Isles of Scilly and Jersey during the exile of Charles I, and completed during a second exile in France, where he died, after being removed from office in 1666 following the debacle of the Dutch wars and the machinations of various courtiers and mistresses of the king. Part of a previously written autobiography was included in his history. The finished work was not published until 1702–1704.1 Clarendon’s History takes the form of a memoir, and is therefore presented as an eye-witness account. This is largely, but not only, because, given the circumstances in which it was written, he had no access to the necessary historiographical material and to tools such as letters, despatches, or archival documentation. Notwithstanding the nearness in time of the events described, Clarendon manages to remain impartial and objective. Naturally, he could be nothing but monarchist and Anglican, but, even as his close advisor, did not hide the faults of Charles I. In an attempt to maintain a balance, he mixes praise with reproval. The Restoration marked the return to an institutional regime whose equidistance from fanaticism, especially Puritan, was guaranteed by an Anglican king, who respected and protected law and order in the land. The bloody events of the rebellion were put forward as a solemn warning against all future attempts to tear apart the now united society. The philosophy behind Clarendon’s history is a vision of the interplay of providence and human responsibility, in which man is seen as a creature, not just possessing, but ruled by free will. His is a history made by men and of decisions made by men, both weak and strong, rather than by movements or ideas. 1
The proceeds from the sales of the work were paid to the University of Oxford, where they were used to establish the great publishing house that bears his name, the Clarendon Press.
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His impartiality can be seen clearly in the famous portrait of Cromwell,2 whom he might have been tempted to attack fiercely. Educated at Oxford, an expert in Greek and Latin historiography, his writing is solemn and balanced, with continual corrections and nuancing that are the stylistic equivalent of his ideological equilibrium. His account proceeds by means of static portraits, or ‘characters’, a fashionable genre at that time, and by means of succinctly, but vividly, recreated episodes. 2. Gilbert Burnet3 (1643–1715) led a feverishly active life, full of ideological and intellectual twists and turns. A Scottish professor of theology, he was at first Episcopalian, and therefore against the Covenant, and later a king’s preacher in London; as a wavering fisher of sinners’ souls he confessed the dying Rochester,4 and castigated the immoral conduct of the king himself, finding himself out of favour when he protested too loudly against the royal leanings towards Catholicism. In 1687 he was exiled, and took refuge at the court of William of Orange, who, after the Glorious Revolution, rewarded him with the archbishopric of Salisbury. He was a protégé of Queen Anne and wrote a long commemoration of her. He began his intense writing career with a series of lives, panegyrics, and minor historical works (1676), which derived a certain degree of authority from the inclusion, in the text, of authentic documents.5 He then published an account of Rochester’s death, and a remarkable translation of More’s Utopia. Above all, he is remembered for his timely, and popular, history of
2
3
4 5
Praz, SSI, vol. II, 23, maintains that Clarendon was one of those historians who presented Cromwell to the world as an astute Machiavel, obviously not having understood that the Florentine philosopher had republican sympathies. In reality, this clashes with Clarendon’s statement that ‘Cromwell completely rejected Machiavelli’s method’. It is widely believed that Clarendon had a thorough knowledge of the writings of the Florentine secretary. A namesake, Thomas Burnet (1635–1715), who died in the same year, but was ten years younger than Gilbert, was also a theologian, but not a Scot. As a scientist, he published Telluris Theoria Sacra (1684) and other works of an esoteric and semiheretical nature, that induced the king to remove him from his office at court. § 61.1. A method acquired through reading four or five times Paolo Sarpi’s Historia del Concilio tridentino [History of the Council of Trent] (CHI, vol. IX, 197).
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the Reformation (1679–1681) a violently anti-Catholic answer to a French pro-Catholic text, also based on original documents. The History of My Own Times, mostly posthumous (1724–1735), is, however, his most readable and enjoyable work: a mixture of anecdote and gossip, it was a subject of debate for Tories in the early eighteenth century, and also criticized for the inclusion of facts of which Burnet had no direct knowledge. As a historian, he is more modern than Clarendon, and rings loud the Whig bell of Latitudinarianism. He lacks, however, Clarendon’s genius and verbal skills. Confused and fanciful, he was disliked intensely by Swift, who dedicated several venomous lines to him in his own copy of Burnet’s works. § 65. Pepys* After Malory’s Arthurian romance, and the poems and meditations of Traherne, the Diary of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) is the third most famous case of a text exhumed and reinstated in the canon of English literature with a delay of scores, or even hundreds, of years. The son of a tailor, Pepys went to Cambridge thanks to a scholarship and the influence of a relative who had become a peer. He was given a post in the administrative section of the Navy, without, at the beginning, the necessary skills. But he learnt quickly, and in 1673 was appointed secretary to the Admiralty. It was in 1660 that he wrote the first page of a diary he was to keep for nine years. On his death it was placed in his personal library and made available to the public in 1705. Later, together with his collection of rare books, prints and objets d’art, it was donated to the library of Magdalene College, Cambridge. The other great contemporary diarist, Evelyn, had informed the English reading public of the existence of Pepys’s diary, but no great interest was shown, until, in 1819, a Reverend John Smith began working on the six volumes of manuscripts, all of them in a kind of shorthand. Smith took three years to decipher the whole diary, which was published in an expurgated form *
The Diary, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews, Berkeley, CA 1970–1983, from which is drawn The Shorter Pepys, London 1985; a shortened Italian translation, Diario (1660–1669), trans. M. Dandolo, has an interesting introduction by G. Almansi, Milano 1982. A. Bryant, Samuel Pepys, 3 vols, Cambridge 1933–1938, repr. London 1948; I. E. Taylor, Samuel Pepys, Boston, MA 1989; C. Tomalin, Samuel Pepys, New York 2002.
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in 1825, then again, complete, in 1893. The unexpurgated diary, in eleven volumes, appeared between 1970 and 1983. I will speak later of the reasons that induced Pepys to terminate the diary in 1669, after which date he began collecting various titles and prestigious appointments. He was a prisoner in the Tower for a short period, charged with conspiracy at the time of the Popish Plot of 1678, and released. For two years, from 1684 to 1686, he was President of the Royal Society, and in 1690 he wrote his memoirs of the Navy. 2. In a romance written at Cambridge when he was twenty, Pepys had demonstrated the stirrings of a literary ambition that was never fully realized, but instead, suffocated for unknown reasons. He destroyed the manuscript ten years later. Similarly, he discontinued the diary in 1669. Pepys continued writing, on and off, for another thirty-five years, but never produced anything so private and revealing. Officially, the diary was closed because Pepys became blind, or thought he would go blind, given that his sight was gradually becoming weaker. The last page states, quite bluntly, that he would soon have to dictate his entries to an amanuensis, and that the whole world would know about his irrepressible sensuality, and, in particular, his advances to his servant, Debbie. The diary ends on a note of regret, echoing Prospero’s farewell in The Tempest: ‘And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave’. I will come back to this syndrome of a Brontëan Rochester ante litteram, as if his blindness were punishment for his sins of the flesh, and a divine injunction against all future pleasures deriving from the faculty of sight. For a start, the six volumes – well-bound with his family arms – contained nine years of diaries, each consisting of about 350 pages. It is an open and closed text, not a farrago. There is a short general proem, and, more importantly, a highly polished epilogue. In between, are a number of short chapters, one for each day of the year. Everything argues against the supposition that Pepys did not want his diary to be read, which is what many commentators and editors have ingenuously claimed. It is not true that he did not want to make a book of it, as affirmed by the authoritative Le Gallienne;1 the opposite is true. What has been disproved, on the
1
In the preface to his abridgement of the diary, New York 1921, vii.
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basis of an examination of the manuscripts, is the idea of the spontaneous, unrevised composition: in reality, fair copies of many passages were made from rough drafts or notes. This is the work of a conscious artist. By statute, the only intended reader of a diary is the writer’s self, but this often masks some remote, undeclared, or denied intention to publish, if only posthumously. Like letters, diaries included in a literary canon are there in a very elastic sense: their value is primarily instrumental, their aim, in the first case, to communicate without any aesthetic ambition, in the second, a memory aid for the writer. Diaries written there and then, for personal use, to record impressions of and reactions to various happenings, usually lack one, sometimes two, of the three prerequisites of literary composition: they have no addressee, or the addressee is the same as the writer, and they have no code – while some, as in the case of Pepys, not only use a ‘style’, but are protected by the use of shorthand or codification. What I am trying to say, in short, is that Pepys’s diary, like Hopkins’s poetry, was written in the awareness that one day it might, indeed would, be published. In fact, one suspects that Pepys himself, with all his candour, was behind this great literary thriller, and he can be seen secretly rubbing his hands at the thought that one day his diary would be pored over by a cryptologist. The analysis carried out on the diary has provided proof that it was not written purely for personal use. It is then far from certain that ‘its pages were never intended to be seen by other eyes than those of the writer’.2 3. A discussion of the two most famous English diarists of the end of the seventeenth century is usually preceded by a few reflections on the rise of the genre, which is linked to the development of individualism and self-examination, not only in the middle class, and not confined to male authors. It has been pointed out that a diary like that of Pepys takes and transforms, though not completely, the idea of the examination of conscience, which, before being taken over by the Puritans, had been adopted by religious poets like Donne and Herbert, influenced by Catholic, and primarily, Jesuit, spiritual exercises. This is particularly true in the case of
2
CHI, vol. VIII, 252.
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Pepys, whose diary records, in a kind of double time, an endless series of weaknesses, mainly of a sexual nature, followed, after a pause, by robust reproval by his conscience, and resolutions to sin no more. Pepys is thus penitent and confessor at the same time. Above all, the diary is a sieve through which the public history of the time is filtered by a witness privileged to be very close to the centres of power. The diary is an alternative way of writing history, absorbing events as they happen rather than afterwards. All analysis, no synthesis. The compulsive recording of public events is punctuated by scenes of family life, involuntary comedy routines, full of faux pas and jokes.3 So the two reference points are daily routine – in the long run, repetitive and a little boring, despite the interludes mentioned above – and the great public events that shape and support the narrative – the return of Charles II from the Low Countries (Pepys had taken part in the expedition), the plague of 1665, and the Great Fire a year later. He switches register, from the confessional, to the descriptive: we see Defoe in the long sections on the Fire, while in his courtship of the maidservant, and the consequent disapproval of his wife, there is more than a hint of Sterne the humourist. From beginning to end, Pepys’s diary is a map, in which the itineraries of the author are always indicated with precision. Far from sedentary by nature, he moves from one part of the city to the other, always looking and watching (the eyes are the gateway of temptation), hungry for new experiences and new pleasures. Pepys’s London as it emerges from his diary can be compared with that of Dickens, or to Joyce’s Dublin, the geography of which underpins Ulysses. It is a kind of journal or bulletin, a non-stop outpouring, always the same but always changing imperceptibly, of the daily schedule of a civil servant who, after his busy morning’s work, found time and occasion for pleasure and company. Sunday is still the Puritan Lord’s day, and righteous Pepys goes to church, listens to and ponders the sermon; at times his attention wanders, and he finds himself flirting openly with some lady who seems to welcome his advances. He is of great assistance, especially to the student of seventeenth-century 3
At the age of twenty, Pepys married the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a French Huguenot émigré. She died at just twenty-nine. Pepys never married again, and had no children.
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theatre, in the reconstruction and evaluation of the tastes of the average theatre-goer, a little old fashioned and, even, philistine. Particularly useful are his comments on the first performances of new plays or the classics of the Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan theatre, which provided most of the material for the newly opened playhouses after 1660. Like the true Jonsonian he professed himself, he has left many trenchant asides, as well as a few inconsiderate comments. He was also ‘guilty’ of certain inexplicable infatuations resulting from his eccentric, or uncultivated taste: for example, he enthused over The Adventure of Five Hours by a certain Tuke,4 adapted from a 1663 Spanish text, which drew a now legendary expression of praise from him. 4. As it constitutes a calendar of the period 1660–1669, and is a real public and private journal, Pepys’s diary should be read for its high points, for those passages dedicated to special, unusual events, rather than the routine of everyday life. We might call it one big dictionary, to be leafed through and used as such, or start from the index, always present in modern editions, and go straight to the name or event of interest, and be sure of finding information and eccentric, original comments. Various editors, after the first edition, reduced the original text both for reasons of ‘decency’, and because, after a while, it becomes tiresome. I have mentioned Joyce’s Ulysses, another masterpiece accused by its first readers of being boring, so let me continue with an examination of the many analogies between the form and contents of the Diary and Ulysses. Pepys might be defined as the foreshadowing of the homme moyen sensuel. The various word portraits of Pepys are surprisingly applicable to Bloom in each of the individual character traits: both love the theatre, and opera in particular, both have quite common tastes, not excluding kitsch, as seen in the aforementioned praise by Pepys of mediocre plays which he placed above the immortal masterpieces of Shakespeare. Pepys was married to a very young wife, and they were mutually unfaithful, though, like Bloom, he was also uxorious; he was unfaithful, but jealously kicked against his wife’s affairs. Like Bloom, he could not help flirting in church. He was a libertine and a Don
4
Sir Samuel Tuke (1615–1674).
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Juan, who, fixated on a particular aspect of eroticism, would give way to endless digressions on the subject. He had a fetish about underwear, laces and gloves. He cultivated odd scientific interests. He was a gentle, moral Epicurean, who accepted his bodily urges as natural, and wrote them down only to repent later, with a touch of hypocrisy. Naturally, the code and the language of the diary are, in themselves, mightily similar to the flow of the stream of consciousness. The elliptical syntax (for example, of the subject of sentences), and fragmented elementary and molecular unity of verb and predicate preannounce the modernist style, as do the multilingual descriptions of his sexual exploits. Strange to say, the tale of intended betrayal, begun or concluded, recounted in his diary by Pepys, is enveloped, as soon as the events take place, or are remembered, in a cloud of ambiguity, such that the mixture of rapture and rebuke, promises and more bursts of sensuality, seems to look ahead to, not the monologues of Leopold Bloom, but those of Molly. § 66. Evelyn It is common practice in literary histories to measure Pepys’s diary against that of John Evelyn (1620–1706), usually with the former emerging as the winner. However, the two diaries are, in fact, too far apart for any meaningful comparison to be made, based as they are on two literary modes and systems that have little in common, and are the expression of two quite different personalities. Evelyn’s diary, too, was brought to light more than a century after the author’s death: to be precise, it was discovered in 1813, and published in part five years later, and in its entirety in 1955.1 As it is not in shorthand, one can be fairly sure that its author wished it to be made public, or at least was not averse to other people reading it. What stands out is that Pepys’s coverage of nine years takes three or four times the space Evelyn dedicated to eighty-six years – from 1620 to 1706. With reference to the same years, the two diaries provide a kind of stereophonic 1
Editions: H. B. Wheatley, 4 vols, London 1879; A. Dobson, 3 vols, London 1906, and, the definitive one, E. S. de Beer, 6 vols, Oxford 1955. An anthology of his other works, never before collected in their entirety, is edited by G. de la Bédoyère, Woodbridge 1995.
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account of the same historical events – the plague and the Great Fire, above all, with the Dutch War in the waters of the Thames. The diaries interact and liaise. Pepys never mentions Evelyn, but Evelyn does refer to Pepys, who died before him, and inserts a eulogy in the pages of his journal. The main difference, however, lies in the style: many of the entries in Evelyn are typical of any diary: simple, brief notes on normal, everyday happenings. In general, there appears to be a great gap between the immediacy of the lived experience and the pondered, thoughtful account if it, and not only because the first pages, which deal with his life from infancy up to the age of twenty, were written much later. Evelyn is a classical, Apollonian diarist, while Pepys is Dionysian and Romantic, as exuberant and intemperate, innocent and revealing, as Evelyn is formal, contained, careful and a little cold. He never comes near to breaking through the barrier of discretion that for Pepys means nothing. For Evelyn, a diary is not an unrestrained private outpouring: it has rules of decorum to be respected. We have seen how often Pepys describes his attempts to win over some woman or other, and how often he commits the most embarrassing faux pas in his dalliance. Evelyn would never have courted so openly, or made advances to chambermaids or any other compliant lady. If he did, he would have kept quiet about it. The two diaries also differ in the subject matter and interests they speak of. Evelyn is eclectic, a man of refined tastes and wide-ranging interests; he is even a little snobbish. Pepys favours the commonplace, and even finds room for kitsch. Lastly, their space-time coordinates are different: those of Pepys are the confines of London; the first part of Evelyn’s diary, more than a third of the whole, is a colourful account of his travels. Only after 1660 does it become ‘just’ a diary of life in London, with varying degrees of interest. 2. Evelyn considered no part of the knowledge accumulated in the course of history a se alienum. Interested in everything, he was an encyclopaedist ante litteram. Not only was he learned in the humanities: he was also an expert in science and the visual arts, and, as such, a member of the Royal Society. He had unusual hobbies like numismatics, horticulture and herbalism. He can rightly be called a ‘virtuoso’, a title that was fashionable at the time, implying great versatility. Yet his many-sided interests were accompanied by a keen sense of reality and responsibility. He was appointed
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by the Crown to several prestigious positions of great importance as a civil servant, expert, or assessor. He scrupulously and competently supervised the maintenance of London’s sewers, the policies for the reduction of smog,2 the building of a hospital for casualties of war, not to mention the city’s traffic regulations. After the Fire of 1666, he collaborated in the drafting of a plan for the reconstruction of the buildings that had been destroyed. In some respects, Evelyn was an Elizabethan Renaissance Platonist, 100 years on, a Sidney or a Spenser, idealizers of gentlemanliness, perfect, unshakeable deference to the sovereign, or incarnation of Elyot’s perfect, faultless ‘governor’. For this very reason, he is a straightforward writer, without flashes of genius, stylistic frills or feats: unpretentious, unassuming and untouched by the temptations of exasperated individualism. His Ficinian Platonism lives on thanks to the importance he attributes to human crafts and arts: time and again, a well-cared-for garden is declared to be a replica of Eden, and ‘the best representation of lost happiness’. Particularly Platonic was his affection for the young wife of the poet and diplomat Sidney Godolphin,3 who died in child-birth at the age of twenty-seven, and was revered as a saint. Evelyn wrote a moving memorial of her, which was published only in 1847. He had no time, only harsh words, for the rampant immorality of contemporary society. It is also true that he, like Thomas Browne, whom he admired,4 lived at a time of attempted mediation between traditional values (Evelyn was a convinced Anglican) and the essentially non-confessional culture of the day. Apart from the diary, his writings consist of a number of short, or slightly longer works, on a whole host of subjects. He also wrote poetry and translated, from the original French, a philosophical pamphlet on freedom and slavery, and from Latin, Lucretius. He also left a book on botany,5
2 3 4 5
See his 1661 pamphlet Fumifugium. § 40.1. Cf. diary entry for 17 October 1671. This is Sylva (1644), which deals with the need to plant more trees in England in order to build ships and also to favour the production of glass. Elysium Britannicum, a history of horticulture, occupied Evelyn for forty years, and was left unfinished. He is also credited with being one of the first ecologists.
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a comparison of English and French gardens, and other handbooks on aesthetics, painting, sculpture, architecture and town-planning.6 3. Evelyn’s diary may be divided, ideally, into three sections. The first, written retrospectively, tells of his forebears, his childhood, youth and years at university before going on to his travels on the Continent, the first of which took place, prudently, on the eve of the Civil War, when Evelyn left the Low Countries for the court in exile in France. There he met and married the very young daughter of a nobleman of tried royalist faith. From France he went on to Italy. By the mid-1640s he had gone as far as Rome and Naples, and back north as far as Lombardy and the Veneto. This first volume is the best of the three, and still rewards reading as an early example of travel literature: it begins like an ordinary guide, but soon breaks into minute architectonic descriptions that remind the reader of Ruskin, and, in the occasional sketches of customs (especially in Rome and the Papal court), of Dickens. Following in the footsteps of Milton, Evelyn went to Geneva and there met Giovanni Diodati, the uncle of Milton’s bosom friend, mourned in his famous elegy. A second, shorter, stay in Paris probably ended with Evelyn’s definitive return to England and the ancient manor house of Sayes Court. After 1652 the diary becomes more factual and detached, though lit up from time to time by various anecdotes, like the ambush by the cutpurses, or the spectacle of the Turkish acrobat or Cromwell’s funeral, described with a touch of sadism. The forty years after 1660 were spent, as I mentioned, in a frenetic succession of journeys the length and breadth of England on the king’s service. This did not prevent Evelyn from cultivating his numerous private interests. Of course, the diary abounds in entries about visits to eminent public figures, working lunches, religious services complete with sermons, obituaries and weddings, diplomatic missions and inspections. Evelyn had a soft spot for elegies. The routine of the diary is broken whenever he takes on the role of a purveyor of choice, refined sensations and experiences. ‘Rare’ and ‘rarity’ are words used with great frequency, and curiosity is Evelyn’s prime quality – curiosity for everything wonderful, a curiosity he held dear well into advanced old age. 6
He discovered and sponsored the wood-carver, Grinling Gibbons, and collaborated with Wren in the rebuilding of St Paul’s. He was also a student of surgery and physiology.
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§ 67. Temple Sir William Temple (1628–1699) is a marginal figure in seventeenthcentury literary history, remembered above all on two accounts: he was the husband of Dorothy Osborne, the daughter of the Governor of Guernsey, who, as a fiancée, wrote a series of ‘adorable’ letters between 1652 and 1654;1 his second claim to fame is that Swift acted as his secretary from 1690 to 1699, and was encouraged by him to write The Battle of the Books. It was while Swift was a member of Temple’s household that his ill-starred affair with Stella was born. In actual fact, Temple was a man of letters who had dabbled, unsuccessfully, in politics,2 and had retired, a wiser man, to his country estate in Sheen, though King William continued to visit him and ask him for advice. He had held important and sensitive diplomatic posts in the preceding twenty-five years. In 1668 he sealed the triple alliance between England, the Low Countries and Sweden, blocked by Charles II. In 1674 he was an intermediary in the nuptials between William and Mary. He was also the English ambassador in Ireland. His literary works, including memoirs and works on politics, were all written when he was an old man in retirement. They were collected in Miscellanea, in three parts, between 1680 and 1701. Swift edited his correspondence in 1700–1703. Temple wrote, not so much a diary, as personal and private essays, long, pleasant digressions in the manner of Montaigne, but much more superficial: they lack arguments, and meander aimlessly, without taking a stand on any of the burning issues of the time. They celebrate the productive meditation that is possible when one withdraws from the world. His easy, elegant prose was soon considered second only to Dryden’s, and Temple seen as the pioneer of a style of writing that was clear, correct, and free from extravagances. Johnson praised it, and confessed he had modelled his own style on it. His reputation began to fail after a long, hostile assessment by Macaulay (1838), who rightly castigated the far from elevated reasoning of his works and the great number of truisms and affirmations included in them that are debatable, if not downright wrong. Of Temple’s three most famous essays, the most fascinating is the one on the gardens of Epicurus, an early fruit
1 2
§ 71.1. SEL, 224.
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of English eccentricity, but also a distant relation of Walton’s Compleat Angler and the fantastical speculations of Thomas Browne. Never too syntactically complex, the essay is a rhapsodic idealization of ancient oriental gardens and that of the philosopher, Epicurus, with whom the author, in a way, identifies. As for Evelyn, here the well-tended garden embodies the Platonic idea of lost happiness.3 It gradually becomes an orchard, indeed the very orchard that Temple kept on his estate, full of peaches, apricots and figs. There follows a detailed discussion of the virtues of the various fruits, flowers and herbs, and the relative methods of cultivation. Also based to a large extent on his own experience is the essay on health, and the ‘recipe’ for a long life, based on the premise that health, happiness and well-being constitute the foundation of life itself. The secret of longevity lies in temperance and living in the open air. Temple gives the reader a short history of medicine, in the style of Robert Burton, piling up example upon example of people who lived to incredible ages with the help of onions, garlic, saffron and other herbs. Two of Temple’s essays deal with aesthetics and literary history, and are constructed on the premise of a general decline in values and beliefs since the days of the ancients, something believed by Macaulay as well. His essay ‘Of Poetry’ is equidistant: Temple finds the origin of poetry in divine furor, but it is also a craft and an exercise in common sense. Contrary to the rigid contemporary rules governing poetic composition, he favours freedom of movement and expression. At the end of the essay, however, he reverts to a sober, classical position, and repudiates comic, nonsense and Rabelaisian poetry. His intervention in the querelle des anciens et des modernes aroused the ire of scholars. Here Temple indeed adopts a viewpoint which is no longer Eurocentric, but embraces a much wider, interconnected cosmos, with Confucius placed on the same plane as Socrates or Pythagoras, and the events of antiquity of the Americas or the Orient just as important as those of Europe. Temple tries to prove that the roots of western culture are to be found in India and China. Bentley 3
A garden is the apotheosis of symmetry, but the Chinese placed in theirs the socalled sharawadgi, the principle of pleasing disorder. This is only a passing comment in Temple’s essay, but in the eighteenth century it was used to idealize the ‘natural’ garden.
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and Wotton were quick to point out Temple’s blunder when, in order to show the superiority of the ancients in every field of knowledge, he chose as a not very apt example, the merits of Aesop, and, especially, the spurious epistles of the despot of Agrigentum, Phalaris. § 68. Hobbes, Locke Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), also called Hobbes of Malmesbury from his place of birth, is present in this volume not only insofar as he is a key figure in the history of seventeenth-century ideas, of which the literature of the time is an expression. In reality, Hobbes started off as a writer, and turned to philosophy at a later date. In old age, he reverted to literature, at a time in which the branches of knowledge were not yet separated into distinct categories, and were all open to the curiosity of the educated reader. He became the philosopher of Leviathan, in other words, after debuting as a child prodigy of Latin and the humanities. He translated Euripides into Latin verse at the age of fourteen; in 1628, his first published work was a translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. At the ripe old age of eighty-four he wrote his, often humorous, autobiography in Latin. An ecclesiastical history in Latin verse was published posthumously in 1688. He ended his career as a translator, though not a very good one, of the two Homeric epics. So, his output was immense, also because he lived such a long life; he wrote Latin and English with the same ease. All he lacked was pure inventiveness.1 Without the body of his philosophical works between the head and the tail, Hobbes would be simply one of the many English authors who wrote in Latin, or one of the dozens of translators of Homer, or from Latin, or just another writer of memoirs and autobiographies. He does have a certain importance in the development of English prose, his style being clearly influenced by Thucydides – not particularly fine or elegant,
1
As a literary critic, Hobbes wrote, in 1650, a reply, only apparently eulogistic, to Davenant’s prologue to his own poem, Gondibert, admonishing the poet to stick to criteria of truth and verisimilitude. In the prologue to his Odyssey (1675) Hobbes advises poets to exercise firm control over the extravagances of fancy.
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but crystalline and to the point.2 Though a contemporary of Milton, his prose is much more modern. 2. When he died at ninety-one, faithful to the saying mens sana in corpore sano, Hobbes had lived long enough to span almost the whole of the seventeenth century. He had been born in the last years of the sixteenth century and died when the eighteenth was on the horizon. His philosophy is evolutionary, heterogeneous and impure because it brings with it the leftovers of the Aristotelianism it fights, and even a little medieval mouldiness; but he mixes it all with new blood, in particular, Cartesian mathematics, Galilean motion and post-Machiavellian politology. It is symptomatic that, although an atheist, or at least, non-religious, Hobbes could not resist the temptation to subject the Scriptures to animated discussion, to approve of, or take for granted, religious belief for political reasons, and kept an open mind on the Roman Catholic Church.3 When he was fifteen, he studied Aristotelian logic at Oxford, and developed a profound hatred for academic institutions. At twenty-two, he became a tutor to a nobleman, and accompanied him on his grand tour. In the 1630s he was in Paris with the nobleman’s son, and, on several occasions, met Descartes, to whom he made several objections concerning his writings. He also met Gassendi. In Florence, he was introduced to Galileo. A political tract written in 1640 already contains the seeds of Leviathan, with the difference that in it he states that democracy is the first form of human aggregation, but can degenerate into absolutism and despotism. His third continental journey was the most productive, because it was a result of the gathering political storm. He lived in Paris for eleven years, from 1640, reading and frequenting Descartes, publishing De Cive (1642) and laying the foundation for a Latin trilogy of natural and social history. Leviathan, the result of this long period of incubation, was published in London in English in 1651, while
2
3
Except in the third and fourth parts of Leviathan, where it is ‘expansive, at times wild, full of metaphors and occasionally fanciful insults’ (D. Runciman, reviewing a recent re-edition [TLS, 1 March 2013, 3–4]), mainly because in these parts the subject is religion. Hobbes never actually declares he is an atheist, but his ‘mechanistic materialism’ leads in fact to atheism.
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Hobbes was still in Paris. A copy of the book was donated to the king just as the author was about to return to England after tacitly acknowledging Cromwell’s government. Hobbes’s own Latin translation was published in Amsterdam in 1668, and contributed to its diffusion on the Continent. In the next thirty years, he was able to dedicate himself completely to his studies, thanks to a pension. He was engaged in many philosophical disputes with the establishment (on free will with Bishop Bramhall, and on various questions of mathematics and geometry with professors at Oxford), and at one point was forced to face charges of heresy, which led to his prudently burning a number of compromising documents. The posthumous Behemoth (1679–1682) is a dialogue on the Civil War. 3. At the heart of Hobbes’s philosophy lies an attempt to adapt Euclidian geometry, and Galilean science and physics, to philosophical problems, a line of thought that proved to be of lasting value through the centuries. Apperception in Hobbes is the pressure of objects communicated through their motion; ‘representation’ is another motion that reacts to the object’s motion on the subject. In logic, Hobbes favours the principle of noncontradiction: truth or falsity reside in words, not in things, and the criterion of truth is not a function of an ontological structure of reality. In ethics, motion governs the passions, by attracting and repulsing. However, Hobbes is important above all for his political vision. The origin of Leviathan may well have been not merely heuristic: Hobbes was born in the year of both uncertainty4 and security: the Spanish Armada had been defeated and destroyed with the help of the elements, and England’s borders were safe. The resulting sense of precariousness might have become particularly strong during the Civil War, giving rise to a harsh depiction of nature as an all-out, internecine war (the same harrowing image found at the end of Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’), sublimated into pure, detached philosophical argument. Individual freedom might, and must, be sacrificed for peace and self-preservation. The government of the civitas, once handed over to a central authority, instituted to protect, and invested with power thanks to a pact stipulated with the whole community, cannot be revoked. The governor 4
In his autobiography he says that, together with him, his mother had given birth to his twin sister, Fear.
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governs with absolute power and unlimited prerogatives. Above all, Hobbes feared anarchy. Rebellion is impossible, because, even if Leviathan were to go mad, it would be sufficient to neutralize the possible outbreak of civil war. Subjects are released from their obligation to obey only in the case of a sovereign who is incapable of offering protection to these same subjects. In international politics, Hobbesian philosophy is seen as defensive and protectionist, rather than offensive. It is dictated by an aspiration for peace and order and reflects a desire for an idealistic isolation from the rest of the world. It is likely that Orwell found in Hobbes the idea of permanent war, or the cold war, between three super-powers. In fact, Hobbes expressly foresaw only a continuous state of war with occasional interruptions. Like Orwell, he deplored the lack of an international governing body, which meant that human progress risked a boomerang effect, with the production of ever more destructive weapons. Only inefficiency could save mankind, in the absence of an impartial world government.5 His energetic defence of absolutism was repeatedly criticized as ambiguous, because it could be invoked to bolster and support quite different political regimes like Cromwell’s (Hobbes did actually accept the Commonwealth) and the restored Stuart monarchy. In the key section on the delegation of power, the delegate may be an individual or an assembly – that is, a parliament. The same section speaks of a mortal god that corresponds to the ‘immortal God’ above us.6 4. John Locke (1632–1704) constitutes a huge, macroscopic bump in western philosophy: Bertrand Russell spoke of an expressly Lockean line of development as opposed to one derived from Descartes, and through Descartes from Kant, and attributes to him an influence that reaches down to later English empiricists, and further ahead, to Bentham and Marx, not
5 6
HWP, 541. Leviathan aroused much controversy, not only among the clergy, and Hobbes was excluded from the pusillanimous Royal Society for being a heretic. After the Restoration his works had to be printed outside England as they were considered to be atheistic. In Oceana (1656) James Harrington (1611–1677) opposed Hobbes’s absolute monarchy with the utopia of a Cromwellian republicanism in which agrarian wealth is equally distributed. He admitted, however, that in situations of emergency a dictator may be needed to restore law and order. Other confutations came from, above all, Robert Filmer (§ 1.1 n. 2) and Joseph Glanvil (1636–1680), Arnold’s ‘scholar gipsy’.
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to mention the interest aroused by his political doctrines based on tolerance and moderation.7 At the same time, Locke, as a philosopher, had no ambition to erect general, totalizing structures, but based his arguments on the solid observation of reality. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690 after a gestation of twenty years,8 deals with the criteria for the authentication of knowledge and ideas, and how they are formed in the mind. At the same time, Locke draws a dividing line between that which can, and that which cannot be known. Locke’s ‘idea’ is, of course, not that of Plato, but derives from English empiricist literature going back to Roger Bacon and Ockham, grafted onto Descartes: in other words, it is a synonym for pure ‘mental content’. Locke denies the existence of inborn ideas, because ideas only reach the intellect through experience; the intellect is able to combine simple ideas, but these are always furnished by experience. However, mental activities are, in themselves, creators of new ideas. This consideration leads to a distinction between two kinds of ideas – ideas of ‘sensation’ and ideas of ‘reflection’. In the latter category, the mind becomes self-aware while still needing material derived from experience. To know, therefore, means to bring together similar ideas derived from experience, the only exceptions being the idea itself of thinking, which is self-evident, and the idea of the existence of God, which is intuitive. In ethics, Locke, a former Puritan, moves away from his original beliefs, like all empiricists, considering good and evil ‘not other than pleasure and pain’. As a political thinker, he posits a state of nature different to that of Hobbes, affirming that the delegation of authority to a sovereign may be revoked. He was a renowned advocate of freedom and tolerance, but excluded Catholics and atheists, the former because they swore allegiance to a foreign power 7 8
HWP 617–22. After leaving Oxford (where he studied philosophy and medicine, anatomy, physiology, and physics) Locke became a follower of the Earl of Shaftesbury, Dryden’s great enemy. After Shaftesbury’s death, he went to the Low Countries, where he paved the way for William of Orange. In 1688 he returned to England and wrote, in the last ten years of his life, treatises on government, education, and ‘the reasonableness of Christianity’. A number of comments and essays on the Pauline epistles and on miracles was published posthumously. An exchange of attack and counter-attack with Bishop Edward Stillingfleet on theological issues was published towards the end of the century.
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in the form of the Church of Rome. Nowadays, Locke’s primacy in the history of ideas is inversely proportional to the literary value of his prose. As I have said, Hobbes was, in part, a writer tout court; Locke was not. A contemporary of the author of Leviathan, he completed the process of the compartmentalization of knowledge that Hobbes had left unfinished. Each signified requires a specific signifier, and philosophy adopts neutral, functional, above all, semantically transparent words – the opposite, that is, of the self-reflecting, imaginative language of literature. It is not surprising, therefore, that Locke had no great liking for the literature of fiction, favouring as he did writing that served some definite purpose. The third book of the Essay takes issue with the abuse of language, and the lack of transparency inherent in figurative language. § 69. Bunyan* I: ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ The Pilgrim’s Progress was written in Bedford gaol, where John Bunyan (1628–1688), born in one of the suburbs of the town, had been imprisoned *
Works, ed. G. Offer, 3 vols, Glasgow 1857, now superseded by The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, ed. R. Sharrock et al., 13 vols, Oxford 1976–1994. Sharrock is also the editor of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Oxford 1960, and, with modernized spelling and without critical apparatus, Harmondsworth 1965. J. Brown, John Bunyan: His Life, Times, and Work, rev. edn by F. M. Harrison, London 1928; G. B. Harrison, John Bunyan: A Study in Personality, London 1928; E. A. Knox, John Bunyan in Relation to His Times, London 1928; W. Y. Tindall, John Bunyan: Mechanick Preacher, New York 1934 (invaluable reconstruction of late seventeenth-century Dissent, with Bunyan almost lost sight of in the crowds of preachers that throng the pages of this book; there is, however, nothing here of the brilliant, world-famous expert on Joyce and Dylan Thomas); H. Talon, John Bunyan: The Man and His Works, Eng. trans., Cambridge, MA 1951; R. Sharrock, John Bunyan, London 1954; O. E. Winslow, John Bunyan, New York 1961; U. M. Kaufmann, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation, New Haven, CT 1966; R. L. Greaves, John Bunyan, Abingdon 1969, and Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent, Stanford, CA 2002; M. Furlong, Puritan’s Progress: A Study of John Bunyan, London 1975; L. V. Sadler, John Bunyan, Boston, MA 1979; The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and Historical Views, ed. V. Newey, Liverpool 1980; C. Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church 1628–1688, Oxford 1988; T. Spargo, The Writing of John Bunyan, Aldershot 1997; M. Davies, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan, Oxford 2002.
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for preaching without the authorization of the bishop. To be more precise, it is believed to have been written during the second of the two six-year periods of detention, which began in 1666.1 Bunyan could easily have taken advantage of the Act of Tolerance promulgated by Charles II, but he always refused to do so. The first part of the Progress was published in 1678, and the second in 1684. In the following century, the book acquired legendary, unprecedented popularity, as witnessed by the great number of editions – in England and English-speaking countries overseas – breaking all records, particularly among the poorer class of Nonconformist Protestants. It became every man’s companion and support, second only to the Bible. It is the second great Puritan epic, alongside, or rather, in opposition to Milton. As a proletarian writer, who exalts the Calvinist doctrine of salvation through grace – in other words, predestination2 – Bunyan formulates a veiled criticism of political power.3 Unlike Milton, Bunyan had no university education; he represented the Puritan mass, 1 2
3
Hill 1988, 199. Others indicate the date of composition in the further six months in gaol in 1675. Tempted by the Ranters, after he had moved towards the Baptists, Bunyan attacked the Quakers, and then the Latitudinarians, especially in the person of rector Edward Fowler (Tindall 1934, 42–59). His last collocation on the complicated chessboard of Dissent was, according to Tindall 1934, 3, with the Baptists, who followed Calvin, Congregationalist discipline, Sunday observance, and adult baptism by immersion. The founder of the Quaker movement, George Fox (1624–1691), himself the author of a famous diary published in 1694, was an itinerant preacher like Bunyan, more transcendental but less cultivated in a literary sense (Tindall 1934, 23). These travelling preachers belonged to an ever more numerous class of ‘mechanics’, a term that included (Tindall 1934, vii n. 1) farmers, rabbit breeders, bakers, tailors, shoemakers, who may or may not have abandoned their trades and become preachers, inspired by divine vocation or popular acclaim. All part of the movement of ‘enthusiasm’, these ‘mechanic’ preachers performed that ‘mechanic operation of the spirit’ satirized by Swift (§ 91). For an identification, albeit far from certain, of the real people behind the allegorical masks of Pilgrim’s Progress cf., once again, Tindall 1934, 60–7. Dissenting ‘enthusiasm’ was openly on the side of the poor and the oppressed, and had, therefore, political objectives, as demonstrated by Tindall 1934, 91–117 (and 114 on Bunyan’s thinking). Hill 1988, 215, too, accentuates the subversive strain underlying Bunyan’s work: ‘Undesirable characters in Pilgrim’s Progress, as later in The Holy War, are almost obsessively labelled as lords, or ladies, gentlemen or gentlewomen’.
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who knew nothing of Latin and Greek, and indeed could hardly read or write. However, Bunyan and Milton, taken together, show that English literature after the Restoration was, at the very least, ‘stereophonic’. In the last forty years of the seventeenth century, the two sources of energy were, on the one hand, the theatre, in its complete expression as performance, mocking religion by means of highly acrobatic compromises; on the other, the Bible, and the apocalyptic messages of preachers, at times, though rarely, elevated to the form given by Bunyan. These two parallel forces, representing different aesthetic objectives, addressed two different audiences: the court and the wealthy middle class of London on one side; on the other, the vast proletariat of tradesmen and artisans, especially in the outlying areas of the Midlands. Yet there is a link between Restoration theatre and Bunyan’s homiletics, because the theatre, too, adopts the tool of allegory, less developed, no doubt, and seen mainly in the semantically charged names given to characters, a trait that unites Bunyan to Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve. His lack of academic education was responsible for the long-standing misapprehension that Bunyan was an unpolished, primitive writer, devoid of any cultural background apart from the Bible, or, at the most, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. This is far from true: buried in the pages of Pilgrim’s Progress are many earlier landmarks, on which Bunyan builds, carefully and consciously, a great work of intertextual mediation. 2. Bunyan exploits and mixes, in the manner of a collage, several formulas and traditions, such as those belonging to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century romance, as well as Spenser’s surreal elements. Above all, he connects to the continental canon, starting from medieval dream literature. In Pilgrim’s Progress a dreamer narrates his dream in the first person, and the dream is that of Christian, who, one day, leaves the City of Destruction to reach, after many difficulties and trials, the Celestial City. ‘Christian’ is the same as ‘Everyman’: the vehicle is the same as used in the moralities, in Piers Ploughman and, since this is a dream allegory, the May morning oneiric vision that takes us back to the Roman de la Rose. It might even be a disguised parody of that poem. However that may be, in Tindall argues that Bunyan had contacts with and sympathy for the Fifth Monarchists (§ 1.6).
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the background can be heard echoes of the great text of the otherworldly journey of a spiritual pilgrim, a text that goes back even beyond Dante.4 Of course, Bunyan’s book is in prose, not verse, and belongs to the genre of allegory. These two formal characteristics are dictated by its didactic purpose. In 1678 Bunyan adopted a form that was already old-fashioned, last used by the poet Stephen Hawes in the early sixteenth century. With this regressive choice, Bunyan takes over the only vehicle that could obviate the charge or suspicion of self-reflection in his text. However, for Puritans, allegory was in itself suspect, and Bunyan seems to be obsessed by the possibility that his text might be judged too literary, or that the allegory might not be understood. The justification of allegory – which is figurative rather than direct and neutral – is given in an introductory ‘Apology’: the Old Testament, says Bunyan, and the New, and the Acts of the Apostles, all speak through images. Throughout the text, the author adopts measures to ensure transparency: reading guides, explanations, summaries, and confirmation of spiritual progress. So the Progress runs on two tracks, one allegorical, the other explanatory, aimed at enlightening whoever might not understand the ‘tenor’ of the allegory. This technique is not unlike that used by Joyce in various chapters of Finnegans Wake, itself a dream allegory. It is, in fact, a mixed formula: after the verse ‘Apology’, short passages of rhyming lines underscore important moments in the story (these lines are so deliberately pedestrian, not to say limping, as to read like a parody). To achieve greater immediacy, the dialogues are not composed of direct or indirect speech with captions, but in dramatic form, with speeches assigned to various named characters. Pilgrim’s Progress is therefore a very early example of the new literary genre, the novel, particularly the picaresque, with its scenes and caricatures of everyday life. Its comic dimension emerges in the second
4
Bunyan proclaimed himself illiterate, and said he got his knowledge of the Bible from current theological disputes. Tindall 1934, 190–214, shows, instead, the breadth of his knowledge of both Scripture and biblical references in English and European literature. He also cites echoes of Spenser, Milton, emblem tradition (Quarles and Wither), popular romances – practically all the fundamental texts, though, strangely enough, he does not mention medieval dream literature, Langland, or the Roman de la Rose.
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part, which has, however, a rhetorical purpose: to reiterate and underline Christian’s spiritual journey. The narrative is fast moving, a rapid succession of phantasmagorical images, never slowed down by analysis, with no division into chapters, but one continuous flow. 3. When he tells his family that he absolutely has to leave for the Celestial City, Christian finds himself isolated, and taken for a madman. Not even his wife and children understand him. Nonetheless, he follows Christ’s injunction, and leaves mother and father to follow his calling. All human relations pale into insignificance at the thought of salvation. Christian, who lives in the City of Destruction, is Lot and all the others who leave Sodom and Gomorrah. For a while he is accompanied part of the way by a few hardy friends, who soon, however, abandon him. As he goes on, signs of warning and persuasion become more frequent: an evangelist follows him like a shadow, and, after him, a Dantesque inner ‘interpreter’ who explains, also for the benefit of the readers, what is happening, and the meaning of the allegorical figures encountered on the way. As I have said, the features of the otherworldly journey are not new: castles, gardens, springs, hills, some steep, others suspiciously easy to climb, meadows full of blooming flowers and fair damsels. Apollyon, the dragon, is the scaly monster. Situations are repeated, with slightly different details, so that the Valley of the Shadow of Death is similar to the Slough of Despond, in which the pilgrim gets stuck almost immediately. Faithful appears by his side and turns out to be the objectivisation of his conscience. Visionary scenes separated by doctrinal interludes beat out the rhythm of Christian’s progress. The episode of Vanity Fair, with the surrealistic spectacle of fat, slimy creatures, like something from Langland’s Piers, ends with Christian’s ghostly trial on a trumped up charge of defamation. After the arrival in the Celestial City,5 the second part narrates, at length and with some repetition, the spiritual initiation of Christian’s female counterpart. Each of the various places and stages of Christian’s pilgrimage is revisited by his wife 5
The crossing of the river of death is reminiscent (though I find no trace of this in critical literature) of the Middle English poem Pearl (Volume 1, § 12.1–3), in which the protagonist sees his daughter in a dream. He attempts to join her as she points to the celestial city.
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and five children, in an atmosphere that, all of a sudden, has become less dreamy and hypnotized, with an increase, at times unjustified, of the fantastic (monsters appearing out of nowhere, as if by magic). There is also a certain amount of comedy, some of it desecrating. This comedy gets in the way of the edifying urgency: Christian’s children get indigestion by eating fruit, and need a doctor and a purge, but the purge contains the blood of Christ, because the tree from which they picked the undigested fruit represents the Tree of Knowledge. The aim of this second part is rhetorical and exhortative, but in a different way, and recalls, at a distance, the trials Christian has overcome, which are summarized and recounted over again, so as to be etched more deeply in the reader’s mind.6 § 70. Bunyan II: Other works on the contest between God and the devil The son of a travelling tinker, but descending from a family of landowners, Bunyan acquired a basic education at the local school, then threw himself into what he called a life of dissipation, accompanied, however, by a desire for redemption. He accused himself of four pastimes that he held to be sinful: dancing, bell-ringing,7 playing tipcat, and reading the romance of Sir Bevis of Hampton. At the age of seventeen, he enrolled in Cromwell’s army under the officer, Luke, who has already been mentioned in connection with Samuel Butler.8 He saw it as a sign from Heaven when a fellow soldier was sent to the front in his place, and was mortally wounded. He married in 1658 and fathered four children. He turned to preaching on the advice of John Gifford of Bedford, the animator of a Baptist cell.9 He 6 7 8 9
According to Tindall 1934, 57, 66, this was an act of benevolent reparation, after Bunyan had earlier denied women access to ministerial functions, and written of ‘the shame of their sex’. The Puritan considered this ‘the devil’s pastime’ (Harrison 1928, 169). § 62.2. For an idea of the atmosphere of this Bedford cell, see the opening in Lantern Yard in George Eliot’s Silas Marner (Volume 5, § 194.2). In the little Presbyterian community, daily life revolved around discussions about justification, conversion, and participation in the society of saints, while some persons were indicated as unequivocally damned. One proof of damnation was theft, especially of sacred objects and alms, as recounted in Mr Badman, the very crime of which Silas Marner is accused.
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became a tireless Puritan preacher, and was imprisoned, as has been said, for twelve years. He died of a fever when he returned home soaked to the skin after trying to heal a quarrel between a father and his son. Such is, in summary, Bunyan’s life story as recounted in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, written in 1666, the second most important of Bunyan’s four main works. His entire production numbers about sixty titles, including various polemical texts and diatribes. Grace Abounding professes to be a neutral, unpolished narration, exemplifying the paradigmatic journey10 of justification through grace. After a foreword, the text is divided into short numbered sections that form a spasmodic diary of morbid introspection, intended to illustrate the continuous uncertainty of the outcome of the fight between God and the devil for possession of the soul of each of us. The single entries of this diary are all very much the same – nightly torments, frightening visions, and diabolical attacks that manifest themselves in an unending series of temptations. However, merciful God never abandons his creature and extends his helping hand just as the sinner is about to fall again. This is not just an account of events, but a chronicle of never-ending crises and suffering, a great tug-of-war between good and evil. For many years Bunyan had in fact been engaged in a daily interrogation about his own situation: was he, or not, one of the ‘saints’? The crucially important sections 58–9 make it clear that it is, unfortunately, God, in his inscrutability, who chooses, not man. Just as important is the doubt whether the choice has already been made, with all of the relapses into vice, disbelief, and apathy. Crises are overcome, but the destination is by definition unattainable: the divine calling must be perceived by the sinner every day. In any case, Bunyan repeats the basic concept of Puritan Calvinism: ‘man is saved through the blood of Christ’. Once again, at the end of reflection 207, Bunyan confesses that he is wavering: ‘so my soul did hang as in a pair of scales again, sometimes up, and sometimes down; now in peace, and anon again in terror’. The spiritual autobiography goes as far as the 10
Tindall 1934, 22–41, provides a detailed comparison between Grace Abounding and numerous other biographies of Calvinist ‘enthusiasts’ of the time, not only in order to highlight the existence of a traditional subgenre, but also to show Bunyan’s superiority as an artist.
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beginning of his activity as a preacher and the discovery of his divine gift for expounding the word of God. Some short additions contain a self-defence against several accusations, mainly fornication, an account of his time in gaol, and the details of the trial that led to his conviction in 1660. They show Bunyan’s firm intention not to abscond, nor to come to some kind of agreement with the authorities. He chose, instead, to keep faith with his community of believers. There is also a transcript of the interrogation that led to his conviction, with the reasons against liturgical practice and Laud’s Book of Common Prayer, in yet another unjust trial of an innocent man, accused of sedition by means of preaching. 2. One of two works written after Pilgrim’s Progress, The Life and Death of Mr Badman (1680) describes a journey in the opposite direction to that of Christian, with the eponymous hero dying unrepented in order to demonstrate the necessity for justification, and the inexorability of divine punishment for sinners. The text is also, albeit inconspicuously, a new experiment in narrative technique: an imaginary, and therefore allegorical, biography, recounted in the form of a dialogue between two personified abstract entities, one wise and knowledgeable, the other ‘attentive’, the adulating companion whose role it is to ask questions and feed the discussion. It is tempting to see here a distant resemblance to the nineteenth-century ‘imaginary conversation’. However that may be, it is yet another proof of Bunyan’s capacity for satire on top of the homiletic intention. One thinks of the Elizabethan Renaissance dialogue, for example Ascham’s Toxophilus. The story of Badman soon fades into the background, both because it is a straightforward account, and because it makes one look back with nostalgia to the sharpness and vividness of the dream of Pilgrim’s Progress. A cold, academic dissertation takes place between the two lofty, distant speakers, expressed in a series of carefully numbered distinctions. Badman is none other than an image of Restoration society – corrupt, sinful, and deaf to religion. The narrative is often interrupted to give way to illustrative anecdotes. The mania for quoting from Scripture becomes tiresome, and Badman becomes almost a Burtonian treatise. Theologically, it is again centred on divine predestination and on the debatable presumption of the justified – or those who believe themselves to be justified – to have foreknowledge of divine judgement. Badman’s damnation has been irreversible
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from the beginning, from his childhood and his early tendency to lie, to steal, blaspheme, and mock everything sacred. Thanks to his hypocritical pretence of religion, he has had a good woman as a wife. Now a widower, he continues to ignore various signs sent by God that might enable him to escape punishment. He is condemned to death by his two interlocutors, who know what is in God’s mind. The Holy War11 (1682) is another Manichaean contest, and, at the same time, a measure of the impact of Milton’s two epics, of which Bunyan paraphrases the same spiritual journey. Shaddai and Diabolus argue over the possession of the principality of Mansoul (the first of a series of personifications). The son who leads the reinforcements, and engages battle with Diabolus, is Emmanuel. The final victory of the forces of good is delayed owing to the ontological uncertainty of the Puritans (and therefore of Bunyan himself ) concerning the result of the war in the human soul. On an aesthetic plane, the outcome is a long, drawn-out text and a certain artificiality. § 71. Early feminism The birth of literary feminism, or women’s writing, almost ipso facto feminist, is controversial, but experts generally place it in the second half of the seventeenth century and point to two or three ‘mothers’, heralded to some degree by Katherine Philips and Margaret Cavendish and, earlier, by three or four women poets and playwrights of the Elizabethan age.1 Unaware of each other’s existence, separated by a generation gap and geographical distance, they nonetheless created a coordinated movement and an interconnected, though diversified, phenomenology of literary genres, and, above all, of varying dialectical positions. These early experiments were followed by scores of others in the course of the eighteenth century. This constitutes the pioneer stage of literary feminism. From the beginning of the nineteenth century on, the number of female authors grows enormously. A short article by Virginia Woolf2 on the letters of Dorothy 11
Memories of the Civil War are mixed with oblique references to political facts and a hidden allegorical message.
1 2
§ 40.2 for the first two, and Volume 1, § 36.6 n. 5 for the others. The essay is ‘Dorothy Osborne’s “Letters”’, in TCR, Second Series, 59–66.
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Osborne (1627–1695) to her future husband, the diplomat, William Temple, is still fundamental reading if one wishes to understand the origins of the phenomenon, as explained by a distant descendant. First of all, it is significant that Virginia Woolf regrets the fact that Osborne’s marriage to Temple not only brought to an end a blissful suspension of time, but also deprives the reader of other letters to add to the mere seventy-seven that the two wrote during their courtship. Thanks to the inexorable passing of time, the young Swift, just appointed secretary to Temple, described the now elderly Dorothy as ‘wise’, ‘gentle’, and ‘placid’, ignorant of the fiery, independent temperament that characterized her when she was young. Formulating a shrewd paradox, Woolf says that it was a pity the marriage was only frowned upon by Dorothy’s royalist parents, and not actually prevented; first, because once married, the two had no need to write to each other, and therefore the correspondence ceased; second, because Dorothy had secret misgivings about married life, and remembered ‘failure after failure’. As is well known, Virginia Woolf often puts a particular spin on the subjects she writes about as a literary critic, impartiality being vitiated in a way by empathy. Thus her treatment of Dorothy Osborne is no different: she is presented as essentially melancholy, splenetic, depressed, unbalanced; a moody woman in whom irony becomes sarcasm and negative existentialism – in short, all the well-known Woolfian traits, so that Dorothy turns into a distant anticipation of Mrs Ramsay: children, home, duties, disasters, right up to the terrifying prophecy of the son who ‘filled his boots with stones and leapt into the Thames’.3 In the context of literary history, a preamble in Woolf ’s essay indicates how and in what circumstances women’s writing began, claiming Dorothy Osborne as the founder. Had she been born in 1527 she would have written nothing; if she had been born in 1827 she would have written novels. As it happened, she was born in 1627, and wrote letters. She overcame social prejudices, though some traces remain, and wrote because of an irrepressible need to express her inner self. So, these are not formal vehicles of information, but invitations to the reader to enter her secret world, and take a seat.
3
Cf. Volume 7, § 159.3 and n. 54 for the contextualization of this detail.
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2. After Dorothy Osborne, in the chain of seventeenth-century women authors come two apparently different writers, whose works converge on two discursive modes that might be called practice and theory, or metaphor and literality, or even just two antithetical registers of the same literary genre. Going by the year of birth, Aphra Behn (?1640–1689) could have been Mary Astell’s grandmother; the two are joined by a secret, experimented inclination towards Catholic spiritualism (in one case, this leaning was always ambiguous, and ultimately, denied). Both were also convinced Tories. All the rest would be just a series of disagreements, were it not that Behn might well have supported Astell’s ideology e contrario, like a consummate, sibylline turncoat, forced to make shift by the demands of the sex market and current prejudice. However, I have to conclude that this hypothesis leaves much to be desired. Most readers know of Virginia Woolf ’s lapidary, unequivocal, and probably over-romantic investiture of Aphra Behn: it was scandalous, she said, but appropriate that Behn should be buried in Westminster Abbey. Woolf tacitly removes from Osborne the title of founding mother of feminist writing, and hands it to Aphra Behn. She was the first professional writer, unique at the end of the seventeenth century. She broke through the barriers of gender, wishing to be, and be judged as, a playwright, not a female writer. She was prodigiously prolific and energetic, and in a mere twenty years wrote as many successful, long-running plays. She also made her mark in poetry, and, especially, the novel, or long short story: her Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister4 (1684–1687) and, particularly, Oroonoko, are evident forerunners, more than fifty years in advance, of Richardson, Defoe and Swift. Using stratagems that smack of the Jesuits at the time of Elizabeth, Behn draws a dividing line between her public role, as a professional writer, and her privacy, which she jealously protects in the highly dangerous period in which she lived. It is not certain what her birth surname was: it may have been Johnson. Her father was a barber. She may have been born in Kent, and a Catholic. That she was a Tory is shown by her support for the Stuarts and the considerable number of her Tory friends. That she was part of the circle of friends of Rochester (as proved 4
A three-volume epistolary novel that tells of les liaisons dangereuses of the English aristocracy at the time of the Exclusion crisis.
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by her elegy for him) tells us little of her convictions, bearing in mind that Rochester too was not exempt from sudden, contradictory bursts of faith and repentance.5 Another version was however circulated: that, in 1663, Aphra accompanied her father to Suriname, then an English possession,6 of which he had been appointed governor. The detailed descriptions of flora and fauna, as well as language, that provide the background to Oroonoko (supposed to derive from the first-hand account of a slaver) are so vivid and clear as to suggest a personal knowledge of the tropics. Others have denied she ever went near the places described, and claim that the story comes from a travel book that had just been published.7 If indeed she did visit Suriname, it was on her return that she married a certain Behn, a Dutch or German merchant, only to separate almost immediately. Another possibility is that the husband, older than her, may have died soon after. The fact remains that she was always known by her married name. The daring temperament of this fearless adventurer, as well as a good deal of duplicity, is shown by the fact that, although an acknowledged supporter of the Stuarts, she fell in love with the son of a regicide, and agreed to become a spy in Antwerp – using the eloquent code name of Astrea – in order to obtain the king’s pardon in exchange for information on the Dutch. At the end of her mission, she was not paid and was imprisoned for debt. She was a precocious and expeditious writer, beginning her career in 1670 when she was thirty, and dying at just forty-nine. In her nineteen years of writing, her production was only slightly less than Dryden’s, not counting her non-dramatic works.8 Readers today are still intrigued by her contradictions: everything 5
6 7 8
§ 61. ‘The Disappointment’, first published in a collection by Rochester himself, uses ten-line stanzas, and numerous erotic periphrases and double-entendres, to tell the story of Lysander’s impotent desire for the willing and eager Chloris during a love tryst in a wood. Of course, the exchange of this colony for New Amsterdam, later, New York, agreed in 1667 between the Dutch and the English, altered the whole course of world history. AEN, 35. Recent studies support the hypothesis that Behn did actually spend some time in South America. The most recent edition of the complete works is edited by J. Todd, 7 vols, London 1992–1996, which takes its place alongside the excellent standard edition edited by M. Summers, 6 vols, London 1915.
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would suggest that there was no real adherence to, but no disagreement with, the style of a certain kind of titillating Baroque theatre popular on the Continent: a discordia concors or juxtaposition of saintly chastity set against extreme sensuality, with the inevitable nuns contemplating a farewell to sex before taking the veil. Behn takes and exploits the trappings of this theatre. Anything for a hit. It is also possible to separate the woman from the professional playwright, who was interested only in the stage success of her plays, and was not above using popular subjects and stylistic stratagems only to abandon them when she saw audiences had had their fill, and move on to more profitable genres. Whatever she wrote was conditioned by the need to make a living.9 If we were to draw ideological conclusions, we would have to say that the world depicted by Behn is irredeemable. Everything is rotten, and sexual disgust has never been so ‘misandric’. Behn’s overriding theme is the same old sexual desire of Elizabethan, and especially Middletonian memory, expressed in the well-worn, repetitive formulas (often plagiarized) typical of the theatre of intrigue. In her first play (1670), a woman has no choice but to be unfaithful, as she is the victim of a ‘forc’d marriage’, as the title reveals. In her most successful play, The Rover10 (1677), set in Naples during Carnival, a feisty Hellena holds her own in a series of dialectical challenges with the libertine hero. However, this is just the main track of a quadriphonic plot. In The Lucky Chance (1686), wives betray their husbands with more justification than their abject mates. In other plays, the ubiquitous fop forms the lynch-pin of satirical farce. Oroonoko, believed to have been published in about 1678 and revised in 1688, is a Marvellian utopia on original innocence,11 which provided ammunition for the anti-slavery movement, until the deplorable trade and practice was abolished after 150 9 10 11
As claimed by SEL, 137. The commercial success of this book led to a sequel in 1681. I, for one, can perceive in this work themes, figures and moods that are reminiscent of Webster’s rather dark comedy, The Devil’s Law Case (Volume 1, § 127). Rather like Othello, Oroonoko is a Moorish warrior, highly educated and civilized, strikingly handsome and deeply honourable, but pathologically jealous of his Desdemona, in this case, Imoinda. So here, in the first section (the African part of the story), we have one of the extremes of the discordia I have mentioned in relation to Behn. Oroonoko kills Imoinda, who accepts her death, to avoid her being raped
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years of impassioned debate. Posthumous publications include a novella in the style of Oroonoko, another London comedy, and a few short stories, perhaps apocryphal, which exploited her fame, as in the case of Shakespeare fifty years earlier. 3. Mary Astell (1666–1731) is apparently the exact opposite of Behn. Born in Newcastle, of middle-class parents, she moved to London when she was about twenty. She had no formal education, apart from what was given her by an uncle, a priest, who cultivated her unusually speculative talent and intellectual curiosity. Her leanings may be guessed from the fact that she was in the good graces of Archbishop Sancroft, and was encouraged to write and helped to publish in the circles of the most sanctimonious blue-stockings of London. Not only did Astell never marry: she never ventured into the field of creative writing. However, she conducted a theoretical, rather than practical, investigation into the same problems as were presented in dramatic and paradoxical form by Aphra Behn. Her first publication, in 1694, was a serious, and far from ‘modest’, proposal to ladies, consisting of the institution of a ‘monastery’, funded by wealthy spinsters, where women might study. Three years later, a curriculum was added. In a set of ‘reflections’ (1700), women were advised to use great caution in choosing a husband, and to refuse enforced marriage, just as in Behn’s play. As a philosopher, she took on Locke himself with a weighty theological-philosophical treatise (1705) based on the criticism of tolerance for Dissenters. Astell constitutes early proof that feminism does not develop smoothly and uniformly in time. It was to prove difficult to reconcile Astell’s bland conservatism with later feminist instances, usually much more radical and ‘revolutionary’. Astell preceded Edgeworth and her pedagogic writings informed by similar moderation;12 the idea of a female academy was to be inserted in Johnson’s Rasselas, and echoes of it are to be found in Tennyson’s The Princess. Nearer to her in time, Defoe approved of her agenda of extending to women the access to education. With just
12
by the English after the failure of the revolt he has organized and led. He then commits suicide. § 166.2.
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a touch of imagination, it was said that both Pope and Richardson were inspired by her, the latter using her as the model for Clarissa. 4. In the early eighteenth century, the female literary canon was already rich and varied in its diametric opposition to male writing. Dissonance was the battle cry. Yet, from a wide variety of backgrounds and intellectual formation, women writers converge on some common objectives and aspirations, while continuing to differ over others. Extreme positions are represented by laicism, irreverent and libertine agnosticism described by the adjective ‘lurid’, High-Church Anglicanism, and Roman Catholicism, right up to transcendental spiritualism. The women involved are married or single, sometimes from London, but more often from the counties – south, Midlands and north. Some are even from Ireland. Unlike Behn, they are tenacious journalists, who collaborate enthusiastically with various newspapers and journals, and take care to collect their work in complete editions so as to hand down their message to posterity. For all this, in many cases they remain shadowy figures owing to a scarcity of biographical data. So the writers I intend to briefly discuss – omitting others13 – are women who were known and renowned in their lifetime, but subsequently have been forgotten, or have become just names in a list. Today they have emerged from obscurity, have been reprinted and translated into various languages, 13
Not exactly a feminist, but a parodist is Charlotte Lennox (1720–1804). The daughter of an English army officer stationed in New York, she returned to England and tried to make a career as an actress, but with scant success. She turned to the novel precisely halfway through the century. She was praised by Fielding and Johnson for The Female Quixote (1752), but her few other novels and plays aroused no great interest or enthusiasm. One of her merits was a groundbreaking concordance of Shakespeare’s sources. The Female Quixote, too, based on the French translations of the Spanish original by Scudéry and La Calprenède, can be seen as a precursor of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Arabella, brought up in a manor, believes she is living in the world of romance, a genre of reading she has been addicted to since childhood. Because she lives mostly in her own imaginary world, there is continuous friction between her and the other characters, like the maidservant, Lucy, who are all very down-to-earth. In a picaresque sequel, Arabella sets off on a journey with a female Sancho Panza, and heads for Bath and London, where the two are involved in a number of grotesquely comic situations. The happy ending comes too soon: Arabella recovers and marries her patient, down-to-earth cousin.
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and form an essential part, not only of the history of women’s writing, but of popular, commercial literature. This ‘archaeological’ operation has led, in some cases, to the discovery of works of some value, not just in terms of feminism, but for literary history tout court, since many of the works in question broke ground that was later cultivated with great success by male writers. Women were, for instance, the first to explore the potential of the epistolary genre, and, in particular, autobiography, sometimes in a highly sophisticated manner. Aphra Behn, Mrs Delarivier Manley (1663–1724) and Mrs Eliza Haywood (circa 1693–1756) formed a triumvirate of wit, according to a contemporary critic, but only in a literary sense, as the latter two were two generations younger than Behn. The biographical cliché is repeated – an adventurous life, defiance of the demands of respectability, and the absolute imperative of the chosen career. Manley, who debuted with epistolary novels full of female outpourings, shocked the reading public with her The New Atlantis (1709),14 in which she attacked, using pseudonyms, many important figures of the Whig establishment, above all Marlborough, Winston Churchill’s forebear, who responded with words of fire. Her principal work is, however, the memoir, The Adventures of Rivella (1714). Here Manley, clearly identifiable behind the anagrammed name, divides herself into two antithetical masks. A prolific writer, she also tried her hand at play writing, and in 1711 took Swift’s place as editor of The Examiner (Swift expressed his approval of her in several letters), an example, unusual for the time, of equal rights for men and women. Eliza Haywood was a failed actress, much maligned because of her love affairs, from which two illegitimate children were born, the unflinching target of Pope’s lethal but carefully phrased jibes in the Dunciad, and the mockery of Fielding. She had begun her career as the author of novellas based on the erotic jousting of the beau monde. She also wrote novels that display an unusually deep psychological portrayal of characters, stories of heroines seduced and abandoned by libertines, who join forces in what is an embryonic form of the nineteenth-century community of women without men. A playwright, on and off, up to 1737, founder and editor of a women’s
14
Pope, too, makes a scornful reference to this work in The Rape of the Lock, III, l. 165.
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journal, she was also the belatedly contrite author of The History of Miss Betty Thoughtless (1751), one of the first models of the growing up of an ingenuous adolescent and her attainment of bourgeois decorum. 5. Penelope Aubin (ca 1679-ca 1738), Jane Barker (1652–1732), Mary Davys (ca 1674–1732) and Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674–1737) represent other versions, nuances and feminist strains that have been released from the sub-literary confines to which they have been relegated until recently. Aubin, the wife of a merchant and mother of his children, wrote seven novels and several books of poetry marked by a subdued, pious feminism – as predicted by her Christian name – which is not dissimilar to that of Mary Astell. Jane Barker followed James II in exile to France. When she returned to England she wrote political verse, and lines in favour of women’s education and the unmarried life. Like Astell, she never married, but, unlike her, was no crypto-Catholic, but a true convert to the Church of Rome. We know that Mary Davys grew up in Dublin, but little else of her adolescence and early life. By 1700 she had been a wife and was now a widow. She moved to London, where she set to writing didactic, moralizing plays, though with a good deal of Irish humour and some outright comedy, aimed at warning women against contracting marriages of convenience. Relying only on her own resources, she tried to make her fortune, and became the owner of a coffee-house in Cambridge. Abandoning drama, she wrote at least two forward-looking novels, one with an eloquent title and a ‘reformed coquette’ as the heroine (1724) – almost like Haywood’s greatest novel, but from a much more patriarchal point of view – and a second one, inevitably in the form of letters, satirizing the aristocracy in a manner reminiscent of Richardson. The portrait of an ‘accomplished rake’ (1727) was drawn by Davys without reticence, and was completely misunderstood, taken for a defence of libertinism rather than a condemnation of it. The daughter of Dissenters, brought up to serve religion and her fellow man, Elizabeth Rowe, though no great beauty,15 had, however, many suitors, among whom the writer of hymns, Watts, and the poet, Prior. She chose, instead of one of them, a poet thirteen years younger than herself. Lady
15
But see BAUGH, vol. III, 907.
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Winchilsea, who met her, gave the name of Philomela to this author of religious poetry, devoted and slightly lugubrious, who began writing at the age of twelve and collected her work in a volume in 1728 with the telling title of ‘friendship in death, in twenty letters from the dead to the living’. Her work contains also a vein of suffering and protest against the indelicacies of males. In 1736 she wrote a biblical poem in eight books based on Milton. Elizabeth Rowe, like Mary Astell, and more than her, was hailed as an icon of wifely saintliness, and admired for her femininity, subdued, but firm and lucid, for nearly 200 years, up to the end of the nineteenth century, when she was shunted into oblivion.
Part III
The Augustan Age
§ 72. England from the Glorious Revolution to 1745 In the past fifty years, historians have gradually modified the conventional image of eighteenth-century England thanks to an ever-increasing apparatus of parameters, indicators and statistics. What emerges from all this is the picture of a dynamic society, more conflictual and less static than that handed down to us by the standard pro-Whig versions. Take, for example, the almost iconoclastic incipit of that classic textbook, England in the Eighteenth Century,1 by J. H. Plumb: ‘The first noticeable thing about [English] towns would have been the stench’. He goes on to describe the terribly unhygienic conditions in which the poor were forced to live. Behind the celebrated Augustan splendour, which represented a supposedly perfect fusion of culture and society, were pockets of poverty, illiteracy, early death, and low wages caused by enclosures, with, as a result, a deepening rift between the two nations of the rich and the poor. In this light, it is to be doubted whether the period from 1688 to 1745 did in fact mark the advent of an affluent society that was to last, without interruption, indeed in crescendo, right up until after the Second World War, a total of 250 years. This is true according to some parameters, but not others. England does take on in this period the role of principal European military and colonial power, and is the home to the Industrial Revolution, thanks to technological innovations, the division of labour, primacy in coal, steel and textiles, and improvements in transport. At the beginning of the century, the economy was still agricultural, and members of Parliament came from the landed gentry. However, trade was flourishing. The expression ‘cash nexus’ is coined to indicate a tendency towards brute monetization backed by the alibi that luxury and waste produce wealth – as we shall see in Mandeville – while alms-giving encourages laziness and malingering. The business class grew, the rising bourgeoisie married into titles and built themselves huge mansions complete with libraries and art collections. The Bank of England was founded in order to raise money to finance William of Orange’s wars. It later extended its lending to private customers by means of paper money that could be exchanged for gold. The newly formed Commercial Companies
1
PLU, 12.
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were given royal approval to establish English monopolies in parts of the world like Russia and India, without excluding individual freelance merchants, but favouring the development of a conflict between protectionists and ‘free-traders’. Unimaginable wealth in the form of gold and precious stones was discovered in India. The resulting rise in standards of living led to a corresponding increase in leisure. In this embryonic consumer society, the middle classes discovered a taste for gambling, cock-fighting, hunting and horse-racing. Snuff became fashionable, as did wigs. Noblemen carried swords or daggers at their sides, and quarrels involving honour were resolved by duels. High society moved in mass to the various spa towns of England, and in Bath Beau Nash laid down the rules of etiquette. 2. The beginning of the eighteenth century saw the confirmation of the supremacy of the House of Commons. The two-party system of parliamentary democracy was born, and government was headed by a cabinet of ministers. Franchise was still limited, however, even though the population had reached more than ten million, and literacy, especially among women, had grown. After a close-run race that ended in victory in 1714,2 confirmed in 1721, Walpole established a Whig supremacy that was to last for twenty years in what was practically a one-party regime, the only opposition being represented by Bolingbroke and the so-called ‘patriots’, who opposed the government and considered themselves to be beacons of liberty. Walpole’s system of patronage consisted in handing out wellpaid sinecures in exchange for political support (these posts were often ‘sold on’). This state of affairs led to a long-standing and bitter war waged by Pope and Swift against ‘dunces’, that is poets, and writers in general, elevated to prestigious positions not through merit but as a recognition of their ‘flexibility’. Walpole instituted an embryonic form of government by inner cabinet, at the head of which sat the Prime Minister, a term which 2
In 1714, Marlborough and the Whigs attempted to reward the Dissenters, who had provided economic support for the war against France and Spain, by repealing the law of religious discrimination, but Queen Anne was adamant in her opposition and dissolved the Whig government. The Tories were invited to form a new administration. A drawn-out disagreement between Harley and Bolingbroke was the cause of the Whigs’ return to power after the death of the queen.
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started off as a kind of nickname. All of a sudden, after 100 years of fierce religious conflict, the Toleration Act of 1689 cleared the board of sectarian bickering, and opened the way to greater tolerance (which did not, however, include Catholics or Jews). Agnostics increased in number, and deism was born. The Church itself seemed to take an economic approach to spiritual matters, and Bishop Tillotson claimed that if the same criteria are applied to faith as are used in trade, then eternal life is guaranteed. The eighteenth-century Church of England, often seen as distant, and deaf to the problems of the masses, contributed not a little to the rise of Methodism. 3. In his ‘Life’ of Addison, Dr Johnson says of William of Orange: ‘His study was only war’. Formally, there were two claimants to the throne of England, the ‘Old Pretender’, followed by the ‘Young’ one; that is to say, the son and the grandson of James II. The Young Pretender was the ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ beloved of the Scots, whose last attempt to take back the throne in 1745 provides the historical setting for Walter Scott’s novel, Waverley. Queen Anne, William’s sister-in-law, came to the throne in 1702, and reigned until her death in 1714. Despite her seventeen pregnancies, she bore no children. She is famous for her morbid relationships with a number of women (two in particular: the Duchess of Marlborough, to whom she wrote letters using a pseudonym, and Abigail Hill, later Lady Masham). Her model was Elizabeth, and she, like her Tudor predecessor, was believed to have the power to heal those affected by ‘the king’s evil’, or scrofula (Dr Johnson was, when still a child, ‘touched’ by the royal hand). She was, however, but a faint copy of the Virgin Queen: tiny, slow-moving, often crippled by gout, she altogether lacked Elizabeth’s charisma. Still, she did succeed in bringing an end to the War of Spanish Succession, with almost triumphal results. Hostilities had broken out in 1702 in an attempt to stop France from occupying the vacant Spanish throne, or making Spain a vassal state. England aimed at re-organizing and reducing the Spanish empire by dividing it. So, it had to form an alliance with Austria. At the same time, it aimed at preventing a Franco-Spanish move to close international markets, including South America, to English wool and textiles. Commercial England rejoiced at the victorious conclusion of the war in 1713, sealed by the Treaty of Utrecht. The war, fought for the first time on the fields of Europe, was won thanks to the famous campaigns of the Duke
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of Marlborough. The Treaty of Utrecht, where peace was underwritten with the help of the poet, Prior, can be seen as a trial run of the Congress of Vienna and that of Versailles, 100 and 200 years later respectively. A truly historic event in English political history, it awarded to England Gibraltar and Port Mahon in Minorca, which became two strategic bases for the control of the Mediterranean. England was also given Newfoundland and Hudson Bay, as well as permission to export slave labour for the cotton plantations of her American colonies. The Treaty stated that the slaves were to be transported in a single ship only once a year, but soon the ship became a whole fleet. At the same time, England launched its long-term policy, conducted on a diplomatic plane, of dividing the great continental powers; it was quick to sniff out possible Franco-Spanish alliances, and in controversies, always took the side of the underdog in order to scotch the formation of large blocs. As usual, the only thorns in its side were Ireland, where the situation had worsened in 1690, and Scotland, formally subjugated by the Act of Union of May 1707, but in reality the scene of fighting between Presbyterian Covenanters and pro-Catholic supporters of the Stuarts, known as Jacobites. France was bound by the Treaty to deny asylum to the Pretenders. Only the Dutch were dissatisfied, claiming they had not been rewarded enough. 4. In 1714 the Tories embraced Jacobitism, and the Whigs were in favour of the Protestant succession and the Hanovers. The general election of that year produced a surge of Whig members, marking the end of the Whig-Tory coalition. After that, elections were held every seven, rather than every three years. When Anne died, without issue, the country might well have found itself in a similar dilemma to the one that was created at the death of James I, and, indirectly, Charles I. Parliament ordered the imprisonment of Harley and the banishment of Bolingbroke, and welcomed George I,3 whose absenteeism and lack of familiarity with things English favoured the executive system of a Cabinet headed by a Prime Minister. With this, the sovereign assumed a secondary role, and was represented before Parliament by the Prime Minister. Walpole knew that the Hanover 3
When the Hanover dynasty was declared eligible to the English throne, several bishops, called ‘non-jurors’, remained faithful to the Stuarts.
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dynasty was as yet fragile; his prime concern was to play for time, keep the peace, reduce hostility between the parties, and anaesthetize the country. First of all he tackled the war debt, which amounted to fifty-four million pounds sterling, with astronomical rates of interest that were pushing the economy to the very edge of bankruptcy. Obviously, his foreign policy was based on non-aggression, so as not to increase the national debt. To this end, he eliminated his rival, Stanhope, who was calling for the resumption of the war against France, and adversaries from other areas of the Whig party, like Sunderland and Carteret,4 thus giving rise to a centralized administration of which he was the undisputed leader. He also saw to it that seven bishoprics went to trusted favourites, in this way guaranteeing his control over the Church. The economy was protected by tariffs and trade laws, although a bill to introduce a tax on the sale of tobacco and wine (rather than taxing them at the port of arrival to discourage smuggling) was shouted down by the representatives of the world of trade. When George I died in 1727, Walpole stayed on as Prime Minister of Queen Caroline, who stood in for her otherwise-engaged husband, George II. However, war with Spain became inevitable when Spanish interference, deemed intolerable, in English commercial shipping in the Pacific aroused the sleeping dog of nationalism. The resulting war was waged in an almost lackadaisical manner. Opposition to Walpole was expressed by the weekly, The Craftsman, as well as by dissenting voices within his own party. Walpole fell in 1742 when he refused to approve of a war (of Polish succession) invoked to increase English prestige and wealth, the very reasons that led Pitt the Elder, also known as Chatham, to support it. Walpole resigned in 1742, and died in the watershed year of 1745. § 73. The Enlightenment in England In 1745, the ‘Young Pretender’, Charles Edward, or ‘Le Chevalier’, landed in Scotland and made his way south to Derby. The population was unreactive, and a small contingent of troops recalled from the FrancoEnglish-Prussian-Austrian war was sufficient to make him turn on his heels
4
The low-quality coins he turned out in Ireland led to Swift’s pamphlet (§ 91.3).
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and flee to France. That same year, the halfway point of George II’s reign, constitutes a historical and ideological caesura: all uncertainty, all suspense concerning the ruling dynasty disappeared with the eclipse of the Stuarts from the scene; in literature, the Augustan Age proper came to an end, and the later eighteenth century dawned, a period similar and yet different to the age of Defoe, Swift and Pope. It is a singular coincidence that Swift died in 1745, preceded, a year earlier, by Pope. Inevitably, there is much of continental Illuminism in the English Enlightenment, which sanctions and precedes, seconds and outstrips its European counterpart. It also stands back, as often happens when England is faced with continental cultural phenomena. In Europe, Illuminism spans a whole century, and begins and ends with clear demarcations and overall homogeneous characteristics. The 100 years of its existence present fewer variations than the Renaissance; there are no definite fractures, but instead a gradual escalation. It is unitary and planetary, in that the world of the time was still Eurocentric. The standard historical versions of the movement use an astronomical metaphor: the initial rising of a star is followed by its ‘apogee’. It must be seen how the English Enlightenment stands in relation to a period which is witness to an epistemic revolution resembling, in a way, the Renaissance, with its focus on the here-and-now, dismantling the body-spirit dualism, establishing the primacy of public utility and progress, and, most of all, the objectives of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, and the removal of all obstacles to this end, such as obscurantist religions, which are to be reformed or abolished. How much of the aforesaid description can be applied to England? The scenario of the English Enlightenment is more fragmented than that of other Illuminisms. The first problem is to determine a time frame and a terminus ad quem. Continuity is broken in England, too, by two events that are, in some way, linked: the French Revolution on a social, political and ideological plane, and, as regards literature, the publication of the Lyrical Ballads. It should be remembered that the French Revolution was a moment of symbolic coagulation for intellectuals, and represented the demise of everything that belonged to the ‘old’ eighteenth century. This caused great alarm in England, however, and many writers foreswore the enthusiasm the Revolution had initially stirred in them. As for the terminus a quo, the age of classicism begins in 1702,
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and is divided into two parts: the first up to 1740–1745, usually called the Augustan age, with reference to classical Rome (the adjective, ‘Augustan’, appears to have been coined by Goldsmith); the other, less unified and more subject to ferments from various directions, occupies the remaining thirtyfive years and is commonly known as the age of Johnson. Within the first period, another subdivision is usually made for the reign of Queen Anne, and, consequently, ends in 1714. ‘Augustan’ should be maintained as the accepted historical term, although it has taken on a different, sometimes quite contrary, meaning: it becomes a word oozing insinuation, irony, paradox. The Augustus referred to is a tyrant, and against him Brutus and Cato, and the republican virtues, are held up as models. Horace and Virgil are still appreciated, but at the same time are viewed with some suspicion as ‘servile court poets’. Cicero is admired. The decline of Rome constitutes a deterrent and a warning, and Rome is therefore overshadowed by Greece in every field, especially as the cradle of liberty. Towards the middle of the century, Graecism or Classicism merge with the neo-Gothic, which corresponds to a revaluation of the Celtic-Germanic-Druidic component of the collective imagination. Orientalism becomes important in Johnson and Beckford and in the first ‘chinoiseries’. From the accounts of travels in the Americas comes the myth of the noble savage, especially the Tahitian, as in Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Omai. 2. The first part of the eighteenth century has been appropriately named, by some, ‘the age of the coffee-house’. The new beverage became popular thanks to increasing imports of coffee beans from the colonies. At the height of the fashion, there were said to be 500 coffee-houses in London, each with its own clientele. In other words, the court gradually ceased to be the place where culture was produced and consumed. It was in the coffee-houses that newspapers, a completely new status symbol, were born and read. The ex-Puritan middle class, hungry for culture as never before, flocked to these gathering places, and created the art of polite conversation and the civilized exchange of the ideas they had read of in the journals to be found in the coffee-house. From Pope onwards, innumerable writers, both great and mediocre, dabbled in journalism, many becoming entrepreneurs and publishers. This practice continued into the Romantic period: Shelley was drowned in 1822 during his return from visiting Byron
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and Leigh Hunt to discuss starting up a new journal, called The Liberal. The first steps were taken by Henry Muddiman around 1650, and by Roger L’Estrange, a supporter of Charles II, and, as such, in disgrace after 1688. The various journals that sprang up overnight throughout the century – published daily or at irregular intervals – at first used the form of the dialogue. Defoe did away with this, and turned journals into an unequivocal vehicle for opinions and ideas: in other words, a political and ideological medium. Two currents or schools of thought emerged expressing different ideas of culture: on one hand, a conservative circle harking back to old values (the renowned querelle between the ancients and the moderns), with, as its leading representatives, Swift, Pope and Gay; on the other, the progressive philosophy of Whigs like Addison, who viewed with interest and approval the steps taken by contemporary science. Rivals were brutally ostracized before being eliminated; the struggle to impose a cultural authority and caste was disguised as a war against amateurism and pedantry, the general climate being aptly encapsulated in the frequently used metaphor of the apocalyptic destruction of all values in a new Noah’s Flood. 3. Writers after 1660 had been only too quick to embrace the licentiousness that the new king had brought from France; they gave further proof of Polonius-like malleability and lack of moral backbone when they enthusiastically donned the preacher’s robes following Jeremy Collier’s invectives against the theatre, and the exhortations of Queens Mary and Anne to put them into practice. The court commanded and writers obeyed. The target of authors was, in the main, the newly enriched middle class, of Puritan extraction, but now bereft of Puritan belief. The job of the man of letters was to provide a forma mentis – in other words, taste, refined manners, and codes of behaviour. It was the same middle class as had been harangued by preachers for the past 100 or so years. A surrogate for the sermon was needed, and was found in the newly established press in its various forms of dailies, periodicals or essays published in journals, a variant, indirect, to be sure, but increasingly more direct, of the plaintive, edifying theatre play. A case in point is Steele, who started out as a playwright and ended up an essayist. Society was split: on one side there was a dissolute aristocracy; on the other, the cautious, canny merchant class. The beginning of the century had seen a cultural revolution resembling, in its general outline, the
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post-1832 upheaval. The petite bourgeoisie was getting bigger and becoming literate, opening a whole new market for publishers. It was a social class with more leisure, and consequently needed reading material that was both edifying and pleasing. Books became a source of income, and publishers and printers were quick to take advantage of the new situation. One natural repercussion was the change in the make-up of the authorial class, until then largely made up of members of the aristocracy. Now they were joined by recruits from the middle classes. The Augustan poet renews and deepens the modern malaise of the artist: strange, hitherto unknown sicknesses become familiar companions of men of letters. One of such medical conditions was hypochondria, which afflicted, among others, James Thomson, Dr Johnson, Boswell (who wrote a series of essays under the pseudonym ‘The Hypochondriack’), and Gray. The Renaissance, of course, had had its melancholics, but now the pathology was more clearly understood and described. The lowest stratum of the authorial class was that of the ‘scribblers’, usually expressed by the term ‘Grub Street’. The lowering of literary standards was attacked by Pope, Swift, Gay, and the Scriblerians. Some were self-taught poets, like Stephen Duck, the wool carder. The year 1750 sees, not the birth, but the emancipation of ‘bluestockings’, and the spread of women’s clubs, the main activity of which was moral edification.1 In 1780 the first circulating libraries appeared, a phenomenon that is synonymous with the Victorian novel. For all of the above reasons, the face of publishing was changed. Pope was the first to excogitate a new publishing formula; at least, he was the first famous author to use the method of subscription, which entailed the advance payment of the costs of printing by means of advertising by influential friends. The copy bought by the subscriber contained a gratulatory table that included the subscriber’s name, ‘writ large’, in a long list of similar supporters. As a consequence of subscription, publishing laws had to be revised or added to. The rights remained in the hands of the publisher, who paid the author a lump sum. A tax was levied on newspapers, for the benefit of the national exchequer. In 1737
1
There were only one or two proletarian poets; in general the voices of popular culture and religious minorities were silenced.
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the Licensing Act exacerbated existing norms; transgression might lead to imprisonment, as in the case of Defoe or Fielding. Politicians were in the writers’ sights, so the politicians defended themselves. 4. Eighteenth-century English thought, based on sensism, empirical and experimental epistemology, and on the utopian dream of the applicability of science to every field of research, rests on Newton and Locke, and, later, on Berkeley and Hume, influential thinkers whose theories constitute essential reference points in the context of European philosophy. The mirage of exactitude was, however, undermined by residual traces of Aristotelianism, with more than a whiff of metaphysics and superstition, until les philosophes rejected the unshakeable certainty with which Newton had glimpsed, behind and beyond the world of phenomena, the presence of an organizing entity. Diderot and Buffon stated their belief in the spontaneous creation of matter, and speculated, at the same time, on the exact duration of the ‘six days of Creation’, an early manifestation of a theory of evolution. Newton’s cosmos presupposes the existence of order and laws laid down by an intelligent creator. The telescope and the microscope were essential instruments for explorations which led to the classification of exotic flora and fauna. By the middle of the century, the first machine factories were up and working; experiments using electricity were carried out, and Watt gave the world the first steam engine. Chemistry, ceramics, fashion – all flourished in the Enlightenment air; and yet, after a mere halfcentury, this temperate illuminism too began to fade. Locke was the first to formulate the concept that the pleasures of the imagination derive from sense perceptions, and secondary pleasures from the ideas of visible objects. Shaftesbury emphasized the creative capacity of an artistic nature; this was further elaborated by German philosophers, and handed on to Coleridge and the other Romantics. The sublime is not an invention of Burke: an eccentric theory held that ruins and rubble testify to the magnificence of a world that was destroyed by the Fall. Thomas Burnet and John Dennis studied the Alpine landscape in terms that were already Burkean, with an essential contribution by Longinus, who had defined art as the expression of passion. In the field of theology, anti-dogmatism and scepticism were considered compatible with religious belief, and the more extreme positions of Continental Illuminism were tempered in England, although even
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the adherents of orthodoxy were not untouched by encroaching secularization, as evidenced by Defoe. After 1689, a reaction against Restoration libertinism entailed a tightening of moral surveillance, sanctioned and encouraged, as I have said, by the two queens. The resulting religion was coldly formal, with none of the passion of mysticism and Puritan pietism; its main virtue was correctness, and its charity skin-deep. There was also a ‘mathematical’ side to religion, with God as a kind of organizer, which, in turn, gave rise to deism and the denial of the possibility of miracles, especially in the Old Testament.2 The concept of benevolence of Collier and Shaftesbury presupposed a perfect universe and inborn human virtue. Since men are rational animals, common sense must be used to resolve differences of opinion. As an inevitable reaction, and in line with the cyclical nature of history, there followed a pietistic revival, which brought with it schools for the poor, associations in favour of temperance and against public indecency, and the ‘Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge’, destined to have a long and glorious career lasting well into the nineteenth century. Methodism was born in the 1730s with the inspired preaching of Wesley and his disciples in barns and farmyards throughout the land. Well before Wesley, the first Masonic lodge in England was formed, in 1715, its aim being to satisfy the need for mysticism and ritual in an increasingly rationalistic age. Especially after 1750, rather than enthusing about unlimited and uninterrupted progress, the more objective among writers and thinkers perceived and passed on to their readers the signs of incipient decay: the standard of education had fallen; society had all but abandoned religious belief and was dominated by a desire for wealth. Already in 1727, Saussure, an ancestor of the famous twentieth-century linguist, was criticizing the English for their crass chauvinism, even though, at the same time, Europe was in the grip of a mania for all things English. Political thinking leaned 2
English deism was much more tolerant than its continental counterpart, the only exception being the sermons by the theologian, Henry Sacheverell, who, in St Paul’s Cathedral, condemned the principles of revolution, and was tried and suspended a divinis in 1710. However, Puritanism, though beaten in the field, had spread throughout society and had become an essential component of the intellectual and practical life of the nation.
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heavily on Locke’s theory of the Glorious Revolution. Arguing against Filmer, Locke maintained that kingship was not based on divine right, but on a contract with the people, which may be repealed in the event of the violation of any of its clauses. Natural law decrees that each man has the right to own property, and obliges the king to protect it. With Locke, the English monarchy became, and remained, a constitutional mixture of oligarchy, monarchy and democracy.3 The English Parliament was a ‘Gothic’ institution, not unlike the Witenagemot of Anglo-Saxon England, as underlined by the Magna Carta and the Revolution of 1688. Hobbes was to agree with Locke when he posited the idea of the state as sovereign and absolute, but not based on divine right. 5. Sentimental drama aimed at arousing emotion and tears by presenting examples of sublime heroism and lofty ideals. Playwrights were at pains to point out that human beings were, by nature, social animals, and that it was only natural to celebrate universal benevolence, philanthropy and reformism, and to work for the creation of humane prisons, orphanages, and houses for the rehabilitation of prostitutes, as well as to encourage the struggle for the rights of women. However, it was prose, historically the literary medium with the slowest development, that became the principal form of expression in the age of reason, and the style favoured by most writers was clear, rational, middle-of-the-road, and restrained. As in every ‘classical’ period, literary law-makers, such as Swift and Johnson, recommended the embalming of the language used in literature, and the erecting of barriers against infiltrations and deformations. The range of possible subgenres had been growing since the end of the previous century. Diaries were published and sold well; letter-writing had become an art, and therefore a commodity; prose branched out into literary criticism, history, philosophy, economics and journalism (which was to play a large part in the anti-slavery campaign later in the century). Lexicography reached its zenith with Johnson’s Dictionary.4 The essay – a more sophisticated version
3 4
SEC, 71. In the eighteenth century the normalization of spelling was all but complete; capital letters were no longer used erratically, and a distinction was made between round and italic letters.
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of the original newspaper article, and the glory of the age – was rooted in Seneca, with, as its modern founding father, Montaigne. Alongside the better-known diarists, like Pepys and Evelyn, we find Thomas Fuller and his The Holy State (1642), while La Bruyère appeared in English in 1688. Satire and the novel were interconnected, in that they shared the same targets, which were made more likeable and treated with less saeva indignatio by the novelists. Ian Watt, the modern authority on the eighteenth-century novel, informs us that Homer and the epic were not popular, with their codes of violence and brutality, so far from eighteenth-century sensibility. Watt quotes the critic Thomas Blackwell, who stated that the conditions in which the Iliad had been written could not be recreated: there was no hero worship in eighteenth-century England, whereas Homer had at his disposal an audience hungry for heroic tales. Furthermore, the epic was an oral genre, probably sung or intoned, featuring larger-than-life characters and inviting its listeners to identify with unusual or unpleasant figures. At bottom, the epic described facts that clashed with real life. The novel addressed the class which was to become the main component of the country and of the reading public. Plots had to have a credible and verifiable social setting. Its genes are, therefore, mixed: the Elizabethan proto-novels of Nashe and Deloney, Greene’s stories of the London underworld, the ‘characters’ and sketches by writers like Addison and Steele, Bunyan, the ‘biographies’ by Defoe, the various romances written in imitation of the French. Literary aesthetics looked back on a rich history of authors and books, and debated with passion the merits of Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden. It was an aesthetics ‘based on rules’, but not without flexibility; neoclassical but also gradually ‘pre-Romantic’ ever since the ‘discovery’ of the sublime. Its sources were Corneille and Boileau, and, in antiquity, Horace. The key word of the century, ‘nature’, needs to be explained in its many contemporary nuances, some of which are antithetical. For poetry, to follow nature meant to seek order, express energy and search for the ‘simple truth’ regarding life. The fight for naturalness and against pedantry and neo-concettism is at the origin of the revival of satire, which was to become the most important poetic genre for almost fifty years. In burlesque, the concepts of imitation and parody are brought into play. The eighteenth century sees the first cases of inversion of signifier and signified on the prosodic plane: blank verse and the heroic couplet are often used as
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vehicles for inappropriate contents, and metrical forms are chosen which are clearly unsuited to the author’s intention (such as Virgilian tropes or epic devices used to describe the squalor of everyday life). 6. An eighteenth-century classification of non-literary art forms in order of importance would be headed by architecture, followed by painting, which actually sometimes overtakes, or at least equals architecture in artistic value. Sculpture is absent (the only three sculptors of any importance are all non-English); music, too, is largely represented by foreigners, Italian and, mostly, German émigrés. As for the English themselves, they excel in applied and minor arts, like gardening, interior decorating, ceramics, and watchmaking. English architects after Wren, such as Vanbrugh, Gibbs and Burlington, formed a group of Palladians who looked for inspiration to Bernini and Borromini, while tempering the Baroque with the severity, bareness and geometrical delimitation of Vitruvius. Burlington originated the ‘Queen Anne style’ – small, unassuming houses with gardens no longer strictly laid out in the manner of the Dutch school of gardeners, but wilder and more irregular; the interiors featured spacious panels, vases decorated in oriental style, and mahogany furniture. This Palladianism was off-set, after 1750, by the Greek architectural ideal, thanks to the impulse given by archaeological tourism and excavations. In all this, Gothic architecture continued to flourish, and provided inspiration for, to give only one example, Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. In the eighteenth century, England continued to import and adopt continental artists like Kneller, a court painter who specialized in portraits of royalty and the aristocracy. The range of possible pictorial subjects was increased by the picturesque, by the landscapes of Wilson and Gainsborough, and by the social art of Hogarth. Reynolds, who, as theorist and president of the Royal Academy, held an opposing view to that of Lessing – that is, the analogies between the arts in the name of their common appeal to the imagination – interpreted the picturesque as the attention given to marginal figures and scenes, and, in his paintings, expressed a realism which was only very slightly sublimated. The portraitist, George Romney, did not limit his art to kings and courtiers, but ventured into genre painting too. Joseph Wright of Derby is an innovator and finds his subjects even in science laboratories. Hogarth had started out as a painter of historical subjects, but soon bade a polemical farewell to the genre. He
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revolutionizes his art when he turns to the ‘conversation piece’, eschewing poses and catching people intent on their everyday tasks or activities. Above all, he brings about a reduction in scale: it is as if the painter were standing back from his position as a portraitist and were looking at a more crowded, panoramic scene, containing separate but connected panels. These are paintings that, for the first time ever, are meant to be studied under a magnifying glass, with distant strains of the wild phantasmagorias of Hieronymus Bosch. Watchmaking and furniture decoration, these too called ‘Queen Anne’, flourished thanks to the Dutchman, Gibbons. Wedgwood’s china, produced in his factory called Etruria, boasted the work of artists like Flaxman, who imitated on the plates and cups the classical motifs found on artefacts discovered in the excavation of Pompeii, which had just been undertaken. In the field of music, the debate on Italian opera had been raging ever since Handel arrived at the English court in 1710, where it met with the open hostility of a Philistine press. 7. The first assessments of eighteenth-century literature were, obviously, the work of those directly involved: the pre-Romantics distanced themselves from the Augustans, and demanded more room for feeling; iconoclastic Romantics in turn criticized their predecessors, while the early Victorians were already looking back with nostalgia. The later nineteenth century saw the gradual emergence of two historical currents, one, led by Macaulay and Leslie Stephen, propounding the view of the eighteenth century as an age of progress; the other composed of Tory critics. After 1920, it was the turn of Modernism to evaluate the century in question: T. S. Eliot defended Dryden, and Leavis championed Pope, both suggesting a natural affinity of their protégés with the Metaphysicals. Both were followed by the ‘new critics’. After 1980, critical positions overlapped and became so entangled as to be, in the end, undecipherable. The only thing the experts concurred on was the importance of not reducing ‘the century to a stub-end of the Metaphysicals, on the one hand, and, on the other, a prelude to Romanticism’.5 The eighteenth-century sense of order identified by Watt was denied by Rawson, who spoke of an internal disorder within 5
G. Sertoli, in MAR, vol. II, 21.
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the comforting exterior. As happens in every controversy, the eighteenth century has, in the past few years, been the object of theoretical constructions and partisan, arbitrary – at times sectorial – interpretations, like those of Foucault, feminist and gender critics, deconstructionists and others, who have further shattered the compactness of the age and are still at work expanding the traditional literary canon of the period. § 74. Pope* I: A ‘re-maker’ of genius Ben Jonson, John Milton, John Dryden and Alexander Pope (1688– 1744) are separated one from another by a generation, more or less, and have 1
*
The Twickenham Edition of the Poems, ed. J. Butt et al., 11 vols, London 1939–1969; Prose Works, ed. N. Ault and R. Cowler, Oxford 1936 and 1986; Correspondence, ed. G. Sherburn, 5 vols, Oxford 1956; Selected Letters, ed. H. Erskine-Hill, Oxford 2000. A new edition of the poems is in course of publication, ed. V. Rumbold, Harlow 2007–. L. Strachey, Alexander Pope, Cambridge 1925; E. Sitwell, Alexander Pope, London 1930; G. Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope, Oxford 1934; G. Tillotson, On the Poetry of Pope, Oxford 1938, 1950; M. Praz, La poesia di Pope e le sue origini, Roma 1947 (typewritten university notes, not included in the bibliography in PSL, 329–30; half of the book is on the ‘origins’, but see below, n. 16); B. Dobrée, Alexander Pope, London 1951; R. W. Rogers, The Major Satires of Alexander Pope, Urbana, IL 1955; A. Williams, Pope’s ‘Dunciad’: A Study of Its Meaning, London 1955; R. A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion, Oxford 1959; M. Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope 1731–1743, Toronto 1969 (reviewed by Praz in SSI, vol. II, 108–12), and Alexander Pope: A Life, New Haven, CT 1985; J. Sitter, The Poetry of Pope’s ‘Dunciad’, Minneapolis, MN 1971; P. M. Spacks, An Argument of Images: The Poetry of Alexander Pope, Cambridge, MA 1971; CRHE, ed. J. Barnard, London 1973; P. Rogers, An Introduction to Pope, London 1975, Essays on Pope, Cambridge 1993, The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia, Westport, CT and London 2004, The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope (as editor), Cambridge, MA 2007, and A Political Biography of Alexander Pope, London 2015; G. Galigani, Il ‘Rape of the Lock’ del Pope: quattro voci di un contrappunto, Pisa 1976; M. R. Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England, Oxford 1978; G. S. Fraser, Alexander Pope, London 1978; The Art of Alexander Pope, ed. H. ErskineHill and A. Smith, London 1979; D. B. Morris, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense, Cambridge, MA 1984; L. Brown, Alexander Pope, Oxford 1985; F. Stack, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation, Cambridge 1985; L. Damrosch, Jr, The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope, Berkeley, CA 1987; V. Rumbold, Women’s Place in Pope’s
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become the symbols of the period in which they lived, so that we now speak of ‘ages’ that take their name from them by definition. Like Dryden, Pope considered himself a true member of the fellowship of poets, and kept in his study the portraits of the afore-mentioned writers, in order, he added, with a touch of hypocrisy, ‘to impose upon himself a constant humility’.1 In the period between 1709 and 1744 there were no great poets, and no dictators of literary norms. Pope stepped into the vacancy. Closer scrutiny shows, however, that he laboured under huge disadvantages in his aspiration to become the central reference point for the culture of his time: that he did not have le physique du rôle was unfortunate but not lethal to his expectations; but he was a Catholic, and his religion had to be hidden or played down. So he anonymized it, and practised it clandestinely, in an under-the-counter, even vengeful manner. By the way, none of the four I have mentioned at the beginning was an orthodox Anglican: Jonson converted, ‘de-converted’, then perhaps re-converted to Roman Catholicism on his death bed; Milton was a Puritan; Dryden a Catholic convert. Only Pope was a Catholic at birth, and remained so, though he wrote no religious verse as such, least of all in the passionate, Baroque style of a Crashaw.2 In him, faith and poetry are kept well apart; indeed his last philosophical works are deistic, and present an ethical system independent of religion and metaphysics, dominated by the eighteenth-century episteme of natural theophany. He did not repudiate his
World, Cambridge 1989; F. Rosslyn, Alexander Pope: A Literary Life, Basingstoke 1990; I. R. F. Gordon, A Preface to Pope, 2nd edn, London 1993; Critical Essays on Alexander Pope, ed. W. Jackson and R. P. Yoder, New York and Toronto 1993; P. Baines, The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope, London 2000; N. Murray Goldsmith, Alexander Pope: The Evolution of a Poet, Aldershot 2002; Alexander Pope: A Poet on the Margins and in the Center, ed. F. Gregori, Atlanta, GA 2005 (monographic number of the journal Studies in the Literary Imagination, XXXVIII, no. 1, Spring 2005); N. Curry, Alexander Pope, London 2008. 1 2
In MAR, vol. II, 84. In fact, Crashaw was attacked in a letter quoted by BAUGH, vol. III, 843. B. Dobrée (DEE, 205), on the other hand, mentions ‘borrowings from Crashaw, whom [Pope] had studied for years, and who, on the fusion of human and divine eroticism had much to give him for this subject’, that is, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’.
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Catholicism, but integrated it in a more serene vision which was no longer seen as an ontological necessity and the reason for existence.3 2. Of the four poets mentioned above, Pope is, together with Jonson, the one that has historically aroused least interest and sympathy after his death; more than in the case of Jonson, his greatness has vacillated, and been doubted. His career shows how insecure and shifting were the foundations of his fame in his lifetime. Until recently, Pope was for the English what Vincenzo Monti was for Italians: he was credited with being, at least in theory, a good, indeed excellent, versifier, but was denied any valid human content or profound philosophy. His role as a mere transposer was regarded with suspicion by those who murmured that his philosophical poems were based on outlines written by Bolingbroke. It cannot be denied that several of his poems contain phrases and fragments from the works of other poets. The ostracism to which he was subjected, intermittent but relentless,4 was temporarily checked by Dr Johnson, who dedicated to him the longest of his Lives of the Poets, just a few pages longer than Dryden’s and much longer than Milton’s. The disregard in which Pope was held was, however, largely due to a misconception of Romantic aesthetics, which impinged on him only fifty years after his death and completely overturned Augustan values. According to the Romantics, Pope’s poetry was non-poetry, cold, artificial, with no personal involvement. Even when he meant to be himself, and appeared without his official bardic robes, for the Romantics he was stiff, rhetorical and ‘literary’. When he chatted, he chatted as from a pulpit, and seemed certain that his words would sooner or later appear in print. ‘Correctness’ was the mantra handed to the young Pope by the minor critic, William Walsh. He was considered ‘flawless’ by Byron, the only Romantic poet to appreciate him. By the end of the nineteenth century, he had touched the height of unpopularity, and become the most underrated and vilified of the
3
4
The importance of Pope’s Catholicism has been studied by contributors to Gregori 2005. No general consensus of opinion appears to have been reached. According to Johnson, the dying Pope was given the last rites by a priest, but said to a confidant: ‘I do not think it essential, but it will be very right; and I thank you for putting me in mind of it’ ( JLI, vol. II, 291, and, further, 303). Gordon 1993, 49.
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great figures of literary history. Arnold called him a master of prose; Taine addressed his most ferocious work of critical demolition to him,5 dictated by the Romantic belief (almost as if he were paraphrasing Giordano Bruno) that great poetry requires great love, a synonym for authenticity of feeling. Reading ‘Eloisa’ had left him, he said, bored, tired and yawning; instead of making the reader’s blood race, Eloisa speaks like Cicero in court. The poem is all decoration and frills, like an aria in some opera; there is no truth in it. The Dunciad was insipid; or rather, it was disgusting. Taine acknowledged only that some of the individual lines in Pope were real jewels: a kind of fortunate pointillism. Arnold would have added that they are excellent versifications of prose. Another historic reader, Saintsbury,6 wrote a rather biting sketch of Pope’s not very likeable character, his tightfistedness and his tendency to mock and lampoon his enemies. Edith Sitwell’s critique caused an uproar in 1930, and was reviewed by Orwell7 together with another book that argued in defence of Pope, underlining his ‘classical’ gifts of detachment and discretion. According to Orwell, Sitwell found in Pope anticipations of Francis Thompson and Hopkins. Orwell was unconvinced and continued to view Pope as a dry, unoriginal writer, in line with current thinking. In fact, Sitwell had provided a new perspective: in the early poetry, written when Pope was still in his teens, she found personal vibrations that would later be smothered; in this respect, these youthful poems are more modern than those written by the adult Pope. Pope criticizes foolishness with a lightness and melancholy that foreshadow the imminent pre-Romantic movement. Now and again we find recognizable signs of a vivid sense of landscape, and, in the elegies, the stirrings of nascent graveyardism. 3. Despite all, Pope is one of the greatest masters of poetic form in any literature. By general consensus, he is defined by one of his own maxims: he is the poet who can say ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’. Not a creator of new ideas, therefore, but a gatherer of old ones, tried and trusty. Pope excels in paraphrase that improves on the original; while still a child he read so voraciously as to build up a huge store of words and 5 6 7
TAI, vol. III, 333–64. SAI, 551. OCE, vol. I, 44–7.
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phrases, epithets and synonyms, with the sole intention of learning how to write. For Johnson he was, of all the poets, the one that was most obsessed and possessed by the labor limae. For all that, it is difficult to find in Pope’s poetry a driving ideal imperative. He is inspired by public events, or, more often, by books he has read. Sometimes a mentor will suggest a subject and urge him to waste no time and write a poem on it. This leads to a number of forced, uninspired poems, more than compensated for, however, by the miracle of The Rape of the Lock. The poet’s apparent indifference to his subject might suggest a far-fetched comparison with Joyce, so different in all respects: both ransacked the treasure chest of tradition with the sole aim of absorbing various styles and, from the mixture, created for themselves a style of their own. Two hundred years before Joyce, Pope might have said, like the author of Ulysses, ‘I’m only interested in style’. What he did was to stuff his mind full of poetic formulas to be kept at his disposal and used when needed.8 Arnold, too, said that Pope, unlike Homer, never loses sight of style, and transforms reality into style. The message becomes the medium. Right from the very start, Pope was a counterfeiter: he lied about his age when he passed off as juvenile, works which appear to have been written later, and altered them on the quiet before publication. He faked his own letters, collected and published in 1737, in which many, originally addressed to one correspondent, were re-addressed to another. Then, of course, there is the incontrovertible fact that his best works are imitations of the classics, especially the Horatian satires of his last period. Pope is characterized by a series of absences: he has no authentic passion or pathos; he has no real sense of nature; he has no lyric voice; he has no personal inspiration, and so takes refuge in translation. Even then, as a translator, he is hampered by his limited knowledge of Greek, and as an editor of Shakespeare he does not possess the knowledge for the job. 4. Joyce confessed to a similar lack of originality: like Pope, he needed the help of outlines and pre-existing models in order to re-invent, or more precisely, re-create. The key of Pope’s work, its pervasive feature, is the idea of imitation in the most elevated sense of the term. Pope tries out various 8
Cf. Fraser 1978, 40, for a slightly different comparison with Joyce.
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poetic styles, and reaches his highest point with his translation of Homer – which, in the end, is not Homer, but Pope, and a work not of mediation but of self-declaration. He began his poetic career writing parody – imitations and re-workings – as if he were trying to take on the identity of famous predecessors and speak with their voice. He also wrote, when still very young, a lengthy didactic poem. An indication that Pope belongs to the world of ‘metaliterature’ is found in the refined intertextuality of The Rape of the Lock. This was followed by two famous works that are, in fact, impersonations. His career can be seen as two distinct phases, with, in the middle, the translations from Homer; a gap of more than ten years. The poems of the first period were collected and published in 1717; the second period begins with the moral epistles and culminates with the Dunciad. The Pope of the first period is an imperturbable, ironic dispenser of epigrams on the orderliness of the created world, and on art as a reflection of it. Of course, far from being monotonous and repetitive, the orderliness in question is varied, and expressed in internal antitheses or dualisms, like town and country, or different styles of architecture or cultural models. In this first phase, characterized by friendliness, tolerance, and benevolence, Pope transmits the idea of a rational, intelligible universe. This optimistic vision excludes nothing, although Pope had various adversaries who did not share his utopian conviction that contemporary society represented civilization at its highest possible level; like Dryden, he thought that a state of near perfection had been reached, from which there was no going back, or forward, either. A comparison with Swift is straightforward, at least up to 1717: Pope loves the human race, and wishes to correct it and improve it; Swift loathes it. Pope justified himself with Swift in order to attempt a gentle correction of the character or manners that were under attack. § 75. Pope II: Poetic experiments up to the Homeric translations Pope’s father was a cloth merchant with a taste for literature, who, perhaps influenced by his business contacts in Portugal, had become a Catholic. When his son was still in his teens, Pope Senior had, wisely, retired to Binfield, in Windsor Forest, to live on the fruits of his commercial labours. Because of his religion, Pope was denied access to public schools and the universities. Although he did have a priest as tutor, he was,
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to all intents and purposes, self-taught. He excelled at languages,9 and at the age of twelve wrote a Horatian ode on solitude which, in five quatrains of earnest but subdued verses, exalts the peace of the countryside and announces fulfilment. Of himself, he said that, little more than a baby, he ‘already lisped in numbers’. By 1709 he was considered a child prodigy by the most important writers of the capital.10 He contracted Pott’s disease, also known as tuberculosis of the bones,11 which stunted his growth, so that his maximum height as an adult was about four and a half feet. The result was that he was looked upon as a freak, and had to adopt various stratagems to face many everyday challenges. However, as remarked by Johnson, the young Pope had noble features, with sharp, lively eyes, as seen in numerous contemporary portraits, where he is always shown from the waist up. The parallel with Leopardi is de rigueur – there were the same frustrations arising from his deformity, exclusion from the pleasures of life,12 the withdrawal into uninterrupted reading, and the feverish pursuit of excellence in writing. It might also be said that, at a distance of fifty years, another Milton was born, intent on claiming as his right the whole wealth of classical literature, but from a non-Puritan standpoint. He was stubbornly determined to become the greatest genius that had ever existed, and drew up an agenda that comprised every style, genre and subject imaginable. He wrote drafts for a comedy, a tragedy, an epic poem,13 as well as panegyrics
9 10 11 12
13
For some it was only a smattering, or even none at all, a mere boast on the part of Pope (CHI, vol. IX, 67). See § 55.1 on his friendship with Wycherley. Cf., to mention only one, Fraser 1978, 11, 15, on the legendary origin of this disease (according to which Pope was crushed by a cow near his father’s shop in London, or may have drunk infected cow’s milk). But not those of the table. Johnson points out that ‘he loved meat highly seasoned and of strong taste; and, at the intervals of the table, amused himself with biscuits and dry conserves’; that he never refused a glass of good wine and that his death was due to ‘a silver saucepan, in which it was his delight to heat potted lampreys’ ( JLI, vol. II, 295). The subject, which, in Johnson’s opinion, Pope had done well to abandon because it was a ‘ridiculous fiction’ ( JLI, vol. II, 289), was Trojan Brutus, the mythical founder of Britain.
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addressed to the crowned heads of Europe. On the death of his father, he and his mother moved to Twickenham. Their house had a magnificent garden that represented an amalgam of the concepts of order and wildness. This was the time when Temple and Thomas Browne were holding forth on the practical, symbolic and historical aspects of the upkeep of the hortus conclusus. A tunnel led from the house to the garden (Pope called it his ‘grotto’), which became famous for the extravagant decorations and ingenious kaleidoscopic effects that turned it into a private sanctuary à la Huysmans, destined to delight later decadents like Praz.14 One of the dominating, constant oppositions in Pope expresses, on one hand, an urge to socialize, on the other, the desire for solitude, along with the cultivation of solipsism, which was emotionally gratifying but politically frustrating. 2. As I have said above, the young Pope had received and appreciated the advice of the influential critic, William Walsh, to do his utmost to become the first ‘correct’ poet in the English language. Pope did not disappoint him. ‘Correctness’ signified density, concentration, sobriety and precision, starting from the primary cell of the poem, the single rhymed couplet, a measure which Pope polishes and refines. He began his career with imitations, as has been said, of authors ranging from Chaucer to Rochester, each about 100 lines long, and clearly declared to be ‘in imitation of ’ so and so. In a sense, this ability to mimic the voice and manners of other writers is already a quite Joycean trait. The ‘Pastorals’ (1709) consist of four dialogues between shepherds (one dialogue each season), heavily indebted to the tradition of Virgil and Theocritus, in which the only personal note is the exclusion from and the impossibility to love, through the exploitation of a small number of fictitious characters. That ‘The Temple of Fame’ is a remake is now accepted by all: in a footnote, Pope himself mentions the almost homonymous poem by Chaucer as his source, but the layout of the work, the descriptions, and the reflections are all his own, and owe nothing to Chaucer. Significantly, in this poem Pope subscribes to the idea that Fame rewards, not the person who boasts about what he has done, but one who lives humbly and piously, doing good without ostentation. Windsor Forest (1713) is vaguely modelled 14
See the splendid short descriptions in ‘La grotta di Pope’ and ‘Ruderi rococò’, in M. Praz, Fiori freschi, Milano 1982, 297–300 and 301–3.
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on Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, but lists many poets and kings associated with that particular place. Pope took the advice of those who suggested writing a poem to celebrate the Peace of Utrecht after the model of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue. The protasis gives rise to the fixed idea of the forest as the epitome of the world, and, consequently, a mixture of order and chaos, as seen in the different descriptive parts of the poem, not always, it must be said, harmoniously joined together. The multi-coloured variety of the created world looks forward to the ‘brinded’ world of Hopkins. An encomiastic coda is stuck on to drive home the message that the picture of abundance, of nature’s fertility and peace, is due largely to the benevolence of Queen Anne. History is progressive, not cyclical; Pope seems to echo Dryden when he states that peace and the height of civilization itself have been reached now, while before men had languished under a despotic, barbaric regime. Windsor Forest provides space for social activities, but also welcomes the man in search of solitude. After the purple passages of the hunter and the angler, the pheasant with the bloodied breast, and the legend of the nymph, Lodona, who becomes the river Loddon while fleeing from the lustful god, Pan, the poet gives voice to a moving, almost Shelleyan, hymn to the peace of the forest. A millennarist note rings out in another remake, this time from the Bible: ‘Messiah’. An Essay on Criticism (1711) is a diagnosis or manifesto of aesthetics of the kind that are normally written at the end of a career, not by poets who are still finding their feet. Pope is a brilliant synthesizer, and in this poem shows great skill in compacting (a bit less in coordinating) and tying together laboured conceptualizations by Boileau and others, to form memorable nuggets of what sounds like self-evident ‘truth’. It represents a moment of transition and metapoetry, as shown clearly in the title: rarely is an essay written in verse, and even less often does a poem busy itself with criticism rather than with emotion. The quintessence of Pope’s thought, and of Augustan thought in general, is artistic moderation as a balance between extremes, and sound ‘judgement’, one of the factors in the semantic equation defining ‘wit’. Much-praised ‘nature’ implies the banishing of all extravagance. Rules ‘methodize’ nature, but critics should beware of nit-picking, and look, instead, at the whole, and the overall structure of the work of art. It is a warning blast, heralding the coming all-out attack on the stupidity of poets and critics alike. Enter Pope the satirist.
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3. The Rape of the Lock appeared in various versions, like his second masterpiece: the first, in 1712, pronounced ‘perfect’ by Addison, was shorter and more essential than the edition that followed in 1714, to which had been added, together with a number of secondary anecdotes, an array of ‘supernatural machinery’ in the form of sylphs, both benign and mischievous. The poem is based on a real event, a trivial incident – a kind of storm in a tea-cup: a certain lord had cut from the head of his loved one a lock of her hair; this had led to a quarrel between the two families. Not for the first time, it was a friend, this time, Caryll, who suggested Pope might write something on the subject. Pope took the title, and nothing else, from Tassoni’s La secchia rapita [The Rape of the Pail]; but The Rape is a construct of imitations, one inside another, like a game of Chinese boxes; behind and above them all tower the great poems of antiquity. Representing the moderns is Boileau’s Lutrin, already the object of imitation in England at the hands of Samuel Garth, who transformed it into a ‘quarrel between chemists’ under the title of The Dispensary; more recent were the badinages of another Frenchman, Voiture. Now, the Rape is a hapax: Pope was to write nothing like it again, nothing so airy, so fantastic, and so impalpable. It is also a scale model of early eighteenth-century England, of the ideals and pseudo-values of the time, identified and described with benevolence, indeed with a hint of complicity. It represents a return, after a short pause, to the cult of pastiche and rifacimento: the Aeneid, Paradise Lost, and Homer are revisited and revived in mock-heroic mode in a series of standard episodes: the storm scene, with the sylph who says his name is Ariel, is clearly a reference to Shakespeare; when Belinda travels down the Thames to Hampton Court the reader cannot but think of Cleopatra’s more magnificent progress on the Cydnus. In Canto II, Ariel parodies Satan when he spreads his wings and convenes a council of his trusty followers. The sudden mixing of the elevated with the bathetic, of heroic deeds with trivial events (like the Queen, who, at the royal palace, ‘sometimes council takes, and sometimes tea’) would have met with Byron’s approval; in fact, Byron employed this stratagy of antitheses to great effect in his own works. For the first and only time, Pope appears here as a skilful cartoonist, capable, with a few brief strokes of the pen or spatula, of capturing Belinda as she wakes up, then sits at her dressing table surrounded by a cheerful confusion of odds and
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ends. Canto III contains the pièce de résistance, the game of ombre, followed by the ritual of coffee-taking, obviously in mock-heroic terms. The canto ends with a nail-biting description of the cutting off of the lock by means of a ‘glittering forfex’, a kenning that is the Latin word for ‘scissor’, but also, with hindsight, the Joycean earwig that crawls into Earwicker’s ear, just where the lock is placed. Pope, whose sense of humour is indifferent, has an intervening sylph sliced in two by the blades of the scissors: no real damage is done, since ‘airy substance soon unites again’. The lock ascends to heaven in a parody of the Assumption, just as Belinda at her toilet was a parody of Eucharistic transubstantiation. In heaven, as in a kind of cemetery, are various earthly appliances, now abandoned, that serve as a reminder of the caducity of all material things. Only the lock, immortalized in poetry, will survive. So, it is better to shake hands and make peace. 4. ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, an echo of the departure for Turkey of the beloved but aloofly scornful Lady Montague, and ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’ were written in 1717, and are to be seen as a change in direction in Pope’s artistic development. The former is a story of passionate love – ecstatic, superhuman, mad – so intense and authentic, says the narrating voice, as to merit absolution by a loving god. The poet’s emotion is expressed rhetorically, to be sure, but it is not insincere. The poem may be read as yet another attempt to probe the mysterious pathos resulting from a tale of extreme and desperate love. It can also be seen as an experiment in style and register, with much in common with heroic drama: an uncle in the background trying to stand between the love of his niece for the exceptional ‘house-guest’; letters that are intercepted; the woman who has a servant bring her a sword with which she kills herself. ‘Eloisa’ is an objective correlative, in which Pope masks and ‘transgenders’ whatever passion he may have felt and repressed. The sources are Ovid’s Heroides and the underlying model John Hughes’s 1713 version of the letters of the two French lovers. 5. Between 1715 and 1720, financed by subscription, and at the rate of fifty verses per day, Pope’s translation of the Iliad presented itself to the world. The first of the six volumes appeared on the same day as Thomas Tickell’s translation of the first book of the same epic, sponsored by a rancorous Addison who had fallen out with Pope. When, with the help of two
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assistants, he completed his translation of the Odyssey (1725–1726), Pope felt he had achieved his dream of surpassing Dryden, who had translated all of Virgil. With these two translations Pope earned a total of 10,000 pounds, a sum he used to buy the house in Twickenham and ensure his future economic independence. Pope’s ideas on translation, based on La Motte, who had translated Homer into French, centred on the need to re-write the Homeric poems as if the author were an eighteenth-century poet. As a translator of Homer, Pope should be seen in the light of a comment by the illustrious classicist and philologist, Richard Bentley: ‘It is a pretty poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer’. Bentley had unwittingly hit the nail on the head, and had identified the very result Pope was aiming at: that is to say, Pope’s Homer is itself a kind of parody, because it does not vie with the original, or attempt to replicate it by transposition into an approximately mimetic linguistic code. He changes everything – colour, register, atmosphere – just as in standard rifacimenti.15 Johnson was of the opinion that Pope worked not from the original Greek, but from Chapman’s version. The best way to test this is a word by word comparison of source text and translation. This shows the scarcity of literal correspondence, and leads to the conclusion that, with his ‘translation’, Pope has, in fact, written a completely new work, rather than a text of ‘utility’, and with little relationship to the original. So Bentley was right to consider it a different thing to Homer.16 His edition of the works of Shakespeare (1724–1725) was savaged a year later by Theobald, himself a competent editor; but, in the context of Pope’s production, it must be seen as another case of imitation, as well as correction and intervention in the canon, given the high number of arbitrary amendments to the text.
15 16
Here, too, we find striking examples of kennings, some of them humorous, others whimsical (‘the vengeful hornet’ comes to mind). Praz gives a detailed and scholarly comment on Pope’s Iliad, and provides a meticulous comparison with the Homeric original (bringing out the liberties Pope has taken), and with the French versions of La Motte and Mme Dacier (Praz 1947, 144–228). His analysis of Pope’s subsequent poetry is much more perfunctory.
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§ 76. Pope III: Hordes of disorder In the Essay on Man17 (1733–1734) Pope once again employs verse to debate and illustrate subjects usually left to prose, and philosophical prose at that. The Essay is a little presumptuous, a forerunner, perhaps, of those manuals of philosophy and folk wisdom that were to be so popular with the Victorians. Pope is careful not to interlace his discourse with anecdotes, examples, or digressions, but sticks without wavering to the rigid protocol of heuristic argumentation, such as the presentation of material divided into four sections, oddly called ‘epistles’, which are, in turn, divided into numbered sections. The poem lays itself open to attack as a congeries of familiar, worn-out aphorisms, however stylistically impeccable, that end up by tiring and boring the reader. As soon as it appeared, it was discussed and challenged by the French Calvinist theologian, Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, and much later was subjected to pitiless, piercing analysis by Taine, who suggested turning it into prose to bring out the banality of its contents. The ideological setting of the poem is that of the Enlightenment, hence the emphasis on stability, balance, and harmony in all sectors of existence. Pope is mild-mannered: he does not use the whip, but dispenses warm invitations to temperance like a wise independent advisor. The tragic forms no part of his Weltanschauung. All reference to revealed religion is omitted in the name of an ecumenical and Enlightenment recognition of a world that is Christian only in part. His humanism rejects extremes: on one hand, it tells us not to deny that part of us that links us to animals; on the other, it warns against pride, and the temptation to believe we are ‘as gods’. Reasonableness is that uniquely human virtue that helps us to dominate our passions and understand the simple truth, that creation is perfect Leibnizian order, in which ‘All that is, is right’.18 In the third and fourth epistles Pope sketches a guide to practical and political reason. Happiness lies in accepting divine will; passions and imperfections must be placed at the service of the common good. Each man, according to his means, history 17 18
The only part to be written of a wider project involving various philosophical essays in verse. Leibniz fits in naturally with the Renaissance idea of the ‘great chain of being’. Pope also helped himself to the contemporary ideas of Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury.
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and civilization, plays a part in creation. In conclusion, Pope, who had earlier cherished solipsism, now presents us with a more mature picture of man as a social and socialized being.19 2. The last ten years of Pope’s activity as a writer produced, first of all, ‘moral essays’, epistles and satires in the style of Horace, with an appendix of re-workings and versifications of those of John Donne. Pope thus proceeds to invent a new genre: loosely constructed verse conversations that abound in variations, but always delivered in the voice and tone of the teacher, admonishing, rectifying, correcting, and advising on good manners. Oldham is credited with being the first to transpose Horatian satire into modern dress and according to modern horizons, as we have seen; but Johnson could remember no previous cases, or later ones, that could equal Pope’s ventures into the genre. The four Moral Essays, formally epistles, deal once again with man and the volatility deriving from his emotions and the impenetrability of his inner world. Female inconstancy is exemplified by characters in part imaginary and in part the aliases of real women, portrayed in incisive and even poisonous vignettes. One pseudophilosophical question that is debated twice, and expressed in the form of a dialogue, is whether it is better to be rich or poor, and whether money is useful or dangerous. Pope does not stray far from his favourite axioms – the importance of reasonableness and common sense, of truth to nature, which helps us to avoid exaggeration in excess or defect, itself an often repeated requirement of good taste. Addressing the architect, Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington,20 Pope decrees that all architecture should naturally fit the geography of its site, and not be forced upon it. Magnificence jars, and is not synonymous with greatness, which lies, instead, in the harmony of the individual parts. The epistle to Arbuthnot,21 the first of the great satires, actually reads like a dramatic monologue in mimetic mode, launched in
19
That it is indeed a parenthesis is suggested by the fact that the fourth book of the Dunciad was meant to be a continuation of this Essay. 20 An enthusiastic follower of Palladianism, he designed and built villas and luxurious palaces in the style of the Paduan master. 21 Arbuthnot (§ 80) contributed to the notes of the Dunciad. Pope was particularly fond of him because Arbuthnot had saved his life, as we read in this epistle.
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medias res, and addressed to someone present. It is effervescent, full of exclamations, interjections, sudden changes of direction; for all the world like Browning. Pope speaks of himself in the third person, examines himself, likes what he sees, glories in the role of the mentor who guides and advises young poets, gives his imprimatur for new books. In short, he displays a conciliatory Horatian bonhomie, and, if he appears to lose his temper, remains, for all that, a well-meaning, though crusty, fellow. 3. In the epistle, ‘To Augustus’, the whole canon of English literature is rummaged through and categorized by pithy one-line judgements, in the conviction that the good old days have disappeared under a deluge of scribblers and their worthless scribblings.22 Pope counsels a return to an art rooted in English soil, not Frenchified. In reality, to take a step backwards, on the publication of Pope’s ‘Pastorals’, Ambrose Philips had responded by publishing his own, which were unjustly praised to the skies, causing Pope to protest from the columns of The Guardian. The critic and playwright, John Dennis, had, in turn, attacked the Essay on Criticism, giving rise to a bitter, lifelong enmity between the two. Pope had been spiritually and politically close to Addison and Steele, and had published various poems and prose pieces in their periodicals. After the death of Queen Anne, in 1714, he joined Swift, Gay, Parnell23 and Arbuthnot in the Scriblerus Club.24
22 This is a paraphrase of a definition contained in the diagnosis of Pope’s alter ego, Martinus Scriblerus (§ 80). 23 Thomas Parnell (1679–1718), an ancestor of the Irish statesman mentioned by Joyce in practically every page he wrote. A deacon and archdeacon of the Irish Anglican Church, at the death of his wife he was affectionately ‘adopted’ by Swift and Pope, only to die suddenly, probably of liver cirrhosis. He collaborated in Pope’s translation of the Iliad, and added a learned essay. He also wrote bitter satires on female affectation, and a few elegies. 24 As well as the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (§ 80), the club produced in 1727 Peri Bathous (a joint publication, but in reality almost entirely by Pope), an ironic, inverted ars poetica that listed and mocked the rules of anti-poetry (darkness, confusion, affectation, which were, in part, components of Longinus’ sublime), and can be seen as a trial-run for the Dunciad. It is superfluous to add that the critical term ‘bathos’, much used everywhere and in this history of mine, too, derives from the Scriblerian text.
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Within a few months, however, the little Tory coalition had collapsed. After 1730, Pope banishes, exiles and demonizes his enemies, no longer willing to turn on them a benevolently blind eye. Before 1725 his writings had already been ‘apocalyptic’, in one of the two senses of the word, the expectation of a golden age. Now it became apocalyptic in the other sense: that is, it expresses the fear that the world he has built up in his imagination is under threat, and soon will crumble and fall. Another vision takes shape: chaos, and the utter destruction of the civilization Pope had always fought for. The Dunciad25 was a last vain attempt to immobilize and freeze this civilization. It took him fifteen long, difficult years to write the three versions that have come down to us: the first was published anonymously in 1728 in three books; dedicated to Swift, it was meant to be part of a miscellany, but turned out to be too long, and was thus rejected; another version was published in 1729 with the title, The Dunciad Variorum, in which he added a prose apparatus, and gave the real names of the targets of his attacks; in 1742 a fourth book was added, and the main target of the satire changed from the philologist, Theobald, to the poet, Cibber;26 1743
25
26
‘Dunciad’ is a neologism derived from ‘dunce’, which, in turn, derives from ‘Duns Scotus’, the mediaeval philosopher who was accused by his adversaries of being a hair-splitting sophist (see Volume 1, § 7.1 n. 2). The mockery was taken up by Swift in Gulliver, in Part III of which Aristotle calls Scotus and Ramus ‘dunces’. Colley Cibber (1671–1757), actor, playwright, competent adaptor of Shakespeare (in particular, of Richard III) and in later life of Molière, specialized in completing other writers’ unfinished manuscripts (Vanbrugh was one of them); he was also a theatre manager and wrote an autobiography full of valuable information on the theatre of the day. The fatuous son of a Danish sculptor, he was appointed Poet Laureate in 1730, a position unattainable by Pope because of his religion. Cibber authored about thirty plays, which were successful at the time, written expressly for famous actors, among whom, himself. His ideas on the theatre matched those of Dennis (§ 79), in that he approved of the moralizing function of drama (through the exemplary punishment of vice, and the timely, though casual, repentance of the libertine husband), and denounced the gratuitous display of licentiousness. His Love’s Last Shift (1696) ushered in sentimental drama and the genteel Steele. Pope’s animosity was due both to the real shortcomings of Cibber as a poet, and to his allegiance to the Whig faction and its support of the Hanoverian dynasty (he even wrote a play with an unequivocal anti-Jacobite message). Cibber wrote Pope three open letters,
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saw the appearance of the New Dunciad, a final version edited by William Warburton. As in the case of The Rape of the Lock, the later version is the one generally referred to, in this case the third or fourth Dunciad; but here not much is gained by choosing one or the other of the various versions, while in the case of the Rape the difference is substantial. Contemporary readers27 would certainly have been able to identify and decipher the myriad references in the Dunciad with no great difficulty, but the modern one must necessarily use explanatory notes (which, more often than not, are notes on Pope’s notes!). Many possible readers are therefore left by the wayside, as is the case with much militant satire. Invaluable assistance, however, is provided by the four ‘arguments’ summarizing the internal evolution of the poem. The dunces are all those poetasters and second- or third-rate playwrights that have dragged down the level of English culture in the 1730s, and still are allowed to congregate at the court of an insouciant George II. The Goddess Dullness breathes on the fire of inertia, laziness, and sloth. The shade of Swift rises up when the scribbling rabble sinks into a sea of mud and excrement. The final prospects are inauspicious: sleep, drowsiness, and chaos-engendering darkness rule and will continue to rule. In the final lines of the poem can be heard the tolling of a funeral bell in a truly symphonic mimesis. The political context of the poem is that of the minority fringe of the Tory party, to which Pope and Swift belonged, and of the Whig regime of Walpole, no friend to true poets, tolerating only propagandists and scribblers who have sold their souls for lucre and position. The coronation of Cibber by Dullness recalls a similar case from fifty in which he pleaded to know the reason for the virulence of the Dunciad. Today he shines with reflected light, although he has acquired a number of objective champions. The entire eighteenth century turned its back on him, starting with Johnson and Fielding, but the Romantics allowed him considerable professionalism, and, in a period devoid of great names, the role of most important man of the theatre between Vanbrugh and Steele. The Victorians thrust him back down the ladder, and the twentieth century pushed him even deeper. 27 But see Swift’s letter from Ireland complaining of the fact that ‘twenty miles from London no one understands allusions, initials, and events that took place in the capital’. He prophesies that in a few years’ time, not even Londoners would be able to catch all the allusions and references.
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years before, the retaliatory coronation of Flecknoe by Dryden, another disappointed man. § 77. Prior One can, indeed must, see Matthew Prior (1664–1721) against the light of Pope. His family was even lower in the social scale than that of Pope, whose father was, after all, a sophisticated merchant, while Prior was the son of a joiner, or so it appears. When his father died, he was brought up by an uncle, who some say was a tavern-keeper, others a butcher. He did have, however, solid religious credentials, since his original family had been Presbyterian. So that, with the aid of serendipity, he managed to climb his way to the top of a diplomatic career, during which he was ambassador to several prestigious and important courts and chancelleries, first under William and Mary, then under Anne. For him the door to royal favour was open, and access granted to high positions such as were denied to Pope.1 In a strictly chronological sense, Prior should come before Pope, but Pope sets the standard for the entire age, and must come first. On the other hand, it is true that Prior was older than Pope by a generation, and had already written most of his poetry when Pope was still ‘lisping in numbers’. In any case, Prior is the most important poet in that temporal gap – more than ten years – between the death of Dryden and the first of Pope’s works. The first of the two to die, he left Pope free to dominate the field of poetry for
1
The life of the shop boy, Matthew Prior, was changed by the Earl of Dorset, who, on a chance visit to the shop, happened to see the youngster behind the counter intent on reading Horace. Dorset asked him to read and translate a passage, saw that he was very good, and paid for his studies at Cambridge, which became the starting point of his diplomatic career. In 1690 he was sent to join the staff of the embassy at The Hague, where he spent the next seven years. Secretary to the British Embassy in Paris in 1698, he gave, to the amusement of the courtiers, some biting repartee which Dr Johnson reports. Amongst other things, he was Undersecretary of State, and one of the signatories of the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. When the Whigs came to power in 1714, he was pumped, in vain, for diplomatic secrets, and placed under house arrest for two years. On his release, he made good use of the money he had earned from his writings, together with gifts from Harley, and retired to Down Hall in Essex, where he lived out his days in peace.
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another twenty years. The differences between the two are considerable: Pope was intensely aware of being a professional poet, while Prior was, first of all, a diplomat, then a poet in his spare time, a dilettante like Carew and Waller, to whom he is linked not only by this coincidence. Pope looked down on him, and most of the time ignored him; Prior looked up to Pope, mentioned him in his poems, and even attempted to imitate his style.2 Prior never had to bear the burden of being the official representative of a whole age; he is more spontaneous, transgressive, even, and speaks only for himself. Johnson suspected him of leading a double life, and recalled that when Prior took off his ambassadorial and diplomatic robes, he would go to the tavern and drink, and lived with ‘a despicable drab’.3 In short he presents him as a kind of ante litteram bohemian. From the point of view of ideas, Prior is the very opposite of the Augustan optimist: he laments the vanity of all earthly things in two long poems that mirror each other in contents though not in form; he is less secure and polished than the young Pope, and less inclined to lay down the law in lapidary, axiomatic sentences. A pessimistic, nihilistic vein is discernible here and there, making him more religious, or metaphysical than Pope, though he could never be called a devotional poet. When Prior spreads his wings in his two philosophical poems, he has something of Browning’s verbosity, forever turning on the same insoluble problems. ‘Alma’, a philosophical or reflective poem, is, significantly, the only work by Prior of which Pope is alleged to have said he wished he had written himself. The conclusions drawn in the poem, however, are shaky, and Prior uses Locke and Descartes to deny the primacy of reason and the predominance of this or that emotion. This kind of undulation links him, above all, with Montaigne.
2
3
Prior is mentioned twice by Pope as belonging to the ‘horde of disorder’ in The Dunciad (§ 76.3); one of the many humorous quotations of Pope in Prior (Pope’s ‘Ode on Solitude’) occurs in lines 225–40 of the poem, ‘Solomon’. One of the Montagu brothers, with whom Prior collaborated in his first poetic foray, was lampooned as Bupho in the epistle to Arbuthnot. In ‘Down Hall’ Prior refers to the popularity of Pope’s Homer, which was published in several volumes from 1720. So, there are many cases of cross-referencing, and several literary sallies between the two. For this weekend ‘slumming’ in the Low Countries, see the 1696 poem, ‘The Secretary’.
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2. What is the nature of Prior’s art? What makes him comparable, or even preferable to Pope, as some illustrious readers of the past have found? Anyone who thinks that Prior has the Midas touch, a formidable gift that enables him to turn out hundreds upon hundreds of polished, gleaming lines, should recall Johnson’s authoritative, but, in this case, arbitrary judgement: Prior, he said, received no nocturnal visitations from the Muse, but instead, assembled his verse, laboriously and methodically, having ‘everything by purchase, nothing by gift’. He, too, is an experimenter who said ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’. The one ability Johnson acknowledged he possessed was Pope’s ‘correctness’. Prior is always elegant and precise, a craftsman of verse, or rather, a goldsmith. At times he may give the impression of carelessness, but he is, on the contrary, an expert in applying the principle of ars est celare artem. Insofar as he is a fine craftsman, he prefers the short lyric to the long poem; in his case, the shorter the better, and best of all is the epigram. The short odes addressed to Chloe are much read and loved because of their liveliness and pithiness. They are examples of the perfect Cavalier poem brought up to date – charming, witty, funny, at times cynical, they form a kind of parodic counterpoint to the sonnet cycles of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. For Dr Johnson, Chloe was only an ideal woman, hence the much admired objectivisation.4 Prior also excels in anecdotes of real, everyday life, and desecrations of mythological subjects, in which incongruous elements of reality are introduced to contrast with the timelessness of the legendary context, rather like Fragonard or Watteau in rococo sauce. Yet every time Prior chooses as his subject the fleetingness of life, and peers beyond death into the world to come, he strikes a chord which is anything but mediocre, and far from insincere.5 It is no coincidence that in Prior the extremes range from icy coldness to thoughtfulness and scurrility. Last comes a kind of lumbering mass of encomiastic witterings that weigh down and devalue 4 5
Prior never married but had affairs with a variety of women, some of whom, like ‘Jinny’ (see below n. 7) were his housekeepers. See the poem, ‘Imitation’, in which an unidentified friend is invited to carpe diem. A similar, antithetical penitential vein is found in the fine paraphrase of St Paul’s words on the primacy of charity in the first letter to the Corinthians.
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the entire corpus of his poetry.6 Pliability, therefore, is the hallmark of his work, and great variety of tone. Even the couplet is called into question, both in its canonical, ‘heroic’ form, and in its Butlerian octosyllabic variant; he sometimes uses alternating rhyme, and occasionally dabbles in the Spenserian stanza enlarged to ten lines. As we have seen, Johnson’s ‘Life’ of Prior is rather costive in compliments. Like Pope, Prior had no lofty concepts to express; he dealt in commonplaces, and was lacking in inventio, but this did not stop him from acquiring a lasting reputation as a readable poet, someone people turn to because he speaks about the issues of life in an ecumenical language, easily understood by all, part doggerel, part decidedly lofty. Cowper pronounced him a ‘familiar’ poet, and Thackeray considered him one of the most enchanting of humorous poets in the English language. 3. Prior’s Poems appeared in three editions, in 1707, 1709 and 1718.7 The first compositions are parodies that take pre-existing models and turn them inside out; a very early one (1687), in the manner of the medieval goliards, or wandering students, was written in collaboration with Charles Montague, and altered the pitch and tone of the author of The Hind and the Panther. Prior then wrote various imitations of Chaucer, and adapted the medieval poem, ‘The Nut-Brown Maid’, turning it into ‘Henry and Emma’, which was popular up to the end of the century. Prior’s poetry until 1714 is a kind of historical calendar in which are mingled lengthy eulogies in flowing verse, which shine with chauvinistic appreciation of this battle or that, and other events that allowed the valour of Englishmen to be seen in all its glory. An ode by Boileau on the capture of Namur is parodied stanza by stanza, with facing text. The interminable ‘Carmen seculare’ (1700) overflows with tributes to King William. Anecdotes of the everyday life of city dwellers are told in the manner of Boccaccio, that is to say, with abundance of vulgarity and scurrility, and the use of Butler-like
6 7
The modern edition is The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and M. K. Spears, 2 vols, Oxford 1959, 1971. ‘Jinny the Just’, on the Dutch housekeeper who was his mistress for sixteen years, was rediscovered only in 1907.
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rhymes, as in the following couplet: ‘With oysters, eggs and vermicelli, / She let him almost burst his belly.’ At the other extreme are biting epitaphs and epigrams that repeatedly draw blood. ‘The Dove’ domesticates mythology by means of incongruous, modern, down-to-earth locutions, used to recount an anecdote that unites the contemporary scene to myth, as in future interminglings of narrative planes: Venus, accompanied by an armed guard, arrives on Chloe’s doorstep to reclaim her lost dove. The poem is spoilt by a plunge in good taste at the end, when Cupid searches under Chloe’s skirt until he uncovers the mons Veneris and its silky down, which Cupid mistakes for the dove in question. The well-known poem, ‘The Ladle’, is another victim of the recurrent motif of the descent of the gods into the everyday life of mortals: the promising beginning is ruined by an unnecessarily vulgar ending. The long poem, ‘Alma, or The Progress of the Mind’, on the functions of the mind in the human personality – clearly a parody of the almost homonymous poem by Donne – is full of Butlerian gimmicks and extravagances. Prior himself makes no mystery of his debt to Butler, and confirms it by his choice of metre, the octosyllabic couplet, or ‘Hudibrastic verse’. The poem is an extemporaneous digressive dialogue, on a range of rather trivial subjects, with various satirical sallies against contemporary post-Aristotelian philosophy, between Prior and his friend, Dick Shelton. ‘Solomon’ is King Solomon, who interrogates his wise counsellors on the mystery of creation, and its end, and on the attributes of the Supreme Being. The three cantos that make up the poem lead to the same conclusion: all is vanity. However, in the second the poet discusses earthly pleasures – those of the flesh, but also art, wealth, magnificence and glory; all are found to be unsatisfactory. Worldly power, too, is seen as vain and transient, as Solomon proves to himself by surveying human history from Adam down to the present day. This is where we find the greatest difference with respect to Pope: reason is insufficient to resolve the problem of the ultimate meaning of human and natural life; an angel arrives and explains that everything has a meaning in the mind of God. The road to belief lies through faith. ‘Solomon’ is a dramatic monologue of Browninguesque opulence, with frequent obiter dicta and amplifications. Yet it does not appear to be a work of routine, but rather a searing analysis of some fundamental questions.
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§ 78. Gay* In the latter part of the eighteenth century and for all of the nineteenth, John Gay (1685–1732) was remembered, above all, as the author of about seventy verse fables, published in two series (1727 and 1738), mostly post Aesopian, that is, featuring talking animals like those of the Italian Abbé Giambattista Casti, with the aim of pricking the egotism and pride of the so-called ‘king of creation’, and calling to account Walpole’s corrupt administration. But he was gradually ‘rediscovered’ thanks to The Beggar’s Opera.1 An immediate success when it opened in 1728, it was revived, triumphantly, in London in 1920, and it became even more famous when Bertolt Brecht transformed it into his Dreigroschenoper2 in 1928. Today it is considered to be Gay’s masterpiece. A handful of inspired songs have been extracted from the huge amount of original material, and will ensure that his fame lives on, far from the confines of Academe. The standard version of Gay the poet is that of a good, solid pen-pusher, who seldom excels, but never disappoints. He runs the risk of appearing, in these first decades of the eighteenth century, an anonymous writer, devoid of strong, clear-cut ideas, loitering in the shadows and always in need of someone to give him a push, or a word of advice, or to point him in the right direction. His life seems to have been one long series of changes of mind and
*
1
Dramatic Works, ed. J. Fuller, Oxford 1983; Poetry and Prose, ed. V. A. Dearing and C. Beckwith, 2 vols, Oxford 1974. W. E. Schulz, Gay’s ‘Beggar’s Opera’, New Haven, CT 1923; P. F. Gaye, John Gay: His Place in the Eighteenth Century, Collins 1938; W. I. Irving, John Gay: Favorite of the Wits, Durham, NC 1940; S. Armens, John Gay, Social Critic, New York 1954; O. Warner, John Gay, London 1964; P. M. Spacks, John Gay, New York 1965; V. Papetti, John Gay o dell’eroicomico, Roma 1971; John Gay and the Scriblerians, ed. P. Lewis and N. Wood, London and New York 1988; C. Winton, John Gay and the London Theatre, Lexington, KY 1993; D. Nokes, John Gay: A Profession of Friendship, Oxford 1995; D. Dugaw, ‘Deep Play’: John Gay and the Invention of Modernity, Newark, DE 2001.
Cibber, in his role as theatre manager, made the disastrous decision of refusing the offer to stage the play. 2 For The Beggar’s Opera in Italy see Praz, in SSI, vol. II, 131–3, in which various films based on Gay’s play are analysed.
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perplexities.3 From his native Devon, Gay came to London when still a child and found employment as a shop boy with a silk merchant. He was there for three years. He returned to Devon, and then went back to London again, where an influential friend from Devon had become an important theatrical impresario.4 The friend started him on his career. From 1712 to 1714 he was secretary to a Duchess, with enough free time to dedicate to his literary vocation. At the beginning of the 1720s, Gay, who had had Whig tendencies up until then, was recruited into the Tory circle of Pope and Swift, and bowed to his superiors’ commands to engage in their bitter literary feuds and party-political sparring. His interventions in these disputes came in all shapes and sizes; he was ready to take up and use any cue that came from the hustle and bustle of London life; he wrote on delinquency,5 the increase in the crime rate, the chaos in moral values, corruption in the governing class that threatened to metastasize into a personal dictatorship, with foreseeable consequences on the by now severely congested urban area of London. As a peripheral member of the Scriblerians, he was ready to back the policy of defamation and the acts of ostracism of Pope and Swift; a farce appeared, the work of the three of them, which targeted an innocuous geologist, used as a smoke screen to hide a greater attack on various eminent men of letters who had incurred the wrath of the Scriblerians.6 His activity as a prolific writer, quite apart
3 4 5
6
And of gender, too: cf. Trivia: o l’arte di camminare per le strade di Londra, ed. R. Birindelli, Parma 2004, 11 and n. 4. The friend in question was Aaron Hill. He invited Handel to come to England and encouraged him to write the 1711 opera, Rinaldo, based on Gerusalemme liberata. Gay met Handel, and worked for him on an opera in English. The Mohocks, the nickname of a gang of criminals, who, dressed as policemen, appear before a Justice of the Peace, until they are found out and unmasked. This is clearly a trial-run of the role inversion in The Beggar’s Opera. Addison’s Spectator of 25 March 1712 contains a reference to these gangs. Three Hours after Marriage. A Doctor Fossil, just married, is unable to enjoy his wife, the object of attention of two suitors who manage to get into the house disguised as a mummy and an alligator. In the end, the good doctor sends the wife packing to her former husband. The main target of the satire was Colley Cibber, who acted in the first performance without realizing that his character was, in fact, a lampoon of
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from his s orties into the theatre, is hinted at in the title of his volume of collected poems, published in 1720: Poems on Several Occasions. Gay’s versatility produced a great deal of purely occasional poems, as well as plays written on commission but with little conviction. He managed to make quite a lot of money with these theatrical works, but lost it all when he invested in shares of the South Sea Company, and failed to obtain further support from his patrons. In 1714 he was secretary to Clarendon, but the death of Queen Anne deprived him of this position. He was buried near Chaucer, and his tombstone bears an epitaph written by Pope. Such are the basic facts that led to the creation of the picture of a lazy, pleasant man, capable of opportunism and double-dealing, and who felt no shame in being kept and fed by others without lifting a finger. 2. Of the ten or so plays that he wrote (some belong to the category of the afterpiece, short enough to be used as interludes), only two are in any way memorable, and only one holds a rightful place in the annals of the more noble English theatre. His production, therefore, is difficult to pin down, uneven and experimental. Leaving aside The Beggar’s Opera, Gay is a small-time ventriloquist, so that it is arduous to find a single, unified picture of the author and pick out a common thread in his plays. Not one play is the same as, or even similar to the next. It is not enough to call him a writer of parodies, burlesques and mock-heroics: the fables referred to above are stylistically impeccable and polished; but, we might ask, surprised by the rather naïve exhortations they contain, who wrote them? Who read them? Who paid for them? The heroic couplet is no longer the predominant form, and romantic ballads involving pure, passionate, eternal love, are written in stanza form.7 Towards the end of his life, he provided Handel with the delightful libretto for Acis and Galatea. Trivia is a unique, unclassifiable gem. To sum up, Gay was a gifted, versatile writer, elegant
7
his own literary pretensions. Sir Tremendous, a critic who pronounces on a heroic tragedy written by a woman, represented Dennis, known to all for his fondness for that particular adjective. Among the other ‘Scriblerian’ targets are the woman playwright, Centlivre, and the poet, Lady Winchilsea. ‘Sweet William’ is the famous farewell of ‘black-eyed Susan’ to her lover as he sails off to war. It shows the limits of poetic diction.
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and varied – one might almost say chameleonic – who appears different according to which of his texts are being read or watched. With reference to his major works, it may be said that he is an attentive observer of the social milieu of England in the early eighteenth century. His first poems make much of the contraposition of town and country. Coming as he does from the ‘country’, Gay keeps his eyes well open on the spectacle provided by the metropolis, taking note of the contradictions, and scrutinizing the affectations of the city-dwellers.8 He does not sentimentalize or idealize, but tells what he has seen, holding nothing back. As soon as he is settled in London, he surveys the sea of humanity around him, which includes politicians and literati. Gay’s first work of any importance, Rural Sports (1713), already expresses disgust at the economistic civilization of the capital, and reacts by turning instinctively back to the country. Technically speaking, it is well-written and sure-handed, and includes lively descriptions of such pleasant and gratifying pastimes as hunting and fishing. Life in the country, however, is not static and tame, but shot through with surges that can be seen in the light of the pre-Romanticism to come. Gay sometimes almost bares his teeth to criticize the Londoners’ obsession with appearance. The Shepherd’s Week9 (1714) consists of six eclogues corresponding to the five working days of the week, unlike the Spenserian formula which followed the months of the year. Here the use of archaisms is intrusive, and the pseudo-classical insistence on unpleasant details off-putting. It was Pope who suggested that Gay write this work as a contribution to the campaign of defamation against Ambrose Philips and his pastorals, which symbolized the sugary kind of writing expressed in the term ‘namby-pamby’. Pope could not accept the fact that Philips’ poems10 should be judged superior to his. However, the burlesque intent, visible mainly in the ugly, cacophonic
8 9 10
‘The Fan’ and ‘The Toilet’ are imitations of Pope, who is complimented for his translation of Homer in ‘Mr Pope’s Welcome from Greece’, in flowing eight-line stanzas. A singular feature of this work is a catalogue, tacked on at the end, containing, in alphabetical order, all the names, of plants, flowers, fruits, birds, beasts, insects and ‘other material things’ mentioned in the five eclogues. ‘Blubbered’, used to describe Clumsilis’ lips in the third, Wednesday eclogue, also appears in one of Prior’s most famous songs, dedicated to Chloe.
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names of the shepherds and their lovers, co-exists with a sincere desire to praise the simplicity and authenticity of the country life. Gay tried his hand at elegies, monologues and dialogues on unrequited love involving shepherdesses and farm girls. If Trivia11 (1716) were really based on the Georgics, as is claimed by some, it would be a case of quite extraordinary desecration. There are, to be sure, vivid scenes of town life in it, but above all it is a work of sudden visions, and flashes of oneiric fantasy, confused and jumbled allusions to obscure private particulars. Gay’s discourse often shoots off at a tangent, and loses itself in enigmatic meanderings, only to return to a cosy domestic scene and the reassuring sound of the old familiar moral precepts. The three books are enlivened by continuous burlesque sorties into mythology, forming a counterpoint and a parallel subtext. Precisely because he knows it is a poem bound to disorient the reader, Gay bizarrely includes an index, such as one might find in a guidebook to the city of London, or a dictionary. Each book of the poem has a sub-heading; the narrating voice advises on how to walk around the city, starting with the appropriate shoes and dress. Once out in the streets, the ‘tourist’ is met by various manifestations of a later age, with ostentation of enormous wealth: his reaction is to think back to the good old days of yore. Little by little, Gay constructs a tour de force of parody, thanks to infringements of the didactic plane and shifts in tone. The burlesque element, here as in Pope, lies in the contamination of the everyday with the mythological, the juxtaposition of the banal with the heroic, and in the frequent use of highsounding comparisons.12 Gay tends towards the pastiche, the classic feast of language and a pyrotechnic display of unexpected, obscure fantastications and random flashes of light that appear out of nowhere. The second and third books are complementary, one describing daytime, the other, nighttime scenes. As usual, the didactic objective is not immediately obvious,
11 12
Trivia, too (with the sub-heading The Art of Walking the Streets of London) has an index at the end. See, for example, the brilliant invention of Cloacina, goddess of the sewers, who fell in love with a road sweeper, giving birth to a black child, who will be the origin of the whole African race. Gay returns to the theme of negritude in several of his works, a reflection of the fact that by now the British Empire was a colonial reality.
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and seems to be appended as if as if to indicate certain duties: the need to respect one’s neighbour, to show tolerance, above all, the invitation to be vigilant, since the night-time brings out the bag-snatchers and sex-workers seeking customers. Luckily, the officers of the law are there to keep watch and ensure that public order is preserved. 3. For ‘London’, read ‘Dublin’, jump forward 200 years, and you have Joyce’s Ulysses, a not dissimilar survey of the sights and sounds of a city, cues for digressions, associative fantasies and free-ranging memories,13 with the same antithesis of the ordinary and the sublime, and an imposing excursus into the whole gamut of human functions, down to and including micturition and defecation, and an associated fixation with excrement. The metre used by Gay is the heroic couplet, but the words no longer respect Pope’s dictates of ‘correctness’; they break loose and acquire a freedom of their own. Gay’s ‘walker’ reminds us of Bloom and the theme of ambulation that dominates Joyce’s novel: both characters employ the primary senses, in particular that of smell, and end among the bookstalls. Trivia is itself the account of a day of almost twenty-four hours, a day that starts early in the morning and ends late at night, in a similar atmosphere of transgression and ambiguity. Furthermore, if Ulysses may be considered mock-heroic because of the Homeric parallel, in Gay the mock-heroic is ubiquitous: see, for example, the unfortunate man who has lost his way in the maze of alleys of London, like Theseus in the labyrinth on Crete, and the many other classical references, principally involving Aeneas and Orpheus. 4. The Beggar’s Opera, the fruit of an idea of Swift’s, was first performed in 1728, in the theatre belonging to the manager, Rich, in Lincoln’s Hill Field, and was repeated sixty-two or sixty-three times consecutively. Author and manager both made a great deal of money from it, some of the actors were given peerages and other forms of recognition. It was later taken to other towns in England, and to the colonies, a sign of the great diffusion of the theatre at the time. The idea behind the play is, to tell the 13
Another surreal, ecstatic moment, and of great pictorial and cinematographic (ante litteram) suggestiveness is the description of the freezing over of the Thames in 1683, and the anecdote of the apple vendor that broke the ice, or the episode of the game with the ball, and the noisy smashing of a window.
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truth, more striking than the play itself. It was a hit because the format was new (I am not counting the bland phenomenon of French vaudeville): that is, it consisted of spoken dialogue alternating with songs set to music by the German, Pepusch, a near contemporary and rival of Handel, who, like the composer of Messiah, had left his native Hamburg and settled in London. One of Gay’s intentions was to fire a shot at the Italian opera that was all the rage in London at the time.14 It was, therefore, a conservative gesture, and the sixty-nine songs in the play are parodies of operatic arias. The quarrels of Polly and Lucy are meant to mock the more high-pitched duels between two Italian divas, well known to London audiences, called Cuzzoni and Faustina. Gay’s real stroke of genius was to adapt a number of popular English and Scottish tunes to the words of his songs, creating a tension between music and text. Every song has, together with the page number in the score book, its original title; the audience is being told, in other words, that it is about to hear a familiar song, but with completely different words. The explosive political metaphor underscores the corruption that has infected all levels of the population, destroying moral guidelines, and the terrifyingly destructive power of money in the creation of an increasingly unjust society. With this play, Gay threw his ‘J’accuse’ in the face of Walpole and his regime. 5. Song no. 1 is an ironic snapshot of contemporary mores, a comment on a Hobbesian world in which everyone is at war with everyone else, people are generally ‘on the make’, and the precept, ‘Love thy neighbour’ has no currency. This is the case in every part of the social spectrum; no class is exempt. The omnipotence of money is a theme that runs through the play from beginning to end, and the Hobbesian refrain is repeated and paraphrased, after the ‘fence’, Peachum, by the other official representative of the law, Lockit, the gaoler,15 who soliloquizes on those wild animals that live in solitude, whereas, of all the predators on the face of the earth, only man is a social animal. Each man preys on his fellow, and yet we ‘herd together’. The first act presents a rhetorical action aimed at overturning 14 15
Dennis had been attacking the Italian opera since 1706. One represented Jonathan Wild and the other Charles Hitchin, the duo that controlled London’s underworld.
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consolidated moral values: the Peachums try to dissuade Polly from marrying (but it is too late) because marriage does not pay; if she should marry, then she would be well advised to seek widowhood, by doing away with her husband, thus inheriting his fortune. Polly is, in part, an ingénue who dreams of leading a normal, honest existence, and of dissociating herself from the perversion of morality that surrounds her. Her mother is undecided: first she leans towards her daughter’s arguments, then opts for her husband’s position. Scene 8 shows the parents vainly attempting to talk Polly out of her decision. Peachum subverts accepted morality when he calls his daughter a hussy, when all she wants is to get married. It is true that she is heavily conditioned by her consumption of romances full of chivalry and love. The petty criminals who serve Macheath invoke, in turn, a paradoxical morality by mimicking the behaviour of ‘honest men’. London is a Darwinian microcosm in which everyone is out to make money, and breaking the law is the norm, so one might as well do the same. Besides, the criminals demand a fairer, almost communistic, redistribution of wealth, seeing that there are many rich misers who do not know what to do with their money, and hoard it instead of returning it to the economic cycle. In this regard, Macheath is ‘morally’ admirable, because he administers the proceeds of the company of thieves with justice, and is thus respected by his ‘employees’. He can be seen as a forerunner of the future ‘Newgate rogue’, a character that occasioned sympathy, and gave rise to a narrative genre in the 1830s.16 In Act III, Macheath is helped to escape from prison by a desperate Lucy, who intones a number of tragic arias in imitation of real operas. Macheath is recaptured because the basically healthy gang of thieves has been infected by the virus of corruption, as Macheath himself is forced to admit. The hero is caught on his way to the gallows by the author, who, in the prologue and epilogue, takes on the role of a beggar. In a breach of poetic justice, Macheath is saved and returned safe and sound to his wife, Polly (the audience is not informed of Lucy’s reaction to this). This solution of compromise is tantamount to admitting that everything will be just the same as before. In a sequel, Polly, set in the West Indies,
16
Volume 5, §§ 3 and 20.
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Macheath is transformed into a pirate, complete with blacked-up face, and is, this time, hanged. Walpole, who had applauded The Beggar’s Opera, thought the idea of a sequel was going too far, especially since by this time the political allusion was clear to all. So he banned Polly. § 79. Dennis Pope met his match in John Dennis (1657–1734), a man so naturally litigious and quarrelsome as to be unable to live without someone to insult and fight with. Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, by the time the seventeenth century ended he had crossed the Alps as part of his grand tour to France and Italy. There he experienced and then recounted those feelings of ecstasy and rapture that he subsequently used to formulate an early version of Longinian aesthetics. By the dawning of the eighteenth century, he was one of the society of wits, like Dryden, who held court in the coffee-houses of the capital. A Whig, he wrote poems celebrating William of Orange and the recent victories of the English troops. He was also the author of several mediocre plays in the French neoclassical style. He is primarily important, however, for a number of influential theoretical works: one dedicated to the foundations of criticism (1704), another to textual criticism, as well as a survey of Shakespeare’s dramatic works (1712). His quarrel with Pope has always been reported from the point of view of the latter, who saw Dennis as an authoritative rival that had to be silenced. Dennis’s Appius and Virginia (1709) had been a flop, and in his Essay on Criticism Pope had dedicated three lines, hostile, but normal for the time, to the wouldbe high priest of criticism: ‘But Appius reddens at each word you speak / And stares, tremendous, with a threatening eye, / Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry’. Dennis retaliated with a mean attack on Pope’s physical appearance, calling him a ‘hump-backed toad’. Pope counterattacked, adding a note to his poem in which he accused Dennis of being a raving lunatic. In short, Dennis had stirred up a hornet’s nest. In actual fact, he and Pope were saying much the same thing, though from opposite sides of the politico-literary divide: literature after Charles II had gone downhill. Dennis then turned his batteries on Cibber and Steele. Pope and Dennis agreed on the importance of ‘correctness’ and the respect for the rules dictated by human nature, the greatest teacher of all, as Pope never tired
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of saying. But obeying the rules pedantically and mechanically was one thing: following them with a certain amount of flexibility was another. A widely held opinion was that the rules in question were not to be attributed, in the abstract, to Aristotle, but were based on the practice that had evolved in several centuries of theatrical activity. As will easily be seen (by Gay, too, at the end of The Beggar’s Opera) the contemporary debate was all about poetic justice, which Dennis and others denied should be applied systematically, because the real reward for our actions, good or bad, is given not in this world, but in the world to come. Dennis may be considered the most paradigmatic representative of a critical praxis that, in the early eighteenth century, was on the way to becoming autonomous, as is proved by the huge number of tracts and treatises that jostled to be noticed in the debate on how and what to write. Fifty years later, Johnson was more cautious in his judgement on Dennis, who was subsequently reclaimed by the unanimous voice of the Romantics, on the basis of Dennis’s conviction that art involves feelings, sense perception, and reason, and that rational certainty is achieved after the involvement of the emotions – not the lower form, but good, healthy enthusiasm. The Romantics also approved of the fact that, for Dennis, poetry was a means of moral improvement, and bore a religious message. He had taken issue with Collier, defending the educational and moralizing role of the theatre, and was, together with Dryden and Rowe, the first ‘serious’, non-extemporary critic of Shakespeare, though tainted by the Illuminist, and Voltairean prejudice that Shakespeare had little taste and fewer ‘letters’. § 80. Arbuthnot Swift famously said that for John Arbuthnot (1667–1735) he would willingly have burnt Gulliver.1 Their friendship began in 1710 when Swift, on his return from Ireland, had founded in London one of the first Tory journals, while Arbuthnot had been a resident of the capital for twentyfive years. With degrees in mathematics and medicine from Aberdeen and Oxford, a member of the Royal Society since 1704, the author of treatises 1
Letter from Swift to Pope, 29 September 1725.
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and texts on various subjects, he had been appointed physician to Queen Anne in 1709. He was a refined, thoughtful man, and much appreciated at court, where his opinions were held in high regard by the Privy Council. There was, however, a hidden side to this pillar of the establishment: in private life he liked to enjoy himself, and appreciated a good joke. Naturally, Swift found in him a man after his own heart. The Scriblerus Club they founded with Pope represents a spark that came from the tinder box of their three imaginations. An early version of the Pickwick Club, a brotherhood born to satirize the enemies of this miniscule group of Tories, the Scriblerus was ambitious but sketchy, and never really took off: projects remained projects, and ideas never progressed beyond the embryonic stage. Any attempt to separate the individual contributions of this or that Scriblerian would be doomed to failure, given that the publications were conceived and written collectively. According to legend, in 1712 Arbuthnot announced the imminent publication of an Art of Political Lying, which was to consist of two large volumes. For the moment, Arbuthnot handed over an extract a few pages long. It is an essay of paradoxical rhetoric, to be deconstructed like those by Swift: the thesis is that a lie is best answered by another lie, or at least a half-truth, and that wherever there is a rumour there is some element of truth. In fact, a half-truth alerts us to a real danger, and, as Machiavelli says, in politics, the end justifies the means. In the same year Arbuthnot invented the nickname of ‘John Bull’ to represent the typical sanguine, patriotic, not to say chauvinistic Englishman, and used it in his History of John Bull in five chapters (1712, published together in 1727), an allegorical attack on Whig policy in the War of Spanish Succession. The mock-heroic nature of the work is immediately apparent in the titles of the chapters, which imitate those in the Jonsonian comedies of humours. The allegory is based on John Bull as a personification of England, and assigns roles to clearly identifiable actors on the contemporary political stage. In the finale, Bull wrests from Frog (Holland) the possession of Dunkerque after the Peace of Utrecht. Today it is still possible to appreciate the liveliness of the sketches, anecdotes and dialogue without bothering about the political controversies from which it all originated. The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, the most famous and tangible fruit of the labours of the club, was included in the 1741 edition of Pope’s works, but was always
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believed to be entirely by Arbuthnot. The prime objective of the founders of the Club, to ridicule the lamentable state of contemporary culture, was achieved thanks to the invention of a character who epitomizes pedantry and absurdity. The project died almost as soon as it was born, and only the first book was actually written. This was sufficient to give some idea of the grotesque mockery, with a touch of whimsicality that brings to mind Laurence Sterne, and even Carlyle, a Scot like Arbuthnot, and the creator of memoirs of another fictitious professor, this time a German. Martinus’ father is an eccentric old Aristotelian grammarian, with his head stuffed full of weird and wonderful notions, so that the education of his son is carried out according to the dusty, medieval system of the trivium and quadrivium. Pages upon pages of hilarious stylistic parody paint a picture of this nightmare Bildung of the unfortunate young man. The account breaks off when Martin begins to pore over absurd problems like those studied by the scientists of Laputa. Indeed he then sets off on a journey to the very lands explored by Gulliver. An eclectic, prolific writer, Arbuthnot was also the author of a number of texts that he did not even bother to sign for posterity. § 81. Bolingbroke Pope’s Tory circle is completed by Henry St John, first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), who is important not so much in the sphere of literature (in fact, his only literary connection is his brief membership of the Scriblerus Club) as in the history of Toryism in the first half of the eighteenth century. In this context he played the part of the great loser, who fought passionately for almost half a century in the name of a utopian vision that was impotent in the face of the corrupt regime of Walpole and his ministers. One might be tempted to say that Pope was part of Bolingbroke’s circle, rather than the other way round.1 His whirlwind life was restless, full of reverses, bursts of egoism and unselfish gestures. In its way, it was romantic and adventurous. After a misspent youth, he entered
1
Bolingbroke’s rival, Harley, Earl of Oxford, was certainly a member of the Scriblerus Club before politics estranged them.
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the political arena and was among those who supported the Hanoverian succession. At the age of twenty-six, he was already secretary of state and the right-hand man of the Earl of Oxford, with Jacobite tendencies. At the head of an anti-Whig movement, he was tempted to form his own political group, but for the moment the Peace of Utrecht gave him an opportunity to shine on the diplomatic plane (togethe