Lines of Equity : Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England 9780801459900, 9780801446726

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Equity

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Lines of Equity : Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England, Cornell University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2011. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved. Lines of Equity : Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England, Cornell University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook

LINES

of

EQUITY

LITERATURE AND THE ORIGINS OF LAW IN LATER STUART ENGLAND

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Elliott Visconsi

cornell university press ithaca & london

Lines of Equity : Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England, Cornell University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2008 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2008 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Visconsi, Elliott. Lines of equity : literature and the origins of law in later Stuart England / Elliott Visconsi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8014 –4672–6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English literatures—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Law and literature—England—History—17th century. 3. Law in literature. 4. Equity in literature. I. Title. PR438.L38V57 2008 820.9'355409032—dc22 2007048433 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

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Lines of Equity : Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England, Cornell University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook

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For Maura

Lines of Equity : Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England, Cornell University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2011. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved. Lines of Equity : Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England, Cornell University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook

Forming in conscience lines of equity To temper Laws, and without force infuse A home-born practice of civility Currant with that which all the world doth use Whereby divided kingdoms may unite If not in truth, at least in outward rite.

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—Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke,“A Treatise of Monarchie” in The Remains of Fulk Grevill, Lord Brooke (London, 1670)

Lines of Equity : Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England, Cornell University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2011. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved. Lines of Equity : Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England, Cornell University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

1 Cultivating Equity, Disciplining Race: The Fictional Method and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England 1 2 The Endless Jar of Justice: John Dryden and the Theater of Judgment 35 3 Equity Restored: John Milton and the Origins of Law 75 4 Reviving Liberty: Writing the English Republic after 1660

113

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5 Universal Wolves: Aphra Behn and the English Race 155 Coda: Robinson Crusoe between Facts and Norms 185 Bibliography Index 209

195

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ix

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Acknowledgments

I have benefited from the generosity of so many teachers, colleagues, and friends as I have written this book. The incomparable Jayne Lewis has been a constant source of insight, inspiration, and wise counsel; her advice and good judgment have informed the project from its beginnings until its present form. Without the encouragement and limitless dedication of Margaret Wong, who brought me into the early modern period as an undergraduate, this book might not have been written. Debora Shuger has been an enthusiastic reader and a model of scholarly generosity from the beginning. Helen Deutsch pushed me to think in new ways, and continues to provide the gift of constant engagement. Max Novak’s illuminating energy has been infectious. Joyce Appleby helped me think like a historian. The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library provided an office and a fellowship. The Huntington Library and the University of California provided welcome fellowship support, and I am especially indebted to Valerie Smith, who first brought me to UCLA. At Yale I have been fortunate in my colleagues, students, and friends. I’m grateful to Ruth Yeazell for her early confidence and to Langdon Hammer for his continuing support. Individual chapters benefited from the advice of Wai Chee Dimock, John Rogers, Claude Rawson, Larry Manley, Pericles Lewis, Catherine Labio, Amy Hungerford, Joseph Roach, Marshall Brown, Richard Kroll, Greg Chaplin, Elizabeth Dillon, and Joe Roach. All along the way, I have been fortunate to have the friendship and encouragement of Jennifer Baker, Jessica Brantley, Sanda Lwin, Blair Hoxby, Chris Miller, Marc Robinson, Julia

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xi

xii

Acknowledgments

Marciari-Alexander, Jonathan Holloway, Emily Bakemeier, Katie Trumpener, Steve Pincus, Greg Jackson, Lukas Erne,Thomas Fulton, Jim Kearney, Lars Larson, Maria Rosa Menocal, Robert Post, Jill Campbell, and David Brewer. Alice Wolfram provided outstanding research assistance. At Cornell University Press, John Ackerman’s enthusiasm for the project has been affirming, and I am grateful for his continued support. Teresa Jesionowski, Eric Schramm, and Susan Barnett helped shepherd this book through the production process with care and skill. Joyce Henderson provided an excellent index. I am grateful to David Ligare for permission to reprint his “Still Life with Polykleitian Head” as the cover illustration. A timely fellowship from the ACLS supported a crucial year of leave as I wrote the book, and I have benefited immensely from the chance to share this material with audiences at Yale, UC Irvine, the Clark Library, and Indiana University. A grant from the Frederick Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University helped support the book’s publication, and a Macmillan Center Director’s Award for Junior Faculty helped immeasurably with last-minute details. A portion of Chapter 5 appeared as “A Degenerate Race: English Barbarism in Behn’s Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter,” ELH 69, no. 3 (2002). But my greatest debts are to my family. My parents, Tom and Gail Visconsi, and Charlie and Heather Cullen, have been unfailingly generous and always supportive. Henry, Charlotte, and now Eliza, my bringers of joy and mischief, remind me of what is most important. My wife, Maura, has been the ideal friend and partner since I met her; none of this would have happened without her extraordinary grace and love.

E.V.

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New Haven, Connecticut

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Lines of Equity : Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England, Cornell University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2011. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved. Lines of Equity : Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England, Cornell University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook

chapter one

Cultivating Equity, Disciplining Race

The Fictional Method and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England

Equity is justice that goes beyond the written law. —Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.13.13

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What race once instructed in the most refined arts, but ceasing to cultivate the humanities, did not sink sometime into barbarity and savagery? —Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History

This is a book about the fictionalization of the origins of law in later Stuart England. My focus is on crucial literary texts such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost and John Dryden’s Indian Emperour, works devoted to demanding of their audience a set of structured interpretive deliberations about the first principles of government, the charismatic utterance of law, and the transition from savagery to civility. At the heart of such an intellectual program is the norm and practice of equity, that merciful inclination and “gentle art of particular perception.”1 Equity is a moral principle (equal justice, fairness), an interpretive method (summoning the original intention or spirit of a law in order to judge fully particular acts or events), and a gesture of sovereign mercy (relaxing the rigorous letter of the law in order to ensure justice). For the writers I study, equity is a habit of thought that may be cultivated through fictional methods. 1. This elegant phrase is Martha Nussbaum’s. See her wonderful essay “Equity and Mercy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993).

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It is an ethos of deliberative judgment rooted in classical and Christian moral philosophy and imagined as a first halting step forward out of the brutal traumas of the mid-century. This is not a book about the relation between literature and the seventeenth-century equity courts (Chancery, High Commission, Star Chamber), nor indeed is it in any meaningful way a study of the entanglement of literary texts with the professional judiciary. I take as a given the claim advanced by scholars such as Susan Staves, Nigel Smith, Steven Zwicker, and Victoria Kahn that in the later Stuart period, serious literary texts are a crucial language for the public constitution of the legal norms and conceptions of sovereignty, subjecthood, and political authority.2 Moreover, I share the view that literary texts are often the most effective and lasting language for explaining and legitimating legal regimes. As Robert Cover has written, “Law and narrative are inseparably related. Every prescription is insistent in its demand to be located in discourse—to be supplied with history and destiny. And every narrative is insistent in its demand for its prescriptive point, its moral. History and literature cannot escape their location in a normative universe, nor can prescription . . . escape its origin and its end in experience.”3 This book’s enterprise is to describe one historical moment of such powerful contextualization—I look not at the narratives attached to the unwritten English common law (although such a project deserves further attention) but instead at a cluster of Restoration-era texts that take part in what Michael McKeon has described recently as the process of political “explicitation.” In his view, the later Stuart period witnesses not just the skeptical demystification of jure divino absolute kingship, but more broadly the rise of a new “modern” epistemology in which political authority must be rendered explicit—justified and legitimated in public controversy rather than tacitly naturalized as an immanent aspect of a traditional order. For McKeon, the seventeenth century hosts the epistemological elevation of inner life—the separation of public from private in a “movement inward” and a progressive “detachment of the normatively absolute from its presumed locale in royal absolutism and its experimental relocation in ‘the people,’ the family, women, the individual, and the absolute subject.”4 In this powerful account, absolutism unmakes itself by revealing its secrets, by explicitly articulating the terms and qualities of sovereignty in response to the 2. Susan Staves, Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution, 1640–1660 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1994); Steven Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 3. Robert M. Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97 (1983): 4–68. 4. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Labor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), xix–xxii and 3–48.

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Cultivating Equity, Disciplining Race

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proto-liberal elevation of the absolute subject. The later Stuart fictionalization (perhaps mythopoesis) of law is a crucial component of this transformation, and it is an enterprise where we can indeed witness absolutism unmaking itself. At the heart of one influential view of the fictional method in later Stuart England is a fundamental and unresolved tension between the desire to cultivate individual judgment and the perceived need to compel regenerative obedience in a barbarian race.5 Serious literature was to be an affectively powerful means for cultivating deliberative judgment in the expanding and bitterly divided English public. It was also understood quite clearly as an instrument of racial discipline—the barbarous tendencies of the English people might be most effectively banished through the literary therapy of the individual conscience. Such divided ambitions are emblematic of the epistemological ferment, the anxiety and the opportunity, of this historical moment. We find in a figure like Milton, for instance, such a conflict between the desire to create a literature for an elite “fit audience though few” and the ambition to serve as a national poet who might transform the English public into a fit audience itself.6 And indeed, the literary enterprise I describe in the pages that follow, with all its internal inconsistencies and illiberal tendencies, is itself legible as a kind of collective deliberation on the rights and capabilities of the individual subject. At the heart of my argument is a description of what I call “imaginative originalism,” a recurring hermeneutic, thematic, and figural obsession with the origins of law.Writers like John Milton, John Dryden, Henry Neville, Nathaniel Lee, and Aphra Behn describe the first utterance of laws, the foundations of states and nations, and transitions from archaic savagery to civil modernity (and back). Such texts confront a reader or audience with occasions for individual judgment of the nature of government, the extent of the rule of law, the limits of obedience, and the duties of sovereign and subject. Put another way, these writers ask their audience to think like kings and judges rather than northern barbarians. Texts such as Paradise Lost and The Indian Emperour ask the English people to exercise the principle of equity in which one weighs the spirit against the letter of the law, an act against its intention, a founding utterance against its just application. As it unfolds in the 1660s, the ambition at the heart of imaginative originalism is reconciliatory rather than partisan, “civilizing” rather than incendiary; for figures such as Milton, Neville, and Dryden,

5. J. G. A. Pocock’s The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957) is the essential study of the “common-law mind,” but there is no sustained scholarly consideration of the explicitly literary understanding of the immemorial and unwritten English constitution in later Stuart England. Staves’ Players’ Scepters comes closest to such an ambition. 6. Lawrence Manley, Convention: 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 294.

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the literary cultivation of an equitable imagination in the English people is a halting way forward from the bitter traumas of the previous decades. Indeed, one of the claims I make in this book is not so radical; the desire to confront a reader or audience with an occasion for individual deliberative judgment is at the heart of classical and humanist theories of poetry. Poesis, or serious literature, had long been understood as a “school of equity,” as an instrument designed to “fashion a gentleman,” and an instrument for the cultivation of virtuous citizens. But while these essential precursor traditions are chiefly aristocratic in their ambitions, the turn to imaginative originalism in the later Stuart period is broader and more concretely directed at the English national character than ever before.7 Whether understood as a remedy for the natural barbarism of the English race, a proto-liberal attempt to enfranchise the masses, or a means for the reinstitution of obedience, this literary enterprise turns increasingly desperate during the Exclusion Crisis, when the spirit of reconciliation began to give way before the perceived needs of collective discipline. But although this intellectual program bowed to the overwhelming pressure of a superheated political culture during the 1680s, it became the model for later works such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, one of the most successful and popular examples of a literary text designed to cultivate an equitable imagination. I begin by sketching briefly the crucial classical development of the concept before turning to an account of the deep bond between equity and fiction. Subsequently, I describe the ways in which later Stuart writers see the fictional method as an instrument of collective remedy, and I sketch out the shape of the mythopoesis of law explored most fully in the subsequent chapters of this book.

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I. Equity is an unusually protean idea with an unusually stable intellectual trajectory. Derived from the Greek epieikeia, equity is a sovereign act of deliberative legal interpretation that realizes justice in the world by relaxing the strict letter of the law. Equity is also an ethos, a personal inclination toward fairness and equal justice before law. The concept takes on its most influential form in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics, and the Rhetoric, and the Aristotelian view of equity supplemented by Christian political theology sits

7. Milton’s famous appeal to “fit audience, though few,” is in my view more aspirational than elitist— Paradise Lost is designed to cultivate a reader who can recognize within the signs of her or his own virtue.

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at the heart of most major early modern theories of justice and government.8 When in the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle turns to his account of equity, he begins with a “difficulty.” Earlier having defined justice as “the chief of the virtues” and even “perfect virtue . . . displayed towards others,” Aristotle seems reluctant to distinguish equity from justice.9 Justice is the highest of virtues insofar as it achieves a distributional mean and creates political vitality—everyone receives their due lawfully and the state thrives when justice is the norm. Justice is enshrined in laws, executed by judges, and practiced as an ethos by men of great virtue. Equity is likewise a synonym for the public cultivation and defense of the good. But Aristotle resolves the apparent redundancy with the following claim: “For equity, while superior to one sort of justice, is itself just: it is not superior to justice as being generically different from it. Justice and equity are therefore the same thing, and both are good, though equity is the better.” Here Aristotle begins to establish the distinction between positive law and equity, between “one sort of justice” and another. However, by suggesting that “justice and equity are the same thing,” Aristotle announces that these two distinct modes are in fact inextricable parts of a single moral and political enterprise—namely the desire to cultivate good. “Equity, though just, is not legal justice, but a rectification of legal justice.” So begins Aristotle’s deeply influential elaboration on the relationship between positive law and equity: Law is always a general statement, yet there are cases which it is not possible to cover in a general statement. . . . When therefore the law lays down a general rule and thereafter a case arises which is an exception to the rule, it is then right, where the lawgiver’s pronouncement because of its absoluteness is defective and erroneous, to rectify the defect by deciding as the lawgiver would himself decide if he were present on the occasion, and would have enacted if he had been cognizant of the case in question. Hence, while the equitable is just, and is superior to one sort of justice, it is not superior to absolute justice, but only to the error due to its absolute statement. This is the essential nature of the equitable: it is a rectification of law where law is defective because of its generality. In fact, this is the reason why things are not all determined by law: it is because there are some cases for which 8. Plato’s discussions of equity in Laws and Statesman precede Aristotle, obviously, but Aristotle is the principal architect of the classical equity tradition in poetics, rhetoric, jurisprudence, and political thought. See Wesley Trimpi, Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and Its Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), and Kathy Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 9. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Horace Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926); 5.1.15, p. 259. All subsequent references are noted in the text parenthetically.

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Lines of Equity it is impossible to lay down a law, so that special ordinance becomes necessary. For what is itself indefinite can only be measured by an indefinite standard, like the leaden rule used by the Lesbian builders; just as that rule is not rigid but can be bent to the shape of the stone, so a special ordinance is made to fit the circumstances of the case. (NE 5.10.5–7, pp. 316–17)

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Here Aristotle establishes the notion that equity is a supplemental remedy for the inherently limited quality of positive law, the “legal justice” that hews to general rules and inevitably strikes upon a case or circumstance in which the strict letter of a general law would create an unjust outcome. At such a moment, the flexible rule of equity is activated—and the judge is obliged to consider the case not according to the absolute letter of the law but instead “as the lawgiver would himself decide if he were present on the occasion, and would have enacted if he had been cognizant of the case in question.” Although Aristotle does not explore the fact fully here, equity is a mode of legal interpretation, a hermeneutic task to be executed faithfully in order to cultivate justice. Equity is a challenge; it requires the deliberative identification of an exceptional case and insists upon the interpretive replication of the spirit of the lawgiver’s utterance. In his equally influential discussion of equity in the Rhetoric, Aristotle describes in greater detail the task and quality of such interpretive labor. The “special ordinance” of equity requires concrete interpretive steps: It is equitable to pardon human weaknesses, and to look not to the law but to the legislator; not to the letter of the law but the intention of the legislator; not to the action itself, but to the moral purpose; not to the part, but to the whole; not to what a man is now, but to what he has been always or generally; to remember good rather than ill treatment, and benefits received rather than those conferred; to bear injury with patience; to be willing to appeal to the judgment of reason rather than to violence.10

Aristotle builds on the notion that equity is a rectifying and flexible supplement to an imperfect positive law by presenting mercy—the pardoning of human weaknesses—as the chief modality of equity. In order to achieve justice, one must of course look to the “intention of the legislator” for guidance, but also to the intention or moral purpose of an act and the character of the agent. 10. Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, trans. J. H. Freese (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), 1.13.15–19. All subsequent references are noted in the text parenthetically.

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Moreover, an equitable consideration demands that a judge look “not to the part, but to the whole.” The notion here is that equity hangs on the juridical consideration of an act in its fullest context, in relation to the universal whole of absolute justice rather than the narrow “parts” of fact and letter. As I will demonstrate later in this chapter, the Aristotelian view that it is equitable to consider not the part but the whole, not facts but norms, is the root of the bond between equity and tragic fiction so crucial in classical rhetorical and literary theory and that emerges as part of a coherent literary enterprise in later Stuart England. One of the striking stylistic features of this definition of equity is the manner in which it turns subtly from a description of legal interpretation into a description of ethos. Aristotle outlines the deliberative labor suitable for equitable relief, but as he nears the end of the description, he turns from strictly judicial considerations to specifically individual qualities. He describes equity as a habit of soul, a commitment in the virtuous man to patience, dispassionate reason, peace, and fairness. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he makes a similar gesture, opening with a description of equity as a governmental norm but seamlessly moving to an account of equity as an ethos to be cultivated: the equitable man “is one who by choice and habit does what is equitable, and who does not stand on his rights unduly, but is content to receive a smaller share although the law be on his side” (NE 5.10.8, p. 317). These two interwoven aspects of equity—the public norm of remedial legal interpretation along with the private cultivation of an equitable soul—are emblematic of the traditional view in classical antiquity that the cultivation of political justice and personal virtue are wholly inseparable. Most of the second book of Cicero’s de inventione is devoted to procedural advice for orators engaged in juridical or forensic dispute, and like Aristotle, Cicero concludes that “in the judicial kind [of argument] the proper end is equity.” The distinction between the letter and the intention of law is never so prominent as in Cicero’s counsels—he offers concrete strategies for each of the many approaches to a law-case in which the letter (scriptum) and the spirit or intention (voluntas) of the law are in apparent conflict. As in Aristotle, equity is an interpretive process that can have the effect of achieving justice, but Cicero is more interested in how an argument for equitable relief from the letter of the law ought to be constructed than he is in making axiomatic claims of moral philosophy. Such an argument describes the intentions and mitigating sentiments of the agent, asserts that “the very framer of the laws . . . would have done the very same thing himself if he had been in similar circumstances,” and insists that the intention of the law is always in need of judicious interpretation: the

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lawgiver expected that judges “would be not mere readers of his writings but interpreters of his intentions.”11 In de officiis, Cicero moves beyond such a procedural focus, making the more expansive claim that equity is a commitment to fairness and equal justice for all. He argues that government—kingly or republican—comes into being so that “the people might enjoy justice” broadly: For as the masses in their helplessness were oppressed by the strong, they appealed for protection to some one man who was conspicuous for his virtue; and as he shielded the weaker classes from wrong, he managed by establishing equitable conditions to hold the higher and the lower classes in an equality of right. The reason for making constitutional laws was the same as that for making kings. For what people have always sought is equality of rights before the law.12

Here equity is the condition of “an equality of right,” a political situation in which justice is distributed fairly across the polity among citizens (if not all individuals). A just state is one founded upon equitable guarantees, and healthy citizenship depends upon “equality of rights before the law.” Later in de officiis, Cicero suggests that

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there is a bond of fellowship . . . between those who belong to the same nation, and [a bond] more intimate still between those who are citizens of the same city-state.

11. Cicero’s description of an argument for equity merits long citation: “He will point out with what feelings, with what design, and on what account he did the action in question. And whatever excuse he alleges he will defend according to some of the rules which I have already given with respect to assumptions. And when he has dwelt on this topic for some time, and set forth the principles of his conduct and the equity of his cause in the most specious manner he can, he will also add, in opposition to the arguments of his adversaries, that it is from these topics for the most part that excuses which are admissible ought to be drawn. He will urge that there is no law which sanctions the doing of any disadvantageous or unjust action; that all punishments which are enacted by the laws have been enacted for the sake of chastising guilt and wickedness; that the very framer of the laws, if he were alive, would approve of this conduct, and would have done the very same thing himself if he had been in similar circumstances. And that it is on this account that the framer of the law appointed judges of a certain rank and age, in order that there might be men, not capable merely of reading out what he had written, which any boy might do, but able also to understand his thoughts and to interpret his intentions. He will add, that that framer of the law, if he had been intrusting the laws which he was drawing up to foolish men and illiterate judges, would have set down everything with the most scrupulous diligence; but, as it is, because he was aware what sort of men were to be the judges, he did not put down many things which appeared to him to be evident; and he expected that you would be not mere readers of his writings, but interpreters of his intentions.” Cicero, de inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), II, xlvii. 12. Cicero, de officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913), II, xii, 41–42, pp. 209–11. All subsequent references are noted in the text parenthetically.

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It is for this reason that our forefathers chose to understand one thing by the universal law and another by the civil law. The civil law is not necessarily also the universal law; but the universal law ought to be also the civil law. But we possess no life-like image of true Law and genuine Justice; a mere outline sketch is all that we enjoy. (de officiis, III, xvii, 69)

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Just prior to this passage, Cicero has lamented the “low ebb of public sentiment” that has left some styles of fraud lawful. He acknowledges the familiar inscrutability of “true law and genuine justice,” points out that an “outline sketch” is the only source of normative guidance, and associates bonds of citizenship with the “universal law” rather than civil codes or moral custom. The universal law that exists only as a flimsy, flickering ideal is, as we have seen above, the condition of equity in which all citizens have equal rights before the law. The horizontal bond between citizens that creates a thriving political community is a feature of an equitable state that is “equally just for all.”13 Moreover, there are certain circumstances in which the natural reason of good men is sufficient to judge in a cause of “unvarying equity and of a general nature,” wherein “the lawyers themselves are an impediment to us, and hinder us from learning.”14 As Kathy Eden has pointed out, early Christian writers such as Paul and Augustine found the distinction between law and equity to be enormously useful: Greco-Roman legal theory conveniently provides Christian philosophy with a way to formulate the breakdown between the Old Dispensation under Jewish Law and the New Dispensation under Christian charity. The Spirit of the Unwritten Law, engrafted in men’s hearts, replaces the letter of the Old Law, engraved on stone tablets.The scriptum of the written law, which looks to the act itself, gives way to voluntas, the intention of the agent. And the fear of God’s wrath and punishment, as the inevitable consequence of attention to the law, defers to an ethic of charity, pity, and forgiveness. The New Dispensation . . . is associated with all the more flexible and humane attitudes of equity and natural law, while the Old is identified with the rigor and severity of the written law.15

Here Eden provides an emblematic sketch of the largely unchallenged view in late antiquity that the Gospel is a realization of Christian equity that 13. Cicero, De inventione, II, liv. 14. Cicero, De oratore, trans. J. S. Watson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), II, xxxiii, pp. 121–22. 15. Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction, 137. A broader survey of the genealogy of equity is available in Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (1861; Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).

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supersedes or completes the rigorous Mosaic law. In the writings of Paul, for instance, the old law withers in the face of Christ’s equity, and the rule of faith supplants the strict rule of ceremonial law: God “has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”16 The Pauline division of strict law from equitable Gospel is profoundly influential in the early modern period: John Milton, for instance, in Book Twelve of Paradise Lost updates the split thus:

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So law appears imperfect, and but giv’n With purpose to resign them in full time Up to a better covenant, disciplined From shadowy types to truth, from flesh to spirit, From imposition of strict laws, to free Acceptance of large grace, from servile fear To filial, works of law to works of faith. (XII, 300–306).

This section is drawn from a longer speech of Michael’s that paraphrases Paul’s letter to the Galatians, wherein we hear that “the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian.” But from this axiomatic reiteration of the equity of Christ, Paul turns to the kernel of his “universal” thesis: “in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. . . .There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”17 The claim here is that Christian liberty is available to all who embrace faith and that a new political identity based on equal treatment before God is possible. Within Paul’s vision is an echo of Ciceronian equity, where we too saw the horizontal bonds of citizenship predicated upon “equality of rights before the law.” But where Cicero’s interest in equity is restricted to citizens, Paul’s vision has been understood as universal—available to all regardless of the status of slave or free, subject or citizen, Jew or Greek. It is such a Pauline hypothesis of universal Christian charity that undergirds, or subtly inflects, the later Stuart flirtation with the idea that all subjects might be capable of exercising, and not just benefiting from, an equitable imagination.

16. The Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, 3:6; in the New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Bruce Metzger and Roland Murphy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). On the early modern status of Paul’s writings, see Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 21–48. 17. Paul, 3:23–28.

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II.

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There she taught him to weigh both right and wrong In equall balance with due recompence And equitie to measure out along, According to the line of conscience When so it needs with rigour to dispence.18

These lines describe the education of Artegall, the allegorical protagonist of “The Legend of Justice,” the fifth book in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. In the absence of his surrogate mother, Astrea, Artegall is tasked with dispensing justice in a corrupted world; to this end, he is accompanied by Astrea’s “iron man” Talus, a relentless Terminator who deals death whenever possible. Although Artegall has been taught to act equitably, his judgments are merciless and spectacular—as Jeff Dolven has written, in the legend of justice punishment is always a pedagogical occasion and never a call for sympathy.19 Dazzled by beauty on the battlefield, Artegall throws away his sword and is enthralled to the Amazon queen Radigund; his rescue falls to Britomart, Artegall’s perpetually frustrated beloved, who is here appropriately recast as an avatar of “that part of Justice, which is Equity.”20 At first glance, it is positively odd that Britomart, the erstwhile knight of chastity and a pretty lethal warrior in her own right, prepares for her rescue mission in Isis Church, the temple of equity. It is likewise odd that Britomart beats Radigund not through a gesture of spectacular forgiveness, but rather with a swift sword-stroke. Here Spenser makes a claim about political theory— retaliatory justice requires an equitable supplement if it is to thrive—without illustrating that theory in action. I suspect this is because, as Dolven has suggested, in Book Five Spenser goes to lengths to avoid occasions for sympathetic judgment or the exercise of an ethic of care.21 Such emotional entanglements are at the heart of tragedy, but they defeat the pedagogical ambitions of the allegorical method of this part of the poem. At the best possible moment to model equitable deliberation for his aristocratic readers, Spenser passes. His interest is theoretical rather than affective, and in this the most didactic and political

18. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas Roche (New York: Penguin, 1987), Book V, Canto 1, st. 7, 728. 19. I am indebted to Jeff Dolven’s elegant discussion of this question. See Dolven, “Spenser’s Sense of Poetic Justice,” Raritan 21 (2001): 127–40. 20. Spenser, Faerie Queene, V, 7, st.3. 21. Dolven, “Spenser’s Sense of Poetic Justice,” 135.

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section of the poem, he is simply not interested in thinking of his epic romance as a “school of equity.” Spenser’s heart was elsewhere. As Richard Helgerson has argued, a generation of late Elizabethan intellectuals such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Drayton, and Coke sought to throw off the yoke of England’s racial identity as a band of northern barbarians. Beginning in the 1590s, these thinkers fashion a literary and cultural tradition worthy of a civilized nation. What had been an insular gothic backwater populated by fierce, lawless, and unlettered savages would now become a legitimate civil society, an independent and energetic early modern nation-state in possession of a proud cultural patrimony. Although this project was multi-disciplinary—the great common lawyer Edward Coke is a major protagonist—Helgerson allots to poetry a central place in the remaking of English national identity. That is to say that poetry—a term I use broadly in its early modern usage as a synonym for poesis, “fiction” or serious literature—is for the Elizabethans and their successors a crucial medium for the affirmative project of reshaping English culture.22 But even though The Faerie Queene or Richard II might seem to solicit the “wide horizontal comradeship” of the nation, the enterprise Helgerson describes is, in my view, essentially aristocratic. Spenser’s ambition for his epic, as outlined famously in his “Letter to Walter Ralegh,” was to “fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline . . . which for that I conceived should be most plausible and pleasing being coloured with an historical fiction.”23 John of Gaunt’s even more famous soliloquy on the ruin of “this England” in Richard II is chiefly concerned with the hereditary property rights of the aristocracy. Shakespeare’s history plays might voice patriotic enthusiasm for the “precious stone set in the silver sea” or that lost “star of England” Henry V, but these homogenizing uses of the English past are largely yoked to dynastic and Protestant providentialism. In a broad sense, the Elizabethans lack a socially comprehensive or “public” theory of fiction that looks beyond the aristocracy to the people as a whole. Poetry is an instrument for the cultivation of gentlemen, or it is the means for describing the movement of a race, a dynasty, and a confessional faith through time, but it is not yet a medium of systematic public enlightenment. In this book, I consider the seventeenth-century legacy of the Elizabethan remaking of English national identity. More concretely, I look at a subsequent generation of intellectuals facing a radically different set of cultural, religious, 22. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race on the Early Modern Stage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 23. Spenser, Faerie Queene, 15. The phrase “wide horizontal comradeship” is Benedict Anderson’s in Imagined Communities (New York:Verso, 1987), 7.

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and political pressures. The middle decades of the seventeenth century hosted a number of major epistemological transformations, including the rise of capitalism, credit, international political economy, and global trade; the emergence of experimental science and scientific institutions; the decline of naturalized aristocracy and the growth of class mobility and “private life”; the development of secular modern political philosophies based on the natural rights of all rather than the duties of the few.24 But these years, beginning with the personal rule of Charles I in 1629, also host a number of searing national traumas—whatever one’s political allegiance, we can identify a set of usually violent setbacks or disappointments. Republican theorists saw their ideal commonwealth fail and be swept away by Cromwellian fiat, and then their hopes quashed seemingly forever by the return of Charles II. Loyal subjects of the Stuart dynasty lost one king and saw that family’s preferred fiction of authority (divine right hereditary kingship) shaken to its core. The Church of England was abolished, as were the most notorious of prerogative courts, the High Commission and Star Chamber; the Church was restored in 1660 while the prerogative courts were not. The later Stuart period was supersaturated with plots real and imagined, apocalyptic signs and spectacles of great suffering, rancorous partisanship, and violent retribution. Both at home and abroad, the seventeenth century was, in short, a “stonie age.”25 The barbarous savagery of the English race, thought to have been refined away in the Elizabethan period, had reemerged, and seemed to be on vivid display in the years during and after the regicide. The perception was widespread that English public life had “run out of square” between 1640 and 1660.26 Scathing claims of wretched hypocrisy and crushing tyranny were ubiquitous, and one very popular formula was to indict one’s opponent for transgressing against “all equity and right” or, in a slightly more technical sense, against “equity and law.” Such grievances were aired across the political spectrum. The royalist biographer David Lloyd, for example, 24. Crucial studies of these transformations include J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Michael Walzer, Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Lawrence Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and most recently, McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity. 25. Spenser, Faerie Queene, Book V, Proem, 723. 26. Ibid.

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described the revolutionary project as the “absolute overthrow of all the Laws or right and wrong” and argued conventionally that “when Majesty it self is assaulted, there can be no security for private fortunes; and those that decline upon design from the paths of equity, will never rest till they come to the extremity of injustice.”27 To “decline upon design from the paths of equity” is to turn deliberately away from justice, to reject or destroy the “laws or right and wrong” in a fit of collective demonic brutality. The Quaker radical Edmund Burroughs took an even more scathing position: in his view, virtually every actor in government between 1640 and 1660 (Charles I, Cromwell, the republican councilors of state) was corrupt and degenerate: in those years, “Sin and Wickedness was strengthened and encouraged in the Government, and by such as were in Authority; . . . them that did well were punished, and limited as Transgressors and the evil-doers were set free, and not made afraid; so that we could truly cry, Truth was faln in the Street, and Justice and true Judgment turned backward, and Equity had no place to enter, and the Innocent were devoured through want of true and just Judgment.”28 The tone and content of these critiques was commonplace, and the violence, faction, and beleaguered antipathy so prevalent in recent history was ample evidence that the English nation was backsliding into its sinful native barbarism as most influentially described by Tacitus and updated by Jean Bodin. As Bodin argued influentially in his 1576 Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, northern lands such as the British Isles produced warriors, miners, and fabricators aplenty, but to find “the greatest rulers, the best legislators, the most equitable judges, the sagest jurisconsults, the most versatile orators, the cleverest merchants, and finally the most famous players and dramatic actors,” one must look instead to the cultures that inhabit the Mediterranean littoral.29 Bodin’s ethnology is both flattering and derogatory; in addition to “cerulean” eyes that announce one as either lupine or goatish, the northern barbarian is recognized as large, robust, hairy, gregarious, reckless, drunken, insolent, filthy, honest, martial, troglodytic, and independent.30 This ethnographic thesis is a mild revision of a long and profoundly influential ethnographic tradition that progresses from

27. David Lloyd, “The Life of Francis, Lord Cottington,” in Memoires of the lives, actions, sufferings & deaths of those noble, reverend and excellent personages that suffered by death, sequestration, decimation, or otherwise, for the Protestant religion and the great principle thereof, allegiance to their soveraigne, in our late intestine wars, from the year 1637 to the year 1660, and from thence continued to 1666 with the life and martyrdom of King Charles I (London, 1667), 80. 28. Edward Burrough, The Memorable Works of a Son of Thunder and Consolation (London, 1662). 29. Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Octagon, 1966), 112. 30. Ibid., 122.

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classical antiquity into the early modern period.31 As stark counterexamples to the civilized cultures dotting the Mediterranean, the gothic northerners were an abhorrently violent, disorganized, and undisciplined mass of primitives who had contributed almost nothing to the processes of advancement. Early modern readers would readily recognize these brutal Goths as the forbears of the various Germanic “races” of Europe, a group that would include the Norse, Germans, Dutch, Irish, Welsh, and English.32 Along with Caesar’s de bello gallici, the loci classici of barbarian ethnography are Tacitus’s Agricola and Germania. Debora Shuger culls a representative picture of barbarian culture from Caesar and Tacitus: The Germans “spend all their lives in hunting and warlike pursuits.” They have “no taste for peace” but consider “war and plunder [raptus]” the only honorable pursuits, leaving “the care of house, home, and fields . . . to the women, old men, and weaklings of the family,” for “a German is not so easily prevailed upon to plough the land and wait patiently for harvest as to challenge a foe and earn wounds for his reward. He thinks it tame and spiritless to accumulate slowly by the sweat of his brow what can be got quickly by the loss of a little blood.” Hence they “are not agriculturalist . . . but live principally on meat, cheese, and milk, . . . nor do they own private property, lest their men get accustomed to living in one place, lose their warlike enthusiasm, and take up agriculture.” (499–500)33

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Like his early modern successors, Tacitus attributes much of the peculiar formation of barbarian culture to the rugged and hostile northern geography: in Agricola’s Britain “the climate is wretched,” while barbarian Germany “is covered either by bristling forests or foul swamps” such that even the cattle 31. For a discussion of the links between barbarian ethnography and early modern English fears of a warrior aristocracy, see Debora Shuger, “Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians,” Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 494–525. 32. Like every racial or national group, the English were recognized as synthetic. While commentators would point out the multiple incursions of other “races” into the national character, each of these incursions was made by a “gothic” race; e.g., Saxons, Danes, Normans, Dutch, Irish,Welsh. It was a commonplace for early modern authors to refer to their countryfolk as a ‘race.’ For a very helpful survey of the intellectual and historical contours of eighteenth-century race theory, see Nicholas Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” EighteenthCentury Studies 29, no. 3 (1996): 247–64. For a discussion of race in the making of English identity see Aparna Dharwadker, “Nation, Race, and the Ideology of Commerce in Defoe,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 39, no. 1 (1998): 63–84. 33. While Agricola is explicitly concerned with the British Isles, it has much less of the ethnographic speculation of Germania and is mostly concerned with the colonial government and life of Agricola. Thus Germania is a more suitable source for ethnography of the northern tribes, even though these tribes are not explicitly resident of Britannia.

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“lack the handsome heads that are their natural glory.”34 Such a climate engenders, for Tacitus, a nomadic, reckless, violent, and uncivil barbarian culture. Bodin, upon whose sophisticated theories of sovereignty the Stuart kings relied, thought of national identity in terms of geographical determinism. For Bodin, characteristics of a given culture could be linked causally to physical factors such as climate, diet, and terrain.35 While climate might engender barbarism, industry, or sloth, such attributes were not racially naturalized. Barbarism may have been a quality of the northern European tribes, but it need not be so in perpetuity.36 As evidence of cultural bootstrapping, Bodin cites the Germanic tribes, which “as they themselves confess were once not very far above the level of wild beasts. Then they wandered in marshes and forests like animals and by some rooted dislike they avoided letters. Nevertheless, they [have now partially] advanced . . . along the path of civilization.”37 The Gothic barbarian, as we have seen, was violent, drunken, libertyloving, and fierce in combat; the barbarian was an indifferent agriculturalist, lawless, vengeful, painted or tattooed, and not inclined to the wearing of pants.38 While such a national character was peerless in combat, it had become an obstacle to stable government in England. Indeed, one of Helgerson’s crucial claims is that Elizabethan intellectuals tried to refashion lawless insularity into robust independence: “sixteenth-century national self-articulation began 34. Tacitus, Agricola and Germania, trans. and ed. H. Mattingly and S. A. Handford (New York: Penguin, 1970), 104. 35. I am here indebted to Margaret Trabue Hodgen’s discussion of Bodin and of early modern geographical determinism. See her Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 254–94. 36. David Hume’s essay “Of National Characters” explicitly argues against such physical causes of national character and posits that the formation of national characteristics or habits of thought are the result of “moral” influences such as the form and stability of government and theology, the efficacy of trade or labor, and cultural representations. Although in “Of National Characters” Hume represents the English favorably as diverse and liberty loving, in his letters, Hume frequently inveighs against the English as a race “sunk in Stupidity and Barbarism and Faction.” The two are not mutually exclusive, however—the independence of the English is, as we will see, in part fashioned as a legacy of a gothic past. However, Hume’s argument against geographic determinism is troublesome to notions of English exceptionalism—if it is not the climate of Britannia that elicits barbarism, then it must have been (and must still be) the moral institutions of England which do so. See Hume, “Of National Characters,” in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, ed. Thomas Hill Greene and Thomas Hodge Grose (Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag, 1992), and Donald Livingston, “Hume, English Barbarism, and American Independence,” in Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Jeffrey Smitten and Richard Sher (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 133–47. 37. Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, 145. 38. Studies of England’s struggle to confront its barbarian identity in the early modern period that build on Helgerson’s argument include Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity on the Early Modern Stage and Shuger, “Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians.” Hodgen’s Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century is the best general treatment of the study of ethnicity in the period.

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with a sense of national barbarism, with a recognition of the self as despised other, and then moved to repair that damaged self-image.”39 The struggle to remake the English people in the image of Mediterranean civility was an uphill one, not least because prevailing early modern theories of racial identity were rooted in physical geography, or what Mary Floyd-Wilson calls “geohumoralism.” In this view, physiognomy, political and legal institutions, social forms and structures—indeed, all the components of the “national character”—were created by climate and terrain. Geography was destiny, but not irrevocably so— civility might be attained through long struggle and discipline, and indeed a nation that so surmounted its native barbarism might be reasonably understood as heroic, elect, virtuous.40 The Troy legend—the obviously concocted myth that England had been settled by a band of dispersed Trojans led by the grandson of Aeneas—was one ambitious response to the problem of a barbarous national character. Although this story took shape in writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Laÿamon, it had a mild efflorescence in late Elizabethan works like the Faerie Queene—before being exploded in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and yet again with even more vigor in Dryden’s 1678 Troilus. Across a political spectrum, the crises of regicide and Restoration were evidence of the English people backsliding into their inherent barbarism. The “martyrdom” of Charles I was readily attributed to the savagery and “monstrous ingratitude” at the core of the national character, just as disillusioned republicans like Milton imagined the Restoration of Charles II as evidence of a thick-headed and slavish gothic primitivism. In 1663, the common lawyer Edward Waterhouse offered this emblematic assessment of the English national character: some heavy misery impends us, who have not learned obedience by the things that we have suffered, who abound in secret hatred each to other; who are proud beyond our fortunes, prodigal above our proportions, slothful beneath ingenuity, envious to great merits, censurers of grave manners, contemners of Native Customs, Affectors of vicious pleasures, intollerably peevish, mercilessly savage, brutishly voluptuous, zealously prophane, and frigidly religious, amongst whom, the Son of man when he comes on the earth, will not finde so much faith as a grain of Mustard seed in bulk, nor as a bubble of air in solidity; all complement, all boast, no truth in word or deed. . . . and whatever befall us, let us say, The Lord is just, and we have reaped but the fruit of our own Deservings. For never was there a Nation more beloved of God, and saved from the hands of our Enemyes then we have been; and never was there 39. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 22. 40. Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity on the Early Modern Stage, 1–24.

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Waterhouse’s shrill indictment is in part a professional critique—the “native customs” of which he speaks are those precedents and decisions in the English common law long thought to safeguard “liberty and property.” But Waterhouse’s critique reveals a much broader anxiety about the savage, profane, and lawless qualities of the English people regardless of class status. After the crushing disappointment of the Restoration, Milton wrote in precisely this vein. In a digression from his History of Britain (1670), Milton argues that liberty had been “sought out of Season, in a corrupt and degenerate age” by a nation of “unfortunate Britains . . . entangled and oppresst with things too hard and generous above their strain and temper.”42 These are the same English people who had in 1660 hugged their chains and rushed back into an Egyptian bondage. Milton attributes this collective failure to the effects of climate on the national character—entirely in keeping with the Bodininan norms of early modern ethnology: For Britain, to speak a truth not often spoken, . . . is a Land fruitful enough of Men stout and courageous in War, [but] naturally not over-fertile of Men able to govern justly and prudently in Peace. . . . For the Sun which we want, ripens Wits as well as Fruits; and as Wine and Oyl are Imported to us from abroad; so must ripe understanding, and many civil Vertues, be imported into our minds from Foreign Writings, and examples of best Ages.

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For Milton, the English people, declined so low, in 1660 got the tyrant they deserved. John Dryden, on the other hand, saw the Restoration as a liberating remedy for the lawless and sullen qualities of the English people. In Astrea Redux he describes the king as a virtuoso of therapeutic equity: Not tied to rules of policy, you find Revenge less sweet than a forgiving mind 41. Edward Waterhouse, Fortescus Illustratus (London, 1663). 42. Milton apparently excised the “Digression” from his 1670 History of Britain, but after his death Roger L’Estrange facilitated the printing of Milton’s harsh critique of his allies as Mr John Miltons Character of the Long Parliament (London, 1681). For a discussion of the circumstances surrounding the publication of Mr John Miltons Character, as well as a critical reading of the History, see Nicholas Von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Andrew Escobedo locates Milton’s History of Britain within a broader early modern English line of historiography anxious about the obscure qualities of the nation; see his Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

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Your power to goodness doth submit your cause Your goodness only is above the laws; Whose rigid letter while pronounced by you Is softer made.

Such an allegedly forgiving manner was put to the test almost immediately, but Dryden would persist in such flattery until the Exclusion Crisis: he would claim as late as 1677, for instance, “at his return,” the king “found a nation lost as much in barbarism as in rebellion: and, as the excellency of his nature forgave the one, so the excellency of his manners reformed the other.”43 Even for Dryden, these were optimistic assessments of Charles II’s skills as an agent of princely mercy; the first years of the Restoration are dominated by violent retribution of all kinds. Charles permitted (and in fact encouraged) spectacular treason trials, the harsh imposition of religious uniformity, and posthumous executions—Cromwell’s corpse was dug up and abused and his head remained on a pike until 1685. By 1680, Dryden had abandoned the conceit that Charles had reformed native barbarism through his equitable character, preferring instead a direct assault on an unteachable national character: in Absalom and Achitophel he describes the English as a “headstrong, moody, and murmuring race / As ever tried the extent and stretch of grace; / God’s pampered people, whom, debauched with ease / No king could govern, nor no God please” and who “led their wild desires to woods and caves, / And thought that all but savages were slaves.”44 The wild, lawless and debauched national character—like the barbarian’s faith that savagery is the only form of liberty—was for Dryden as for many other intellectuals across the political spectrum at the heart of the seventeenth century’s ongoing crisis of sovereignty. There was one significant strain of dissent against this generally bleak assessment of the English national character. The Cromwellian Protectorate was the high point of seventeenth-century chauvinistic Anglo-Saxonism, but more broadly in the 1640s and 1650s anti-absolutist writers of varying degrees of radicalism blew up the myth of their Saxon ancestors into an affirmative theory of racially based political liberty.45 In his 1657 Discourse of the National Excellencies 43. John Dryden, “Defence of the Epilogue,” in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 11, ed. John Loftis, D. S. Rodes, and Vinton Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). There is a helpful discussion of this point in Michael Werth Gelber, The Just and the Lively: The Literary Criticism of John Dryden (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 28. As Gelber outlines, Dryden pursues a program of poetic and linguistic improvement and reform, stripping the archaic construction and slovenly methods from English verse while trying to preserve the originality and vivacity of the language. 44. Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel,” 44–55, in The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 2, ed. H.T. Swedenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). 45. On the seventeenth-century Saxonism, see Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982), 53–70; Colin Kidd, British Identities before

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of England, for example, Richard Hawkins describes the Saxons as the “strongest and valiantest” tribe of Germans, who the Romans saw as the “most resolute and valiant . . . of all Nations.” These glorious Saxons were empire builders:

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[They] are reported to have inlarged their bounds further then any other particular Nation did in Germany, and carried the terror of their Arms into all parts that lay about them; but especially to have lorded it on the Seas. In a word, they were dreaded for their Arms, and commended for their Chastity: so that the English derive from a most noble and pure Fountain, being the off-spring of so valiant and so chast a people.46

This is optimistic historiography, and the fingerprints of Cromwell’s western design are apparent. A “noble and pure fountain” of Saxon blood flows in the English people; the national character is thus warlike rather than savage, imperial rather than tribal, chaste rather than intemperate, maritime rather than troglodytic. Moreover, these Saxon originals provided the customary basis of the English common law, since the painted Britons were “too barbarous (as some will have it) to have such excellent Customs amongst them” (239). Hawkins saw English law as the enduring expression of Saxon independence: “No particular man can vaunt, he was the law-giver to the English. [Moreover] . . . it is a greater commendation to a people, that the whole Nation is wise, and capable to make good laws, then that one man onely is so” (240–41). The liberty-loving Saxons made rather than inherited laws; through “long experience and trial of what is best,” their English progeny continued to improve and refine that native legal tradition such that it might be styled the “better genius” of the nation (240). The Saxons had long been celebrated as crucial developers of the common law tradition, and during the civil wars the restoration of Saxon liberty was a popular appeal against arbitrary power.47 Although the Saxons would have provided an attractive and historically plausible ur-volk for a turbulent nation, they never quite captured popular attention during and after the civil wars. There is no Saxonist epic, no significant historical drama treating William the Confessor or Alfred the Great. Milton, for instance, researched but abandoned an epic Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 75–122. On the explicitly imperial ambitions in the Saxonist program, see David Armitage, “The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire,” Historical Journal 35 (1992): 531–55. 46. R[ichard]. H[awkins]., A Discourse of the National Excellencies of England (London, 1657), 14–15. 47. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Reissue with Retrospect (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 80.

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featuring the great Saxon lawgiver Alfred while Dryden’s 1691 opera King Arthur casts the Saxons as warlike but profane heathens who are absorbed peacefully into the English nation.48 The Saxonist argument was a political language useful to constitutional theorists, antiquarians, and anti-absolutist agitators; it was never a fully developed theory of racial origins.49 There was very little literary interest in this glorious fountain of pureblooded progenitors, despite the hyperventilating efforts of propagandists like Hawkins; even during the Protectorate, the prevailing mood touching English ethnicity was overwhelmingly sour. For a handful of crucial mid-century intellectuals like William Davenant, Milton, and Dryden, the remedy for the problem of the English people’s lawless barbarism was the fictional method itself. Francis Bacon, writing in The Advancement of Learning, had proposed serious literature as a therapy for barbarism: it “satisfieth the mind of man . . . serveth and conferreth magnanimity, morality, and delectation” and is especially to be valued “in rude times and barbarous regions where other learning [is] excluded.”50 The force of such a point was not lost on later Stuart writers like Dryden, who worried that the people would “turn Picts again” and hoped that the “genius of the nation [might be delivered] from the reproach of its barbarity.”51 So too felt Thomas Rymer, and Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips, who wrote that poetry achieves “miracles among irrational and insensible creatures [by raising] beauty out of deformity, order and regularity out of Chaos and confusion” and it is poetry that can, “if thoroughly and rightly prosecuted, . . . civilize the most savage natures and root out barbarism and ignorance from off the face of the Earth.”52 On the way to outlining his sanctimoniously correct theory of literature, Rymer castigated what he saw as bestial license: “shall our Poet therefore pamper [our] corrupt nature, and indulge our barbarity? Shall he not rather purge away the corruption and reform our manners? Shall he not with Orpheus rather choose to

48. E. M. W. Tillyard, “Milton and the English Epic Tradition,” in Seventeenth-Century Studies Presented to H. J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 211–36. In King Arthur, the eponymous hero defeats the Saxon prince Oswald, and in a fit of racial consolidation proposes a synthesis: “Britains and Saxons shall be once one People; / One Common Tongue, one Common Faith shall bind / Our Jarring Bands, in a perpetual Peace” (V, ii). John Dryden, King Arthur, or The British Worthy, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 16, ed.Vinton Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 60. 49. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution, 56–57. 50. Bacon, “The Advancement of Learning,” in Sir Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 186–87. 51. Dryden, “Epistle Dedicatory to the Earl of Sunderland,” in Truth Found Too Late; or, Troilus and Cressida, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 13, ed. Maximilian Novak and Alan Roper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 221. 52. Edward Phillips, Preface to Theatrum Poetarum, in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 2:257.

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draw the Brutes after him, than be himself a follower of the Herd?”53 In this same idiom, John Oldham sees poesis as a medium of broad civil reform and the distribution of equal justice. In his imitation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, Oldham figures poetry as a remedy for lawless violence: Orpheus the first of the inspired Train, By force of powerful numbers did restrain Mankind from rage, and bloudy cruelty, And taught the barbarous world civility.

Not only does fiction lead humanity out of its original savage condition, but also it supplies a just foundation for civil government:

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. . . Wondrous were the effects of primitive Verse, Which setled and reform’d the Universe: This did all things to their due ends reduce, To publick, private, sacred, civil use: Marriage for weighty causes was ordain’d, That bridled lust, and lawless Love restrain’d: Cities with Walls, and Rampiers were inclos’d, And property with wholsom Laws dispos’d: And bounds were fix’d of Equity and Right, To guard weak Innocence from wrongful might. Hence Poets have been held a sacred name, And plac’d with first Rates in the Lists of Fame.54

53. Thomas Rymer, Tragedies of the Last Age, in Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt Zimansky (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1956), 19. 54. John Oldham, “Horace His Art of Poetry, Imitated in English,” in The Works of Mr. John Oldham together with His Remains (London, 1684). Here is the passage in Horace that resembles most nearly Oldham’s discussion of Orpheus: The wood-born race of men when Orpheus tamed, From acorns and from mutual blood reclaimed, This priest divine was fabled to assuage The tiger’s fierceness, and the lion’s rage. Thus rose the Theban well; Amphion’s lyre, And soothing voice the list’ning stones inspire. Poetic wisdom marked, with happy mean, Public and private; sacred and profane; The wand’ring joys of lawless love suppressed; With equal rites the wedded couple blessed: Planned future towns, and instituted laws— So verse became divine, and poets gained applause.

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In the Horatian original, Orpheus does indeed tame savagery, but his office is explicitly “divine” and priestly; Oldham goes out of his way to cast the poet as a secular and political agent of justice and a facilitator of “wholsome laws” and “equity and right.” Such a notion that the poet’s office was to be the agent of paideia—that Greek term for the comprehensive civic and moral instruction of citizens—is inextricably related to the nexus between equity and poetry established in classical literary theory and central to early modern neo-Aristotelian theories of literature.55 Jean-Pierre Vernant has argued that ancient tragic fiction is based in legal reasoning, and that it “depicts one dikê in conflict with another, a law that is not fixed, shifting and changing into its opposite.”The emblematic classical case of such a collision of norms is Aeschylus’s Oresteia, a play-cycle explicitly designed to celebrate the triumph of equitable justice over the archaic rigor of retributive lex talionis.56 But the bond between equity and fiction goes well beyond such a shared figural concern with law and justice. In Aristotle’s deeply influential account, poesis, like equitable judgment, looks not to the part but the whole, not to specific historical facts but to the universal norms that give them meaning; like equity, poesis solicits a sympathetic bond between a character and the judging audience; like equity, Aristotelian poesis is an invitation to hermeneutic deliberation in the service of ethical development. As Wesley Trimpi has written of ancient literary theory, “Equity seeks the proper relations between the individual controversy to be judged and the body of statutes to be applied to it, while poetry seeks the proper relation of given particular events, historical or imaginary, to a principle by means of which they gain significance.”57 For Aristotle, the fictional method is distinct from history because while history is chained to mere facts, poesis represents the probable and the universal: the fictional method is “more philosophical and more elevated than history, since poetry related more of the universal, while history relates particulars.”58 Such a distinction recalls equity, the gesture of looking past the sentence of fact to the spirit or intention of law. Indeed, as Kathy Eden has pointed out carefully, the Aristotelian view of fiction shares formal and affective qualities with equitable judgment: 55. Werner Jaeger, Paideia:The Ideals of Greek Culture, 3 vols., trans. Gilbert Highet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939–1952). 56. Illuminating discussions of the Oresteia appear in Theodore Ziolkowski, The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), and Danielle Allen, The World of Prometheus:The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 57. Trimpi, Muses of One Mind, 271. 58. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 9, p. 59.

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The fictional method, by imposing the universality of philosophical inquiry on the infinitely various particulars of human action, discloses the causes of action in the agents’ characters and intentions. Only when constructed in this way does the tragic fiction move its audience to fear and to pity. Similarly in touch with both universality and particularity, equity qualifies the individual action by these same means in its effort to correct or mitigate the rigid generality of the law. The analogy between equity and fiction, in other words, extends even beyond their common psychology to a common logic.59

The thematic attention to the origins of law or the first principles of states— the “legal vocabulary” that Vernant sees at the heart of tragedy—is then hardly a requirement of the fictional method, although in moments of political crisis such content tends to emerge as a highly privileged and affectively powerful focus. Later Stuart intellectuals were deeply influenced by early modern neoAristotelians like Philip Sidney, in whose Apologie for Poesy we find an updated assessment of the bond between equity and poesis. Sidney outlines a theory in which fiction is the artful “purifying of wit . . . enriching of memory, enabling of judgment, and enlargement of conceit [designed] to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.”60 Sidney rejects history as a mode of crude facticity “laden with old mouse-eaten records” and suggests that the poet’s perfect mimesis of probability and human nature stems from the coupling of “the general notion with the particular example.” Moreover, fiction gives “to the powers of the mind an image [that does] strike, pierce [and] possess the sight of the soul,” and in so doing, it cultivates the “juridical comprehending” of norms and illuminates the “imaginative and judging power” of the mind.61 Sidney’s theory, and indeed virtually all Tudor-Stuart literary theory, was designed to promote works of serious literature that might “fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline,” as Spenser writes or as Sidney himself put it, to create great princes or “to make many Cyruses” though mimetic fiction.62 The idiom here is aristocratic and parochial—fiction is useful insofar as it offers counsel to princes and wise habits of judgment to aristocrats; there is virtually no interest in cultivating the judgment of the “common crowd” or elevating a barbarian public from its violent and lumpish ignorance. 59. Eden, Poetic and Legal Fictions, 61. 60. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 88. 61. Ibid., 90. 62. The Cyrus to be replicated is Cyrus the Great—that exemplary prince described in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (itself a crucial early modern work of princely counsel). Sidney, Apologie for Poetry, 85.

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But in the 1640s and 1650s, England had become a radically different place. The combination of a booming print culture (encompassing news, pamphlets, petitions, and satires) and increased literacy with a highly volatile political situation had created a fractious and wildly careening public sphere (if not a “deliberative” one in the Habermasian sense).63 As Peter Lake and Steve Pincus have recently suggested, the years between 1640 and 1660 witnessed a profound transformation in communication—disputes, rumors, controversies, polemics, sermons, and poems that had once circulated privately or were addressed to a narrow audience “went public” almost overnight. While Elizabethan political actors had appealed for popular support (often through instruments like the history play), for Lake and Pincus, “what was new . . . was the intensity, speed, and sheer volume of popular and public political discussion.”64 The velocity and volume of print likely exaggerated the sense that the English people were disorderly and unregulated, but once this robust new arena had developed, it became unshakably hegemonic. Moreover, as Mark Knights has written, in these years “the public as a collective fiction that was both frequently appealed to as an umpire of politics and as a legitimating force was a phenomenon that grew to new proportions. Moreover, the culture of plots and elections that dominated the later Stuart period repeatedly invited the public to participate by exercising its judgment.”65 The rise of this volatile public sphere brought with it new literary forms and, as I argue, new theories of fiction designed to cultivate and discipline a fractious public in its exercise of judgment.66 The first virtuoso of the new public sphere was Sir William Davenant, who spearheaded the move toward a theory of fiction as a medium of comprehensive public paideia. Davenant followed the future Charles II to France in 1649 but returned to England during the Protectorate where he operated a kind of clandestine theater in the service of Cromwellian expansionism; after the Restoration he became Dryden’s mentor and the eminence grise of the new theatrical world.67 Davenant’s range as a writer was impressive—he was the author 63. The advent of a “print public sphere” during these years is of course a contested claim, although it is a well-established historical fact that in the 1640s and 50s, there was an explosion of pamphlets, newspapers, petitions, and countless other forms of writing designed to mobilize ideological support, or influence political decision-making, or create collective action. See David Eli Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Print, Politics, and the Public Sphere (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 64. Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 280. 65. Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 29. 66. On the emergence of new forms, see Smith, Literature and Revolution, 1–24. 67. A. H. Nethercot, Sir William Davenant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938); Mary Edmond, Rare Sir William Davenant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).

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of important masques of the 1630s like Salmacida Spolia, imperial plays such as The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, heroic tragedies like The Siege of Rhodes, and important revisions of Shakespeare including his Macbeth, a Tempest he coauthored with Dryden, and a 1662 play called Law Against the Lovers (an awkward but fascinating fusion of Measure for Measure and Much Ado About Nothing). In 1651 Davenant had published the first cantos of his unfinished epic Gondibert, a work most notable for its prefatory matter—letters between Davenant and Thomas Hobbes outlining the status and public utility of serious literature.68 In its early pages, Davenant’s “Preface to Gondibert” makes a familiar Sidneyan defense of “poesy” or serious fiction as princely counsel. Like Aristotle and Sidney, he distinguishes between history and fiction, contending that “Truth narrative and past is the Idol of Historians, who worship a dead thing, and truth operative, and by effects continually alive, is the Mistris of Poets, who hath not her existence in matter but in reason.” The lively and operative truth of fiction is designed to “make great actions credible” to elite readers, those “most necessary men” whose judgment and attention the poet solicits and seeks to govern.69 At first, Davenant professes little hope for the mass of readers and subjects: “the common Crowd, of whom we are hopelesse, we desert, being rather to be corrected by laws, where precept is accompanied with punishment, then to be taught by Poesy” (14). These sentiments seem at first glance to corroborate Nigel Smith’s view that Davenant “sought to take epic back from national identity and locate it in the education of princes.”70 However, Davenant backs quickly away from such elite loathing of the rabble and outlines the view that fiction could bring into being a remedy for ethical and political crisis at the level of the “Nation, [which is] a Poets standing guest and require[s] monarchicall respect” (24). According to Davenant, states thrive when literature supplies a kind of unacknowledged paideic legislation of the soul. Contemporary English history was all too obvious an example: Statesmen and Judges, whose business is governing, and the thing to be governed is the people, have amongst us—we being more proud and mistaken than any other famous Nation—look’d gravely upon Poetry, and with a negligence that betray’d

68. The prefatory letters printed with Gondibert are in Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, vol. 2. Davenant’s letter to Hobbes is customarily called the “Preface to Gondibert.” 69. Davenant, “Preface to Gondibert,” 28. Studies of Davenant’s political and literary program include Patricia Springborg, “Leviathan, Mythic History, and National Historiography,” in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain, ed. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Manley, Convention, 1500–1750, 276; 286–90. I am particularly indebted to Steven Zwicker’s excellent treatment of the Davenant-Hobbes material in his Lines of Authority, 8–26. 70. Smith, Literature and Revolution, 214.

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a Northerly ignorance, as if they beleev’d they could perform their work without it. But Poets, who with wise diligence study the People, and have in all ages by an insensible influence governd their manners may justly smile when they perceive that Divines, Leaders of Armies, Statesmen, and Judges think [they] . . . can give without the help of the Muses a long and quiet satisfaction in government. (38)

Davenant’s objective here is to give poetry legitimate status as a “collateral help” of government, as a medium of peaceful remedy for the benefit of the entire public. The beneficiaries of Davenant’s system are not the princes he seems to address, but are instead the English people, whose difficult political circumstances he presents with measured sympathy: “the people’s anger, by a perpetual coming in of new Oppressors, is so deverted in considering those whom their eyes but lately left, as they have not time enough to rise for the Publick” (39). With moral and political crisis at the highest amplitude, and the tone of public life so dizzying, violent, and partisan, Davenant sees literature as a means of eliciting in the broad mass of readers and spectators the experience of “rising for the public.” As he tries to outline literature’s public utility, Davenant proposes a new scenario in which fiction can cultivate the soul of the many instead of the princely few.To achieve this turn, Davenant figures literature as a kind of secular religion in which the poet assumes a pseudo-pastoral office. “I fear,” Davenant writes, “since Poesy is the clearest light by which they finde the soul who seek it, that Poets have in their fluent kindnesse diverted from the right use, and spent too much of that spirituall talent in the honor of mortall Princes” (32). Here the distance from an idea of literature as princely counsel is overt; poetry can endow any seeker with judgment and illumination. Davenant extends the religious analogy, equating the “dominion of Poesy, [during which] a willing and peaceful obedience to Superiors becalmed the world” with the “pleasant quietnesse” of prelapsarian Paradise. He points out, moreover, that in the Gospel Jesus “vouchsaf ’d to deliver his Doctrine in Parabolicall Fictions” that supply “the People with harmonious precepts” (35). Poets and divines are to “temper the rage of humane power . . . , converse in steadfast motion the slippery joints of government, and to perswade an amity in divided nations” (33). Not only has poetry been demonstrably successful as a means of peaceful political remedy “in the most grave and important occasions that the necessities of State or mankinde have produced,” but also it is the “most naturall and delightfull interpreter . . . of the Mind” (49; 51). Davenant reads the political catastrophes of his age as the result of the “misapplication of force,” or a failure to imagine, persuade, and cultivate the minds of the people. Coercive power only eggs on the barbarous people, “so disobedient and fierce,” to resist authority,

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but poetry can have the salutary effect of persuading all subjects to enter peacefully into public life. The poet is tasked particularly with cultivating such subjects:

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since Persuasion is the principal instrument which can bring to fashion the brittle and mishapen mettal of the Minde, none are so fit aids to this important work as Poets, whose art is more then any enabled with a voluntary and chearfull assistance of Nature, and whose operations are as resistlesse, secret, easy, and subtle as is the influence of the Planets. (45)

At first glance, these lines seem to cast poesis as a kind of mass ornament or an instrument of propaganda. Davenant’s objective is to bring all minds, through varying poetic means, into amity and peace. Davenant does refute the potential objection that he seeks the universal enfranchisement of equals in the “dominion of poesy,” suggesting that there are forms and genres suited to elite and common readers: heroic poems such as Gondibert, for instance, “hath a force that overmatches the [minds of common men] who are not enabled by degrees of Education; but there are lesser forces in other kinds of Poesy, by which they may train and prepare their understandings.” These “lesser forces” shape the mindes of common readers into subjects and citizens, preparing them to emulate the exemplary virtue of the “Princes and Nobles . . . reformed and made Angellical [by poetry] which the people cannot but chuse but use for direction, as Gloworms take in and keep the Suns beams till they shine and make day to themselves.” Here Davenant is interested in what we might call mimetic paideia, a notion that the people might be reformed through the reflected glory of angelical princes, which is itself created through poetry. Such a view is somewhat consistent with his argument in the recently unearthed Proposition for the Advancement of Morality. In that text, Davenant is uncertain that “the people” have the capability to manage and internalize the complex deliberations invited by poetry. Instead, the mass of the people must be beguiled into obedience through the “collateral help . . . of instructive morality . . . which is active and brought home to the senses.”71 The pseudooperatic entertainments Davenant proposes to the dour Cromwellian regime are designed to divert and reform the restive public: if the “peoples senses were charmed and entertained with things familiar to them, they would easily follow 71. J. R. Jacob and Timothy Raylor, “Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and A Proposition For Advancement of Moralitie by Sir William Davenant,” Seventeenth Century 6 (1991): 205–50. All subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text.

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the voices of their shepherds” (244–45). But even as he suggests that the people must be pacified through a range of affective techniques (music, theatrical spectacle, love-plots), Davenant elevates poetry as the crucial medium for “evincing the necessity of virtue into vulgar mindes” (247). Poetry, in his view, is crucial to the reform of the people, for unlike the rare great man who can apprehend moral philosophy in all its subtleties, the people require a more subtle pedagogy:

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Speeches and entertainments to the minde, might court even the coursest of the people into goodnesse; for though vertue must needs be transcendently amiable, et since her beames are too dazeling for the Eyes of the vulgar, her meaner approaches, through the disguises of morall Poetry, and other Arts, lessen her into a due proportion to their sight. (246)

Davenant, as in his “Preface” to Gondibert, wants to have it both ways. He hopes that “entertainments,” and especially poetic fiction, will pacify the people, but at the same time he cannot let drop the humanist faith that poetry can tutor the judgment into moral virtue.72 Dryden was intensely, perhaps obsessively, interested in thinking of epic and heroic tragedy as genres devoted to the therapy of the soul. From Davenant, Dryden inherited the conception that poetry could persuade an amity in divided nations, that the poet’s task was to work as an affectively powerful moral lawgiver. For Dryden, the rhymed heroic play was an instrument of emotional casuistry and disciplinary regulation. His notorious preference for rhyming verse in tragedy meets the demands of decorum but also restrains the potential excesses of the “lawless imagination” of poet and audience both.73 An early play such as the 1664 Indian Emperour leads its audience casuistically through familiar crises of political obligation—the play is composed of several “cases of conscience” or fictional set-pieces of filial disobedience, disloyalty, and excessive aristocratic honor designed to model the proper response of subjects during crises of sovereignty. Such a play may “resemble truth, but it must be ethical”; that is to say, it must above all “insinuate morality in the people” through affective and didactic appeals. Following Davenant, Dryden insisted that tragedy must “affect the Soul, and excite the Passions and above all . . . move Admiration.” A successful

72. Despite the powerful claims advanced by Jacob and Raylor, it seems crucial to take the theoretical claims of Proposition with caution, as it is an instrumental appeal to a military regime designed to make an end-run around the prohibitions against theatrical performance. 73. Dryden, “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” in Works, vol. 17, ed. Samuel Holt Monk and A. E.Wallace Maurer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).

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poem would achieve these therapeutic ends in part through the skill of the poet in guiding the audience in its adjudication of competing norms and the proper relations between particular facts (what he calls the Plot and Manners) and general truths (what he calls the Fable).74 In the later Stuart period, it was a conventional claim that tragedy was an Aristotelian “public lecture without comparison more instructive than philosophy; because it teaches the mind by the sense, and rectifies the passions, by the passions themselves, in calming by their emotion the troubles they excite in the heart.” But the genre of tragedy was also unusually well suited to the national character, for the English people seemed to “delight in cruelty,” wildness and the spectacular abasement of the powerful. The French critic René Rapin had made just such a commonplace critique: “the English, our Neighbours, love blood in their sports, by the quality of their temperament: these are Insulaires, separated from the rest of men; we [the French] are more humane.”75 Even while writers like Dryden and Rymer sought to rebuff the chauvinism of such a claim, they were stung by its accuracy; on the verge of the Exclusion Crisis, Dryden turned his theory of fiction increasingly in an affective direction. The tragic catastrophe of the great was most suited to the therapy of barbarous emotions of pride and hardheartedness:

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when we see that the most virtuous, as well as the greatest, are not exempt from such misfortunes, that consideration moves pity in us: and insensibly works us to be helpfull to, and tender over the distressed, which is the noblest and most Godlike of morall virtues.76

The poet’s brief here is to cultivate charity—equitable emotions of pity and tenderness for the distress of others rooted in what would later be called sympathetic identification. For Dryden, this process was called “concernment” and it works “when the Soul becomes agitated with fear for one character, or hope for another; then it is that we are pleas’d in Tragedy, by the interest which we take in their adventures.” Here Dryden begins a move away from the neo-Aristotelian strictness in which character is a mere adjunct of the ethical 74. Broader studies which treat Dryden’s theory of fiction include Gelber, The Just and the Lively, Alan Roper, Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965),Thomas Reinert, “Theater and Civility in Dryden’s Essay,” ELH 65, no. 4 (1997), Steven Zwicker, Dryden’s Political Poetry:The Typology of King and Nation (Providence: Brown University Press, 1973), and David Haley, Dryden and the Problem of Freedom (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1997). 75. These conventional phrases are drawn from Thomas Rymer’s idiosyncratic translation of René Rapin’s “Narrations on Aristotle’s Poetics” (1677), included in The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer. 76. Dryden, “Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy,” in Works, vol. 13, 231.

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function; instead, he sees an affective bond between character and audience of principal importance to the project of paideia. Put another way, he downplays the didactic imperative while preserving the equitable function at the heart of the fictional method—those ways in which poesis cultivates “the gentle art of particular perception,” in Martha Nussbaum’s elegant phrase.77 Walter Benjamin would put the situation a bit differently—baroque tragedy creates “a state of emergency in the soul” by amplifying and then disciplining the passions.78 To create through tragic fiction an equitable imagination in the English people, Dryden relies increasingly on the deep affective entanglement with character and the careful management of the passions, and not just on didactic moral utterances in the style of the “public lecture.” In Benjamin’s reading, the object of seventeenth-century tragedy is “not history but myth,” and the genre is devoted chiefly to the “the representation of a primordial past [that supplies] the key to a living national community.”79 Much of the serious literature of the later Stuart period is indeed devoted to describing the mythic and primordial, images of “nature wrought up to an higher pitch.”80 This book describes a generational enterprise organized around such a fictionalization of law and inflected by the theory of fiction outlined above. My objective is not to claim a comprehensive account of the norms of mid-seventeenth-century literature, or that all writers between 1649 and 1688 are interested in thinking of literature as a means of public paideia or a remedy for English barbarism. Instead, I focus on the handful of writers—and indeed upon a handful of works—in which the nexus between literature and equitable judgment is exaggerated, or indeed over-determined, by a thematic focus on the origins of law and the first principles of states. It is in the mythopoesis of law that the appeal to cultivate an equitable imagination is most publicly visible. 77. Martha Nussbaum’s account of the Aristotelian nexus between equity and tragedy deserves an extended citation: “In [Aristotle’s] theory, the spectator forms bonds of sympathy and identification with the tragic hero. This means that ‘judging with’ is built into the drama itself, into the way in which the form solicits attention. If I see Oedipus as one whom I might be, I will be concerned to understand how his predicament came about; I will focus on all those features of motive and agency, those aspects of the unfortunate operations of chance, that I would judge important were I in a similar plight myself. I would ask how and why all this came about, and ask not from a vantage point of lofty superiority, but by seeing tragedy as something ‘such as might happen’ in my own life. Tragedy is thus a school of equity, and therefore of mercy. If I prove unable to occupy the equitable attitude, I will not even enjoy tragedy, for its proper pleasure requires emotions of pity and fear that only suggnómê [judging with] makes possible,” “Equity and Mercy,” 95. 78. Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osbourne (New York: Verso, 1978), 74. 79. Ibid., 62. 80. Dryden, “Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” in Works, vol. 17, 74.

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The compulsion to describe the origins of law and government was widespread in seventeenth-century England, and is legible as part of the process of explicitation McKeon has identified at the heart of the age’s epistemological transformation. Once writers like Filmer, for instance, felt the need to justify patriarchal kingship, they lost their “tacit force and, by being asserted with a positivity foreign to tacit conviction, became vulnerable to refutation.”81 In political theory etiologies of law and government are commonplace—we might look to Filmer’s account of the donation of absolute patriarchal authority to Adam, Hobbes’s prepolitical war of all against all, and Locke’s state of nature— in all of which a fiction of origin exists to enable the narrative of political foundations.82 Hobbes, for instance, begins with an abstract, ahistorical myth of origins—the war of all against all within which condition “the notions of right and wrong, Justice and Injustice, have no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law; where no Law, no Injustice.”83 Out of this condition, with the desire to preserve themselves from injury, perpetual fear, and death, individuals consent to be bound irrevocably by a “common power.” From this sovereign power descends the body of laws, acts, and institutions that nurture and defend the commonwealth as it moves toward its fundamental objective of individual self-preservation and its corollary objectives—liberty, felicity, collective peace, equal justice. Law is a consequence or an outgrowth of the sovereign authority established by irrevocable consent of the many, rather than a fundamental norm of civic rationality as it would be in classical political philosophy. Put another way, Hobbes argues that the “state [is] primarily founded on ‘right,’ of which ‘law’ is a mere consequence.”84 Hobbes’ radical gesture of establishing a language of natural rights in the individual—of rooting the commonwealth in pragmatic human desires rather than divinely authored norms—casts justice as a language of desert constructed and enforced by the sovereign will: “before the names of Just and Unjust can have place, there must be some coercive Power, to compell men equally to the performance of their Covenants, by the terrour of some punishment greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their Covenant. . . . where there is no Commonwealth, there nothing is Unjust” (202). The notion that law and justice are essentially arbitrary social constructions is now a familiar part of modern political thought, as is the sense that, 81. McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity, 13. 82. Crucial studies of the seventeenth-century controversies over the origins of law include J. N. Figgis, The Divine Rights of Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896), and J. M. Gough, Fundamental Law in English Constitutional History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). 83. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin, 1968), 188. 84. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, trans. Elsa Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 157.

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left to their own devices, humans will follow their appetites and private interests rather than “justice and other laws of nature.”85 Indeed, the break from a language of divinely authored duties to the language of individual rights has been seen as an epistemological marker of the seventeenth-century transition to modernity. And so too do we see an efflorescence of the literary mythopoesis of first principles, the foundation of empires, and the emergence of civil law out of savagery. Pseudo-Virgilian epic fragments like Davenant’s Gondibert (1651) and Cowley’s Davideis (1655) celebrated princely lawgivers engaged in heroic nation-building while James Harrington, John Milton, and Lucy Hutchinson, among others, used the fiction of origins to elevate humanist self-instruction over the idolatrous veneration of the heroic founder.86 Most of Milton’s major post-Restoration work is devoted to describing the origins of laws, nations, or indeed of all creation itself—Paradise Lost is the age’s grandest account of the origins of everything from divine law and criminal disobedience to beetles and gunpowder. Milton seeks to reconstruct the archaic history of his nation in the History of Britain, examines the foundations of political authority and national belonging in Samson Agonistes, and in Paradise Regained offers a “thick description” of the life of Christ. Dryden’s Indian Emperour uses spectacular and often hyperbolic plots of conquest, usurpation, humiliation, and heroic martyrdom to explore the emergence of justice, the limits of political obligation, the force of international law, and the crisis of equity, while Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus rewrites Livy’s influential account of the origins of republican Rome to promote the self-sacrificing virtue at the heart of republicanism.87 Other writers such as Henry Neville uses the “prose relation” to sketch out etiologies of law, justice, and government in the supposedly archaic context of colonial or imperial territory. Neville’s 1667 Isle of Pines is an imperial fantasy of sexual

85. Thus Hobbes anticipates Federalist 51. Here is Hobbes: “For if we could suppose a great Multitude of men to consent on the observation of Justice, and other Lawes of Nature, without a common Power to keep them all in awe; we might as well suppose all Man-kind to do the same; and then there neither would be, nor need to be any Civil Government, or Commonwealth at all; because there would be Peace without subjection” (225). And here is Federalist 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary” (The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick [New York: Penguin, 1987]). 86. The norms of epic—its foundational presumptions or its abjurations of martial heroism—are discussed in David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Thomas Greene, The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1975). 87. On Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus, see Victoria Hayne, “‘All Language Then Is Vile’: The Theatrical Critique of Political Rhetoric in Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus,” ELH 63 (1996), and Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

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superabundance and interracial violence set on a once-empty island; Neville uses a stock narrative of political foundation to make a satirical critique of the absurdly literalist patriarchal theory of kingship. The Stuart loyalist Aphra Behn likewise finds in the exotic colonial space an ideal site for the mythopoetic exploration of the origins and spirit of law and government, and she holds out little hope that the English people will ever rise above their lawless barbarism. Her 1688 novella Oroonoko is a tragic demonstration of the view that colonial enterprises in the New World are at their core venal and unjust because they fail to recognize princely status or heroic magnanimity—virtues that for Behn make up the core of a just society. These texts foster acts of individual deliberative judgment about morality and mercy, justice and tyranny, obedience and rebellion, about the movement from archaic to civil law and from savage to civil liberty. Much of the literature of this age is propaganda, topical commentary, wild spectacle, or partisan slander. The texts I discuss—Paradise Lost, The Indian Emperour, The Isle of Pines, and others—are not fully insulated from such charges, but I contend that imaginative originalism is legible as the age’s most sustained public language for considering the moral, affective, and hermeneutic questions of justice.Wai Chee Dimock has suggested that in many circumstances literature can work as a “textualization of justice, the transposition of its clean abstractions into the messiness of representation.” Since literary texts play “havoc with any uniform scale of measurement and bring to every judicial act of weighing the shadow of an unweighable residue,” she argues that we might do well to think of the literary as an “eloquent dissent from that canon of rational adequation so blandly maintained in philosophy and law.”88 The literary, from this view, is the domain of incommensurability; it is a language of unevenness that raises open-ended and often painful questions of justice rather than an instrument to deliver the sealed normative rationality of law. In later Stuart England, imaginative originalism is efficacious as a public language precisely in these terms—it uses the mythopoesis of law and the fictional method itself to textualize justice, to solicit deliberation through the designed messiness of representation. Equity is by definition concerned with grey areas and ethical ambiguities, and we witness in writers at the leading edge of modernity a desire to confront their public with ambiguous questions of justice, law, and obligation—questions that might discipline and perhaps regenerate the nation by endowing it with equitable habits of thought.

88. Wai Chee Dimock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 10.

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chapter two

The Endless Jar of Justice

John Dryden and the Theater of Judgment

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I declare for distributive justice. —John Dryden, Defence of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668)

In a panegyric written to curry favor with a new political regime, it might normally be thought strange and surprising to compare the poem’s powerful subject to a flooded mine. Yet in “To the Lord Chancellor Hyde, Presented on New-Years Day 1662,” this is one tack that John Dryden pursues as he solicits the patronage and approbation of the immensely powerful Earl of Clarendon.1 In this poem, Dryden harps on a string he had tuned in “Astrea Redux,” a coronation poem for Charles II—in both works he reads the restoration of the Stuart line as a historical inauguration of justice, the beginning of “time’s whiter series” of equity and peace in a settled kingdom.2 In addition to his role as the king’s chief lawmaking officer, Clarendon was the architect of the king’s transitional justice and the namesake if not the author of severe laws against religious dissent (the so-called Clarendon Codes). Until he was sacked in 1667 following the debacle of the Second AngloDutch War, Clarendon was the de facto executive who shouldered much of the burden of government. The poem to Clarendon does not fail to highlight 1. John Dryden, “To the Lord Chancellor Hyde,” 1662, in Works, vol. 1, ed. Hooker and Swedenberg. All subsequent references are noted in the text parenthetically. 2. Dryden, “Astrea Redux,” 292, in Works, 1:30.

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the Chancellor’s formal duties as the king’s chief guardian of equitable relief from the severe and potentially unjust rigor of positive laws: “Justice, that sits and frowns where public laws / Exclude soft mercy from a private cause, / In your tribunal most herself dost please; / There only smiles because she lives at ease” (49–52). Writing of the spirit of justice that emanates from the restored Charles II, Dryden suggests that “passing though your hands it gathers more / As streams, though mines, bear tincture of their ore.” On its face, this is a clumsy metaphor, insofar as Dryden wants to suggest, as he does earlier in the poem, that Clarendon is the “channel” of royal justice rather than an original source of that justice. But this golden mine contributes directly to the stream of justice, supplementing and guiding it toward its end in the souls of the people: “by you he fits those subjects to obey” (84). Indeed, Dryden sees the relationship between the Chancellor and the king as complementary: While you dispense the laws, and guide the state The nation’s soul, our monarch, does dispense, Through you, to us his vital influence: You are the channel, where those spirits flow, And work them higher, as to us they go. (26–30)

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To see Clarendon as the channel in which the “vital influence” of Charles II flows is to flirt dangerously with the king’s libertine reputation, but the poem gets even weirder. Shortly after he figures Clarendon as a mine that tinctures the king’s “vast treasure” of merciful justice, Dryden suggests that the Chancellor is in fact akin to the New World: And, as the Indies were not found before Those rich perfumes, which, from the happy shore The winds upon their balmy wings conveyed, Whose guilty sweetness first their world betrayed; So, by your counsels, we are brought to view A rich and undiscovered world in you. (73–78)

Once again Dryden’s intense figurative language seems to have gotten out of control, for the winds that blow from the New World are “guilty,” and responsible for seductively betraying their world to rapacious conquest. Clarendon’s counsels, the golden judgment that is his principal political duty as Chancellor, are the rich perfumes that invite a conqueror (presumably Charles II) to appropriate the “rich and undiscovered world” of the man.

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I dwell at some length on what may seem at first glance an obsequious and incoherent poem because the portrait of Clarendon as a channel of justice working hand in glove with the nation’s sovereign soul to engineer equity, peace, and right social order is emblematic of Dryden’s ascriptive goals for the “dramatic poet.” He imagines the poet as an instrument, like Clarendon, of the royal stream of justice and as a medium for cultivating the souls of a divided and traumatized nation though the seductive counsels of fiction or poesis. Through his career, Dryden attributes to the poet an equitable function, seeing the outstanding writer of epic or tragedy as unusually well qualified to interpret the founding intentions of law or polity, and to grasp the universally valid thesis behind the facts and circumstances of a historical narrative of origins. Dryden naturalizes this role: he repeatedly insists that “genius must be born and never can be taught,” even though to natural perceptiveness one must add experience and method. He asserts that poets such as Shakespeare and himself are members of a “godlike race,” and links the fictional method persistently to an ethical mandate: the poet may “add, alter or diminish” historical facts so that his work will be a “just and lively image of human nature” useful to a fractured English public. As I have suggested in the previous chapter, Dryden imagined the serious play as an instrument of public paideia or comprehensive civic and ethical education for the English polity. For Dryden, tragedy is a genre designed for “rendering virtue always amiable, though it be shown unfortunate; and Vice detestable, tho’ it be shown Triumphant,” as he would write in the Heads of an Answer to Rymer. Borrowing from Aristotle, Philip Sidney, and his mentor Sir William Davenant, Dryden sees tragedy as an opportunity for the dramatic poet to guide his audience’s ethical deliberations between facts and norms with the assistance of a deep emotional response. In the Defence of an Essay of Dramatick Poesy, included in the 1667 printing of the Indian Emperour, Dryden outlines his early theory of tragedy, which must “affect the Soul, and excite the Passions and above all . . . move Admiration” (6). But a successful dramatic poem also works as a rhetorical “fable” or an ethical argument on behalf of recognizable principles: in that same essay, Dryden contends that “Moral Truth is the Mistress of the Poet as much as the Philosopher; Poesie may resemble natural Truth but it must be Ethical” (12). Dryden draws on both of what Eric Rothstein has described as the two major theories of tragedy in the Restoration—the “fabulist” and the “affective”—insofar as he builds his play around an abstract moral fable or argument while also pursuing the neo-Aristotelian end of a substantial emotional effect on the audience.3 Throughout his later critical works such 3. Eric Rothstein, Restoration Tragedy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 3–23.

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as Of Heroic Plays, The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, and the Heads of an Answer to Rymer, he reiterates the twin goals of the serious play or “dramatic poem”—to pursue an ethical argument and cultivate the soul of the audience. In this chapter, I focus on two important plays in Dryden’s dramatic canon— the 1665 American-conquest drama The Indian Emperour and the 1679 Troilus and Cressida (the latter a comprehensive renovation of the difficult Shakespearean original). These two melancholy and moving plays elaborate upon Dryden’s theory of tragedy as public paideia, and contribute to the status of literature as experiential and rhetorical medium of political philosophy in the Restoration. More specifically, The Indian Emperour and Troilus and Cressida are occasions of what I have called “imaginative originalism,” the literary and philosophical process through which a writer asks their audience to imagine the first principles of nation-states, the origins and quality of sovereignty, and the limits of individual political obligation. The Indian Emperour describes in soul-commanding fashion the triumph of lupine Hobbesian ambition in the New World, seeing the cruel and venal Spanish conquest of Mexico as symptomatic of a broader crisis of equity in international geopolitics. Dryden’s American play turns the Black Legend of Spanish atrocities in the New World into a source of powerful pathos, and figures the movement of history not as progress but as declension into primitive and lawless brutality. In 1679 Dryden rewrote Shakespeare for the third time, undertaking a comprehensive rearrangement and overhaul of Troilus and Cressida into Truth Found Too Late; or,Troilus and Cressida. This play is much more than the slavishly neoclassical adaptation for which it is commonly taken. Where Shakespeare was interested in contaminating the Troy legend and undermining its political capital, Dryden’s Troilus empties out much of Shakespeare’s anti-aristocratic thesis; Dryden turns a charismatic Trojan past into a measured sketch of the putative national character at its moment of sacrificial inception.4 The play uses the obviously fictional status of the Trojan genealogy in order to incite broad public reflection about the nature of English racial identity, the work of cultural memory, and the normative status of the myth of political foundation. And as he works within the frame of an openly fictional origins myth, Dryden uses his Troilus and Cressida to offer a figural description of the fictional method itself, an influential account of which he gives in the essay attached to the play—The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy.

4. For a discussion of Shakespeare’s engagement with the Troy legend, see Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses describes the eclipse of “degree” as a crisis of worldly justice.5 Without naturalized forms of distinction in political and social order, “right and wrong / Between whose endless jar justice resides, / Should lose their names, and so should justice.” As an antithesis to the condition in which “force should be right”—that violence is always subordinated to moral right—Ulysses posits the grim hegemony of the “universal wolf ” of appetitive violence. Even while it is finally self-consuming, the wolf of absolute power makes a “universal prey” out of humanity once the endless jar of justice is quieted. Ulysses casts justice as both a mediating inhabitant of a dangerous middle ground between clashing forces and as an outcome of this deliberative clash. Justice, it seems here, is both the highest of moral virtues attributable to politics and the consequence of adjudication between right and wrong. When in 1679 Dryden renovates Troilus and Cressida, he cuts this speech severely, substituting “Supremacy of kings” for degree, eliminating outright the lines on the obsolescence of justice, and scaling back the role of appetite:

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O when Supremacy of Kings is shaken, What can succeed: How could Communities Or peaceful Traffic from divided shores, Prerogative of Age, Crowns, Scepters, Laurels, But by degree stand on their solid base! Then every thing resolves to brute force And headlong force is led by hoodwinked will, For wild Ambition, like a ravenous Wolf Spurred on by will and seconded by power, Must make an universal prey of all, And last devour it self.6

Dryden’s truncated version of the degree speech is emblematic of more than just his stylistic preferences and partisan commitment to jure divino kingship. By 5. Force should be right; or rather right and wrong, Between whose endless jar justice resides, Should lose their names, and so should justice. Then everything include itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey And last eat himself up. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.115–23. 6. John Dryden, Truth Found Too Late; or,Troilus and Cressida, in Works, vol. 13, ed. Maximillian Novak, Alan Roper, and Vinton Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

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casting “wild Ambition” as the agent of brute force that shakes the solid base of degree, Dryden narrows Shakespeare’s grimly ubiquitous wolf of will and appetite into the specific political problem of lawless independence and aristocratic overreaching.

Mortality and Mercy in Mexico He came dancing across the water, with his galleons and guns Looking for a new life, and a palace in the sun Cortez, Cortez . . . what a killer —Neil Young, “Cortez the Killer”

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John Dryden’s 1665 The Indian Emperour; or, The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards was one of the most popular heroic plays of the Restoration, and it is easy to see why.7 Building on the world-historical collision of two warlike and chauvinistic empires (Spain and Mexico), Dryden’s play trades upon the frisson of New World exoticism: human sacrifice, interracial romance, the torture of kings, and the norms of antique Mesoamerican culture all contribute to the play’s perceived originality. It is the play that launched Dryden’s career—it was a tremendous success in 1665 and remained in repertory well into the 1720s, when Voltaire saw the play and liked it well enough to write Alzire, a New World play along similar thematic lines.8 Influenced by a wide range of European literary, political, and philosophical writing on the subject of the New World by Montaigne, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Francisco Lopéz de Gómara, Sir William Davenant, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and others, The Indian Emperour is designed to tell a story “the greatest, which was ever represented in a Poem of this nature- (the action of it including the Discovery and Conquest of a New World)” (25).9 7. John Dryden, The Indian Emperour; or, The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards (London, 1667). The play was performed in 1665 but not published until 1667, when it was issued with a critical preface entitled “A Defence of the Essay of Dramatic Poetry.” All subsequent references to The Indian Emperour, its apparatus, and the “Defence” are noted parenthetically, and are drawn from the Works, vol. 9, ed. John Loftis and Vinton Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 8. T. W. Russell, Voltaire, Dryden, and Heroic Tragedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 96–100. The Indian Emperour held the stage until at least the 1720s; in France the story was adapted into Ferrier’s 1698 Montézume and influenced the composition of Alzire. (1723). Subsequent dramatic versions of the conquest theme include Piron’s Fernand Cortez ou Montézume (Paris, 1757), Marmontel’s Les Incas, (1777), Henry Brooke’s Montezuma (1787), August Friedrich von Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru (1795), and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro (1799) 9. Among the most influential early modern accounts of the Conquest translated into English are Peter Martyr’s De novo orbe; or, The Historie of the West Indies (commonly known as the Decades), trans. Richard Eden (London, 1612); Francisco Lopéz de Gómara, The pleasant historie of the conquest of the Weast India, trans. Thomas Nicholas (London, 1578); José Acosta, The naturall and morall historie of the East and

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Translating the fall of the Mexican king Montezuma and his empire into a heroic tragedy liberally salted with agonizing Corneillean romance plots, Dryden uses the play to pose a set of urgent questions—about the quality and limits of political obligation, the nature of kingship, and the extent of territorial sovereignty—and resolve them in casuistical fashion by modeling solutions to nationally ubiquitous problems of love, loyalty, and political obligation. In the years immediately following the Restoration of Charles II, English subjects were bombarded with reminders of their duty to love their kingly father, and their recent inability to carry out this task—new codes of law, retributive treason trials, aborted plots and failed risings, apostasies and punitive disinterments, and public revisions of national history all contributed to the tone of moral anxiety, rather than relief, in these years. The Indian Emperour is a spectacular account of tragic catastrophe at the level of a whole civilization, and in the play Dryden juxtaposes an antiquated but virtuous mode of filial duty with profound political hedonism demonstrated by sovereigns, subjects, and usurpers in order to replicate and then resolve the emotional and moral experience of a nation still divided by years of civil war and political violence. But on top of the ambition to offer a remedy for a crisis of English political obligation, The Indian Emperour figures European imperialism in the New World as a violent and venal enterprise that appropriates and parodies transnational norms of equity, aristocratic honor, and naturalized kingship. The discovery and conquest of Mexico is, for Dryden, a painful emblem of an international crisis in sovereignty that attends the rise and pursuit of a dynamic, restless, improvisational, and ultimately lethal mercantile ideology. Until recently the play has been understood as an endorsement of the great leap forward in history represented by the European overthrown of a savage Mesoamerican culture, a reading enabled by the failure to grasp the Machiavellian hedonism of the charismatic adventurer Cortez.10 Lately, however, Joseph Roach has described The Indian Emperour as a “spectacle of superabundance, miscegenation, and sacrifice” designed to help “British subjects to imagine a community for themselves by making a secular spectacle out of the deeply mysterious play of ethnic identity and difference,” while Bridget Orr has argued that “Dryden acknowledged the West Indies, trans. Edward Grimestome (London, 1604); Gonzalo de Oviedo, The Natural History of the West Indies, trans. Richard Eden (London, 1555). Girolamo Benzoni’s History of the New World (Venice, 1565) and Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s History of the Conquest of New Spain (Madrid, 1632) were available in Spanish and Latin. Analytical commentary is the goal of Bartolomé de Las Casas in his works, especially his widely cited and frequently published Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias. 10. John Loftis, The Spanish Plays of Neoclassical England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 178–208. On the thesis of historical progress, see in particular Anne Barbeau Gardiner, The Intellectual Design of John Dryden’s Plays (New York: Routledge, 1965).

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greatness of Spanish achievement but his critique of the cross-and-booty mode of Peninsular empire implicitly invited the audience to ponder the potentialities of their own liberal, protestant, oceanic expansionism.”11 Unlike Sir William Davenant’s 1657 short opera The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, a work that deeply influenced Dryden’s play, The Indian Emperour makes no provision for “liberal expansionism” and spins out instead a grim portrait of colonial violence. The Indian Emperour ends badly, and it is in that spectacle of collapse that Dryden roots his monitory claims.Where Davenant has a band of intrepid English soldiers rescuing oppressed Peruvians (and thereby leaves behind any pretense of historical verisimilitude), Dryden’s play concludes with a “night of Horror, not of Love” (V, i, 133) that sees the princely hero Guyomar exiled from the ruins of Mexico. Dryden had ready access to the ideology of English imperialism, and could easily have incorporated the jingoism of, for instance, John Phillips’s preface to the 1657 reissue of Las Casas’s Brevissima Relacion (as The Tears of the Indians). He chose, instead, to harvest the painful materials of la leyenda negra (the “Black Legend” of Spanish atrocities in the New World) and put them to work as part of a critique of a venal and hedonistic ideology at work in both the Old and New World.12 The Indian Emperour is to double business bound, then. It offers a monitory portrait of the impact of unrestrained mercantilism on the lawmaking authority and equitable gestures of the sovereign, describing a painful transition from constituted authority to lawless realpolitik. Also, through casuistical modeling, it proposes to deliver the English public from their perceived alienation of affection from a king they are required by law to love as a father. In 1664 Dryden and Sir Robert Howard composed jointly a wholly preColumbian heroic play called The Indian Queen, a usurper-tragedy built on a thesis of just restoration.13 In this play, the masterless warrior Montezuma turns out to be the legitimate heir to the Mexican throne, which he has, coincidentally, redeemed from the clutches of the eponymous usurper.The crude political claims of this narrative of restoration would not have been lost on the English 11. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 153, 145. Bridget Orr, Empire on the English Stage, 1660–1714 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 145. 12. Studies of the Black Legend and its echoes include Sverker Arnoldsson, La leyenda negra: estudios sobre sus orígenes (Göteborg, 1960); Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970); and Benjamin Keen, “The Black Legend Revisited: Assumptions and Realities,” HAHR 49 (1969). Julián Juderías, La leyenda negra: estudios acerca del concepto de España en el extranjero (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1974), and William Maltby, The Black Legend in England, 1550–1700 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1971), defend the Conquest as a “White Legend.” 13. John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard, The Indian Queen (London, 1664). All subsequent references to this play are cited parenthetically in the text accompanied by the abbreviation IQ and drawn from the Works, vol. 8, ed. John Loftis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).

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audience, and, as Susan Staves has pointed out, such a thematic proposition was ubiquitous in the new plays in the early years of the Restoration.14 The Indian Queen is notable mostly for having brought Mesoamerican civilizations onto the English stage for the first time. But I suggest also that the play establishes a set of rhetorical and philosophical norms (justice, mercy, sovereign legitimacy, the rule of law) that Dryden would continue to associate with the Americas in The Indian Emperour. Although aspects of this play are cribbed from the Zelmatide episode in the French prose romance Polexandré by Marin le Roy de Gomberville, in my view The Indian Queen adapts the plot and concerns of a play chronologically far afield but thematically close to home—Aeschylus’s Eumenides, the third play in the Oresteia. The Eumenides dramatizes the birth of justice and the emergence of Athenian civil society from the rule of blood vengeance and the retributive lex talionis.15 Although it lacks a courtroom climax, The Indian Queen rewrites the Eumenides, tracking the birth of justice in Mexico over and against the cruel and archaic rule of the usurping Queen Zempoalla, who had her brother murdered to take his throne. Once he ascends his rightful throne, Montezuma shows off his newfound powers of mortality and mercy—The Indian Queen closes with a pageant of pardons, beginning with the forgiveness of the bloodbathed Zempoalla: “Live Zempoalla—free from dangers live; / For present merits I past crimes forgive” (IQ, V, i, 262–63). The conclusion expands into a list of axiomatic utterances such as “Kings best revenge their wrongs when they forgive” (IQ, V, i, 271). Zempoalla rejects this new nomos, preferring instead to kill herself; with her death the lex talionis is banished from Mexico and the movement from archaic to civil law is complete. Here the retributive economy has consumed itself, making way for a system based upon clemency and justice, in which kings “best revenge their wrongs when they forgive.” The Indian Emperour recycled expensive sets and costumes from the 1664 Indian Queen and continues that play’s use of rhymed verse, but the play represents Dryden’s break from the formulaic idiom he had explored with Howard. In fact, in his first single-author heroic play, Dryden undoes the etiology of law and the narrative distribution of desert so central to the argument of The Indian 14. Susan Staves offers the finest exposition of this theme in Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979). See also Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660–1700 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1980); Rothstein, Restoration Tragedy; J. Douglas Canfield, Heroes and States: On the Ideology of Restoration Tragedy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); and Derek Hughes, Dryden’s Heroic Plays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981). 15. See Danielle Allen, The World of Prometheus:The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), and Theodore Ziolkowski, The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 33–55.

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Queen; he inverts the Eumenidean logic of the former play to thematize the crisis and failure of a worldly sovereign, the aggressive inroads of Hobbesian realpolitik, and the return of archaic blood violence. The Indian Emperour opens with a scene of Spanish wonder; Cortez and his henchmen Vasquez and Pizarro disclose their fantasies of lucre, lust, and massacre while they utter pseudoOvidian clichés and spout weird metaphors describing parturition, the “viewing of parts” (e.g., sexual organs), and mountains that urinate silver.16 While Vasquez contemplates where he might find the residue of the mountains’ “silver shower,” the reprobate Pizarro hatches a plan to avoid the appearance of an unjust war: “Declare we first our quarrel, then Invade” (I, i. 42). This is of course a pretext. Cortez, who seems determined to mimic aristocratic honor and inhabit a romance world, offers a slight refinement of Pizarro’s war plan: “By noble ways we Conquest will prepare, / First offer peace, and that refus’d make war” (I, i, 51–52). Cortez professes noble ways but has already settled upon a more rigorous course than even the venal Pizarro. He will offer peace on impossible terms in order to guarantee a refusal and thereby invasion—there is nothing conditional in this strategy, and with this scene Dryden turns a familiar trope of European astonishment at an American Eden quickly into a vicious serialization of goods to be extracted and lusts to be satisfied. Along these lines, the historical content of The Indian Emperour, gleaned from Las Casas, Oviedo, Gómara, Montaigne, and others, is chiefly concentrated in the first act—the interview of Montezuma and Cortez, the Aztec prophecy of Quetzalcoatl’s return from the sea, the figure of “invisible bullets,” stock doxologies of conquest, and the reading of the requerimiento announcing the sovereignty of Charles V all come onstage right away. By front-loading these well-known historical anecdotes, Dryden raises the emotional stakes of the action while calling into question the moral status of both civilizations on stage. Spain and Mexico begin in a condition of cultural equilibrium, each in its way potentially savage.When we first meet Montezuma, for instance, it’s his birthday, and there’s a party: “The incense is upon the altar placed, / The bloody sacrifice already past. / Five hundred captives saw the rising Sun, / Who lost their light ere half his race was run” (I, ii, 3–6). Dryden invokes the most vivid and wellknown image of Aztec brutality—human sacrifice—to create a tone of obvious violence that applies to Montezuma’s imperial kingship, to the New World, and, most critically, to the Spanish conquistadores as well. As Joseph Roach has written of this moment, “the horror of human sacrifice . . . establishes not 16. Vasquez professes wonder at the ubiquity of gold and silver: “Methinks we walk in dreams on fairy land / Where golden Ore lies mixed with common sand; Each downfall of a flood the Mountains pour, / From their rich bowels rolls a silver shower” (I, i, 27–30).

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only the uncanny otherness of the Indians but also their uncanny familiarity” (148). The extravagant figure of human sacrifice, as Roach implies, is a leveling trope designed to merge the Spanish and the Mexicans into one coherent picture of violence, passion, and coercion, one shared portrait of vaguely unpalatable but happily remote savagery. But this apparent leveling quickly collapses as the play unfolds and the civilizations recede toward somewhat more stable moral poles.The Spanish reveals themselves to be venal, vicious, and grotesquely fraudulent—even the putatively heroic Cortez is revealed to be a duplicitous hedonist—while the Mexican princes become magnanimous and courtly in an excruciating downfall which is, in best tragic form, a disaster at least partly of their own making. The Indian Emperour roots its ethical program in a critique of the broader contemporary assault on transnational and embodied norms of aristocratic honor, justice, and sovereign equity. Like the Eumenides and Measure for Measure, The Indian Emperour contrasts the rigorous interpretation of law with the merciful juridical flexibility of equity. But unlike these important predecessors, Dryden’s play thematizes the failure of equity in the face of raw power and describes the worldly retreat rather than the triumph of justice. The crisis of equity is portrayed in familiar dramatic terms as a struggle for sovereignty between the legitimate king and the charismatic adventurer-aristocrat, in the line of Shakespeare’s Richard II.17 In his version of the famous interview between Montezuma and Cortez, Dryden gives us a travesty of equity in which the “ambassador” Cortez offers clemency to a Montezuma regnant.18 Cortez’s Taxallan allies having captured Montezuma and his court, the Spanish leader does begin their meeting with an act of apparently “wond’rous mercy” (I, ii, 218)—he frees Montezuma and his attendant princes. Is this unconditional benevolence from the romance lead of the play? Hardly. Cortez frees the court to preserve the propriety of his ambassadorial office; by granting something akin to mercy to Montezuma, Cortez at once establishes the proper terms for submission to Spanish sovereignty and creates a debt of honor from a king to a private subject. Since it is Cortez’s stated intent to offer peace and then make war, it follows that his offer must be made on equal terms between parties, even though an essentially private debt of honor remains. 17. On Richard II as emblem of sovereignty in distress in the seventeenth-century see Tracey Tomlinson, “Breaking the Mirror: The English History Play in the Seventeenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2002). 18. On the embassy trope, see Roland Greene, “Fictions of Embassy, Fictions of Immanence,” in The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and The New World, ed. Elizabeth Fowler and Roland Greene (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in the European Encounter with the New World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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Defending his decision to the Taxallan allies, Cortez claims that “nor are they my Foes my clemency defends, / Until they have refus’d the name of Friends,” and then offers an example of what happens when his friendship is refused: “Draw up our Spaniards by themselves, then Fire / Our Guns on all who do not straight retire” (I, ii, 220–23). That Cortez is in the position to grant mercy to Montezuma is the leading edge of an inversion that associates the Spaniards with the rigorous application of the laws of conquest that will rapidly return Mexico to an archaic and violent nomos. Cortez’s threat to the Taxallans reveals the quality of his “mercy”: ostensibly setting Montezuma back on a level playing field, he demonstrates the dire consequences of refusing a public friendship he has already contracted privately. Further, this pardon or liberation of Montezuma and his court is the first of many fictions of equity improvised by Cortez in order to ease and legitimate his conquest.19 Continuing with the world turned upside down of his embassy, the Spaniards offer terms of submission from “Charles the Fifth, the worlds most Potent King,” whom Montezuma immediately brands as “some petty Prince” and “poor Tributary Lord” (I, ii, 254,259). Aside from encouraging anti-hispanist glee in a playhouse audience, this line allows Cortez an opportunity to delegate his embassy to an underling, leaving him free to flirt with Montezuma’s nubile daughter Cydaria, “entertaining her with courtship in dumbshow” (I, ii, 266). Vasquez reads Dryden’s redaction of the famous requerimiento: Spain’s mighty Monarch, to whom Heaven thinks fit That all the Nations of the Earth submit, In gracious clemency, does condescend On these conditions to become your Friend, First, that of him you shall your Scepter hold Next, you present him with your useless Gold: Last, that you leave those Idols you adore, And one true Deity with prayers implore. (I, ii, 266–73)

Montezuma shrugs off this list of absurd demands, derisively taunting the Spaniards with his disdain for gold. Like Cortez’s earlier desire to pretend “noble ways” but inevitably make war, the requerimiento is a covering fiction designed to lend conquest a veneer of lawfulness. It is, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s terms from the Critique of Violence, evidence of “something rotten in the law,” a moment designed to incite capital violence and thus make new (Spanish) 19. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

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law in Mexico.20 Moreover, here Dryden makes a dramatic pun with the dual meanings of the Spanish verb requerir —which means both “to require” and “to seduce.” Vasquez performs his ceremonial duty by requiring the absolute submission of Montezuma to Charles V while Cortez begins his successful seduction of Cydaria, and the scene is meant to imply that these apparently disparate acts are legible as part of one coherent ethos of malignant conquest.21 The demands of Vasquez’s requerimiento would certainly have resonated as profoundly ironic, particularly Charles V’s “gracious clemency” in condescending to conditional friendship with Montezuma.22 The requerimiento here pronounced by Vasquez is more than imperial bluster— historically resonant as a callous justification of slaughter, these lines make explicit the opposition between Montezuma’s legitimate sovereignty and the stark violence to come. After an exchange casting in doubt the Pope’s ability to grant or alienate sovereignty, Montezuma rejects the “peaceful” demands of the “proud, and Poor” Charles: “Your gods I slight not, but will keep my own, / My Crown is absolute, and holds of none; / I cannot in a base subjection live, / Nor suffer you to take, though I would give” (I, ii, 323–26). Echoing the Bodinian model of “royal sovereignty” Dryden had promoted in Astrea Redux, Montezuma reasserts his status as a lawmaker, a parent, and most critically as a dispenser of mercy. The exchange over the requerimiento emphasizes the irreconcilable conflict between legal norms (Mexican and Spanish) and in doing so brings into question the status of law itself. By rejecting Montezuma’s dominion, the Spaniards ignore ius gentium and its foundations in the law of nature, preferring instead the unvarnished positivism of conquest. Since equity is the process by which the sovereign is thought to bring natural and positive law into harmony, the requerimiento is the first of many steps in the play toward a lupine law of the sword propped up by covering or legal fictions of one kind or another. The requerimiento is the legal fiction authorizing territorial conquest—it is the juridical equivalent of the aristocratic fiction of honor with which Cortez veils (deliberately or ignorantly) the violence of his minions. Although the Spanish conqueror continues to defend his invasion with the rhetoric of merciful friendship, later the Mexican princess Alibech denounces such claims of justice as mere coercion: “Injurious strength would rapine still

20. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz and trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 286. 21. Studies of the requerimiento and its cultural legacy include Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, and Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America. 22. On the popular awareness of episodes such as the utterance of the requerimiento, see Maltby, The Black Legend in England, 12–28.

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excuse, / By off ’ring terms the weaker must refuse; And such as these your hard conditions are, / You threaten Peace, and you invite a War” (II, ii, 20–23). In this suggestive exchange, Cortez retorts that he is merely the executor of royal commands and is “not to dispute / My Princes orders” (II, ii, 27–28), after which Alibech chastises such unflinching obedience: “He who his Prince so blindly does obey, / To keep his faith his Vertue throws away” (II, ii, 29–30). Though he continues by defending the sovereign’s right to have his orders obeyed in “each private breast,” this short exchange completes the inversion or travesty of mercy that begins when Cortez frees Montezuma and his court. His claims to Alibech reveal the ironic absurdity of a private subject (even in the role of ambassador) offering political forgiveness to a monarch well in possession of his empire.The irony would have been amplified by knowledge of the historical record upon which Dryden loosely drew: in most English translations of the Conquest, Cortez is a rebel against royal authority in the person of Velasquez, governor of Cuba, when he sets off on his unauthorized expedition to Mexico.23 The appropriation of the power of mortality and mercy by private individuals, even if their acts tend toward the glory of their nation, emblematizes the perceived threat to justice afoot in the colonial Americas.24 The Indian Emperour ’s debates over Mexican versus Spanish sovereignty, the authority of the Pope, and the scope of Montezuma’s property rights signal the play’s thematic presentation of an exacting or strict interpretation of law in the service of private (acquisitive, retributive, or passionate) motives. In addition to Vasquez’s incantation of the requerimiento, these dramatic disputes between Montezuma and the Spaniards’ arguments would evoke a second example of the legislative justification of cruelty, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s argument that Indians were “natural slaves” and thus not in possession of dominion over their lands. Famously refuted by Las Casas in the 1554 Valladolid debates, Sepúlveda couched his defense of the conquest in Aristotelian and legalistic terms, arguing that human sacrifice and idolatry demonstrated that the Mexicans were outside of civil society and thus incapable of exercising dominion over their own 23. Dryden’s sources are many. Chronicles of the conquest were published often in complete translations, and earlier in the seventeenth century a large number were anthologized in Purchas His Pilgrimes. Aside from Davenant’s The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, Dryden likely drew upon a large number of Spanish and English sources, including Las Casas, Tears of the Indians, Gómara, The pleasant historie of the conquest of the Weast India, Acosta, The naturall and morall historie of the East and West Indies, and Oviedo, The Natural History of the West Indies. It is also likely that Dryden drew at least Montezuma’s torture scene from Montaigne’s essay “on the cannibals.” On the general question of Dryden’s relationship to these sources, see Dougald MacMillan, “The Sources of Dryden’s The Indian Emperour,” Huntington Library Quarterly 13 (1950): 355–70. 24. Aphra Behn’s Widow Ranter is a later tragicomic consideration of the problem of aristocratic warrior excess.

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lands.25 In this line of argument, the only just course of action is to subdue Mexico by force in order to eliminate inhumane savagery, the murder of innocents, and the institutional practice of injustice. But such a position allows dangerous conclusions to be drawn about the nature of sovereignty if institutional practices like human sacrifice can cancel a nation’s legal right to dominion. The threat of sovereign alienation would be clear in an England still haunted by a profound anxiety about the interventionist foreign policy of international Catholicism. If the Spaniards could continue their Reconquista into the New World and legitimate it on philosophical grounds (however spurious), then the sovereignty of any allegedly heretical nation was potentially compromised.26 Although imperial adventurers eager to justify their slaveholdings and plundering embraced Sepúlveda’s thesis that Amerindians were “natural slaves” in the Aristotelian mold, the ethical and political status of the American empires was the subject of rich and endlessly variable controversy in Spain and in Europe more generally.27 Las Casas argued in contrast that since human sacrifice was an institutional part of Mexican culture, it was unjust to punish a Mexican for obeying the laws of his nation, which themselves ought to be interpreted through the relatively tolerant lens of ius gentium. In the Defense of the Indians, Las Casas writes that it is unjust and unlawful to kill an Indian with the pretext of preventing human sacrifice, since the ritual is a cultural institution given binding force by Mexican public law: “In some regions of the New World, either by law or by very ancient custom, [sacrifice] is confirmed by order of the rulers and scholars and priests and so by public authority, it is thought to be reverent and holy to sacrifice men to the gods who are taken for the true God, it follows that this custom and common error establishes a law among them and, consequently, will excuse those who sacrifice, since he is not considered to err or be mistaken who obeys a public law.”28 Sepúlveda, as Las Casas would claim, was a rank apologist for impious atrocity. His law of natural slavery was nothing but a fraudulent set of norms justifying enrichment and enslavement. Such manipulation of ius gentium is concrete evidence of tyranny, the unjust use of public offices, funds, powers, and institutions for private or personal enrichment, pleasure, ambition, power, or plain old malice. 25. The best overview of this complex and often byzantine series of political and theological debates is Anthony Pagden, “Dispossessing the Barbarian: The Language of Spanish Thomism and the Debate Over the Property Rights of the American Indians,” in his Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1990). 26. On the persistence of the Reconquista script, see Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 27. Pagden, “Dispossessing the Barbarian,” 31. 28. Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, ed. and trans. Stafford Poole (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992).

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The passage from sovereign justice to backward-looking tyranny is most plainly revealed in the play’s most famous scene (one borrowed from the French version of Montaigne’s essay “of Coaches”) in which Pizarro and a Jesuit accomplice torture Montezuma and a Mexican priest on the rack. This scene reveals not just the cruelty of a Spanish interpretation of positive law, but also offers evidence of what in the 1660s would have been an obvious point—that the debates over Indian sovereignty were not solely matters of colonial policy. Defending the torture and deposition of kings with the rhetoric of piety and justice, in Dryden’s view, is the first step toward backsliding into a crude condition dominated by lex talionis and venal sword-law. By the end of the play, Cortez has devoted all his time to courting the winsome Cydaria, neglecting entirely his political and military offices. Pizarro exploits this vacuum, gathering up a cleric to help him interrogate Montezuma and his high priest on the topic of hidden gold. Taunting Pizarro with “gold [he] shall never find,” Montezuma endures the rack with stoic fortitude, contemptuously rejecting the “Barb’rous Cruelty” of Pizarro which the Indian high priest cannot bear. Recognizing that he is temporarily the “subject of [Spanish] tyranny,” Montezuma yet again makes explicit the contrast between Spanish injustice and the sacral character of royal sovereignty, claiming that “when Monarchs suffer, gods themselves bear part” (V, ii, 27). Trying to convert Montezuma into revealing his gold, the Jesuit engages the racked king in a doctrinal argument, repeatedly dismissing Montezuma’s “heathen ignorance.” Echoing Sepúlveda’s claim of Mexican infantilism as well as a critique of Mexican polytheism, the Jesuit demands of Montezuma that “Since Age by erring Childhood is misled, / Refer your self to our un-erring Head” (V, ii, 88–89), and then offers to “make your reason judge what way to go” (V, ii, 95). As examples of tyranny these dicta are less potent than, say, torture, but the Jesuit’s claims and actions do deepen the already strong association of Spanish colonial Catholicism with New World genocide, plunder, and enslavement. Like his earlier rejection of the authority of the Pope and Charles V, Montezuma refutes the jesuitical reasoning of his interlocutor while Pizarro impatiently waits for directions to the treasury. The racked king speaks with the voice of natural law as he argues. Resisting the Jesuit’s claim of Catholic supremacy, Montezuma contends that nations and faiths practice different customs in the service of a universal divine law: “to mankind / one equal way to bliss is not designed. / For though some more may know, and some know less, / Yet all must know enough for happiness” (V, ii 73–76). All nations, however they constitute their religious and political customs, are governed by the timeless “Light of Nature,” the “Publick Light” of ius gentium in which early modern culture embodies a politically cosmopolitan

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mean.29 Immediately after he delivers the famous pathetic lines “Think’st thou I lye on Beds of Roses here, / Or in a Wanton Bath stretch’d at my ease?” (V, ii, 103–4), Montezuma is freed from the rack at the entry of an otherwise preoccupied Cortez. Ironically distanced from the inhumane Pizarro and his Jesuit accomplice by his pursuit of Cydaria and concomitant neglect of his authority, Cortez kneels weeping before the tortured King, who initially derides him: “Am I so low that you should pity bring, / And give an Infants Comfort to a King?” (V, ii, 119–20). Nicely inverting the Jesuit’s dictum above, Montezuma restores his kingly office by haughtily refusing the pity of his inferior. Cortez sends the torturers away and acknowledges the return of a law based on retribution: “Accursed Gold, ’tis thou hast caus’d these crimes; / Thou turn’st our Steel against thy Parent Climes! / And into Spain wilt fatally be brought, / Since with the price of Blood thou here are bought” (V, ii, 135–38). As in the lex talionis, cruelty begets cruelty, murder murder. That Cortez imagines the “price of Blood” as a curse only heightens the supernatural and archaic quality of this retribution to be visited upon Spain.30 The brutal law of simple vengeance that failed in The Indian Queen has returned in an ostensibly modern form; here Cortez acknowledges Spanish culpability for the fall of justice in Mexico and recognizes that their cruelty will be reenacted as blood vengeance. Lex talionis is back. It is fitting that one of Montezuma’s last political acts is related to equity: a kneeling, weeping Cortez asks Montezuma to “forget those Crimes” Pizarro and the Jesuit committed while under his authority. Montezuma, searching into the intentions of his supplicant, does his kingly office by forgiving Cortez: “Rise Sir, I’m satisfied the fault was theirs” (V, ii, 140). Reasserting his authority, Montezuma here distances Cortez from his torturers while reasserting the Spaniard’s “mistaken clemency.” The tortured monarch acknowledges Cortez’s virtuous motives in freeing him once again, but refuses the debt of honor he owes to Cortez. He is, after all, a king and not a subject: “I was your Slave, and I was used like one; / The Shame continues when the Pain is gone: / But I’m a King while this is in my Hand [his sword ] (V, ii, 222–24). Montezuma stabs himself and dies to expiate his failed sovereignty, but it is only power and not legitimacy or 29. On the cosmopolitan mean and its place in the seventeenth-century literary imagination, see Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), and for a discussion of this scene as an interrogation of philosophical skepticism, see Angus Ian Fletcher, “The Aesthetics of Doubt: Skepticism and Tragedy in Seventeenth-Century England” (Ph. D. diss.,Yale University, 2003). 30. On the supernatural quality of the forces here loosed, see David Bruce Kramer, The Imperial Dryden: The Poetics of Appropriation in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994).

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kingship that is transferred to Cortez. Since he is only a subject and a conqueror, Cortez’s clemency will always be mistaken.The romance hero does successfully seduce Cydaria, but his rule offers no political solution to the ubiquitous violence present or impending in Mexico: he is distracted and overwhelmed by love and is consistently unable to prevent his troops from beginning wars or committing tortures. Although after he discovers the torture Cortez sends Pizarro scuttling offstage with a threat of punishment under martial law, it is clear by the end of the play that a parody of sovereignty in the person of Cortez has replaced a real king and that the new law in Mexico is a medley of greed, false piety, and inhumane cruelty figured in Pizarro and the Jesuit. For not only does the Black Legend lurk as a historical reminder here, but also Guyomar and Alibech, the rightful sovereigns of Mexico, depart north into voluntary exile, “where Rocks lye cover’d with Eternal Snow; / Thin herbage in the Plains, and fruitless Fields, / [and] The Sand no Gold, the Mine no Silver yields” (V, ii, 369–71). Although Montezuma and Mexico are both deeply flawed and ethically murky, the new regime is a Hobbesian nightmare of violence and venality made all the worse by its fraudulent covering fiction of aristocratic honor emitted by the despicable Cortez. If a philosopher and a Pope can repudiate the sovereign law of whole civilizations, if a charismatic adventurer can improvise or ape the habits and judgment of kings, if equity and honor fall before the sword, then for Dryden the just rule of law both territorial and international is in peril of becoming nothing more than sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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The Casuistry of Love and Duty In the 1660s, the spectacular trials and public executions of regicides and the imposition of the Clarendon Codes dredged up rather than banished the memory of a “disloyal” past. Due to the powerful affective analogy that cast the king as pater patriae, the English people were obliged collectively to consider how, as the treason statute 11 Hen. 7 cap. 2 puts it, they had managed their “cordial love, and true, due, and natural obedience” to their royal father since 1649. The restored Charles II was thus potentially figured as a disappointed father or a jilted lover.Victoria Kahn has argued that the prose romance was one of the age’s most fluent and adaptable genres for discussing and shaping the philosophy and individual experience of political obligation. Romance, and in particular the short prose romance in the 1640s and 1650s, Kahn contends, allows readers to “imagine and ask questions about a political subject who consents to be contractually bound,” and more polemically, allows Margaret Cavendish,

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the author of the short prose romance “The Contract,” to unfold a theory of “political obligation based on love rather than on filial obedience.”31 With The Indian Emperour, Dryden turns the serious play away from the usurper-tragedies and narratives of just restoration that dominated the stage in the 1660s and celebrated the providential distribution of desert and the grievous punishment of treason and apostasy. Dryden sees his play, perhaps akin to the politically inflected prose romances Kahn describes, as a deeply structured medium to replicate and transmit the ethical experience of individual political subjects as they confront competing claims of loyalty, honor, and obligation and adjudicate the nature and extent of their ethical duties to family, nation, reputation, and self. The romance plots in The Indian Emperour are deeply inflected by the language and forms of casuistry, the seventeenth-century science of ethical problemsolving that sprung up in print culture to help a nation confront their collective unease over ubiquitous dilemmas of love, loyalty, and duty.32 The “case of conscience” is predicated upon uncertain moral circumstances, and much of the casuistical enterprise is devoted to settling questions of public interest. John Hall’s 1654 Cases of Conscience Practically Resolved, for instance, offers guidance on whether it is just to enter into monopolies, for a man to marry his wife’s brother’s widow, and whether upon the appearance of evil spirits one may hold discourse with them. But political obligation with all its religious inflections is clearly the main concern in most of the printed cases of conscience, as for example in the copious fulminations of Bishop Robert Sanderson, the period’s leading casuist. Sanderson, like Hall and others, spends most of his time weaving answers to the period’s basic questions of political obligation, such as whether and how far one is obliged to obey a usurper or an unjust rule of law, at what point love and duty for a supplanted king may and may not cease, and to what degree may subjects consider the justice or injustice of lawful commands. Patriarchal and royalist theories of political obligation are ripe for casuistry, since they rely so deeply on a complex affective analogy figuring the sovereign as a beloved pater patriae. If one must love the king as a father, can 31. Victoria Kahn, “Margaret Cavendish and the Romance of Contract,” Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997), and “Reinventing Romance, or the Surprising Effects of Sympathy,” Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002). 32. On the doctrine and discipline of casuistry, see Keith Thomas, “Cases of Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Public Duty and Private Conscience: Essays Presented to G. E. Aylmer, ed. J. S. Morrill, Paul Slack, and D. R. Woolf (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Lowell Gallagher, Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). On the application of casuistry in contemporary literary circles, see John Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), and G. A. Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). On Dryden’s use of casuistry, see Alan Roper’s “Commentary” on The Conquest of Granada in Works, 9:407–25.

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and must that love be reassigned when a new authority comes to claim it? How is a subject to know whether divine justice has swept a tyrant from the throne and replaced him with a just and godly prince? Is it appropriate to obey a tyrant? In The Indian Emperour Dryden creates the subplots surrounding Montezuma’s two good children Guyomar and Cydaria as antithetical models of casuistical problem-solving. In each case, Dryden presents and resolves a series of ethical hurdles and ambiguous crises of obligation that would have been quite familiar to his English audience. The romance between Cortez and Cydaria is a plot suffused with routine ethical ambiguity—does the Mexican princess owe her love and loyalty to her father and king, or may she transfer her allegiance to the charismatic conqueror so obviously rich with futurity? Are they mutually exclusive? She chooses hedonism in the political sense, abjuring her family and her nation in the service of individual pleasure. Guyomar, by contrast, is Dryden’s normative remedy for the crisis of obligation. The virtuous prince negotiates a very dangerous path guided by an unimpeachable sense of justice. Even while he flirts with the appearance of treason, Guyomar illustrates the magnanimous style of political obligation and emerges from the play ethically unscathed. A rehearsal of the complex plots and crises provides a bit of the flavor of this play’s ethical framework. Montezuma passionately loves Almeria, the cruel daughter of his former rival Zempoalla (from the Indian Queen) who seeks revenge on behalf of her mother and commands the king as a slave. Montezuma’s sons Guyomar and Odmar compete for the love of the patriotic pragmatist Alibech. Cortez is infatuated with Montezuma’s grave but insubstantial daughter Cydaria while Almeria swoons over the same Spaniard. As the play unfolds, Guyomar seems to betray his father Montezuma in favor of the equally aristocratic Cortez and Odmar jealously betrays his brother-rival Guyomar and their father Montezuma, who seems to desert his role as pater patriae at Almeria’s behest. Alibech betrays her mother Zempoalla’s ghostly cry for vengeance while Cydaria falls in love with her father’s usurper and the malicious Almeria lets her infatuation with Cortez thwart both Zempoalla’s revenge and the triumph of Mexican forces. Cortez and Cydaria come together in the end while Montezuma and Almeria each die by proud suicide. The gloriously virtuous Guyomar and his Alibech flee Mexico for a land “where rocks lie covered with eternal snow,” presumably Canada. No character in the Indian Emperour is a more suitable figure for moral identification and the political education of English subjects than Guyomar. Although he is saddled with conflicting moral and political obligations, Guyomar’s every action is transparent and supplies a qualifying hypothesis of virtuous intentions. Montezuma is confronted with the standard crisis of heroic

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tragedy—he must choose between public duty and private pleasure, and his agonized vacillations between these poles make up much of the dramatic action of the play.33 But Guyomar is caught between political obligations to his father and the usurping Cortez, even while he competing with his brother Odmar for the hand of an apparently fickle Alibech. Guyomar must manage two complex economies of obligation—his loyalty to Mexico and to his father conflicts with his aristocratic debt of honor to Cortez and with his pursuit of the patriotic princess Alibech. But he manages to extract himself from charges of treason, disloyalty to his father, and (most alarmingly) lukewarm passion for his beloved. Guyomar’s ethical conflicts result from his romantic contest with Odmar for the love of Alibech. In the first battle between Mexicans and Spaniards, Montezuma and Alibech are isolated and split by a Spanish attack, presenting Guyomar and Odmar with a tough decision—whom to rescue? Guyomar “follows Piety” to save Montezuma (and the state) while Odmar celebrates his individual passions by saving Alibech (II, iii, 47). Guyomar defends his difficult choice by claiming that his love and his duty are inseparable while casting Odmar as a traitor: “Her Country, she did to herself prefer, / Him who fought best, not who defended her; / Since she her interest for the nations wav’d, / Then I who sav’d the King, the Nation sav’d; / You aiding her, your country did betray, / I aiding him, did her command obey” (III, I, 33–38). Guyomar’s speech reveals his rather orthodox sense of political obligation. His love and duty toward the king and the nation are inseparable—in fact his erotic desires for Alibech are not subordinated to but encompassed in his duty to the state. Odmar is a hedonist by contrast. In the course of saving the nation, Guyomar is briefly captured by Cortez, who frees the prince sympathetically because they are both rival lovers (for different princesses). This gesture establishes a new debt of aristocratic honor to contrast with the Mexican prince’s existing debts of dynastic, filial, and national allegiance. Guyomar considers Cortez his “brother, [a name his] breast shall ever own,” although they may still be enemies at war (II, iii, 173–74). These competing obligations do not present an immediate problem for Guyomar, who prevents the assassination of Cortez as a morally reprehensible act, even though it would benefit Mexico. In the course of an unsuccessful attack on Tenochtitlán, Cortez kills the “degenerate coward Orbellan” and is then captured by Odmar and Guyomar. The bloodthirsty Mexican princess Almeria (a reprise of her mother Zempoalla), who commands Montezuma’s passions, demands that 33. See Eugene Waith, The Herculean Hero in Seventeenth-Century English Drama (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), and Staves, Players’ Scepters.

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Cortez be executed for killing her brother Orbellan, but Guyomar resists his father in aristocratic manner: “He yielded on my word; / And as my Pris’ner, I restore his Sword; / His Life concerns the safety of the State, / And I’le preserve it for a calm debate” (III, iv, 91–94). In this case preferring the “safety of the state” over the wishes his father the king, Guyomar’s preference for justice leads him into an act of rebellion. Neither reason of state nor filial piety sways the stubborn Guyomar, for whom the “safety of the state” describes not a pater patriae (or even a natural one) but instead a national commitment to transnational precepts of justice. Infuriated, Montezuma brands him a “false and degenerate boy” who dares to rebel against his authority, and goes to kill him: “that being which I gave, I thus destroy” (III, iv, 95–96). Forced into an unenviable clash of ethical obligations, Guyomar seems to have chosen the abstract path of honor unwisely. But Odmar and Cortez trip over each other in offering themselves as surrogative sacrifices for Guyomar while Almeria screams that all of the princes “merit death . . . for rebellion [and Cortez] for murder” (III, iv, 119–20). Rejecting her cry for satisfaction, Montezuma instead delays Cortez’s execution, hoping that Almeria will eventually abandon her thirst for revenge. Caught between duty to his father’s law and his sense of moral justice, Guyomar rebels against what he perceives correctly to be a tyranny without wholly abandoning his love and respect for his sovereign and father. Guyomar doesn’t swerve from his position, but Montezuma does; recognizing his own “head-long passion” and hoping for “pity,” Montezuma restores Cortez to Guyomar’s custody and postpones the execution (III, iv, 131–32). Although defending Cortez is an act of rebellion, the prince’s clear commitment to norms of justice mitigates his guilt. Guyomar’s rebellion stages the manner in which a subject’s rightful obedience “in lawful things” may be compromised while his love and duty remained fixed upon their original liege. Shortly after the “rebellion” scene, Guyomar demonstrates unwavering loyalty to his father when he rejects Alibech’s pragmatic plea to “save the town” by surrendering it to a merciful Cortez: Alibech When Kings grow stubborn, slothful, or unwise Each private man for publick good should rise. Guyomar Take heed, Fair Maid, how Monarchs you accuse: Such reasons none but impious Rebels use: Those who to Empire by dark paths aspire, Still plead a call to what they most desire; But Kings by free consent their Kingdoms take, Strict as those Sacred Ties which Nuptials make;

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And what e’re faults in Princes time reveal, None can be Judge where can be no Appeal. (IV, ii, 75–83)

Coming on the heels of his own impious accusation of a monarch, Guyomar’s position would be surprising if his ethos was not so deliberately transparent.The prince’s filial piety, love, and allegiance to Montezuma are unimpeachable, even if Guyomar’s particular actions previously defied his legal will. Imagining his father’s authority in the language of the marriage contract as well as in terms of his position above the law “where can be no Appeal,” Guyomar here defends Montezuma and the institution of absolute kingship in unambiguous terms. When he excoriates Alibech for her seemingly republican views that “each private man should for publick good rise,” the loyal prince builds his critique around the matter of judgment, elevating the deliberations of the sovereign into the realm of the sacred. Guyomar falls back on equity as the fundamental index of sovereign power: since “None can be Judge where can be no Appeal,” only Montezuma is fit to judge and command. Guyomar’s stance is ironic, of course—he has only recently thwarted the will of his mercurial father whose judgment is beyond appeal. His reply to Alibech is chiefly abstract, and in it the Mexican prince defends the theory of kingship if not the conduct of his father. Montezuma’s struggles to rein in his passions are excused conditionally in Guyomar’s theory—whatever faults the tragic king displays are punished by God and not humanity. Here the Mexican prince reiterates the standard index of seventeenth-century political obligation: the subject has no right to inquire into the title of his sovereign or conqueror, an office that falls to God alone, and as a result is protected from retribution or claims of disloyalty.34 When Guyomar rejects Alibech and her republican ferment with a “burning heart,” he has again chosen piety over passion, reiterating the self-denying stoicism of seventeenth-century dynastic loyalty. The affective power of Guyomar’s painful decisions between ethical creditors (Alibech, Montezuma, Cortez) could not but stimulate “concernment” or identification in Dryden’s audience, who see in the Mexican prince a figure like themselves: an individual presented with conflicting obligations and desires who hopes to act

34. Consider the issue of filial love of subject for a deposed monarch. Although deposition is in royalist thought illegal, the subject is nevertheless under the coercive authority of the law of the conqueror, and caught in an awkward position. If subjects publicly maintain their love for the deposed king, they are guilty of treasonous sedition, but if that love is kept private, they are guilty of dissimulation and ethical alienation from the polity. Contrarily, if subjects reassign their allegiance pragmatically to the new sovereign, they illustrate the arbitrary and incomplete nature of the love-bond in the first place. The way out of this problem is to claim, as Hobbes does in Leviathan, that no one may be required by law to waive the right of self-preservation. It is better to submit than to be killed by a conqueror.

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ethically and legally. Guyomar’s “case of conscience” mitigates the prince’s putatively disloyal conduct by casting it as equity in action—he exercises ethical discretion to ensure that judgments or punishments are consistent with the universal commands of divinely authored justice. Using the affective forms of heroic tragedy to enroll the audience in the process, Guyomar’s case mitigates his rebellious acts with transparently just intentions—Dryden thus demonstrates the manner in which a loyal subject may be vindicated from his apparent transfer of love and duty from one authority (Montezuma) to another (Cortez) and back. By redeeming Guyomar from the taint of apostasy, the play models not only a strategy for moral excellence, but also seeks to relieve its 1665 audience from its burdens of obedience and apparent disloyalty during the interregnum years 1649–60. The interracial romance between Montezuma’s youngest daughter Cydaria and the aristocratic Spanish conqueror occupies much of the play’s erotic energy and is laid out in fairly conventional terms. Instantly smitten by Cydaria’s “conquering Eyes,” Cortez falls into a “love which must perpetual be” (I, ii, 364, 371). Jealous rivals, disappointed fathers, and the demands of state frequently imperil their love. The pair does triumph against outrageous fortune, but their romantic union is overshadowed by its immensely problematic connotations. In 1665 Charles Hart played Cortez to Nell Gwyn’s Cydaria. Hart would later become famed as a “king actor” of majestic deportment while Nell Gwyn’s fame was more closely attached to her role as one of Charles II’s many actress-lovers. While Pepys saw Cydaria as a serious role and disapproved of Gwyn’s awkward performance, Montezuma’s youngest daughter is vapid, narcissistic, and entirely consumed by her desire for Cortez.The Spaniard is a lover to the detriment of his political and military offices—like the winsome princess he courts, Cortez quickly loses interest in matters of state and is thrall to an all-consuming erotic fire. In this pair of lovers, Dryden figures the worrisome triumph of a political and emotional hedonism and casts their self-regarding passion as a natural partner of, rather than heroic antithesis to, the unvarnished law of conquest and plunder. In contrast to the stoical and self-denying romance of Guyomar and Alibech, wherein duty, justice, and love are all a coherent ethos, Cortez and Cydaria’s romance describes the triumph of a style of hedonism in which individual passion is the sole arbiter of political morality.35 At the beginning of the play, Montezuma’s love for Almeria gives her craven brother Orbellan license to declare his love for Cydaria, who is repulsed and rejects him despite her father’s commands:

35. For discussion of “interest,” the passions, and hedonism in Dryden’s serious drama, see Scodel, Excess and the Mean, 170–85.

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So strong an hatred does my nature sway That spight of duty I must disobey. Besides you warn’d me still of loving two, Can I love him already loving you? (I, ii, 186–89)

Defending herself from a Mexican Mr. Solmes, Cydaria uses the conventional seventeenth-century rhetoric of political obligation paradoxically to obey and resist her father. Although she disobeys Montezuma’s request to “use [Orbellan] kindly,” Cydaria justifies her resistance by citing her inalienable filial love. Here “loving two” seems implausible for Cydaria, since to this point love is not charged with any erotic value and is only a sign of piety and obedience. Cydaria here makes a convenient claim about the inalienability of love for her royal father and suggests that she will always subordinate personal desires to filial piety and “true, due, and rightful love which is his right,” to quote the treason statute. But Cydaria is delivered from any real rejection of the unappealing Orbellan by the arrival of Cortez, who sweeps in with his entourage to offer Montezuma peace under hard terms of fealty to Spain. In the first of many abdications of his already dubious authority, during the negotiations with Montezuma, Cortez wanders off to flirt with Cydaria, leaving Vasquez and Pizarro to execute his various offices and by implication transferring to them his political authority. Fracturing Cydaria’s tidy economy of filial love and duty, Cortez fills the nubile princess with an overwhelming erotic desire. Now unfazed by the possibility of “loving two,” Cydaria experiences “thick breath, quick pulse, and heaving of [the] heart” which she interprets as “signs of some unwonted change . . . [which raises] such storms within [her] breast” (I, ii, 353–57). Her father’s soon-to-be usurper is an “unwonted change,” an irresistible foe who breaks and remakes her norms of love. Paralyzed by the new and commanding presence in her heart, Cydaria recognizes that she shares a “love which must perpetual be” with the Spanish stranger, whose absence she immediately regrets (I, ii, 371, 383–84)—and the implied conflict between passion and filial duty is over before it started. Cortez conquers this terra incognita with one glance. A bit later as the Mexican and Spanish-Taxallan armies draw up for combat, Alibech drags Cydaria with her to a parley with Cortez, where in a fit of civic virtue the agonized lover compels Cortez to call off his troops who seek to kill her father. Pitting his passion against his duty to Charles V, Cydaria tells Cortez that “all your care is for your Prince I see, / Your truth to him out-weighs your love to me;You may so cruel to deny me prove, / But never after that pretend to Love” (II, ii, 32–35). Despite his dutiful rejection of this plea, Cydaria “cannot love [him] less when . . . refused”; Montezuma’s claim on her loyalty evaporates

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and is replaced by her unconditional love for Cortez. This is just too much for Cortez, who buckles and tries to stop the assault:

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Honour be gone, what art thou but a breath? I’le live, proud of my infamy and shame, Grac’d with no triumph but a Lovers name; Men can but say Love did his reason blind, And Love’s the noblest frailty of the mind. Draw off my Men, the War’s already done. (II, ii, 67–72)

In their respective struggles between duty and love, Cydaria seems to have gotten the upper hand. She seems to have safely won the day for her father and preserved her lover as her own. But as Pizarro notices with the typical glee of a stage-evildoer, Cortez acts “too late, the fight’s begun” (II, ii, 73). Having each abandoned the dictates of state and political obligation to their kings, throughout the rest of the play the lovers remain in a limbo of unrequited but overwhelming desire for each other at the expense of their previous loyalties and loves. Cydaria’s chief concern is her lover’s fidelity, and she wrings herself into a fit of tears contemplating the fact of Cortez’s dead beloved. In a lachrymose exchange reminiscent of casuistical discussions of love and loyalty, Cydaria indicts Cortez for his ability to love more than one woman in his lifetime but the Spaniard replies by suggesting that “the object of desire, once tane away / ’Tis then not Love but pity which we pay” (II, iii, 121–22). Cydaria is not having any of this; she proceeds to accuse Cortez of serial inconstancy and mourns the moment when she herself will lie in her grave equally forgotten. As a proof against these claims, Cortez calls in her captive brother Guyomar and sets him free. He is then threatened by a passionate Almeria, but Cortez refuses her proffered love carefully: “now should I change my Love, it would appear / Not the effect of gratitude, but fear” (IV, iv, 17–18). Once again, Cydaria confronts Cortez for his inconstancy and the Spaniard is once again rescued by military force. Cydaria’s idealist notion of love fades as the play unfolds while Cortez continues to succeed as an emotional machiavel—he does win Cydaria by the end of the play, but his ability to entertain multiple loves amplifies the hollowness of his pretensions of clemency, and his character becomes fully legible as a case study in political hedonism. Returning to battle, Cortez tries to ease Cydaria’s pain on his departure by promising that “Your Noble Father’s Life shall be my care; / And both your Brothers I’m obliged to spare.” Almost incredibly, she responds only with one concern: Fate makes you Deaf while I in vain implore My Heart forebodes I ne’er shall see you more:

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I have but one request, when I am Dead Let not my Rival to your Love succeed. (IV, IV, 157–60)

Here Cydaria has banished the first of her “two loves”; Montezuma’s fate hardly registers with her, so ardently does she dread the idea that Almeria will seduce Cortez. By the end of the play where she and Cortez are joined as sovereigns of Mexico, it is difficult to avoid reading Cydaria as a silent partner in the conquest, especially when we contrast her romance with that of Alibech and Guyomar who successfully but with difficulty incorporate erotic and civic duty into a coherent and just ethical program. Cydaria finds in Cortez a double of her own inconstancy—yielding so fully to private passions and individual desires, the princess finds in the Spaniard a suitably matched mate in whom loyalty and duty are transient fictions. Cydaria’s romance with Cortez demonstrates the dangers of relying on love as the core bond in political obligation because in practice the erotic almost always wins out. As Cydaria’s case illustrates, when love is parsed into erotic and filial, the overwhelming passions affixed to erotic desire can push everything else into the background. Private passions and public duties are not easily balanced—even Alibech and Guyomar are compelled into seemingly treasonous actions by their struggle to keep the erotic and the civic fused. The erotic value Cydaria attaches to Cortez seems to mitigate her otherwise sad circumstances: with her family killed or preparing for exile and her father’s empire in ruins, she is united with a Cortez who has absorbed her love entirely. Cortez also is rewarded with his beloved, but his example has a far darker shadow. Both Cortez and Cydaria are culpable for their neglect of public duties and filial piety, and their romance is at bottom the story of an all-consuming erotic hedonism, a repellent antithesis to the sympathetic deliberation modeled in the Guyomar plot. A little more than a century after The Indian Emperour, the Americas exerted a more concrete and less figurative influence on British political thought and foreign policy. Concluding his essay A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1765), Thomas Jefferson exhorts George III to act justly toward his American subjects, for in their case “the great principles of right and wrong are legible to every reader; to pursue them requires not the aid of many counsellors.”36 Worrying about the perilous advance of a Hobbesian realpolitik and thematizing the difficult terms of individual political obligation, Dryden’s Indian Emperour makes legible its great principles of

36. Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1774).

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right and wrong, and it too does so without the aid of many counselors. The play tries to foster ethical deliberation over the terms of political obligation, the nature of sovereignty, and the perceived crisis of equity in public life, and it relies at least in part on the emotionally powerful resources of tragedy to amplify the impact and veracity of these deliberations. The Indian Emperour is, finally, emblematic of Dryden’s sense that fiction and political philosophy construe a coherent language at once rhetorical and affective that he hopes will, in the words of his mentor Sir William Davenant, “perswade an Amity in divided Nations.”37

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Trojan Originalism As Hugh Macdougall, Richard Helgerson, and Mary Floyd-Wilson have shown, in the seventeenth century the primitive past of the English race was an enormously powerful narrative that might be mobilized for savage internal critique, endorsements of acculturation in the present, or occasionally chestthumping jingoism.38 The fiction at the core of early modern controversies over England’s antique past was the national myth of Trojan origins, a legend Samuel Johnson derided later as a “ridiculous fiction.” The “Brut legend” was invented chiefly by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae, versified in the form of Layamon’s Brut, and subsequently bandied about in a historiographical and political argument until the seventeenth century, when the story seems finally emptied of its plausibility. Here is a caricature of this story: Brute, Brutus, or sometimes Felix Brutus, the grandson of Aeneas, gathers to him some of the dispersed remnants of the Trojan race, receives an oracular vision of Albion, and after a number of prescribed epic adventures sails with his band out of the Mediterranean. Eventually he lands in England, where he crushes the indigenous giants and creates a new Troy (“Troynovant,” later London) on the banks of the Thames. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia had met with skepticism in its contemporary moment, while in Tudor England the legend’s popularity hit its apex. Despite historical

37. Sir William Davenant, Preface to Gondibert in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Spingarn, 33. 38. Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History:Trojans,Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982), Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Roach, Cities of the Dead.

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refutations carefully composed by figures such as Polydore Vergil, Ben Jonson, and William Camden, the “ridiculous fiction” of translatio imperii from Troy to Troy-novant proved to be a useful cultural etiology in a moment when the English project of proto-nationalist cultural legitimation was in full swing. And indeed, as Heather James has argued, the Tudor monarchs “were willing to host the legend, as long as they were not required to give it credence.”39 One finds the Trojan myth deployed as obsequy in the work of a George Owen Harry, for instance, who composed a genealogical chart linking the new King James I with the legendary Brute.40 The most potent of poetic explorations of the myth is in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, where the Tudor dynasty acquires a Trojan lineage through the figure of Britomart, the allegorical knight of chastity. She is destined to be the mother of “A famous progenie . . . out of the ancient Trojan blood, / which shall revive the sleeping memory / of those antique peers, the heaven’s brood, / which Greek and Asian rivers stained with their blood.”41 Here the “sleeping memory” of England’s Trojan progenitors commands both bravura and melancholy—Britomart’s progeny, figuratively heaven-born like their Trojan forbears, will be “renowned kings and sacred emperours” who create a rival to both Troy and imperial Rome: “A third kingdom yet is to arise, / Out of the Trojans scattered offspring / That in all glory and great enterprise, / Both first and second Troy shall dare to equalise” (3, ix, 44). But like those ill-fated “antique peers” whose blood stains the rivers, Britomart’s descendents will suffer misery and slaughter as a consequence of their excellence. Even within the frame of Spenser’s Tudor boosterism, the idea of Trojan origins has as its affective core an unusually vivid combination of pathos and aristeia, melancholy and honor. The English diasporic myth of Trojan origins, like the notion of racial diaspora itself, relies upon a mixture of trauma and typology. As Svetlana Boym puts it, “The nostos of a nation is not merely a lost Eden but a place of sacrifice and glory, of past suffering. . . . Defeats in the past figure as prominently as victories in uniting the nation. The nation-state at best is based on the social contract that is also an emotional contract, stamped by the charisma of the past.”42 The Trojan diaspora is more than a charismatic nationalist fiction, however; even

39. James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 87. 40. George Owen Harry, The genealogy of the high and mighty monarch, Iames, by the grace of God, king of great Brittayne, &c. with his lineall descent from Noah, by diuers direct lynes to Brutus, first inhabiter of this ile of Brittayne (London, 1604). 41. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas Roche (New York: Penguin, 1976); Book 3, Canto iii, 22, pg 421. All subsequent references are noted in the text parenthetically. 42. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 15.

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while it bathes the mythic past in sacrificial glory, it also promises a forwardlooking racial destiny imbued with historical providentialism that David Quint has described as the formal core of epic.43 The Brutus myth persists as a useful and labile fiction of national origins well into the seventeenth century and long enough into the eighteenth to command Alexander Pope’s attention toward the end of his life, even if the project ultimately frustrated him.44 Milton had flirted with the idea of a Brutus-poem in works such as “Epitaphis Damonis” and “Mansus”; his critical evaluation, in the opening pages of his 1670 History of Britain, is emblematic of the legend’s heuristic utility in the seventeenth century. The fiction of Trojan origins is most relevant to “our English Poets and Rhetoricians . . . who by their art will know how to use [it] judiciously.”45 Milton’s History is at least in part a work of analytical ethnography, and he sees such dubious legends as usefully descriptive markers of the English national character, but it is his argument that such legends merit “judicious use” by poets that explains the persistence of the Brutus plot. After decades of relative dormancy, the myth of Trojan origins reemerges in 1678 and 1679, those explosive, paranoid years dominated by the Popish Plot and by the beginnings of the Exclusion Crisis. With substantial hesitation, I am tempted to identify a “Trojan moment” on the London stage in these years.While in 1675 John Crowne had broached the subject in his translation of Racine’s Andromache, three original Trojan plays are more or less coeval with the leading edge of the Exclusion Crisis. Nahum Tate’s 1678 Brutus of Alba is a melodramatic rehearsal for his later opera Dido and Aeneas, while John Banks’s 1679 The Destruction of Troy is an overt “parallel” or topical commentary on London factionalism and city politics that might have been more accurately titled “The Destruction of Troynovant.”46 The third play, easily the richest and most judicious use of the Trojan theme, is John Dryden’s 1679 Truth Found Too Late: or, Troilus and Cressida, a major overhaul and reinvention of Shakespeare’s anti-aristocratic play.47 Here, as

43. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 44. Owen Ruffhead, The Life of Alexander Pope (London, 1767); Samuel Johnson, “Life of Pope,” in Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald Greene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Miriam Leranbaum, Alexander Pope’s Opus Magnum, 1729–1744 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). 45. John Milton, The History of Britain (1670), ed. Graham Parry (New York: AMS Press, 1996), 1, 2. See also Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 104. 46. John Wallace, “ ’Examples Are Best Precepts’: Readers and Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Poetry,” Critical Inquiry 1 (1973). 47. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); see also Philip Harth, Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda in Its Political Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

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throughout his career as a dramatist, Dryden is uninterested in the crude “parallel play” as a method of philosophical or political argument—and I want to avoid the assumption or even tacit implication that his Troilus and Cressida is such a parallel along the lines of its near-contemporary Absalom and Achitophel.48 The Shakespearean precedent is notoriously difficult and corrosive: in his preface to the play, Dryden argues, somewhat confidently, that “because the play [Troilus and Cressida] was Shakespeare’s, and that there appeared in some places of it, the admirable Genius of the author, I undertook to remove that heap of rubbish under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly buried.”49 But what are those many excellent thoughts that Dryden tries to bring forward into clarity? Unlike the Shakespearean precedent, Dryden’s play is deeply concerned with posterity, the transmission of the soul across generations, and the exemplarity of a Trojan house divided against itself. It is through such figurative additions that Dryden hopes to foreground his play’s ironic commentary upon the fiction of Trojan origins without violating the rules of neoclassical fidelity; that commentary becomes an occasion for Dryden to unfold a theory of fiction that casts the poet as the privileged interpreter of not just the historical past and the literary tradition, but also of the idea of national origins itself. Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida is a case of “Trojan originalism” in two discrete senses. First, it is a play in which Dryden adapts the pliable fiction of national origins into a pseudo-ethnographical political critique. Dryden describes the often inconsistent and finally self-consuming Trojan ethos as an obvious surrogate for the inherent barbarism of the English race. Dryden finds much to despise and much to celebrate in this national character, which in this play is composed of the love of honor and of violence, of painful credulity and willful independence. In one sense, Dryden’s “Trojan originalism” is purely thematic—he turns the plot of England’s Trojan origins from a script of proto-nationalist chest-thumping into a moment of analytical reflection on an ambivalent choice of inheritance. But in addition, Dryden sees the chance to speculate into national myths and foundational fictions as an unusually rich opportunity to unfold, in the figural and narrative construction of this play (as well as in the attached The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy), his well-developed theory of dramatic poetry as systematic public enlightenment. Troilus and Cressida is rich with meta-theatrical and self-reflexive discussions of the fictional method, and in the play Dryden casts the dramatic poet as the intellectual agent best suited to interpret the origins of

48. For discussion of the political “parallel,” see Wallace, “Examples are Best Precepts”; Harth, Pen for a Party; and Staves, Players’ Scepters. 49. John Dryden, Preface to Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late (London, 1679), in Works, vol. 13.

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laws, nations, and peoples. In this sense, the play resembles what has been called “originalism” in contemporary U.S. constitutional law—an interpretive reconstruction of the putative intentions or original spirit of a law with controlling normative implications for the present. As the specter of a collective relapse into armed insurrection began to grow, Dryden sought to strip the Trojan myth of some of its charisma and reinvent it as a tragic discussion against the “wild ambition” and warrior lawlessness of the English people. From Troilus, it is a short step to the more severe assessments of English barbarism that would come to dominate Dryden’s late career. Troilus and Cressida advertises its relationship to the diasporic theory of national origins in its prefatory matter. Consider for example the commendatory verses by Randolph Duke printed with the play in 1679: “Hector and Troylus darlings of our Age, / Shall hand in hand with Brutus tread the stage. / Shakespear ’tis true this tale of Troy first told, / But, as with Ennius Virgil did of old, / You found it dirt but have made it gold.”50 Duke (not so subtly) praises Dryden for removing the Shakespearean “heap of rubbish,” and in so doing reminds us of the play’s implications: Hector, Troilus, and Brutus are together the “darlings of our Age . . . hand in hand,” one coherent vision of the Trojan ethos. I think, however, Duke misses the subtlety of Dryden’s Troy, and the manner in which it presents an ambiguous portrait of a self-consuming Trojan national character. The famous prologue “spoken by Mr. Betterton, representing the ghost of Shakespeare,” ratifies Dryden’s thesis ironically. Concluding the prologue, the ghost asks his audience to Sit silent then, that my pleased Soul may see A judging Audience once, and worthy me: My faithfull scene from true records shall tell How Trojan valour did the Greek excell; Your great forefathers shall their fame regain, And Homers angry Ghost repine in vain.51

It is essential to remember that Dryden has publicly advertised his desire to supplement Shakespeare’s crudeness in this particular play, even though he venerated his great predecessor as a “divine poet” equipped with a “universal mind which comprehended all characters and passions.”52 Here Shakespeare’s ghost voices a simple idealism consistent with the myth of Trojan origins—“how

50. R. Duke, “To Mr Dryden on his play, called Truth Found Too Late,” in Dryden, Troilus and Cressida. 51. Prologue of Troilus and Cressida. All subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text. 52. The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, in Works, 13:27.

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Trojan valour did the Greek excell”—makes a claim of historical fidelity—“my faithfull scene from true records shall tell”—and links the Trojan past with the English present—“Your great forefathers shall their fame regain.” These lines ending the ghost’s prologue have two objectives. On the one hand, they make a clear link between the play and the fiction of Trojan origins, and this link is asserted by the authoritative voice of Shakespeare, who here appears in the guise of a subtle advocate for the Brutus legend. But it is nearly impossible to read Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida as in any way supporting the crude thesis that “Trojan valour did the Greek excell,” for the Trojan oikos fatally divides against itself. In fact, the wooden moral with which Ulysses closes the play is the opposite of the ghost’s claim, for it celebrates the Greek ability to triumph over aristocratic infighting: “Now peacefull order has resumed the reins, / old time looks young, and Nature seems renewed; / Then, since from homebred factions ruin springs. / Let subjects learn obedience to their kings” (V, ii,). The play does not bear out the Ghost’s thesis, which looks simple and idealistic in comparison with the moral ambiguity that follows.The most important work achieved by the ghost’s prologue is to cast the very idea of Trojan valour and Trojan diaspora, like Shakespeare’s play itself, as a crude predecessor vision that Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida will remedy and purify. Heather James has argued that Shakespeare’s play contaminates the Troy legend to such a degree that “the late Elizabethan audience should mortally fear that England has indeed inherited its national identity” from the Trojans.53 Dryden’s version of the plot is less sexualized, and also much more ambiguous in its description of the implied national character. Dryden’s audience, I think, would not have “mortally feared” his description of their national character because the tone and objective of the play is measured in contrast with Shakespeare’s broad deictic calumny. Consider the epilogue, spoken by Thersites, the vulgar fool: “You British Fools, of the old Trojan stock / That stand so thick one cannot miss the flock, / Poets have cause to dread a keeping Pit, / When Women’s cullyes come to judge of Wit.” The high seriousness of the play’s ending, with Troy in ruins and Ulysses moralizing about the obedience of subjects, turns over in these lines to satire when Thersites mocks the “old Trojan stock” in the pit as a clot of “women’s cullyes.” Of course part of this tone is pro forma—epilogues in Restoration tragedy tend to lighten the mood with wit and irony—but it is also the case that Dryden’s play tolerates such satire in a manner that Shakespeare’s does not. Troilus and Cressida relies upon the diasporic genealogy to realize an ambiguous historiography of the English race at its putative moment of inception. 53. James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 117.

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Dryden traces English cultural memory back as far as it will go to describe the manner in which loss and foundation are coeval and antithetical. Catastrophe and inception negate each other, in Dryden’s view, and the diasporic myth, while politically labile, is a fiction divided against itself. The Trojan oikos, fractured fatally by the love of Troilus and Cressida, reflects this deep structural opposition in the familiar idiom of Restoration heroic drama. Troilus cannot be both a faithful lover and a dutiful Trojan, and his formulaic struggle between passion and duty is an emblem of self-consuming inconsistency. In his treatment of the doomed love plot of the eponymous lovers and in the equally crucial and vexed relationship between Hector and Troilus, Dryden describes the essential character of “Trojan” culture as an inevitably self-consuming blend of liberty and hedonism, of sacrifice and ingratitude, of generosity and indolence. Hector and Troilus are each princes in whom psychomachia is visible; instead of a crude opposition in which Hector stands for martial heroism and Troilus stands for hedonistic private passion, Dryden offers us the wild oscillations of heroic personality one comes to expect from his serious plays.Troilus, whom we first meet rejecting the desire to fight—“why should I fight without the Trojan walls, / who, without fighting, am overthrown within: / The Trojan who is master of a Soul, / Let him to battle, Troilus has none”—is at turns martial, raging, uxorious, honorable, and equipped with bad judgment. He rejects his ascribed role as a “public sacrifice for Troy” when his beloved Cressida is exchanged, and pursues his revenge upon Diomede to such a degree that he carries Hector and all of Troy with him into catastrophe. As he seeks revenge ungratefully, his complex blend of excellence and solipsism increasingly becomes evident. Hector likewise demonstrates a combination of characteristics long imputed in classical and early modern ethnography to the gothic northerner—a warlike love of liberty and independence coupled with credulity and strikingly poor judgment. Early in the play, the Trojan princes discuss returning Helen to the Greeks, and Hector argues in favor of this remedy as consistent with “the moral law of nature and of nations” (II, i). But Hector seems unable to tolerate a long-term embrace of the rule of law, and comes quickly to concur with Troilus, hoping to keep Helen as “a cause on which our Trojan honour / And common reputation will depend.” Later in the play, Hector is easily gulled into seeking the field of honor and revenge with his brother, despite Priam’s clear injunction that “the general safety upon [his] life depends; / and should you perish in this rash attempt, / Troy with a groan, would feel her Soul go out” (II, i). These words are prophetic, and Hector’s manly excellence is not enough to defend him from vanity and bad judgment—he pursues and kills an anonymous Greek for his beautiful armor, and when he strips to put on this shiny new gear, the Myrmidons surprise and kill him.

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Taunting Troilus on the final battlefield, Diomede says that “I triumph in thy vain credulity, / Which levels thy state to mine” (V, ii). His analysis is correct—Troilus is both vain and credulous—but these lines are also an analysis of the collective character of the Trojan aristocracy—it is indeed heroic vanity and bad judgment that has reduced the glory that was Troy to the condition of the petty, factious Greeks. Dryden provides Hector and Troilus with a conventional heroic psychomachia but draws the terms of that inner struggle from ethnographic portraits of the English national character—warlike, vain, independent, lawless, credulous. Early in 1679 such characteristics were for Dryden both laudable and disturbing; at this point, the national character was still capable of hosting both heroism and hedonism. The poet who had argued so stridently for the historical and literary excellence of his nation in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy and elsewhere was increasingly dispirited by the reemergence of lawless barbarism inherent in the national character, especially in the wake of the Exclusion Crisis. While he had always enjoyed a good rabble scene, Dryden, like his fellow travelers in the Stuart cause Roger L’Estrange and Aphra Behn, began to attribute treason, rebellion, and political dissent to the inherently warlike, credulous, and barbarous racial character of the English people. In so doing, such writers promote the view that only a disinterested jure divino sovereign above the law could be capable of imposing discipline and order on the revolted multitudes. This mode of argument is present clearly in works such as Dryden’s 1685 opera Albion and Albanius and in Aphra Behn’s late, grim works such as Oroonoko (1688) and The Widow Ranter (1689). From 1679 to 1685, when James II takes the throne and his poet laureate converts to Roman Catholicism, political crises and seditious plots convince Dryden of the essentially lawless and primitive character of the English race. The qualified approval, or at least toleration, in Troilus and Cressida, of the English people’s inherited blend of martial honor and self-interest, of pusillanimity and selfsacrifice, vanishes before the amassing evidence of simple barbarism. As Dryden writes not much later in Absalom and Achitophel, the English are a “headstrong, moody, murmuring race . . . [and] God’s pampered people, whom debauched with ease, / No king could govern, nor no God could please [who] thought that all but savages were slaves.”54 The year 1679 also saw the passing of the Act of Habeas Corpus in Parliament.55 The theorist Giorgio Agamben reads this law, hyperbolically I think, as a democratic breakthrough, a transformation in the normative status of the 54. John Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel” (London, 1681). 55. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 123.

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human life in which the corpus, the body that signifies zoe or bare life, becomes the legal index of personhood in place of an older ideal of citizenship and ethical pursuit of the good. But he is right to notice the law, and while habeas corpus was enacted to restrict the crown’s ability to make away with its enemies, Agamben sees the law as evidence of a mounting concern with the essential—with the simplest, most pure and qualitative description of the human person replacing the outward ornaments of citizenship and public duty.56 For Dryden, racial character is an essential and descriptive physiological fact, legible in Agamben’s terms as zoe writ large in the body of the nation. Troilus and Cressida is obsessed with essential qualities and irreducible phenomena, and in this play Dryden uses the figure of soul to describe a national ethos that links past and present in a mythic, if spurious genealogy. “Soul” abounds in Dryden’s play, and the princely Trojans seem most determined to cultivate their soul in as many permutations as possible. Hector describes his unwillingness to leave Andromache before battle, for example, as “struggling in my manly Soul.” This is a conventional and unremarkable reference; of course he would describe a psychological struggle as a torment of the soul. Andromache rebuts his claim in similar terms, suggesting that his “Soul is proof to all things but to kindness.” Hector’s soul, however, quickly turns over into something else entirely, into a startling claim of collective megalopsychia as he leads the Trojans into their last battle:

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To Arms, to arms, the vanguards are engaged: Let us not leave one man to guard the walls, Both old and young, the coward and the brave, Be summoned all, our utmost fate to try; As one body move whose soul am I. (V, i)

Here Hector understands himself as the soul of the Trojan state—not an inaccurate thesis, according to Priam—and presents the combat as a judgment of that collective soul, the trial of “our utmost fate.” But it is no accident that Hector’s heroic call to arms ends with the pronominal expression of his real concern—“whose soul am I.” Hector’s soul becomes the soul of the Trojan polity; his manly excellence and soft-headed credulity radiate outward to become the character of the whole nation. This speech is one of the many such emblematic moments in the play where the soul is a marker of transmitted essential quality, of radiant personality that echoes down through generations. For example, after they argue over the exchange of Cressida, Hector insults his brother, after having branded him as a 56. Ibid., 123–25.

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traitor, by swearing an oath on “our father’s soul, of which no part / did ere descend to thee,” to which Troilus replies “if urged beyond my temper, [I’ll] prove my daring, / And see which of us has the larger share / of our great father’s Soul.” At this point, Troilus has refused to part with Cressida, whom he calls “my life, my being, and my soul,” despite Hector’s argument that the public good demands her exchange, and he defends his position with a withering assault on the idea of the public:

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The public is the Lees of vulgar slaves: Slaves, with the minds of slaves: so born, so bred: Yet such as these united in a herd, Are called the public; millions of such cyphers Make up the public sum: an Eagle’s life Is worth a world of crows: are princes made For such as these, who, were one Soul extracted From all their beings, could not raise a Man. (p. 70)

Troilus’s most potent damnation of this vulgar, slavish public comes in the last two lines, where the mob of millions is found wanting soul enough to “raise a man.” Later Troilus uses the same figure in vulgar fashion to explain Cressida’s apparent infidelity with reference to her apostate father Calchas: “with her mother’s milk / She sucked the infusion of her father’s soul. She only wants and opportunity, / Her soul’s a whore already” (IV, ii). Troilus and Hector, in antithetical terms, each describe an exclusively descending relationship between the exemplary man and his posterity—the actual or collective progeny his transmitted soul comes to inhabit and constitute. Through the figure of radiant soul Dryden is able to describe the transmission of essential qualities (racial character) across time, and in so doing reinforce his play’s status as a fiction of national origins. I have argued that Dryden’s play is a complex portrait of the English national character that makes judicious use of the diasporic legend while acknowledging its fictionality. It is also an occasion for Dryden to outline self-reflexively his fictional method, and assert the dramatic poet’s privileged ability to interpret the inscrutable normative origins of law, race, and political society. Attached to the preface of the play is “The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy,” which, along with the Essay of Dramatick Poesy, is Dryden’s most important piece of literary criticism. In this short essay, Dryden outlines a neo-Aristotelian theory of tragedy in which fear and pity are the affective vehicles of systematic public enlightenment. Tragedy cannot be one long hyperbolic rant, Dryden argues, but must be measured: “He who would raise the passion of a judicious audience . . . must be sure to take his hearers along with him; . . . he must move them by degrees, and kindle

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with ’em; otherwise he will be in danger of setting his own heap of stubble on fire, and of burning out by himself, without warming the company that stand about him” (23). It may seem obvious, but here Dryden is defending the use of dramatic irony, suspense, and the emotional crescendo—all strategies that he had put to masterful use in his earlier heroic plays. He puts the matter quite bluntly— “ ’tis necessary therefore for a poet, who could concern an audience by describing of a passion, first to prepare it, and not to rush upon it all at once” (23–24). The most wrenching and passionate scene in Troilus and Cressida (III,ii) is a set-piece of this dramatic theory. Hector prepares Troilus for the shattering news of Cressida’s exchange en crescendo, moving his brother by “degrees and glimpses” ostensibly to prevent his intemperate and unmanly rage: Hector And I will tell my news, in terms so mild, So tender, and so fearful to offend As Mothers use to sooth their froward babes; Nay I will swear as you have sworn to me, That if some gust of passion swell your soul To words intemperate, I will bear with you. Troilus What would this pomp of preparation mean? Come you to bring me news of Priam’s death, Or Hecuba’s? Hector The Gods forbid I should; But what I bring is nearer, more close, An ill more yours. Troilus There is but one that can be. Hector Perhaps ’tis that. Troilus I’ll not suspect my fate So far, I know I stand possessed of that. Hector ’Tis well: consider at whose house I find you. Troilus Ha! Hector Does it start you? I must wake you more: Anthenor is exchanged. Troilus For whom? Hector Imagine. Troilus It comes like thunder grumbling in a cloud, Before the dreadful break; if here it fall, The subtle flame will lick up all my blood, And in a moment turn my heart to ashes. Hector That Cressida for Anthenor is exchanged Because I knew ‘twas harsh, I would not tell Not all at once, but by degrees and glimpses

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I let it in, lest it might rush upon you And quite overpower your soul.57

Here Dryden casts Hector as poet and Troilus as audience, using the theoretical language of his Grounds of Criticism to announce the play’s status as a mediation on the fictional method and its affective tactics. At the fatal moment, Hector refuses to even say Cressida’s name, substituting a cruel “imagine.” This one word, which for Troilus connotes disaster but denotes endless possibility, refers to the affective core of Dryden’s tragic theory—it is only through the imaginative experience of disaster that fear and pity arise for the audience.This exchange is the beginning of a long quarrel and reconciliation scene between Troilus and Hector, a scene that attracted substantial critical notice. In the preface Dryden admits that “the occasion of raising [the scene] was hinted to me by Mr. Betterton: the contrivance and working of it was my own. They who think to do me an injury by saying that it is an imitation of the scene betwixt Brutus and Cassius, do me an honour, by supposing that I could imitate the incomparable Shakespeare” (Preface, 12–13).58 In short, this scene of almost unimaginable pathos turns out to be the play’s most meta-theatrical moment, a scene in which Shakespeare’s genius (by way of Julius Caesar) and Dryden’s affective method are equally on display. It is also worth recalling at this point that in the prologue, Shakespeare’s ghost asks the audience to “sit silent then, that my pleased Soul may see / a judging audience once, and worthy me.” In these lines, Dryden here echoes his own dramatic thesis in the Grounds of Criticism, advertising his courtship of a “judicious audience” and promising to “take his hearers along with ’em, move them by degrees, and kindle with ’em.” And it is no coincidence that Shakespeare delivers these lines. For Dryden, Shakespeare “had a universal mind, which comprehended all characters and passions.” He was an unsurpassed genius writing in a barbarous age whose “magic could not copied be” and whose “power is as sacred as a king’s,” to quote from the prologue to Davenant and Dryden’s 1667 Tempest. For while individual plays such as Troilus and Cressida might be buried beneath rubbish, Shakespeare is Dryden’s ideal poet, described admiringly as a “masculine soul” able to conjure into drama “just and lively images of human nature,” Dryden’s definition of poetical excellence. In fact, the transmission of soul is Dryden’s preferred characterization of his relationship to Shakespeare, as in these lines from his poem “To Sir Godfrey Kneller”: 57. There is a striking contrast with the austere Shakespearean precedent: see William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (London, 1601), 4.2.59–71. 58. For discussion of the controversy surrounding this scene, see Eugene Waith, Ideas of Greatness: Heroic Drama in England (New York: Routledge, 1971).

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Shakespeare, thy gift, I place before my sight; With awe I ask his blessing ere I write; With reverence look on his majestic face Proud to be less, but of his godlike race. His soul inspires me, while I thy praises write. (73–77)

Describing a drawing of Shakespeare that Kneller had presented to him, Dryden casts himself in a posture of abjection strikingly at odds with the confidence of his screeds against Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Dryden is “of his godlike race,” the last term a fairly conventional claim of poetic filiation akin to the “tribe of Ben,” and he is inspired by Shakespeare’s comprehensive soul. The conjunction of race and soul in this later poem echoes Dryden’s nearly ubiquitous use of this figure in Troilus and Cressida, where the exemplary soul resonates outward to give coherence and identity to a whole nation or ethnos. In his critical writings and key dramatic prologues, Dryden venerates Shakespeare as a genius of universal dimensions, a masculine and godlike poet of nature. But at the same time, he uses the figure of Shakespeare’s ghost to establish a crude and inchoate thesis of Trojan glory that the revised contemporary iteration must supplement. I read the ghost’s prologue to Troilus and Cressida as an emblem of Dryden’s imaginative originalism, his normative interpretation of a original text that lacks a transparent controlling goal. Betterton is playing a ghost, a specter of uncertain provenance lurking at the opening of the play, casting a long shadow over the subsequent drama. Shakespeare’s ghost claims his authority in clear verse, but that plain intent is obscured by the unworldly source of its utterance. The past—whether in the form of predecessor poets, history, prescriptive regimes, or mythic diasporas—exerts a normative claim upon the present, and it cannot be dispelled once conjured. It falls to the godlike, sovereign poet, in Dryden’s view, to translate murky apparitions into ethical clarity, honoring the past while purifying it for the use of the present. Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida is an example of the “judicious use” of the Brutus legend in which we are provided with a portrait of the English national character at its moment of inception, a self-reflexive commentary on the fictional method, and a resonant meditation on the dynamics of cultural memory. As in The Indian Emperour, for Dryden the poet’s ultimate goal is systematic public enlightenment; in both plays he turns charismatic historical materials into elaborate, often painful fictional occasion to create deliberative “juridical comprehending” in his broad and expanding English public. With the specific assets and advantages of poetic fiction, Dryden hopes to achieve the cultivation of the national soul.

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chapter three

Equity Restored

John Milton and the Origins of Law

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If men were angels, no government would be necessary. —The Federalist Papers, no. 51

Toward the very end of Book Twelve of Paradise Lost, the archangel Michael describes a political landscape in which the “unfaithful herd” betray God, revel in Sin, and persecute the few just followers of divine law. Michael’s “grievous wolves” exploit the “sacred Mysteries of heav’n” in the service of “lucre and ambition,” to their false priesthood “join secular power,” and force false laws “on every conscience” (XII, 508–21). Milton is talking about more than Roman Catholicism here; the condition of fallen humanity is punctuated by false lawgiving and rigorous orthodoxy, especially when sacred and secular powers are entangled. The tyrannical wolves “force the Spirit of Grace itself, and bind / His consort Liberty,” and the result is crisis: “Truth shall retire / Bestuck with sland’rous darts, and works of Faith / Rarely be found: so shall the World go on / To good malignant, to bad men benign” (XII, 535–38). Michael describes a moment in which the spirit of divine utterance is not only obscured but also willfully corrupted. Doing violence to the spirit of Grace and Liberty is a ubiquitous phenomenon in a fallen world; while there are a handful of the just who remain faithful, human history is legible as a sustained crisis of equity. As we have seen, such a sentiment was by no means limited to John Milton—mid-century intellectuals were deeply concerned about the

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rule of rigorous orthodoxies and the dangerously unstable modalities of legal interpretation in secular and sacred institutions both. Earlier in his career, Milton had suggested that “the prudent and heavenly contemplation of justice and equity” was fully absent not only from legal instruction, but also from the education of young men more generally. In the 1644 tract Of Education, Milton offers a curriculum designed to remedy the pedantry,“the preposterous exaction, . . . ragged notions, babblements, . . . the invitations to license and venality, . . . and the trifling at grammar and sophistry” of contemporary education. Milton’s pedagogy is at bottom paideic: he proposes a “complete and generous education that . . . fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.”1 Among the core practices in Milton’s curriculum are deliberation over good and evil, “the study of . . . the beginnings, end, and reasons of political societies,” and instruction in the interpretation of Mosaic and classical law, but the apex of the soaring paideic flight is poetry. When fully cultivated, Milton’s ideal student will not only apprehend “what religious, what glorious and magnificent use might be made of poetry, both in divine and human things,” but also as “writers and composers in every excellent matter . . . [they] shall be fraught with a universal insight into things” (637). That “universal insight into things” is the outcome of explicitly poetic composition is no accident; Milton relies upon the early modern version of Aristotelian literary theory that holds poesis to be a medium for cultivating equity in which particular details or circumstances yield to the deliberative contemplation of “universal things.” In Milton’s 1671 “brief epic” Paradise Regained, we find a similar set of theoretical claims and hermeneutic occasions within the narrative of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. Paradise Regained and its partner Samson Agonistes are best understood as theoretical dissidence rather than partisan argument disguised from a repressive state. Far from a retreat from politics (that old view having now been widely discredited), Milton’s post-1660 poetry reveals at every turn the deep and sustained presence of deliberative considerations of justice, divine and human law, sovereignty, and obedience—all set within the frame of “functional ambiguity.”2 Paradise Lost, Sharon Achinstein writes, is “principally 1. John Milton, “Of Education,” in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Milton, ed. Merritt Hughes, 632. Such a thesis is not particularly original—among others, Milton follows the Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, who describes his pedagogical project thus: “I am seeking to form . . . a man who to extraordinary natural gifts has added a thorough mastery of all the fairest branches of knowledge, a man sent by heaven to be the blessing of mankind”—and Milton’s claims are legible as part of the early modern humanist educational enterprise. 2. Annabel Patterson, Reading between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). Studies that read the play within its political and philosophical moment include Blair Worden, “Milton, Samson

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concerned with proper interpretation, given the human condition of contingency, both in spiritual and in political terms.”3 Put another way, Milton’s major poems of the Restoration are unusually well suited to fostering equity as an interpretive habit and an ethos; because of this, they are de facto unsuited to the unambiguous transmission of a political program. Let us take Paradise Regained as the briefest of test cases. As Barbara Lewalski has argued, the poem is a spectacular demonstration of intellectual controversy where the outcome is never in doubt.4 Although the poem thematizes the “temptation” as controversy, there is never any real possibility that Satan will persuade Jesus, or even compel him to consider the merits of, say, “the kingdoms of this world.” Paradise Regained is composed of a formal deliberation that lacks deliberative content, and as such it seems on its face an unusually dogmatic argument for the “Inner Oracle” of Christian grace and mercy. However, a key point of Paradise Regained as I take it is to differentiate between the perfect and unmoved will of Jesus and the contingent, fallen, and thus necessarily deliberative action of the human creature.5 The form of controversy invokes the act of deliberative judgment, but the quality of the disputants abrogates any such process; the gesture here is to create distance between the perfectibility of Christ’s judgment and the profound imperfectibility of human judgment.The partial remedy for this incommensurable gap is equity, which is not only a habit of deliberative judgment, but also is for Milton at the very heart of the Gospel. Among other things, Paradise Regained contains a long creedal soliloquy by Jesus, a passage that has been read as a repository of Milton’s autobiographical sentiment.6 Jesus begins by describing a moment in his childhood when “a

Agonistes, and the Restoration,” in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration, ed. Gerald MacLean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Laura Lunger Knoppers, “‘This So Horrid Spectacle’: Samson Agonistes and the Execution of the Regicides,” English Literary Renaissance 20 (1990); and Julia Reinhard Lupton’s chapter “Samson Dagonistes” in her Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Samson has also elicited attention as a work concerned with violent religious extremism: see John Carey, “A Work in Praise of Terrorism?: September 11 and Samson Agonistes,” Times Literary Supplement, 6 Sept. 2002, and Feisal Mohammed, “Confronting Religious Violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes,” PMLA 120 (2005). 3. Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 222. 4. Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 511. 5. See Regina Schwartz, “Redemption and Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 42 (2003); David Quint, “David’s Census: Milton’s Politics and Paradise Regained,” in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson (New York: Methuen 1987); and Barbara Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence: Brown University Press, 1966). 6. Thomas Corns sees the poem as an audacious enterprise: “Paradise Regained is not a handbook for failed revolutionaries, but rather a speculative reconstruction of a historical episode documented in the

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multitude of thoughts at once / Awakened in me swarm,” and when his vocation became clear:“all my mind was set / Serious to learn and know, and thence to do / what might be public good; myself I thought . . . born to promote all truth, / All righteous things” (PR, I, 196–206). These moments of lucid introspection (not confusion or psychomachia) lead to a plan:

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Therefore above my years The Law of God I read, and found it sweet, made it my whole delight, and in it grew To such perfection that, ere yet my age Had measured twice six years, at our great Feast I went into the Temple, there to hear The Teachers of our Law, and to propose What might improve my knowledge or their own; And was admir’d by all: yet this not all To which my spirit aspir’d; victorious deeds Flam’d in my heart, heroic acts; one while To rescue Israel from the Roman yoke, Then to subdue and quell o’er all the earth Brute violence and proud Tyrannic power, Till truth were freed and equity restored: Yet held it more humane, more heavenly, first By winning words to conquer willing hearts, And make persuasion do the work of fear; At least to try, and teach the erring Soul Not willfully misdoing, but unaware Misled: the stubborn only to subdue. (PR, I, 206–26, my emphasis)

I take this passage as an emblem of Milton’s poetic project in the years after the calamity of Restoration, and share the view that even if it is not intended as autobiography in the strictest sense, this passage is deeply self-referential as are so many other first-person moments in Paradise Lost and elsewhere. This section of the soliloquy is divided into three parts, each corresponding

Gospels. Milton offers, not primarily a paradigm for Puritans, but a depiction of a Son of God who shares values, assumptions, attitudes, and opinions that are, perhaps unsurprisingly, very close to Milton’s own published views. It is not that the Son invites wayfaring Christians to fashion themselves in an imitatio Christi; rather, Milton offers a divine figure made in his own image, a daring, almost impudent, imitatio Miltoni.” Thomas Corns, “‘With Unaltered Brow’: Milton and the Son of God,” Milton Studies 42 (2003): 108.

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to a discrete mode of action nonetheless subsumed into the single protodivine ethos of charity and justice.These three modes are contemplation (lines 207–14), heroic deeds (214–20), and humane persuasion (221–26). On its face, the passage seems to indicate that study and heroic acts come up short in comparison with the persuasion of the erring Soul—this last is, after all, “more humane, more heavenly.” The fulcrum, the center of this passage and the objective of Jesus’ vocation, is in line 220, that moment when “truth were freed and equity restored.” This state of (Christian) liberty is the goal of his whole calling; it is the end of contemplation and victorious deeds both, and it is the thesis his “winning words” will inscribe on the hearts of men. The turn to persuasion is not a renunciation of study and heroic acts—it is a fulfillment of those acts in the “more humane” jurisdictions of the soul, which is precisely where Milton’s major poems hope to reside. In his dispute with Satan, Jesus returns to the language of heavenly persuasion in order to elaborate upon his true spiritual kingship and repudiate temporal sovereignty:

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to Guide the Nations in the way of truth By saving doctrine, and from error lead To know, and knowing worship God aright, Is yet more Kingly; this attracts the Soul, Governs the inner man, the nobler part; That other o’er the body only reigns And oft by force, which to a generous mind So reigning can be no sincere delight. (PR, II, 473–80)

Casting himself as the king of souls while locating the source of true political and religious liberty in free consent, Jesus here lays claim to the inward kingdom of human hearts. At such a moment, Jesus clarifies his eschatological purpose and parts ways with the worldly modalities of study, deeds, and persuasion, which in comparison with divine guidance are to seem inherently contingent, fallen, and incomplete.7 The soliloquy thus is legible as an emblem of the specifically worldly modalities of Christian virtue—study, deeds, and persuasion—that are the signal features of Milton’s post-Restoration poetry. For Milton, poetry is an occasion for paideia rather than prophecy; it is a handmaiden of the providential

7. Lewalski clarifes the issues surrounding Jesus’ vocation in Milton’s Brief Epic; see also Victoria Silver’s luminous discussion in Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton’s Irony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 26–44.

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history that propels humanity “from shadowy types to truth” and a medium of disciplined deliberation than can only prepare the individual for the harder inner work of achieving true Christian liberty.8 In this chapter, I suggest that Milton’s Paradise Lost is a poem invested in the double function of equity as private ethos and a public norm; it is a poem devoted to cultivating the circumstances in which “truth [is] freed and equity restored” in “human things.” The poem becomes the repository of Milton’s lifelong interest in the utterance, transmission, and interpretation of divine law, and it is more inclined toward the hermeneutic struggle between competing political theologies than it is toward a dogmatic profession of republicanism. As I demonstrate in the pages that follow, Milton’s interest in equity dates from his early prose tracts and sits at the core of his view of Christian liberty as the redemptive obedience to the spirit of divine law. I argue that equity is crucial to Paradise Lost as a norm and an affective experience. Milton consistently figures Satan as a “heroic” lawgiver, a political progenitor who offers rigorously foundational justifications of his sovereignty. As such, Milton demonstrates a deep antipathy to historicist-inflected claims of the normative force of original intentions or first principles in human government. For Milton, equity is that process through which the spirit of divine law is recovered; when that faculty is deployed to legitimate sovereignty or conquest, it becomes a crude demonic parody of equity. In this chapter, I offer an account of the poem’s consistent mythopoetic link between the gospel of Christian liberty and the ideals of equity, and I offer am original description of the ways in which the poem is an invitation to private equitable judgment and an exhortation for equity as a public or governmental norm. Paradise Lost is an interlaced tissue of occasions in which the fit audience is asked to sort between facts and norms, acts and intentions, utterance and ramification, and finally is asked to answer the painful questions of “suffering, incoherence, and seeming injustice” at the core of what Victoria Silver calls the poem’s vision of an “incorrigibly human predicament.”9 Milton invites his readers to share in the difficult fulfillment of a typological arc, disciplining themselves from shadowy types to grace, from the letter to the spirit of law. 8. John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 169–72. 9. Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004): “We can see Paradise Lost as exemplifying Milton’s covenant with God in the form of equitable interpretation. In contrast to Hobbes’ strictures about scriptural interpretation—his insistence that the sovereign is the only authoritative interpreter—Milton’s goal is to create revolutionary readers, readers who will understand their covenant with God as a matter of interpretation” (197). See also Silver, Imperfect Sense, 44.

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Sovereign Charity Milton’s fascination with equity and, beyond that, with the interpretation of divine law and the mythopoetic representation of political origins, dates back well before Paradise Lost. As is well known, he had contemplated an epic built from Arthurian legend, and early in his career he cast his poetic vocation in the Spenserian line of national cultural legitimation: in his 1641 Reason of Church Government, for instance, Milton outlines his desire to write for “the glory and honour of my country” and thereby to serve as “an interpreter & relater of the best as sagest things among mine own Citizens throughout the Island in the mother dialect.”10 But even as this sense of poetic vocation modulates over the course of his career, and Milton’s desire to fictionalize the origins of the English people evaporates, his commitment to what I call “imaginative originalism” remains high. Paradise Lost is, after all, the Restoration’s most grand and elaborate fiction of origins—among other things, we are offered an etiology of sin, human and divine law, the physical world, political rhetoric, temptation, murder, sex, mining, ants, history, naphtha, tyranny, exile, and vanity. But it is those original utterances emblematic of divine justice, in the broadest sense, that Milton’s poem offers up for interpretive struggle, and it is the deliberative contemplation of “first what cause” motivated God that is at the heart of Paradise Lost’s mythopoetic and affective program. Like others of his generation, Milton saw equity as a hermeneutic process to be replicated broadly in the English public and a political ideal or theoretical norm of “sovereign charity” to be inserted into human government by any means necessary. In tracts such as the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes, Milton’s critique of the Stuart theory of kingship hinges on Charles I’s abuse of the equitable function.These tracts acknowledge the utility of a kingly executive elevated by consent and fully subject to law and punishment while underscoring what was for Milton an indisputable fact drawn from history, theology, and law—“a parliament is by all equity and right, above a king, and may judge him” (Eikonoklastes, 809). “Equity and right” is a common seventeenth-century legal formulation that is loosely akin to citing the spirit and the letter of law. To invoke “equity and right” is to summon up the original spirit of divine utterance (equity) in tandem with the long customary juridical practices of a settled kingdom (right). Milton, in Eikonoklastes and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, tolerates a princely executive bearing the power of mortality and mercy so long as he remains guided by and subject to the constituted laws of the kingdom. When Charles I, whom Milton accuses 10. John Milton, The Reason of Church Government, in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, 668.

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of “stony rigor” and moral lassitude, turned from this path he became a tyrant and slavemaster who brought upon himself the righteous sword of justice. According to Milton, Charles I sought to recast the king’s equitable function as absolute and arbitrary prerogative: “all Britain was to be tied and chained to the conscience, judgment, and reason of one man; as if those gifts had been his only peculiar and prerogative, entailed upon him with his fortune to be a king” (Eikonoklastes, 791). In this view, Charles rejects the authority of the “public reason” of English constitutional law—a tangled and unwritten skein of precedents, customs, and liberties—“interposing only his own private reason, which to us is no law” (792). When a king replaces public reason with private will, he violates the original conditions of his investment by “common league” to do justice; such kings “for a while governed well and with much equity, til the temptation of such a power, left absolute in their hands, perverted them at length to injustice and partiality” (TKM, 754–55). As a consequence of such corruption “the law was set above the magistrate” and the original trust is translated into the statutory regulation of the sovereign by the people, “in whom the power yet remains fundamentally and cannot be taken from them without a violation of their natural birthright” (TKM, 755–56). Like other English republican writers such as Anthony Ascham and Marchamont Nedham, Milton sees Charles I as having turned the equitable function into nothing more than the arbitrary will and private reason. Ascham, for instance, in his 1649 tract Genesis Kai Telos Exousias, corroborates this thesis as he defends the equitable function while savaging the claims of the king’s private reason: How frequently and familiarly is much precious blood shed in all nations (as in this Land lately) to defend the unjust greatness and prerogative of princes? Their just prerogative being nothing else but a power to do good in such cases to which the written Law does not extend. I say again, their unjust prerogative, which is nothing else but the Product of a long settled Tyranny, a base and sordid Issue, a Sperme begotten by the coition and copulation of the wills of Tyrants and their flatterers, in the lustiness of their usurped Domination: and now God hath discovered it to all men to be a bastard and illegitimate brood that cannot derive its parentage from the Consent of the people, by his stirring up of almost all mens spirits to kick it out of the world as a spurious Brat.11

Ascham makes the claim, with which Milton would have agreed, that the royal prerogative is limited strictly to the work of equity, that the “just prerogative” of princes is “nothing else but a power to do good in such cases as the written 11. Anthony Ascham, Genesis Kai Telos Exousias (London, 1649), 23.

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Law does not extend.” This is a classic definition of the dispensing prerogative as it descends from St. German and the Tudor jurists, a mode of equitable relief in which the sovereign may remit or relax punishment in a specific single case where the positive law is obscure or would produce an unjust outcome. It is the emblem of the Stuart kings, for Ascham, to assert “unjust prerogative,” their perversion of the “power to do good” into a “long-settled Tyranny” marked by arbitrary and privately motivated acts of will. The tyrannical character of Stuart justice is also, by extension, the ethos of the Stuart family. Ascham sees the family and their absolutist designs as monstrous progeny: they are “the Product of a long settled tyranny, a base and sordid Issue, a Sperme begotten by the coition and copulation of the wills of Tyrants and their flatterers, in the lustiness of their usurped Domination.” Milton was hardly a stranger to such rhetoric; in Paradise Lost, for instance, Sin and Death are each the “base and sordid issue” of Satan’s tyrannical and copulative will. The Stuart kings have for Milton given birth to a demonic parody of equity in their claims of absolute prerogative; while equity is an uncontroversial normative ideal, strictly as a political polemicist Milton is concerned chiefly with demonstrating the crisis of the concept. To find Milton’s most coherent and sustained consideration of the political theology of equity, we must turn to the 1644 tract The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (hereafter abbreviated DDD). In this work, equity is for Milton both the method of proper biblical interpretation and the spirit of the biblical utterance; as such the DDD is a kind of prospectus for the literary goals and the political philosophy of Paradise Lost. On its face, the DDD is a scholarly refutation of the canon law prohibition against divorce and an exercise in biblical criticism that restores the “doctrine of Charity” to public life and in doing so reveals the “pure and sacred Law of God.”12 Milton sees his argument as a remedy, a salutary piece of scholarship to be “reckon’d among the benefactors of civill and humane life” that will “restore the much wrong’d and over-sorrowed state of matrimony . . . to that serene and blissful condition it was in the beginning” (240). For Milton that blissful condition is one of mutual felicity, “a meet and happy conversation” tending toward the “remedy of our lonliness” and the performance of “acts of peace and love.” When the proper conditions of marriage are absent, the result is a tyrannical and uncharitable bondage that poisons 12. “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2., ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959) 2:232, 233. All subsequent references are to this edition and are indicated parenthetically in the text. Notable readings of the DDD are in James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Stephen Fallon, “The Metaphysics of Milton’s Divorce Tracts”; and Annabel Patterson, “No Meer Amatorious Novel?”—these last two included in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. Loewenstein and Turner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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the soul, vilifies God, encourages adultery and prostitution, imposes the “secret affliction” of conjugal despair, and proves to be “unprofitable and dangerous to the . . . vigor and spirit of all publick enterprizes” (247). The tract’s argument in favor of divorce is built upon a commonplace opposition between rigorous literalism and the flexibility of equity—between the letter and the spirit of the law—and it is designed to illustrate the disaster of indissoluble marriage. An early passage provides a representative anecdote for the whole. Milton argues that

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Christ’s words touching divorce are as it were congeal’d into a stony rigor, inconsistent both with his doctrine and his office, and that which he preacht onely to the conscience, is by canonicall tyranny snatcht into the compulsive censure of a judiciall Court; where Laws are impos’d even against the venerable & secret power of natures impression to love what ever cause be found to loath. (238)

Milton’s anti-ecclesiastical temper is here in evidence, and throughout the work he returns to vilify the “calumnious dunceries” of canonists such as Gratian and Lombard, whose literalist misreading has “not only dissipated and dejected the clear light of nature in us, & of nations, but hath tainted also the fountains of divine doctrine, & rendered the pure and solid Law of God unbeneficial to us” (351).The root problem to which Milton objects is jurisdictional: he argues that Christ’s utterances against divorce are “preacht onely to the conscience” rather than intended as judicial law. Not surprisingly, the DDD draws upon the Pauline typology of Law and Gospel; Christ supplements the rigorous Mosaic Law with the mitigating sweetness of charity and faith and in so doing inaugurates circumstances fruitful of Christian liberty. In doing so, Christ alters the spirit of moral law from sacrifice to mercy, from retributive rigor to charitable remedy. In order to overturn the rigorous literalism of the canon lawyers, Milton describes what he perceives to be an exact reversal of the Gospel and the Mosaic Law: “O perversnes! That the Law should be made more provident of peacemaking then the Gospel! That the Gospel should be put to beg a most necessary help of mercy from the Law, but must not have it” (258). Against the “extrem literalist . . . whose boistrous edicts tyrannize the blessed ordinance of marriage into the quality of a most unnatural and unchristianly yoke,” Milton offers relentlessly the equitable offices of Gospel, “that authentick precept of sovran charity; whose grand Commission is to doe and dispose over all the ordinances of God to man; that love & truth may advance each other to everlasting” (342–43).The tyranny of which Milton complains is both ecclesiastical and political, insofar as the law imposes “a jurisdictive power upon the inward and irremediable disposition of man, to

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command love and sympathy” (346). Such resistance to the external imposition of affective political obligation is emblematic of Milton’s contempt for the political vernacular of royalist patriarchalism, in which kings are styled as loving fathers of the family politic. Moreover, the DDD is legible as a powerful political critique designed to free its readers from voluntary servitude and the tyranny of literalism: as Victoria Kahn writes, for Milton “these newly liberated, equitable readers were the ideal subjects of the political contract—citizens who would voluntarily subject themselves on the basis of their own reason.”13 To Kahn, the Milton of the DDD is a radical theorist of contract who builds a continuum between spiritual self-preservation, equity, and the “affective disposition of the contracting subject.” In her view, Milton proposes a mode of contractual political obligation in which the subject is freed from rigorous custom, prelatical tyranny, and political compulsion to exercise his own reason and will with the counsel of his passions as he consents to be governed.14 As an alternative to Kahn’s Miltonic contractor, I would like to suggest that his method of biblical criticism is equally as essential to the tract’s political theology of equity. The DDD is designed to remedy the persistently stony rigor of marital jurisprudence by bringing the positive laws of England into line with divine utterance or the spirit of Gospel. This is, of course, the gesture of sovereign equity, but as Kathy Eden has pointed out, it is equally the influential method of biblical criticism as practiced by Erasmus. In a moment when the distance between church and state was nil, these hermeneutic enterprises were more than complementary—they were a single coherent interpretive idiom distinguished only by the authority of their practitioners. Debora Shuger sees in the Annotationes of Erasmus a method that seeks “to identify the original audience and occasion behind Biblical utterances . . . [in order to] distinguish the universally valid thesis implicit in a passage from the historical contingencies informing it.”15 The act of recovering the spirit or original intention of biblical utterance is an act of equitable interpretation; as Eden points out, Erasmus sees the historical particulars of Paul’s composition of the epistle to the Corinthians as largely ornamental detail that offers little to a reading of the timeless kernel or “true equity” of the Pauline utterance.16 The important distinction here, as both Shuger and Eden suggest, is that for Erasmus historical context can often mislead or obscure, say, Christ’s sentiments on divorce: “The whole point of his 13. Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 199. 14. Ibid., 198–207. 15. Debora Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Subjectivity, and Sacrifice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 21. 16. Kathy Eden, “Equity and the Origins of Renaissance Humanism: The Case for Erasmus,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 5, no. 1 (1993): 137–45.

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rhetorical method is to isolate the unchanging, general principles that should govern a Christian understanding of divorce from the parasitic tangles of historical detritus that medieval literalism often mistook for the main trunk.”17 The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce lays out an early version of Milton’s theory of the proper relations between the state and the divine law—the state is the instrument of justice and the adversary of sin, for properly “sin can have no tenure by law at all, but is rather an eternal outlaw, and in hostility with law past all atonement” (288). Sin is the antithesis of divine and moral law, and the office of the magistrate is to keep sin in exile as an “eternal outlaw.” It is the office of the magistrate to make and preserve harmony between the positive laws of the state and the universally applicable moral and divine law; for if the laws of the state permit or produce sin (as does the rigorous law against divorce), “they enter into a kind of covenant with sin, and [therefore] there is not a greater sinner in the world than the law itself ” (288). This is a fairly conventional expression of early modern Pauline political theology, in which the Law and the state are mutually constitutive and mutually directed toward “the sacred and glorious end” of piety. However, Milton differs from high-church theologians like Hooker in seeing the interpretation of divine and moral law as the common inheritance and charge of

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men of what liberall profession soever, of eminent spirit and breeding join’d with a diffuse and various knowledge of divine and human things; able to balance and define good and evil, right and wrong, throughout every state of life; able to shew us the waies of the Lord, strait and faithful as they are, not full of cranks and contradictions and pitfalling dispenses, but with divine insight and benignity measur’d out to the proportion of each mind and spirit, each temper and disposition, created so different from each other, and yet by the skill of wise conducting, all to become uniform in virtue. (230)

Milton is here approaching a thesis that emerges fully in his later political writings—this is the view that a just state must rely upon the government of an aristocracy of grace and merit.The “wise conducting” of the nation falls to men of “eminent spirit and breeding,” in whom judgment is fully cultivated. The eminent man exercises his “knowledge of divine and human things” in specifically equitable fashion: rather than obscuring or rigidly enforcing the “waies of the Lord,” such a man acts with “divine insight and benignity measur’d out to the proportion of each mind and spirit, each temper and disposition, created

17. Shuger, The Renaissance Bible, 20.

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so different from each other.” In short, it is through the stewardship and rule of such men that the state can achieve its potential to become “uniform in virtue.”18 The arguments that emerge from the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce reveal Milton’s early and consistent advocacy for a political theology is which equity is a private ethos and a public norm, while the tract itself presents equity as a method and a message. Paradise Lost shares this enterprise.

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The Satanic Lawgiver In the epigraph of this chapter, I cite the famous line from the Federalist Papers—“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” On its face, Paradise Lost gives the lie to James Madison’s confidence in angels, some of whom rebel against heavenly government with dramatic and unfortunate consequences. However, Paradise Lost operates upon the most foundational premise in Milton’s political theology—that there is an incommensurable gulf between divine and human things that allegory, analogy, and mimesis cannot overcome. Victoria Silver, for instance, writes that for Milton it is not the problem of human sin but the absolute “hiddenness of God with which humanity must struggle from the moment of its creation.”19 In Silver’s reading, the poem is legible as a quixotic remedy for the insoluble alienation of human from divine. Summing up the historicist consensus in regards to the political valence of this incommensurability, David Norbrook argues that in Paradise Lost “it is simply invalid to make analogies between heavenly rule and earthly government.”20 Since its initial publication in 1667, readers of the poem have been at odds to locate the true kernel of Milton’s political program within the richly ambiguous and often conflicting tissue of political claims, theories, languages, and affectively powerful occasions. Such elusiveness is at the core of the poem’s hermeneutic mandate, as has been widely pointed out by scholars from Stanley Fish and Barbara Lewalski to Sharon Achinstein and David Loewenstein. In this chapter, I see the poem’s expansive political ambiguity as, in part, an occasion for deliberative equitable judgment. In this section of the chapter, I would like to sidestep the venerable debates over Milton’s republican ambition or his

18. Carole Pateman’s study of the specifically gendered nature of the social contract offers an illuminating critique of the seventeenth-century contract theory; see The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 19. Silver, Imperfect Sense, 53. 20. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 477.

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apostasy from politics in order to focus on the poem’s generally disinterested and often nonpartisan view of lawgiving, its transmission, and interpretation. It is hard to argue with the view that Paradise Lost is an anti-heroic poem, a “higher argument” against a culture of violence, vainglory, and impiety that for Milton is the source of bloodshed without end. The critique of aristocratic romance in the invocation of Book Nine of Paradise Lost, where Milton spurs the “tinsel trappings” and “tedious havoc [of] fabled Knights” as false heroics, is probably the most benign view Milton takes of a nefarious culture of violence, honor, and vainglory he associates consistently with Satan.21 But the charismatic Satan is much more than a diabolical Achilles whose petulance and will creates catastrophe and perdition.22 In Paradise Lost Satan is figured repeatedly as a conquering lawgiver and a self-created sovereign whose will constitutes a counter-nomos; in this gesture we see Milton revising the norms of classical epic, in which the foundational violence of the lawgiver is celebrated as national etiology. For Milton, the heroic lawgiver is the fountainhead of sword-law and tyranny, and the law Satan gives to humanity is a cruel parody of a divine original. Although he imagines himself as an innovator, as Silver contends, Satan is “incapable of any original idea, inventing only novel and of course degenerate uses of the world [he] mourns and misremembers.”23 In the first two books of the poem, Satan is chiefly concerned to create an elaborate political architecture, to realize his sovereign will through the skillful exercise of rhetoric and martial charisma.24 When, in an act of mighty fortitude, Satan leaves behind the lake of fire and settles his unblest feet on the burning shore of Hell, he makes a powerful claim of sovereign possession, with his mind compassing and inhabiting the new jurisdiction: “Thou profoundest hell / Receive thy new possessor: one who brings / A mind not to be changed by place or time. / The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n” (PL, I, 252–55). Satan is demonstrating more than simply the executive function of his “unconquerable will,” though it is certainly a core objective of the possession speech to display his restless desire to possess, delimit, and legislate the uninhabited wilderness of Hell.The possession speech casts no

21. It is equally true in Paradise Regained that violence and martial heroism look grotesque and sinful. 22. Quint, Epic and Empire, 281–83. 23. Silver, Imperfect Sense, 252. 24. David Loewenstein suggests that Satan is figured as a political rhetorician whose skills at appropriating revolutionary language are to be recognized as malevolent; see Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Sharon Achinstein contends that part of the objective of the poem is to train readers to recognize the misuse of political language: see Milton and the Revolutionary Reader.

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doubt on the legitimacy of his claims for sovereignty; instead the key feature of the speech is a superabundance of heroic will, the kind of flawed and violent megalopsychia here figured as the self-possessed mind and on display most frequently in seventeenth-century romance and heroic tragedy. At the root of Satan’s rebellion in Book Five lies his unwillingness to tolerate the Son of God in the function of lawgiver: his very first utterance (in the chronology of the poem) takes the form of a conspiratorial aside to Beelzebub, in which he credits the “new Laws . . . imposed” with raising “new minds [to revolt] in us who serve” (PL,V, 679–81). Satan harps on this string again in his exhortation to his followers, arguing for a kind of negative liberty or freedom from “prostration vile” to the unjustly imposed laws of God:

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Who can in reason then or right assume Monarchy over such as live by right His equals, if in power and splendor less, In freedom equal? or can introduce Law and Edict on us, who without law Err not? (PL, V, 794–99)

In this speech, Satan reads the heavenly polity as a clear hierarchy of status and splendor within which nonetheless every being is equally free. By this reasoning, God is simply the most powerful and splendid of angels who coexists on the same ontological plane with Satan and the rest of the angelic demos. As such, in Satan’s view God lacks the reason and right to place himself (and indeed his Son) above the law. Satan is still in the negative mode at this point; he rejects the supralegal standing of God, and he has not yet imagined himself as a competing sovereign.25 Ironically, it is the strident and faithful Abdiel who introduces Satan to the idea that he might set up as a rival lawgiver: “shalt thou give Law to God, shalt thou dispute / With him the points of liberty, who made / Thee what thou art” (PL, V, 822–24). Although he intends a full and searing repudiation of Satan’s blasphemous and prideful dissent, Abdiel’s critique has the opposite effect—he supplies Satan with the language and occasion to turn from a negative claim of liberty to a positive assertion of self-creating authority and

25. Satan’s negative thesis is a broader phenomenon, a pattern explicable in his whole program of dissent. With specific reference to Satan’s economically inflected “enterprise” in Paradise Lost, Blair Hoxby identifies a figural and ideological resemblance between the restored King and the apostate angel: “Like Charles II, Satan is a new monarch in a provisional regime. His powers are poorly defined, and he is committed to an enterprise that is better defined by what it is not than by what it is.” See Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2002), 154.

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radical will. Satan’s dispute with Abdiel is not an occasion to air competing sides in a topical ideological controversy—it is instead a description or etiology of the fashion in which Satan’s negative dissent transforms, with the unintended help of God’s good servant, into the self-begotten tyranny of will. Satan replies to Abdiel’s “strange point and new” with a heretical and striking claim of autochthony:

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We know no time when we were not as now; Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised By our own quick’ning power, when fatal course Had circled his full Orb, the birth mature Of this our native Heaven, ethereal Sons. Our puissance is our own. (V, 859–64)

John Rogers has argued that Satan’s speech flirts with danger, outlining as it does “the hesitant emergence of the Satanic ideology of self-possession and selfauthorization, and affirmation of creaturely autonomy from which the poem, in its more theological mode, will be forced to distance itself.”26 In Rogers’s view, Satan’s defense of autochthony is consistent with the poem’s proto-liberal natural philosophy but set at odds with its political theology; I would suggest that Satan’s defense of creaturely autonomy is a precursor language of his more elaborate self-creation as a sovereign lawgiver throughout the poem. The focus in these lines is not, I think, intended to be on Satan’s revolutionary claim of selfactuating “quick’ning power”; instead Milton describes here a psychology of apostate will in which assertions of strategic amnesia and authochthony are the chiefly ornamental means to achieving the instrumental end of self-begotten sovereignty. In this passage, we are asked to see the literally unholy alliance of radical will with a rhetoric of lawfulness. Victoria Silver reads this speech as a moment in which Satan makes an “assertion of autarchic will and significance” in order to compensate for his radical inability to see divine providence as anything other than retribution.27 The claim of self-begetting—a view of authority that arises from the depths of the individual rather than descends from a benevolent father—is therefore not really a perversion of the revolutionary language of liberty. Instead, the naively autarchic claim that “our puissance is our own” is yet another symptom of the kind of excessive personality and expansive charismatic will that for Milton obscures the plain light of Christian liberty.

26. Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, 126. 27. Silver, Imperfect Sense, 242.

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When first he encounters Adam and Eve, Satan explains away his bad intentions and claims to be a prisoner of momentum: “public reason just, / Honor and Empire with revenge enlarg’d, / By conquering this New World, compels me now / To do what else though damned I should abhor” (IV, 389–92). But of course the unwelcome pressure of “public reason just” falls away after the successful conquest of humanity; after Satan has done the damage to the first parents, he meets Sin and Death beating a track across the abyss. Sin greets him as a heroic lawgiver: Satan is the “author and prime Architect” of “magnific deeds” and the sovereign of Earth: “Thine now is all this World, thy virtue hath won / What thy hands builded not, thy Widsom gained / With odds what War hath lost, and fully avenged / Our foil in Heaven. Here thou shall Monarch reign” (372–75). Outfitted with the status of a conquering lawgiver—one who wins new realms through virtue and wisdom—Satan indulges himself with a gesture of sovereign donation:

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All yours, right down to Paradise descend; There dwell and reign in bliss, thence on the earth Dominion exercise and in the air, Chiefly on man, sole lord of all declared, Him first make sure your thrall, and lastly kill. My substitutes I send ye, and create Plenipotent on earth, of matchless might Issuing from me. (398–405)

Here Satan operates exactly like the kind of patriarchal king Sir Robert Filmer had argued for in his published writings. Satan is a superior power who by command and consent establishes a law (in this case the surrogative dominion of Sin and Death) that becomes customary and normative. There is a kind of tonal chiasmus in this donation speech, wherein Satan is both an uncontested sovereign and a subversive. The donation of earthly usufruct to his plenipotent substitutes is legitimate—as a conqueror he has the uncontested right to create deputies who will execute his law—even while it seeks to undermine what looks like the toothless declaration that humanity is the “sole lord of all.” Although it is attenuated, Satan’s sovereignty is never really in dispute—he has a clear title to Hell and Earth, and God never once figures him, like Nimrod, as a usurper of “dominion undeserved.”28

28. The two usurpers in Paradise Lost are Nimrod and Death, who usurps the Son’s temporal throne briefly until he gets his comeuppance at the end of time (XII). For discussion of Nimrod and the problem of tyranny, see Patterson, Reading Between the Lines.

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When the “Dogs of Hell” arrive on Earth, they sow havoc, discord, and corruption; they “destroy, or unimmortal make” all of God’s creation. Far from repudiating this catastrophe, God claims it as his own, just as he claims Sin and Death for his own:“I call’d and drew them thither / My Hell-hounds, to lick up the draff and filth / Which man’s polluting Sin with taint hath shed” (X, 629– 31). God assimilates Sin and Death into the historical pageant of divine justice, deputizing them as instruments of his own retribution. God tolerates Satan’s malignant law that humanity be enslaved and killed, and likewise permits Sin and Death to enjoy the fiction of their absolute might; the donation speech is in this view not a parody at all but in fact a moment of tangible Satanic lawgiving that exists unchallenged by God. Of course, God always has the upper hand; as he says when he claims ownership of Sin and Death, his enemies “laugh / as if transported with some fit / Of Passion, I to them [the hell-hounds] had quitted all, / At random yielded up to their misrule; / And know not that I called and drew them thither” (X, 626–30). In this divine “as if,” God reveals Satan to be only in possession of partial knowledge, irretrievably alienated by his own bad agency yet fully and falsely convinced of his authority to create jurisdictions, laws, and plenipotent substitutes. The donation speech is emblematic of the poem’s view of Satanic lawgiving, which is figured consistently as an exercise of rhetorical art and martial charisma. But Milton’s objective is never to attack the laws that Satan gives—as we have seen, he has a clear title to Hell and Earth, and indeed God figures Satan’s sovereign utterances, like his punishment, as unwitting components of the broader juridical sweep of providential history. By casting the Satanic law—a regime under which all of creation is enslaved, impurified, and killed—as a just and legitimate sentence for “man’s polluting sin,” God seems to claim Satan for his own. When Milton collapses Satan’s bad eminence into simply an unusually violent and cruel mode of divine retribution, he seems to flirt with dangerous heresy. The God who sneers at Satan’s prideful lawgiving and tolerates ages of human suffering here seems to resemble the brutal and unscrupulous character Empson identifies famously with Stalin.29 On its face, God’s startling claim of possession of all the hell-hounds (including Satan) is legible in radically Pauline terms—this is the face of the vengeful Father whose iron law of retribution must be satisfied by the sacrificial atonement and the merciful redemption of the Son.Taking a more generous view, David Norbrook has argued that in such moments Milton’s God is intended to function as a “dynamic, Machiavellian legislator” who manages his political architecture with creatorly care, skill, and

29. William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 146.

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self-sacrifice.30 Such a view rescues God for republicanism; while Machiavelli certainly advocates the reduction to first principles to save a corrupt polity, Milton’s God, however, is not at all interested in saving his creation from blood violence or impurity. The only substantial reduction to first principles in the poem occurs at the end of time, when Satan is packed off to the eternal gulag. God sticks to his rigorous historical plan, even despite the pathetic spectacle of a broken and discordant creation and a melancholy pair of best-loved creatures. For Milton, episodes of Satanic lawgiving are useful in that they point a contrast between modes of lawgiving, a comparison between the charismatic donation of law-as-heroic-will and the hidden but self-evidently perfect effusion of the law of God. Milton avoids a heretical indictment of God by figuring Satan’s jurispathic utterances as impurely charismatic, as self-aggrandizing conceits of normative foundation. As such, Satan is the master type of the tyrant, who corrupts the lawmaking function and the offices of mortality and mercy into the exercise of private will.31 Satanic lawgiving is charismatic, spectacular, rhetorically fluent, and ceremonial; it is an emanation of autarchic will, excessive personality, and incomplete knowledge that Milton not only finds deeply suspicious within the poem, but also that he would have identified with the political conceits of historical foundationalism within Stuart ideology of kingship. In short, Satanic lawgiving is a demonic parody of the divine original that remains largely hidden, obscure, and uncharismatic but is nonetheless written clearly in the hearts of God’s creatures. Such a contrast between charismatic and veiled lawgiving clarifies aspects of the often puzzling abdication of God. After the Son takes upon himself the office of redemptive sacrifice for humanity, God is moved by such merit to elevate him to the throne of Heaven: here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt Reign Both God and Man, Son of both God and Man, Anointed universal King: all Power I give thee, reign for ever, and assume Thy merits; under thee as Head Supreme 30. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 477. 31. There is a key difference between Satan and his human simulacrum Nimrod, and that difference hangs on the phrase “dominion undeserved.” Nimrod, in Michael’s account, arrogates dominion undeserved from his brethren as a result of his “proud ambitious heart.” Satan’s dominion is never undeserved (quite literally), and since his “title” is clear, his declension into tyranny (which is virtually instantaneous) more closely replicates the theoretical evolution of the king into tyrant that Milton describes (unoriginally) in TKM. Nimrod’s assertion of a bad title over his equals—a willful misreading of the divine donation, as Annabel Patterson has pointed out—is more legible as conquest than tyranny. See Patterson, Reading between the Lines, 254–55.

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Lines of Equity Thrones, Princedoms, Powers, Dominions I reduce: All knees to thee shall bow, of them that bide In Heaven, or earth, or under Earth in Hell. (III, 315–22)

Norbrook has argued most recently that the divine abdication is the natural outgrowth of God’s status as a “republican founding legislator” who finally “must undergo sacrifice for the general good.”32 Such a view is not far from Empson’s view of Milton’s God as a character who exemplifies the ideal lawgiver, a figure whose bad behavior and palpable vengefulness is nonetheless tempered by a “purifying aspiration.”33 The Son’s kingship is to be transitional, and he too will abdicate peacefully when, at the end of time, for men and angels no government is necessary:

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The world shall burn, and from her ashes spring New Heaven and earth, wherein the just shall dwell And after all thir tribulations long See golden days, fruitful of golden deeds, with Joy and Love triumphing, and fair Truth Then thou thy regal Sceptre shalt lay by, For regal Sceptre then no more shall need, God shall be All in All. (III, 334–41)

These twin abdications are legible as symptoms of Milton’s deep and abiding suspicion of ceremonial, fetishistic, or charismatic presentations of legal utterance. The Machiavellian reduction to first principles is normally a singular act of heroic personality, or as he writes in the Discourses on Livy, the purifying exercise of the “simple virtue of one man.”34 But God’s view of these abdications is properly speaking historical rather than legislative or political, for while the embodied or titular head of each regime may change, in this speech there is neither ontological distance nor providential dissimilarity between God and the Son. Meet the new boss; he’s the same as the old boss. The transition of power from God to the Son is best understood not as an abdication or a regime change at all, but rather as a simple modulation of the divine principle that emphasizes the historical transition

32. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 478–80. 33. Empson, Milton’s God, 145. 34. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, ed. and trans. Nathan Tarcov and Harvey Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 111.

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from law to Gospel, from shadowy types to truth, from retribution to mercy. The point of these pseudo-abdications is to highlight the fact that charismatic circumstances and spectacular personality add no legitimacy to a nomos. Moreover, the profession of humility that God makes in subjecting himself to the Son is an expression of self-negating evanescence of personality meant to distance the grumpy but finally generous God from the megalomania, the excessive personality of Satan. God can vanish in preference for the Son precisely because his law is so self-evidently perfect that it needs no charismatic utterance or emblematic ceremony to lend it substance and binding force; it is simply the case that “God shall be All in All.” Such a figural argument underscores the Erasmian thesis (discussed above) that the true spirit of divine law is fully separable from the historical contingencies or charismatic entanglements of its utterance. In that the true law of God is written with clarity in the hearts of the faithful, the amplification of first principles, political foundations, or of heroic lawgivers looks in contrast like a Satanic idolatry. In Paradise Lost, Milton certainly allows for lawgiving in “human things.” The poem’s worldly rejoinder to the Satanic modality—the heroic conqueror who imposes law as fiat—is the humble man of faith, who acts as a selfnegating conduit for the divine ethos and who often “dares single to be just.”35 As the tapestry of human history unfolds in Books Eleven and Twelve, Michael describes a world dominated by “ministers of death” and depraved, impious masses within which there are nonetheless signs of life. Enoch, for instance, is “the only righteous in a world perverse, / And therefore hated, therefore so beset / With foes for daring single to be just” (XI, 701–3). Enoch’s discourse of “Right and Wrong, / Of Justice, of Religion, Truth and Peace, / And Judgment from Above” (XI, 666–68) invites only the fury of his interlocutors: God spirits him away in a cloud and “so violence / Proceeded, and Oppression, and swordLaw / Through All the Plain, and refuge none was found” (XI, 671–73).This is a familiar script in Michael’s divine history (and, for that matter, a well-worn path to claims of Miltonic self-congratulation); from Enoch, Michael turns quickly to Noah, “the only son of light / In a dark age” who turns out to be the progenitor of all subsequent humanity. Noah, like Enoch, is compassed round by degeneracy in a culture of violence marked by “acts of prowess eminent / And great exploits, but of true virtue void” (XI, 789–90). Michael’s history of exemplary men flows from Noah, from whom God builds a race anew, to Abraham, that “one faithful man” in whom God “will

35. David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 101–6.

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raise / A mighty Nation, and upon him show’r / His benediction so, that in his Seed / All nations shall be blest” (XII, 111–12, 124–26). This chain of just men is legible, in part, as testimony of the ways in which durable commitments to faith and justice are to help bring about the advent of true Christian liberty and the adherence to divine law. For as we hear, the Seed of Abraham in whom “all Nations of the Earth . . . shall be blessed” is none other than Christ, a point Michael makes unambiguously: “by that Seed / Is meant thy great deliverer, who shall bruise / The Serpent’s head” (XII, 145–50). These singular and exemplary men are in Michael’s account the soil in which the Seed of redemption is to be cultivated; part of the utility of this germinal trope depends upon the evanescence of personality implied therein. None of these good men are charismatic lawgivers or even heroes of liberty; they are admirable in their audacity to be just, but finally they are unable to reach and persuade the revolted multitudes. Moreover, the manner in which the rhetoric of singularity recurs to the point of cliché collapses these three distinct men into one recurring mode of self-negating personality. As such, these men are something like creaturely replicas of the abdicating God, mimetic doubles of the continual and necessary extinction of personality in the service of divine providence. Milton’s Moses is a singular man of faith as well, but in Paradise Lost the hieratic lawgiver who mediates between God and humanity is deliberately elusive and vague. For a poem devoted to the description and interpretation of divine law, the relatively minimal impact of Moses is striking, even while it is consistent with the poem’s generally Pauline thesis. Of course, as I have argued above, Milton is deeply skeptical of the normative fetish that charismatic lawgivers and their original intent can become. As an allusive or figural presence, Moses pops up famously in the invocations to Books One and Three, and in Book Twelve he enters Michael’s divine retelling of Exodus. In Michael’s account, Moses is a liberator armed with the special favor of an interventionist God: he is “sent from God to claim / His people from enthralment” and able through awful power to translate the Red Sea into “two crystal walls” between which the Israelites may pass (XII, 170–71, 197). But Moses’ abilities are always carefully attributed to God—“Such wondrous power God to his Saint will lend, / Though present in his Angel” (XII, 200–201)—and his identity as an heroic liberator is linked uniformly to his status as the agent and factor of divine will. The line “such wondrous power God to his Saint will lend” is epigrammatic, creedal—the emphatic use of the future tense amplifies an already functional analogy between Moses and other saints armed by God who will subvert tyrants or bustle in the world. The enjambment of “lend” is no accident, however, and what looks like an axiomatic profession of faith in worldly heroism of saints turns over into a qualified narrative of dependency. Moses is lent rather than given “wondrous

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power,” and that power resides not in the man but in God’s Angel. Milton here begins backing away from the high-flying heroic language he has previously attached to Moses, and he takes care to ensure that the powers Moses wields are suitably credited to God. Moreover, when they arrive in the wilderness, the Israelites design their own political institutions—“there they shall found / Thir government, and thir great Senate choose / Through the Twelve Tribes, to rule by Laws ordain’d” and then are given law by God himself: God “descending, will himself / In Thunder, Lightning and loud Trumpet’s sound / Ordain them Laws” (XII, 224–26; 228–30). Both God and the Israelites ordain new laws here, but Moses is nowhere to be found in these lines. It is only a few lines later that majestic theophany turns into mediated hierophany:

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. . . But the voice of God To mortal ear is dreadful; they beseech That Moses might to report to them his will, And terror cease; he grants what they besought Instructed that to God is no access Without mediator, whose high office now Moses in figure bears, to introduce One greater, of whose day he shall foretell. (XII, 235–42)

Moses here inhabits the “high office” of mediator whose function is to report God’s will and thereby to ease the terror of the people—he is not the architect but the draftsman of divine law. The crucial gesture in these lines is to cast Moses as a type of Christ, a primitive figuration of the “One greater” in whose works a better covenant is fulfilled. As Jason Rosenblatt has written, in Paradise Lost “Moses is the figure who ultimately falls short.”36 Such a shortfall is not a failure, however; it is instead a necessary function of the poem’s generalized hostility to the charismatic utterance of law and the “heroic” elevation of the imperfect, creaturely lawgiver.

Equity Colleague with Justice At this point, it is important to recall that the theodicy of Paradise Lost provoked Milton to an expansive fictional etiology, and that in the large, the poem

36. Jason Philip Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 163.

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is a sustained invitation to perform the classic interpretive work of equity as it descends from classical rhetorical and literary theory—to arrive at a justice by weighing the distance between particular facts and universal norms, between individual circumstances and general principles. But in Paradise Lost, equity is more than a code word for guided political deliberation.37 I argue that equity is a specifically juridical mode in which Milton outlines the poem’s theory of justice in “divine and human things,” and demonstrates the dialectical relation between its private and its public offices. Paradise Lost contains crucial episodes emblematic of this mode; these are moments in which we see discussions of, or arguments over, the quality and exercise of justice, mercy, criminal guilt, grace, and law. Moreover, such moments are designed to cultivate the soul of the fit audience, replicating in mimetic and affective terms the searching and often painful labor of equitable adjudication. In the second edition of Surprised by Sin, Stanley Fish restated his influential thesis axiomatically: in his account, the method of Paradise Lost is “to provoke in its readers wayward, fallen responses which are then corrected by one of several authoritative voices (the narrator, God, Raphael, Michael, the Son). In this way, I argued, the reader is brought to a better understanding of his sinful nature and is encouraged to participate in his own reformation.”38 As Fish himself writes correctly, this reading “was immediately influential and continues to be so” (xi). For although many critics have disputed Fish’s local claims, and have contested the censorious and quietist Milton implied in Fish’s reading, the notion that Paradise Lost is a poem designed at least in part to foster interpretive action in its readers is now part of the lingua franca of Milton studies.39 For instance, Sharon Achinstein has suggested that the poem is intended to create revolutionary readers by provoking incomplete or fractured allegoresis, while David Loewenstein has suggested that Milton instructs his audience in how to recognize and interpret perilous and seductive political rhetoric.40 A recent twist on the Fish thesis holds that Milton’s deep interest in fostering deliberative work in his audience is part of a broader proto-liberal plan to cultivate self-activating individuals through the formal and hermeneutic entanglements of the poem. 37. This is the mistake Kahn makes in Wayward Contracts; she asserts equitable deliberation as a feature of the poem’s affective program but allows the term to simply operate as a placeholder for the consideration of political obligation—thinking through the subject’s relation to lawful duty can be informed by the discourse of equity, but her reading of Paradise Lost never demonstrates this point convincingly. 38. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin:The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), x. 39. For Fish, the poem is methodologically committed to a “dialectical experience . . . involving the respondent in his own edification” (ibid., 49). 40. Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 218–23; Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 202–41.

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At the core of most such recent readings of the poem is a dissent against the repellent caricature of Milton as a “redundant pedant who already knows the truth of things, humiliates and berates his [audience] for their errors,” and whose poem is a dogmatic fulmination uttered ex cathedra to humiliate the revolted multitudes into an acknowledgment of their own sinfulness.41 Victoria Kahn, for instance, has argued recently that deliberation over the terms and condition of Godly political obligation is at the heart of the praxis of Paradise Lost: “Milton’s goal is to create revolutionary readers, readers who will understand their covenant with God as a matter of interpretation.”42 Kahn’s Milton, as I have alluded to above, is a theorist of political contract avant la lettre. The proto-liberal Milton described by John Rogers, Kahn, and others is a function of a proto-liberal Paradise Lost; in this view, Milton’s poem is a space within which antithetical views, political ideologies, and theological standpoints are held deliberately in productive tension as part of a formal solicitation of deep interpretive labor. The struggle to integrate the language of self-activating Christian individualism with the demand to submit unconditionally to the absolute goodness of a difficult God is in this view legible as the formal core of the poem’s induction of its audience into the better fortitude of theological, political, and ethical deliberation. Put another way, insofar as Paradise Lost proposes competing normative regimes, it does so as part of a formal commitment to productive ambiguity. The liberal-humanist Milton tolerant of ambiguity and host to inconsistency has largely supplanted the more resolutely dogmatic and unbending Milton, although recently David Norbrook has argued that Paradise Lost is a coherent and consistent “republican speech-act” that emerges from, and is intended to transmit, the partisan revolutionary ferment of the Interregnum years. In what remains of this chapter, I propose a reading of Paradise Lost in which the apparent tension between the poem’s inherently unstable hermeneutical form and its openly orthodox (stable) profession of divine providence and Christian liberty is resolved. The way out of this bind is through equity. I suggest that Paradise Lost is composed of two distinct, independently articulate formal objectives—the imperative to deliberate and the injunction to obey a perfect and absolute God—that are nonetheless bound together dialectically by the poem’s sustained cultivation of equity. Let us recall here that equity is, in early modern political and rhetorical theory, the act of summoning the spirit of an utterance to create worldly justice. It is both a political norm to be practiced in good government and an inherently personal (and sometimes dangerously) 41. John Rumrich, Milton Unbound (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 21. 42. Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 197.

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subjective deliberation.The two prongs—the public and private strains—of equity are reflected in the formal structure of Paradise Lost. On the one hand, Milton offers a heterodox, unstable invitation to deep and challenging deliberations over the spirit of the divine utterance—this is the paideic method with which Milton corrects his wayward audience or cultivates revolutionary readers. With apologies to Fish, in place of “discovery as form,” I demonstrate in the pages that follow “equity as form” in Paradise Lost.43 On the other hand, the poem makes an unambiguous, strident, and orthodox argument for divine equity. In this movement, equity is the signature of the Gospel and of Christian liberty—it is also the remedy through which God brings his creatures back into purity and justice. As I will demonstrate, this rhetorical (rather than hermeneutic) appeal is the space within which Milton argues for equity as a public, governmental norm. Taken together, the interpretive and the rhetorical appeal in Paradise Lost are part of a broader commitment to equity as governmental norm and personal ethos.The poem proposes simultaneously, and without contradiction, a private language of unstable, heterodox, individual deliberation and a normative public language rooted in an equitable Christian liberty.These two strains form something like a double helix of equity—a unit composed of two distinct backbones that operate only when bound together. The first emblematic discussion of equity is in Book Three, where Milton turns to an unadorned verse style suitable for the representation of divinity.44 God’s opening speech is a defensive assertion of the liberty of his creatures; they are “made just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” (III, 98–99). Without the freedom to fall into apostate disobedience, God’s creatures would be no more than slaves of necessity, and as he outlines the voluntarist position God sounds very much like a liberal political philosopher: his creatures are “Authors to themselves in all / Both what they judge and what they choose; for so / I form’d them free, and free they must remain, / Till then enthrall themselves” (III, 122–25). It is an obvious point in God’s speech that pain, alienation, and guilt are the inevitable consequences of such a system, but these (human) crimes against divinity are mitigated finally through the redemptive intervention of the Son. For while Satan should have known better, humanity “falls deceiv’d” and “therefore shall find grace” (III, 130–31). The distinction here between human and Satanic disobedience hinges, of course, on the intent of the disobedient creature, but the real objective here is to establish a providential schema within which simple distributive justice is accompanied by a second or 43. The reference is to Fish’s essay restating his argument:“Discovery as Form in Paradise Lost,” in New Essays on Paradise Lost, ed. Thomas Kranidas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 44. Fish, Surprised by Sin, 74–80.

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alternate mode of judgment, a selectively applied gesture of equitable remedy. In other words, when he allows his creatures to be “authors to themselves in all,” God also creates the need for retributive punishment, which he calls here and throughout the poem “Justice.” Within this more or less positivistic system, disobedience is punished according to the intent of the malefactor. However, as a sign of his goodness, God also brings into being “Mercy,” that cardinal gesture of equitable relief that drops like rain from heaven when circumstances dictate. Divine Justice is absolute, universal—no one is above this law that at key moments resembles nothing some much as the lex talionis. Divine Mercy, however, is particular and contingent—there is a whole host of revolted angelic multitudes who shall find no grace at the end of time. It is finally the principle of mercy, of equitable mitigation, that makes this voluntarist universe bearable, a fact that God acknowledges at the end of his speech: “In Mercy and Justice both, / Through Heav’n and Earth, so shall my glory excel, / But Mercy first and last shall brightest shine” (III, 133–35). God’s glory will be diffused throughout the creation by Justice and Mercy, but he then subordinates that glory to “Mercy first and last.” The goal in these last lines is to cast glory and Justice as transitory phenomena, as natural consequences of the dynamic movement through time of God’s voluntarist universe. Moreover, by suggesting that divine glory and justice yield finally to Mercy, God prepares the ground for his abdication in favor of the Son, the poem’s primary officer of equitable relief. As the divine colloquy unfolds, mercy becomes increasingly the exclusive office of the Son while God articulates a syncretic version of justice, equal parts diké and severe Old Testament deity.The Son’s ethos is not easily missed, for “in his face / Divine compassion visibly appear’d,” but in this section of Book Three he is not strictly speaking a merciful intercessor. In his first speech, the Son doesn’t press God to remit the rigor of his sentence or to forgive humanity—he does ask God if “Man [should] finally be lost” and if the creation will be unmade. At this moment, is it crucial that the Son does not ask God to forgive humanity in positive terms, for to do so would compel God to judge too soon, before the Son has had the chance to sacrifice himself voluntarily. In reply to the Son’s exploratory queries, God fulminates in a severe and alienating manner. He suggests angrily that more than apostate angels will find no forgiveness: any hard-hearted and sinful creatures who “neglect and scorn” God and his Umpire Conscience “from mercy I exclude” (III, 195; 199; 202). Moreover, God offers up a stark and retributive sentence of measure for measure: . . . man disobeying Disloyal breaks his fealty, and sins Against the high supremacy of Heav’n,

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Affecting Godhead, and so losing all, To expiate his treason hath naught left, But to destruction sacred and devote, He with his whole posterity must die, Die he or justice must; unless for him Some other able, and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death. (III, 203–12)

In this passage, humanity is accused of disobedience, disloyalty, overreaching, and treason—all, in a sense, political crimes—and the “rigid satisfaction, death for death” is meant to resemble the lex talionis. God’s position is an absolute one rather than an overly rigorous one, for justice cannot exist if crimes go unpunished. Since justice flows from the fact of a voluntarist universe, the death sentence is cast as the necessary or inevitable consequence of creaturely liberty rather than as excessive divine rigor. By so closely linking justice but not mercy with the voluntarist hypothesis, God sets aside mercy as a special language or experience of grace that may be selectively applied. Mercy is not an inevitable quality of God’s providential design the way justice is; it is instead a circumstantial gift of grace to those who merit it. When the Son responds to God’s invitation to “some other able, and as willing [to] pay / The rigid satisfaction,” he becomes the sacrificial surrogate, the pharmakos of sinful humanity. Here the Son never pleads a case or argues for the mitigation of the death sentence; indeed, by offering up himself in satisfaction for human crimes, the Son endorses the retributive code of divine justice. As he volunteers for the Atonement, the Son describes his gesture as an act of grace rather than mercy, and he underscores again the symmetrical quality of divine justice. For God’s positive sentence of “death for death,” the Son offers in its place “men for him, life for life” (III, 236). By so offering himself in satisfaction, the Son will “rise Victorious and subdue” Death and in so doing return with the legions of his redeemed into the bosom of heaven where God shall be all in all. In this episode, the Son never appeals for mercy in juridical terms, but by instead operating as the sacrificial agent of conquering grace, he embodies the merciful principle in God’s providential design. The choirs of adulating angels describe to God the intervention of the Son as intended to “appease thy wrath, and end the strife / Of Mercy and Justice in thy Face discerned” (III, 405–6). Here again the Son’s surrogative sacrifice is figured as an act of grace and “unexampled love” rather than as a plea for mitigation, as an ethical practice rather than a hermeneutic appeal. The point here is that, in the Son’s exchange with God, equitable relief is not a matter of legal interpretation, for after all God “judgest only right.” Given the absolute perfection of divine justice, any appeal

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to equity by the Son or anyone else would be a blasphemous critique. Divine law needs, and admits, no remedy. A good part of the Son’s function here is to represent the fashion in which equity can be, in addition to legal interpretation, a habit of soul and a creedal commitment to realizing mercy and grace through action. As such, this episode is properly understood as the etiology of the Gospel, that worldly utterance of the Son’s ethos that fulfils divine law without critique. On its face, this divine colloquy is tailor-made for a discussion of equity—a lawgiver hands down a rigid sentence that is then contested by a merciful intercessor. But Milton refuses to challenge the absolute goodness of divine justice and the heavenly judge-sovereign, and instead he figures equity as a commitment to grace and love that realizes mercy without pleading for it. The perfect quality of divine justice (and its immanence in the basic voluntarist fabric of God’s creation) is intended, I think, to amplify the contrast between heavenly and worldly government, much in the way that figuring God as king is meant to operate.45 Only the most blasphemous and tyrannical of kings might see themselves as executors of a perfectible justice.The practice of equity is an ethos, but it is also the public norm that Milton sees, in opposition to the office of kingship, as the best response to the irretrievably alienated and imperfect quality of human justice. The poem’s most direct engagement with equity is scattered through the tragic notes of the last four books, wherein Milton describes the ethical, political, and cognitive consequences of alienation from the divine. Upon arriving at the forbidden Tree with the Serpent, Eve admits that in Paradise there is only one positive law: “of this tree we may not taste or touch, [but for] the rest, we live / Law to ourselves, our Reason is our Law.” (IX, 651, 653–54). By suggesting that “our reason is our law,” Eve describes the Edenic nomos as a mimetic double of its heavenly original; the law is written in the hearts of God’s creatures and needs neither interpretation nor utterance. It is essentially perfect, and the single prohibition is a necessary condition of creaturely liberty, for as God suggests in his first speech, without the freedom to fall his creatures would be nothing more than slaves. The system in which “our reason is our law” allows criminal activity but is itself never possibly implicated in a transgression. Put another way, while it is obviously possible to deviate from reason and law, such a crime is in no way explicable as a function or consequence of the law itself. Disobedience is, instead, purely irrational. These are the high stakes that Milton’s self-governing subject has to play, and 45. Blair Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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in his rhetorical appeal to Eve at the base of the Tree, Satan exploits her relative lack of counsel. Collecting himself for this auspicious occasion, Satan puts on a “new part . . . and as to passion mov’d, / Fluctuates disturb’d, yet comely, and in act / Rais’d, as of some great matter to begin” (IX, 667–69). The new role to be played is the “Orator renowned” whose theatrical mastery of gesture, physiognomy, and language is to be put in service of “some great cause.” By casting Satan as a practitioner of classical rhetoric, Milton achieves at least two goals. He reiterates the poem’s ubiquitous bond between Satan and the ornamental language of persuasion, but more critically in this moment, he amplifies the dramatic irony already palpable in the whole scene of Eve’s temptation. By calling the theatrical and forensic quality of Satan’s speech so obviously to notice, Milton figures Eve, and behind her the fallen reader of the poem, as the audience for an affectively powerful consideration of divine justice. As he takes on the mantle of a classical orator, Satan introduces to Eve the language of equitable deliberation, an unfamiliar and superfluous style of hermeneutic activity in Paradise. Equity is a crucial element in Satan’s rhetorical appeal to Eve. After collecting himself for this great forensic occasion, Satan opens with an apostrophe to the Tree: “O Sacred,Wise, and Wisdom-Giving Plant, Mother of Science, now I feel thy Power / within me clear, not only to discern / Things in thir Causes, but to trace the ways of highest Agents, deem’d however wise” (IX, 679–83). The “science” that the Serpent so lauds is strikingly similar to the sovereign exercise of equity jurisprudence wherein the primary interpretive gesture is likewise to “discern Things in their causes” and “trace the ways of highest agents” in order to produce justice. A few lines later he describes the divine prohibition as “rigid threats [made] . . . by the Threat’ner” (IX, 685,687); in these moments, Satan figures God as an enforcer of an arbitrary and punitive rigor in order to elevate Eve’s impending “petty trespass” into a display of “dauntless virtue.” Equipped with such discernment of agents and causes, Satan proposes that Eve consider God and his ways as a hermeneutic subject.46 His oration is a piece of exemplary casuistical persuasion, and Satan raises searching questions in order to give Eve a staccato crash course in deliberative contemplation. For instance, after having dismissed Death as an empty threat, Satan invites Eve to consider why God might wish to restrict

46. From an alternative view, Joanna Picciotto sees Eve as a “zealous but incompetent natural philosopher”: see her “Reforming the Garden: The Experimentalist Eden and Paradise Lost,” ELH 72 (2005): 29.

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knowledge of good and evil; since a loving God would have no incentive to do so, then “God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just; / Not just, not God; not fear’d then, nor obey’d” (IX, 700–701). Satan here uses the same kind of strict positivistic grammar we have seen attached to divine justice, even while the content of his first line is exactly the opposite of the divine command that “die he, or justice must.” Eve seems unwilling to jettison the notion of a loving God, but (as she has demonstrated already) she is intensely curious about the ways of highest agents and things in their causes. Satan pursues this second path to disobedience. Since a just and loving God by definition would never hurt his creatures, he must have put the prohibition in place as a trial of creaturely virtue or a technology of servitude. Eve responds to the Serpent’s argument by turning inward, musing to herself for thirty-four lines in which she weighs the merits of Satan’s case, reshapes and utters elements of his argument, demonstrates his snarled logic, and mimics his theologically interrogative mode. Up until this point in the poem, Eve’s questions have been either affirming (e.g., Adam, why should we doubt God’s goodness?) or designed to satisfy her intense curiosity (e.g., Serpent, where is this fabulous tree?). Eve is already, it seems, demonstrating the corruption that attends Satan’s science of causes and the ways of highest agents. One crucial objective of the persuasion speech and of Eve’s introspective is to demonstrate the ways in which the language of equity, and especially the forensic consideration of first principles and highest agents, is wholly out of place in a prelapsarian world. The persuasion of Eve is yet another emblem of the incommensurable gulf between the perfect heavenly nomos and the condition of fallenness. In a prelapsarian world, equity is a superfluous heresy. In the post-lapsarian world, however, equity is an absolute necessity given the criminal alienation of humanity from God. The Son’s cardinal function in the last books of Paradise Lost is to demonstrate this point, and in the wake of the first disobedience, he becomes the unambiguous voice of equity. Adam and Eve’s criminal trespass elicits a subtle rearticulation of divine justice: But whom send I to judge them? whom but thee Vicegerent Son, to thee I have transferr’d All Judgment, whether in Heav’n, or Earth, or Hell Easy it may be seen that I intend Mercy Colleague with Justice, sending thee Man’s Friend, his mediator, his design’d Both Ransom and redeemer voluntary, And destin’d Man himself to judge Man fall’n. (X, 55–61)

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God’s assignment of the office of judge to the Son is a bit redundant, but the important gesture here is to modify the proper relationship between mercy and justice from the vision we saw previously in Book Three. It is a move from strife to collegiality, from an asymmetrical agon to a symmetrical co-partnering of mercy and justice. Moreover, God intends that his gesture be easily seen by fallen humanity whose vision has been clouded literally as well as morally. The symmetrical and immanent bond between mercy and justice is an emblem of the emergence of a modulated nomos, a regime of law and justice better suited to the alienated condition of “Man fall’n.” The phrase “Mercy Colleague with Justice” is the most orthodox description of equity in the poem—it is a redaction of a standard classical and early modern view of justice as a bifurcated faculty in which the letter and spirit of law, or the sentence and the remedy, are colleagues brought together harmoniously through the equitable function. The Son is, as we hear a few lines later, “judge and intercessor both,” a double status explicable as a sign of sovereignty. The point here is not that the Son remits punishment or relaxes the law—he does, after all, deliver the capital sentence—but rather that good government in a fallen world is made up of both punishment and remedy, of mortality and mercy. The Son is fully capable of delivering a death sentence, but his love and pity also compels him to clothe the nakedly abject first parents—the first of many such gestures of intercession on behalf of the condemned. One of the key gestures of Book Ten is to make literal not only the painful consequences of alienation from God, but also to illustrate the radical break from the unfallen mode of rational self-government.47 When the narrator returns to the first parents late in Book Ten, Milton casts Adam and Eve as prefigurations of Michael’s later commentary on political life: their fractured polity is one in which “true liberty is lost” and “inordinate desires / And upstart passions catch the Government / From Reason, and to servitude reduce / Man till then free” (XII, 83–90). The first parents struggle through painful deliberations of the posterity and quality of their disobedience, of the nature of divine justice and the character of death, but also by the end of the book through self-instruction they erect themselves from recumbent servitude. Milton presents the relationship between the experience of alienation and the potential for self-authored regeneration as a ubiquitous ethical condition of fallen humanity. The radical separation from God creates anxiety, seemingly eternal woe, and

47. Joshua Scodel has argued that “unfallen Adam and Eve influentially embody an ideal of individual self-respect and self-governance that remains central to contemporary liberal thought.” Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 254.

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painful interpretive struggle—these are some of the constant challenges of a world in which true liberty has been lost. But at the same time, the challenge to comprehend divine justice and be ruled by reason engenders in Adam and Eve an ethic of resourceful self-cultivation, a program of inner discipline that turns deliberation into an occasion for paideic regeneration. It is not a restoration of self-government, exactly, but a gesture of accommodation with the new inscrutability of divine law. After the Son passes his judgment and retreats beyond the horizon of human cognition, Adam lays “outstretcht . . . on the cold ground” (X, 851) like Satan stretched out on the lake of fire, offering a melancholy lament. The first theological question in Adam’s extended “sad complaint” is a familiar one that stems from the fact that God’s “Justice seems . . . inexplicable” (X, 754–55). He poses a childish rhetorical question: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay / To mould me Man, did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me . . . ?” (X, 743–45). Adam answers his own question—“God made [me] of choice his own, and of his own / To serve him” (X, 766–67)—and the lament turns away from this relatively simple matter toward the more strenuous contemplation of divine punishment. Though Adam does not contest the suitability of his imposed doom, his sense of overliving, of being “mockt with death and lengthened out / To deathless pain” is the source of profound suffering and anxiety.48 In confronting the apparent fact of God’s “wrath without end” (X, 797), Adam wonders if he is governed by a cruelly sadistic deity interested only in simple retribution:

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Will he draw out For anger’s sake, finite to infinite In punisht Man, to satisfy his rigor Satisfi’d never; that were to extend His sentence beyond dust and Nature’s Law. (X, 801–5)

Adam backs away from this tangled assertion of an insatiable divine rigor, recognizing the inconsistency of such a claim; he turns instead to thinking of death as the experience of “endless misery” imposed upon all of humanity without redemption. From such a position Adam makes a critique of God’s apparent cruelty: “Shall Truth fail to keep her word, / Justice Divine not hast’n to be

48. Emily Wilson, Mocked by Death:Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

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just?” (X, 856–57). Adam’s sad lament is meant to display a painful interrogation of divine motives and a struggle to grasp the inexplicable theory of justice embedded in divine creation. His soliloquy is evidence of alienation from God and of the loss of true liberty—it is an emblem of fallen experience, to be sure. But is it also the necessary starting point of a more subtle narrative of development, a bildungsroman of creaturely regeneration in which the first parents respond to their own suicidal self-pity, abject fear and anxiety, and malicious recrimination by raising themselves part of the way toward reconciliation. When Eve proposes suicide and childlessness as means to avoid bringing “Into this cursed World a woeful Race, / That after wretched Life must be at last / Food for so foul a Monster” (X, 984–86) as Death, Adam rises to the occasion. While he admires the sublimity of her suggestion, Adam proposes a “safer resolution,” a strategy that would not tempt God into a fit of even greater wrath. Adam’s plan is revenge:

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Then let us seek Some safer resolution, which methinks I have in view, calling to mind with heed Part of our Sentence, that thy Seed shall bruise The Serpent’s head; piteous amends, unless Be meant, whom I conjecture, our grand Foe Satan, who in the Serpent hath contriv’d Against us this deceit; to crush his head Would be revenge indeed; which will be lost By death brought upon ourselves, or childless days Resolv’d as thou proposest; so our Foe Shall ‘scape his punishment ordain’d, and wee Instead shall double ours upon our heads. (X, 1028–40)

The advantages of this plan are clear—the first parents will fulfill their obligation to produce the Seed that shall crush Satan’s head, and will avoid pragmatically any further punishment. But the expressed motives in the speech are at least bifurcated, if not wholly antithetical. Adam figures the first parents as agents of divine justice, whose good offices will bring into being Satan’s “punishment ordain’d.” However, Adam first proposes the strictly personal goal of revenge: “to crush his head would be revenge indeed.”Vengeance is a passionate response to individual injury, a lust to revisit an injury on a foe; it is not a juridical response like an ordained sentence. The relish in Adam’s desire for revenge

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is palpable; since we have above just heard Adam worrying about the rigor of a vengeful God, his “safer resolution” flirts dangerously with mimetic parody. Put another way, here Adam seems to be appropriating to himself falsely the language and ethos of a God bent on revenge, and as such he is for a moment perilously close to being fully governed by the upstart passions and inclined toward violent retribution. Thus it is no accident that when in Book Twelve Michael rephrases Adam’s “safer resolution,” he expunges any suggestion of revenge and points out instead that the bruising of the Serpent will be realized “Not by destroying Satan, but his works / In thee and thy Seed” (XII, 394–95). Adam retreats from his momentary channeling of Nimrod and proposes prayerful repentance as the most satisfying revenge against Satan: for the “remedy or cure / To evils which our own misdeeds have wrought, / Hee will instruct us praying and of Grace / Beseeching him, so as we need not fear / To pass commodiously this life” (X, 1079–83). Let us, Adam suggests, “prostrate fall / Before him reverent, and there confess / humbly our faults, and pardon beg . . . in sign / Of sorrow unfeign’d and humiliation meek” (X, 1087–92).The Son receives the prayers of Adam and Eve and offers them to God as evidence of the partial regeneration of humanity: “see Father, what first fruits on Earth are sprung / From thy implanted Grace in Man . . . Fruits of more pleasing savor from thy seed / Sown with contrition in his heart, than those / Which his own hand manuring all the Trees / Of Paradise could have produc’t” (XI, 22–29). Here the Son describes the prayers of Adam and Eve as the produce of human labor, and his metaphor of cultivation amplifies the idea of a self-authored regeneration. The Son’s contrast between literal and figurative fruit suggests correctly that God finds more pleasure in the voluntary, self-authored pursuit of true liberty than in servile obedience. God is willing to offer reconciliation, but the sentence of death is still controlling, the merciful remedy is deferred until the end of time, and human experience will remain marked by corruption, death, woe, interpretive struggle, anxiety, and alienation. Especially as seen in the intercession of the Son, in this episode Milton suggests that partial spiritual regeneration can occur through the active labor of self-instruction—a painful deliberative struggle with an often opaque law can become, as it does here, an occasion for the correction of the passions, the cultivation of self-discipline and humble, sincere obedience.The first parents do not wait passively for Grace, wallowing on the ground in self-pity, but instead they cultivate regeneration through their own mental labor, sociable charity, and individual resource. It is by exercising, as authors to themselves, these human capabilities that a true reconciliation with God becomes possible. The later stages of Book Ten—the episode of lamentation and argument that leads up to prayerful repentance—is

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best understood as a narrative of paideic cultivation: Adam draws on capabilities he forged in part through the painful contemplation of divine justice to moderate Eve’s sublime passions and to redirect both of their sentiments toward the hard pursuit of liberty and the partial regeneration of their hearts. As Michael nears the end of his grand narrative, Adam pauses to thank the divine historian for illuminating the mysterious terms of human history and guiding him past agonizing perplexity. However, Adam remains puzzled by the extent and the quality of Mosaic law: “why to those / Among whom God will deign to dwell on Earth / So many and so various Laws are giv’n; / So many Laws argue so many sins / Among them; how can God with such reside?” (XII, 280–84). Here Adam seems to wonder simply why the Mosaic law is superabundant with regulations and ceremonial strictures, and he suggests that such a dense and complex juridical code may be an emblem of national corruption. But these lines disclose a more subtle question, one established earlier in Book Twelve when Michael fulminates about the sinfulness of whole nations. The lines at the center of Adam’s question (282–83) display obvious repetitions— three claims of “so many” laws are joined by the seemingly synonymous phrase “so various.”These four semantic terms so versified create a fractured chiasmus, an asymmetrical crossing that emphasizes the claim of juridical variety over the claim of juridical superabundance. The point is not just that the Israelites have a lot of laws, but also that there are competing modalities of law, alternative interpretations of divine utterance that verge upon confusion. In his reply, Michael suggests that “Law was given them to evince / Their natural pravity” (XII, 287–88). Michael has already offered an argument that government is often fit to the character of a nation: early in Book Twelve he opines that “sometimes Nations will decline so low / From virtue, which is reason, that no wrong, But Justice, and some fatal curse annext / Deprives them of thir outward liberty / Thir inward lost” (XII, 97–100). Adam’s emphasis on the variety of laws combined with Michael’s earlier interest in describing the moral and juridical character of whole nations suggests a second reading of this exchange. Rather than a parochial discussion of Mosaic law, Adam’s question wonders subtly why God allows so many modalities of religious law, so many faith traditions among which he may “deign to dwell.” In this reading, law is given diversely to the various nations of the world, and in each case is designed to reveal their particular national idiom of corruption. As a preamble to his question, Adam claims to understand that in the Son “all Nations shall be blest” (XII, 277), which is the sum and substance of Michael’s long reply: And therefore was law given them to evince Their natural pravity, by stirring up

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Sin against law to fight; that when they see Law can discover sin but not remove, Save by those shadowy expiations weak, The blood of bulls and goats, they may conclude Some blood more precious must be paid for man, Just for unjust, that in such righteousness To them by faith imputed, they may find Justification towards God, and peace Of conscience, which the law by ceremonies Cannot appease, nor man the moral part Perform, and not performing cannot live. So law appears imperfect, and but giv’n With purpose to resign them in full time Up to a better covenant, disciplined From shadowy types to truth, from flesh to spirit, From imposition of strict laws, to free Acceptance of large grace, from servile fear To filial, works of law to works of faith. (XII, 287–306)

Understanding Adam’s question in its broadest, world-historical sense allows the fully “universal” Paulinism of Michael’s speech to emerge.49 The Gospel, the “better covenant” established by Christ, is not only the fulfillment of the Mosaic law, but also it is the means for the potential regeneration of “all Nations.” In this speech, Michael maintains his view that human experience will be a “fight” between obedience and sin, and he figures law as a descriptive regime: it can “discover sin, but not remove” it, and it can point the way toward “peace of conscience” by establishing the necessity of sacrificing “some blood more precious.” As Jason Rosenblatt has written, Michael’s view of the Mosaic law is strictly Pauline—it is an imperfect code suited most to revealing its own limitations, and it is “but giv’n / With purpose to resign them in full time” up to the Gospel.50 For Milton, the Pauline typology through which the unregenerate are “disciplined / from shadowy types to truth, from flesh to spirit, / From imposition of strict laws, to free / Acceptance of large grace,

49. In The Matter of Revolution, John Rogers has suggested that the passage illustrates a shift in agency from divine to human, a “movement away from divine intervention and toward a world of human choice and voluntary acceptance of help from above” (170). But I suggest that such a shift has already happened in Book Ten, that the bildungsroman culminating in Adam and Eve’s reconciliation displays the pursuit of true liberty through self-cultivation and divine grace both. 50. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost, 218–34.

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from servile fear / To filial, works of law to works of faith” is also a narrative of instruction at the broadest level that leads humanity to the state of true liberty. An imperfect law strictly imposed falls away, and the remedial spirit of truth and grace takes its place. In Paradise Lost, the Gospel is a triumph of divine equity.

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Writing the English Republic after 1660

So virtue giv’n for lost, Deprest, and overthrown, as seem’d, Like that self-begott’n bird In the Arabian woods embost, That no second knows nor third, And lay erewhile a Holocaust, From out her ashy womb now teem’d, Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most When most unactive deem’d, And though her body die, her fame survives, A secular bird ages of lives. —John Milton, Samson Agonistes

It is no great surprise to find the arch-Whig G. M. Trevelyan describing the later Stuart period as a bloody “reign of terror,” and the English polity as a state haunted by the unpredictable oscillation between tyranny and decadence. The years between the killing of Charles I in 1649 and the revolution of 1688—the “reign of terror”—provided generations of political activists in England and most famously in the American colonies with a rhetoric, a political language, and a pantheon of heroes.1 John Adams, for instance, in his 1765 1. G. M. Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts (1907; New York: Methuen, 1961). David Ogg takes a more measured approach in England in the Reign of Charles II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934). On the status of later Stuart England for the American revolutionary generation, see Bernard Bailyn, The

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Dissertation on Feudal and Canon Law, described Charles II and James II as the heart of an enduring “infernal confederacy” designed to quash liberty of conscience and repeal the birthright privileges of English subjects. In less measured terms, Josiah Quincy reads the Restoration as a case of “unexampled folly and madness” that validated the designs of “that odious and execrable race of tyrants, the house of Stewart.” Trevelyan,Adams, and Quincy all share the polemical view that the repressive conditions of later Stuart England—a culture of public executions, punitive exhumations (of Cromwell’s corpse, for instance), merciless partisan arrests and killings, plots, exile, secret treaties, and millenarian anxiety—were the direct stimulus for an immense philosophical argument and political movement in favor of liberty of conscience, the consent of the governed, and the extension of natural rights law to all individuals. Adams, for instance, suggests that “the Hampdens, Vanes, Seldens, Miltons, Nedhams, Harringtons, Nevilles, Sidneys [and] Lockes are all said to have owed their eminence in political knowledge to the tyrannies of those reigns” and contends that George III abuses his prerogatives and enslaves his subjects “in a manner which no king of England since James the Second has dared to indulge.”2 But what exactly does Adams intend to signify with the phrase “eminence in political knowledge”? Some of his heroes of liberty (Vane, Sidney) were killed by the Stuarts and others were forced into exile or dogged by the everpresent threat of capital violence.This is more than a list of philosophers spurred into action by a repressive regime—it is also a list of dissidents whose lives and deaths became legible as carefully crafted works of art, deliberately fictive or mythic performances of affective exemplarity. For Adams, political knowledge seems to expand into civic magnanimity or the performance of manly excellence. Now there is nothing new about martyrdom and hagiography— the early modern period has examples of such secular and religious selffashioning in superabundance. The difference between the men on Adams’s list and Foxe’s martyrs, Sir Walter Ralegh, or even Charles I, hangs on the republican principle of the vita activa, the view that the health of the polity and the moral worth of the individual emerges from robust, disinterested, intellectually rigorous public deliberation. In the classical republican tradition, the state is a work of art guided and preserved actively from its corruption by the civic virtue of its great

Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Alan Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 2. John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (Boston, 1765).

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men. Moreover, in the years after the Restoration of Charles II when the English republican project looked hopelessly lost, the lettered resistance of Milton, Neville, Locke, or Sidney is attributable to the ideal of the vita activa, however attenuated it might be by personal disenchantment, repression, or ambiguity. In 1660, when the English people had seemed eager to welcome back Charles II from his residence in the court of Louis XIV, Milton was not amused. In The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, he accuses the English people of craven apostasy and self-destructive slavishness: “they seem now to be choosing them a captain back for Egypt” and are hurrying the nation toward a “precipice of destruction” though the “epidemic madness . . . and general defection of a misguided and abused multitude.”3 The republican remedy Milton outlines in this essay depends fully upon the virtuous civic action of a few just men, a cadre “whom God may raise of these stones to become children of reviving liberty.” This last felicitous phrase, “children of reviving liberty,” is emblematic of the figural and ideological path of republican argument in the years after 1660. These men, who dare single to be just, are the progeny of liberty shaking off her chains and the source of new life; they are “children” who revive liberty through their discernment and exercise of civic virtue. The reciprocity of obligation and dependence—the sense in which the “children” are both the progeny and the progenitors of liberty—indicates the grafting of affect onto the trunk of republican ideological critique. Moreover, republican dissidents, through their writings and often their own heroic conduct, redirect the political emotions of love, loyalty, and duty away from the pater patriae and toward the abstract but here anthropomorphized norm of English liberty. It is not difficult to find a genealogy of republican political theory in the years after 1660, but it is much harder to locate a coherent literary tradition until at least the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–81, and even then the violently partisan work of writers such as Elkanah Settle and Nathaniel Lee is more akin to the fulminations of a professional opposition than it is to the philosophical legacy of the English republican cause. David Norbrook has called for a new account of the varieties of republicanism beyond Paradise Lost in the years after the Restoration, and this chapter is in part designed to fulfill that office.4 In the previous chapter, I outline the ways in which Milton tries to establish equity as a figural, hermeneutic, and affective presence in Paradise Lost, while he rejects

3. John Milton, “The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth” (London, 1660), in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 898–99. 4. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics 1627–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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the normative authority of heroic or conquering lawgivers and the whole program of political foundationalism. In this chapter I turn to a broader range of texts—the fiction and political writings of Henry Neville and the lifewritings, political tracts, and treason trial narratives of Sir Henry Vane the Younger and Algernon Sidney—to trace some of the literary modulations of later Stuart republicanism in an often chilling political climate. As Richard Kroll has written, “The age thought about political [theory] not only through high political texts like Leviathan or the Two Treatises, but more so by appealing to modes of apprehension we can only call popular, literary, and mythic.”5 Indeed, one of the goals of this book is to demonstrate the slippage between all of these categories in the crucible of liberalism that is the later Stuart period—high philosophical tracts, heroic plays, treason trial narratives, epic poems, and short prose fictions all participate in the work of paideia, in procuring the ethical and civic cultivation of a fragmentary and expanding English public even while they maintain specific formal attributes. Tragedy, as we have seen, is of little use in historiographical debates since its formal objective, in a neoclassical idiom, is to address general ethical norms and moving probabilities rather than to present concrete facts of history. The “brief true relation” of political first principles, however, has much to offer when the terms of controversy are historical or when curiosity or the desire for novelty is the affective goal. Taken together the writings and records of Henry Neville, Henry Vane, and Algernon Sidney are legible as affective (if not formal) precursors of the eighteenth-century novel, which in Michael McKeon’s account relies upon the display and vicarious consumption of an accessible mode of personal virtue.6 Henry Neville, whose political philosophy of religious toleration, separation of powers, and a mixed republican constitution contributes much to the later growth of political liberalism, imagined prose fiction as a medium for affectively powerful theoretical argument. Tracing the evolution of a fictional commonwealth from its rugged origins, Neville asks his audience to perform acts of imaginative originalism as I have outlined it above—by fictionalizing the foundations of political society, he solicits public ethical deliberation over the source and quality of sovereignty, the spirit of laws and institutions, and the nature of civil society. Where Milton turns the origins of law into a contemplation of divine equity and a critique of Satanic lawgiving, Neville uses parody and irony to

5. Richard Kroll, “The Double Logic of Don Sebastian,” Huntington Library Quarterly 63 (2000). See also John Wallace, “‘Examples are Best Precepts’: Readers and Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Poetry,” Critical Inquiry 1 (Fall 1974). 6. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

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explode the absurd foundation narratives at the core of the jure divino theory of kingship while he advances subtly a claim for a mixed republican constitution. Again unlike Milton, whose discontent with the failure of the English republic led him to see his nation as a rabble of wild barbarians who had overreached their capabilities, in the lifewritings, political tracts, and public performances of Henry Vane and Algernon Sidney, republicanism takes on the tone and pathos of wide horizontal comradeship and translates resistance to the Stuart kings into the emotionally dynamic and proto-imperial defense of the native liberties of the English people.7

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Satyr and True Character: Henry Neville and the Fiction of Political Origins In “Nomos and Narrative,” Robert Cover makes the claim that “for every constitution there is an epic.” His broad hypothesis is that law and narrative are inseparable components of a nomos or normative worldview; law obtains its legitimacy through the work of narrative, the “epic” that is immanently bound up with, rather than supplemental to, the constitution. Cover’s use of “epic” is meant to signify only a fiction, myth of origin, or national history imbued with grandeur and world-historical status. Cover outlines a view of legal interpretation that is expansive rather than parochial, in which constitutional decisionmaking must be performed with reference to the nomos (made up of law and narrative) rather than in the narrow terms of jurisprudence. As we have seen, the later Stuart period is a historical moment torn by deep and violent disputes over the source of lawmaking authority, the origins of sovereignty, and the proper relationship between the executive and the law. As J. N. Figgis has written, “the controversies which rage round the origin of law [became] prominent” flashpoints of argument in mid-seventeenth century England; while there are many varied approaches to the debate over the normative authority of first principles or the original intentions of a lawgiver, in a broad sense jure divino theorists turn chiefly to scriptural sources to make probative historical and theological claims while republican writers reject outright the appeal to foundations.8 Jure divino kingship is predicated upon a mythico-historical argument in which power descends from God at specific, concrete moments (the donation of sovereignty to Adam, for instance, or the miraculous conversion of Henri IV at Paris)

7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (New York:Verso, 1993). 8. John Neville Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896), 145.

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and is enabled by affective bonds of political obligation often but not exclusively patterned on the family. The diverse theorists whose doctrines later become the foundation of political liberalism—Locke, Sidney, Neville, and others—share a philosophy of political time insofar as they reject the historical mythologies of dynastic providence and discrete sovereign donation, preferring instead an overt fiction of origins, an abstraction that enables the constitution of polity without making specific juridical claims on the present. A fiction such as Locke’s state of nature, out of which humans emerge into political association, roots the power to make and unmake laws and governments in the polity, but it does not offer a method for legal interpretation, and it makes no findings on specific first principles, national customs, or lawgiving intentions. Locke’s account of political origins in the state of nature is a theory—it is deliberately fictive and ahistorical. The republican theorist and legislator Henry Neville’s 1667 short prose fiction The Isle of Pines is an intervention into this historiographical debate over the source and quality of sovereignty. As an act of “imaginative originalism,” The Isle of Pines is designed to confront its audience with an ironical account of first principles and the foundation of a commonwealth ab origine, making clear in the process the obvious ethical and political failings of hereditary patriarchal kingship. Neville provides a parodic history of a castaway commonwealth that arises from a lusty shipwrecked clerk and four women; the group blossoms into violence and libertinage and is only rescued from a savage civil war by the intervention of Dutch sailors. By choosing as its subject a deliberately fabular account of political origins, The Isle of Pines is legible as Neville’s ironic version of a Machiavellian ridurre ai principii, or imaginative return to first principles advanced in the Discourses on Livy that allows a republic to refresh and sustain its progress through historical time.9 For Machiavelli, it is most often the excellent man or cohort who, practicing their civic virtue to preserve their state from decay, leads the state back to its beginnings, and, as J. G. A. Pocock has demonstrated, Harrington and Neville were two of the principal English advocates for the Machiavellian thesis of individual civic virtue as the highest mode of public life.10 Henry Neville constructs The Isle of Pines from Machiavellian timber—in

9. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, ed. and trans. Nathan Tarcov and Harvey Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 209–12. 10. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Essential studies of Machiavellian political thought in early modern England include Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), and Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (London: Routledge, 1964). For an argument against Pocock, his followers, and the anti-bourgeois writings of C. B. Macpherson, see Steven Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth,” American Historical Review 103

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the exercise of an ironic version of civic virtue, he blends parody and theoretical analysis to describe the beginnings of a mythic island commonwealth so that he might demolish the historical and theological conceits of absolutist political theory. As a satirical work, moreover, the novella has the added benefit of an affective claim on its readers, and Neville uses the frisson of polygamy and incest along with the somewhat conventional authenticating tropes of the “brief true relation” to enlist his readers in an imaginative contemplation of the origins of political community. Enjoying several years of a Florentine exile (much of it in the company of the later Grand Duke Cosmo III), Henry Neville returned to England in 1667 when the fires of retribution had cooled and the crown’s anxiety about republican assassins and fifth-columnists had diminished a bit. Shortly after his return from Florence, using the deliberately ridiculous pseudonym Henry Cornelius Van Sloetten, he published The Isle of Pines in two short installments, and the novella of lascivious castaways who form a tropical island nation quickly ran to several printings and was translated into Dutch, French, Italian, German, and Spanish.11 Nearly a conte philosophique in the later style of Swift and Voltaire, and much more than the typical seventeenth-century scandalous or polemical pamphlet, The Isle of Pines is a brief true relation of a pseudo-erotic island adventure featuring polygamy, incest, civil war, pastoral abundance, race-mixing, and Dutchmen. Although it seems to be about sex, I suggest that the novella is really about political theory. Victoria Kahn has demonstrated the ways in which mid-seventeenth-century prose romance operated as a powerful medium for political theorizing, and I suggest here that Neville’s Isle of Pines does similar work.12 Shorter and certainly more playful than a work like Cavendish’s The Contract or Barclay’s Argenis, The Isle of Pines is both an ironic demolition of the historical and theoretical conceits of the idea of jure divino kingship and an exposition of Harringtonian principles of a mixed republican constitution. Like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the appealing story of castaway survival on an uninhabited island lends itself easily to the task of thinking about the origin and quality of sovereignty and the first principles of political association.

(1998). Isaiah Berlin’s fine essay “The Originality of Machiavelli” has influenced my thinking on these matters. It is collected in Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). 11. Worthington Chauncey Ford, Henry Neville’s “Isle of Pines” (Boston: Club of Odd Volumes, 1927). 12. Victoria Kahn, “Margaret Cavendish and the Romance of Contract,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (1997).

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An “ingenious and well-bred gentleman, a member of the House of Commons, and an excellent (but concealed) poet,” Henry Neville was a republican moderate who, during the waning years of the Interregnum, promoted with James Harrington a mixed constitution marked by the rotation of executive and legislative functions among an “optimacy” or aristocracy of merit. Through his “smart discourses and inculcations [Neville and Harrington] made many proselytes to the cause of the Rota Club, as their circle came to be called.”13 As a political theorist, Neville was not interested in debates over legitimacy or dynastic succession, and he took no part in any of the age’s many plots against Charles II and his brother James.14 Shortly after the Restoration, Neville came under an umbrella of suspicion as a potentially traitorous malingerer, and the agents of the crown repeatedly sought unsuccessfully to incriminate him in one plot or another. In the years before habeas corpus, he was jailed in the Tower while royal investigators tried in vain to drum up evidence of an assassination and usurpation plot. In the Memoirs of the Life of Colonel John Hutchinson, for example, Lucy Hutchinson records her husband’s interrogators trying assiduously to uncover evidence or even anecdotal testimony of Neville’s malfeasance.15 Lucy Hutchinson also records Neville’s somewhat ignominious departure from the Tower and England—he “wrought [his] own liberty secretly” through patronage and after swearing a loyalty oath to Charles II was in 1663 allowed to embark for Italy. Prior to the 1668 publication of the complete The Isle of Pines, Henry Neville had written a handful of mildly prurient satires on leading political figures: these are The Parliament of Ladies (1647), The Parliament of Ladies with their Laws Newly Enacted (1647), An Exact Diurnall of the Parliament of Ladies (1647), The Ladies, a Second Time Assembled in Parliament (1647), News From the New Exchange (1650), and the vaguely anti-Cromwellian Shufling, Cutting, and Dealing at a Game of Picquet (1658). Because of the Parliament of Ladies tracts, which can feature women discussing the merits of multiple husbands in mildly salacious fashion, Neville has critically been seen as a libertine advocate of polygamy and coterie pornographer.16 Often archly ironic and

13. John Aubrey, “Life of Harrington,” in Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), 289. 14. See the biographical essay “Henry Neville” by Caroline Robbins in Two English Republican Tracts: Henry Neville’s Plato Redivivus and Walter Moyle’s An Essay Upon the Constitution of the Roman Government (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 15. Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. N. H. Keeble (London: Everyman, 1995), 304. 16. For more on these tracts and the idea of coterie pornography, see James Grantham Turner, “‘News from the New Exchange:’ Commodity, Erotic Fantasy, & the Female Entrepreneur,” in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (New York: Routledge, 1995).

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occasionally saucy, this small clutch of pamphlets does demonstrate Neville’s early interest in the use of satirical fiction as political argument. The pseudopornographic nature of the Ladies tracts is responsible, I suspect, for coloring later interpretations of The Isle of Pines as a misogynist fantasy of generation, a libertine utopia, and an extended pun that relies on reshuffling the vowels in “Pines” to spell “penis.”17 After the wild success of the Isle of Pines, which was generally attributed to him, Neville turned to translation, and in 1675 he brought out a fine complete edition of Machiavelli’s Works intended to vindicate the Florentine from misinterpretations and “those slanders which Priests and other byas’d Pens have laid upon him.”18 Neville’s most important work is the 1681 Plato Redivivus, a moderate and principled exposition of proto-liberal theories of religious toleration (even for Catholics) and a balanced constitution. This tract was responsible for Neville’s substantial eighteenth-century reputation as a leading framer in the philosophical tradition that would evolve into liberalism; for John Adams it was evidence of Neville’s excellence and for the scabrous author of a royalist screed, Plato Redivivus qualified Neville for inclusion with Milton and Sidney in “a chain of a parcel of rebellious libellers linked in a orderly combination.”19 In his fictional “Letter from Nicholas Machiavel to Zenobius Buondelmontius” included as an appendix in his 1675 translation of Machiavelli’s Works and later circulated independently as a pamphlet, Neville vindicates The Prince from commonplace accusations of atheism and immorality: speaking of tyrants, Neville writes: “If I have been a little too punctual in designing these Monsters and drawing them to the life in all their lineaments and colours, I hope mankind will know them better to avoid them, my Treatise being both a Satyr against them, and a true Character of them.”20 Here ventriloquizing for Machiavelli, Neville describes an ironic mode of political philosophy in which moralizing parody (satyr) and descriptive analysis (true character) make up a

17. W. C. Ford tells the story of a foolhardy German philologist who made this speculation. Recent critical accounts of the novella include brief mention in Felicity Nussbaum’s Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narrative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Amy Boesky, “Nation, Miscegenation: Membering Utopia in Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 37, no. 2 (1995): 165–84; Susan Wiseman, “‘Adam the Father of all Flesh’: Porno-Political Rhetoric and Political Theory in and after the English Civil War,” in Pamphlet Wars, ed. James Holstun (Portland, Ore.: F. Cass, 1992), 134–57; and Adam Beach, “A Profound Pessimism about the Empire: The Isle of Pines, Dutch Supremacy, and English Degeneration,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 41, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 21–36. 18. Henry Neville, “The Publisher to the Reader,” in The Works of Nicholas Machiavel, ed. and trans. Henry Neville (London, 1675). 19. Anon., Remarks (1699). 20. Henry Neville, “Letter from Nicholas Machiavel to Zenobius Buondelmontius,” in Works (1675), 4.

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rhetorical position or argumentative style. Neville is trying, of course, to insulate Machiavellian political thought from its vulgar and biased interpreters and he is making an astute critical reading of Machiavelli’s prose style, but I think the passage bespeaks Neville’s own understanding of the proper relations between fiction and political theory. The Isle of Pines, a fictional work that like the letter to Buondelmontius claims to be purely factual, is both satyr and true character—it is both a parody of the conceits of jure divino kingship and an analytical discussion of the emergence of political society that anticipates his later and more thoroughly developed discussions of the issue in Plato Redivivus.21 Neville’s target was the jure divino theory of sovereignty, which was advanced in the later Stuart period by theologians such as Samuel Parker, Bishop Sanderson, and John Nalson, writers such as Roger L’Estrange, John Dryden, and Aphra Behn, and politicians including the Earl of Clarendon and the Duke of York. Sir Robert Filmer cast a long shadow as well, and the reprinting of his works as Patriarcha in 1680 is chiefly responsible for calling forth at least two generative works of political theory—Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Algernon Sidney’s Discourses of Government. Jure divino writers refuted the essentially secular origins of the Hobbesian sovereign (who sits above the law as a necessary enabling fiction of authority and judgment) and argued in the strongest terms against a commonwealth or republican style of government by consent. One path taken by writers such as Sir Robert Filmer and the High Church clergyman Samuel Parker was to always historicize. Parker, like Filmer, found in the Genesis account of God’s donation of sovereignty to Adam a concrete, causal, and (theologically) verifiable narrative of God’s original endorsement of patriarchal kingship. In his 1679 Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity, Parker describes political society and absolute kingship as natural remedies for the corruption of human nature: it was necessary there should be one Supreme and Public Judgment to whose Determinations the private Judgment of every single Person should be obliged to submit itself. And hence the Wisdom of Providence, knowing to what passions and irregularities mankind is obnoxious, never suffered them to live without the restraints of Government; but in the beginning of things so ordered Affairs that no man could be born into the World without being subject of some Superior: every Father being by Nature vested with a Right to govern his Children. And the first Governments in the world were established purely upon the natural Rights of

21. Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, in Two English Republican Tracts, 83–85.

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Paternal Authority, which afterward grew up to a Kingly Power by the increase of Posterity; . . . hence it came to pass that in the first ages of the World, Monarchy was its only Government, necessarily arising out of the Constitution of Human nature . . . as appears not only from the Mosiack History, but also from all other the best and most ancient Records of the first Ages of the World.22

For Parker, absolute kingship is divinely authored and coeval with the beginning of the world. Parker sees the original intentions of God as clearly manifest in the “wisdom of providence” that ordained “one supreme and public judgment,” and supplies concrete historical evidence for this claim. Both the “Mosaick history” of the Old Testament and the best and most ancient records of the first Ages” seem to prove that absolute kingship is the divinely ordained remedy for the “passions and irregularities of humanity.” Parker tries to establish a position that gains probative force from the Old Testament, a work so self-evidently true for much of his audience that it would be hard to contest the grounds of monarchy as anything less than divinely ordained. Filmer’s Patriarcha, published posthumously in 1680 to intervene in the Exclusion Crisis, makes a similar claim, arguing that God installed Adam as the sovereign patriarch and in doing so established a descending patrilineal and normative system of government, while James Nalson argued in his True Account of the Tryal of Charles I (1683) that “the royal prerogative is the true supporter of the people’s liberties and laws.” An original contract (even a Hobbesian one that results in an absolute monarch) and the polity it establishes may be easily broken and reconstituted to suit the whim and passion of the corrupt populace, but an absolute monarch may neither be resisted nor compelled by the will of his subjects. Any turn away from the sole authority of this supreme power on earth, this parens patriae and lex loquans, is an act of infidelity to divine law. Parker, Filmer, and Nalson are voices largely symptomatic of later Stuart theory of jure divino kingship—a style of theologico-political argument devoted to finding in the historical past a concrete moment of sovereign origins in order to refute the heresy of a fundamental political contract and to downplay the normative authority of the unwritten and immemorial constitution of England.23 For Filmer, the notion of an immemorial rule of law, so important to Sir Edward Coke and the English common lawyers, is absurd:

22. Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity (London, 1679), 28–31. For discussion see Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 23. James Nalson, A true copy of the journal of the High Court of Justice, for the tryal of K. Charles I as it was read in the House of Commons, and attested under the hand of Phelps, clerk to that infamous court (London, 1683), 11.

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for every custom there was a time when it was no custom, and the first precedent we now have, had no precedent. . . . Customs at first became lawful only by some superior power which did either command or consent unto their beginning. And the first power which we find (as is confessed by all men) is kingly power.24

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Filmer is acutely critical of timeless national custom as the basis of law, and rejects the common-law notion that law’s origins lie in the ethos or will of a people. Rather, as in Parker’s Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity, some superior power must authorize those laws at some finite moment in history. Because there must be some “superior power” or divine lawgiver whose donation enables the nomos, the gesture of describing political inception or first principles legitimates divine-right kingship, explodes the idea of an immemorial or selfbegotten national law, and refutes republican arguments for timeless norms of justice.25 Neville provides a pithy and symptomatic view of the patriarchal thesis in his important theoretical dialogue Plato Redivivus, when he dismisses the whole platform of jure divino monarchy as a “fancy . . . first started, not by the solid judgment of any man, but to flatter some prince.”26 English republicans like Neville and his close friend James Harrington saw themselves as the defenders of England’s lex non scripta, the unwritten and dynamically evolving constitution in which is embodied the customs, habits, and privileges of the nation. Harrington, like Algernon Sidney, rejects the normative authority of original intentions and the historicist dependence on the past, especially in moments of political or interpretive crisis: in his 1659 Art of Lawgiving, Harrington writes: Where a nation is cast by the unseen ways of providence into disorder of government, the duty of such especially as are elected by the people is not so much to regard what hath been as to provide for the supreme law, or for the safety of the people. . . . The art of true lawgiving is . . . in erecting the necessary superstructures that [are] conformable

24. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, ed. Gordon Schochet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 45. 25. Algernon Sidney, in his Discourses concerning Government (1698), puts the republican stance thus: “We are not to seek what government was the first, but what best provides for the obtaining of justice, and the preservation of liberty.” For Sidney, Filmer’s foundationalism is a fraud; the only index of justice is the timeless law of nature, and neither law nor sovereignty, however fundamental or ancient, is binding when it violates those eternal precepts. See Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas West (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1996). 26. Neville, Plato Redivivus, 86.

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to the balance or foundation [of the state], which being purely natural, requireth that all imposition of force be removed.27

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The Harringtonian thesis that “what hath been” is more or less irrelevant to the supreme law of salus populi suprema lex is straightforward republican antifoundationalism, and he here discloses his inclination as a theorist of “natural public law,” a tradition in which institutions and laws supplant a prudential sovereign as the “universally valid solution to the political problem.”28 The “balance or foundation” of the Harringtonian state is a way of describing not its first principles but its settled principles of operation, its customary political composition from aristocratic, popular, and executive estates. Harrington sees true lawgiving as an exercise of prudential judgment to be sure, but he imagines the act as a kind of impersonal forensic analysis of the moral and racial characteristics of the state designed to create the collective sense that the law is so self-evident and natural that force is not necessary. The “Atlantic republican tradition,” as Pocock describes it, stretching from Machiavelli, Harrington, Neville, and Sidney to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, breaks from an excessive dependence on the past as a source of normative authority.29 New generations possess their own authority; law gains no controlling force from its antiquity. Each generation ought to be free of the undue and potentially repressive influence of the past, and while first principles or original intentions might have descriptive or purifying utility, they lack normative value. From the republican standpoint, sovereignty and law are things of the present. As Algernon Sidney wrote in his influential Discourses Concerning Government (composed under duress in the late years of the reign of Charles II, and used as a second witness against Sidney in his 1683 treason trial and subsequent “judicial murder”), one is not to seek what government was the first, but what best provides for the obtaining of justice, and the preservation of liberty. For whatever the institution be, and how long soever it may have lasted, it is void, if it thwarts or does not provide for the ends of its establishment.30

For the republican Sidney, the antiquity or first principles of a polity are irrelevant—the instrumental success or failure of a normative regime is the

27. James Harrington, The Art of Lawgiving (London, 1659), in The Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 603. 28. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). 29. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment. 30. Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government.

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index of legitimacy. Sidney’s position is emblematic of the anti-foundational argument in early modern English republicanism, a “political language” designed to promote property rights, a contractarian model of political association, and a mixed constitution of executive, aristocratic, and popular agents. Neville’s Isle of Pines is imbued with that anti-foundational language in two senses—first, it unfolds the historical absurdity and philosophical frailty of the patriarchal theory of political obligation, and second it offers a Harringtonian solution to the facts of political chaos and the structural problem of an unstable normative order. Because it is unfamiliar and because many details are important to the work’s political argument, allow me an extended summary of the novella. Written as a letter from Henry Cornelius Van Sloetten to a friend in Amsterdam, the narrative opens with a storm-blown discovery by a Dutch trading ship.31 After sixteen days of harried survival, the storm dissipated to reveal a tropical island peopled by scantily clad English-speaking natives. Fortunately, a Dutch-English translator is on board; a small party of sailors is treated with gracious hospitality and fêted by William Pine, the Prince of the Isle. Astonished by both the language and the rudiments of civil society he finds (Bible readings, formal laws), the Dutch ask about the origins of the island nation and are read the sacred narrative of their founder George Pine (which was the first brief section of the work published). With the apparent reverence suitable for a national origin-story, George Pine’s relation unfolds: shipping on board a vessel bound for Indonesia as bookkeeper to a colonial merchant, the twenty-year-old Pine is abandoned on board with four young women when a fierce storm prompts the crew to take their chances in the longboat without their passengers. The perfidious crew perishes at sea, the ship is broken on the rocky shore, and the five survivors are deposited safely onto an uninhabited, abundant, tropical shore. Pine and his female companions (including his master’s daughter and a black African slave) salvage much of the ship’s non-perishable cargo while discovering that some of the local flora and fauna are tasty and “nutrimental.” Having secured themselves from starvation, Pine describes a climate of sexual superabundance in which “custom taking away shame we did it more openly, as our lusts gave us liberty.” Soon each of the women is pregnant for the first time; in a gesture of generative economy, Pine concentrates his sexual labors on each woman until she conceives, ensuring a steady stream of children to people the

31. Henry Neville, The Isle of Pines (London, 1668). All subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text. The novella is included in the anthology Three Early Modern Utopias, ed. Susan Bruce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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island. As the children grow into adults, Pine divides them carefully into four maternal families and intermarries the children. In his old age, as he writes the account, Pine’s four families add up to a total of 1789 Pines. George Pine’s grandson, Prince William Pine, completes the brief history of the Pines by describing his father’s succession and tumultuous reign after the death of the venerated patriarch. After Pine’s oldest son, Henry, succeeds to the principate, the gradual migration of families out into the expanses of the island dilutes the authority of both the prince and the institutions established by George Pine. A small group of the islanders begin to commit unbridled incest, open adultery, and predatory rape. With the consent of the law-abiding Pines, the offenders are rounded up and their ringleader, John Phill (son of the former slave Philippa with whom Pine felt “willing to try the difference”), is executed. The result of this first disobedience is the institution of laws, framed by Henry Pine, against blasphemy, insufficient piety, rape, adultery, fraud, theft, maiming, and insubordination. With an established peace, Henry Pine’s magistracy continues until his death at age ninety-four, at which time his oldest son, William, inherits the office. After William’s brief history ends, the Dutch witness a group of weddings and a Bible-service before a six-day zoological and geographic exploration of the edenic island. Before they leave the Isle, the Dutch build William Pine a royal palace and use their firearms to put down a second insurrection instigated by a rape (again committed by the head of the mulatto Phill family). With Dutch aid, the malefactor Henry Phill is captured and thrown from a cliff into the sea just as his father John had been. Having restored order, the sailors take their leave and continue on their commercial peregrinations. Most of the recent work on The Isle of Pines focuses on its status as an erotic imperial utopia built upon disturbing practices like polygamy and miscegenation. Neville does not come off well in these accounts. Aside from Pine’s brief original descriptions of his polygamous stud-service, and the conceit of a young man stranded with five women, the novella’s supposed eroticism is tame in comparison with the licentiousness of the court and public culture in the late 1660s. As recent commentators on the work have noted, the novella offers a number of conventional insights into seventeenth-century economies of gender and race: these readings see the work as a misogynistic utopian fantasy which weighs in with judgments on miscegenation (bad), polygamy (good), and male promiscuity (good). Given typical seventeenth-century attitudes toward allegedly hyper-sexualized Africans, it is hardly surprising that the Phills are blamed for starting two insurrections with rape. But the novella is more interested in solving the political problem of rape than in assigning racialized blame for the act, and while there are important colonial resonances in The Isle of Pines, Neville is working in a theoretical idiom.

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As Susan Wiseman has argued, The Isle of Pines is a concrete description of patriarchal government in its original condition. George Pine, literally the founding father, with his plural wives, engenders a nation and a polity from nothing.32 Out of the state of nature comes a state. Pine governs it first as a lover and then a patriarch in the most literal sense. As Filmer would like to have it, at first the sovereign’s natural and political families are indistinguishable, but of course Neville points out with some delight that such a condition leads inevitably to incest. Pine describes his patriarchy thus: “having by my several wives forty seven children, boys and girls, but most girls, and growing up apace, we were all of us very fleshly” (13). Whether or not the “all of us” in this passage suggests incest between Pine and his children, the “necessity” of incest is inescapable in Pine’s narrative, and Neville here points out the moral corruption upon which patriarchalism relies and makes the commonplace republican gesture of equating monarchy with voracious sexual appetite. Incest is hardly the only problem with the Isle’s concrete version of patriarchal kingship. The Isle revivifies Plato’s account in the Laws of a peaceful postdiluvian society:

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Men’s isolation prompted them to cherish and love one another. Their food supply was nothing they needed to quarrel about. . . .They always had a supply of milk and meat, and could always add to it plenty of good food to be got by hunting.They also had an abundance of clothing, bedding, houses, and equipment for cooking [which came from] moulding pottery and weaving, skills which . . . were a gift from God to men. His intention was that whenever the human race was reduced to such a desperate condition it could still take root and develop. Because of all this they were not intolerably poor, nor driven by poverty to quarrel with each other.33

Here Plato describes one of the innumerable episodes of catastrophe and renewal that cycle through human history. Although the ability to adapt and associate is a gift of God, humanity needs these gifts frequently: “Whenever the human race [is] reduced to such a desperate condition, it [can] still develop and take root.” In Plato’s cyclical view of history, humanity is a zoon politikon spurred by catastrophe into the renewal of its associative gifts. Building upon the relics and memory of the past, these new and relatively innocent societies expand into larger communities, develop political institutions and technologies, and eventually decay 32. As Wiseman puts it, the novella demonstrates the “inadequacy of a mere patriarch to govern in ethical, legal, and above all, political terms” (“‘Adam the Father of all Flesh,’” 152). 33. Plato, Laws, ed. and trans. Trevor Saunders (New York: Penguin, 1970), 3.122.

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into tyranny, violence, and lawsuits. Plato, like his early modern followers such as Neville, writes such origin accounts in the style of political anthropology. Immediately after the castaways land in a “desperate condition,” they realize that their superabundant island home is rather like a paradise: we find them in a condition of pure felicity and a state of equilibrium dictated by nature “without any disturbance or want” (12). In George Pine’s account of the Isle’s beginnings, the five fleshly castaways live without fear or pain, “the Country so well agreeing with us, that we never ailed any thing” (13). Each castaway enjoys her or his due and acts according to nature, without prejudice or conflict. The first generation of Pines (the original castaways) live in a state wherein common right and the law of nature are operative conditions unchallenged by corrupt institutions or bad habits. As they “take root and develop,” so too does disenchantment.With expansion comes conflict, with conflict comes the emergence of political society, and with this politeia comes a greater alienation from the relatively just circumstances of the past. When George Pine’s children move away and begin to reproduce incestuously, the once-stable family order deteriorates and the patriarch’s authority withers. As his life draws to a close, Pine itemizes the institutions he thinks will move his nation forward—hereditary principality, knowledge of Europe, and a primitive version of Christianity. But Pine is not a particularly skillful political architect, for immediately after his death there are riots, violent crimes, and insurgent families. His one normative mandate, aside from the monthly reading of the Bible, is drawn from the law of nature. Pine gives his son and heir the “charge not to exercise tyranny over [the other Pines], seeing they were his fellow brethren by father’s side (of which there could be no double dealing therein), exhorting him to use justice and sincerity amongst them, and not to let Religion die with him, but to observe and keep those precepts he had taught them” (18). This exhortation turns out to lack the binding force of laws and institutions, and is legible as an instance of “oral tradition, [which] lasts but one age, and then degenerates into fable,” as he would write later in Plato Redivivus.34 The catalyst for the island’s entrance into formal political society is the pattern of rapes, “whoredoms, incests, and adulteries” of which a lot of Pine children are guilty. Faced with a group of unrepentant and recalcitrant offenders, the virtuous Pines “all with one consent agreed that they should be severely punished, and so arming themselves marched against them. . . . the grandest offender of them all was taken, . . . proved guilty of diverse ravishings and tyrannies, . . . was

34. Neville, Plato Redivivus, 84.

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adjudged guilty of death and accordingly was thrown down from a high Rock into the Sea” (17–18). With the mulatto John Phill done exemplary justice, the virtuous Pines pardon the rest of the horrid crew. The immediate result of this episode is the formal drafting of a body of laws we might call a constitution, and what William Pine describes (without irony) as “good and wholesome laws for the preservation of Human Society” (18). Although they are preceded by a sweeping act of oblivion, the positive laws of the Isle are draconian and inflexible. Neville here describes a legislative declension from the self-evident laws of nature (accessible even to feckless teenage clerks) into a crude retributive code not particularly well suited to the characteristics of the nation it binds. It is, in short, an example of poor lawgiving after the Harringtonian model, and the new law leaves little room for executive acts of equity and mercy. The following crimes are immediately punishable by death: murder, blasphemy, a second absence from Bible assembly without just cause, rape, a second adultery by a woman. Physical injury, fraud, and theft are punished by simple remunerative retribution. This rigorous constitution seems unlikely to last and incapable of providing the “culture that a skillful people might bestow upon [the isle that it] would prove a Paradise” (11). As the visiting Dutch learn, the rule of law is uncertain at best, and the authority of the governor William Pine is severely limited. The head of the mulatto Phill family having raped the wife of the head of the Trevor family, the Trevors form an armed band to seize and punish Henry Phill. Of course, since his family realizes Henry is to be summarily executed, they resist with force, “whereupon the whole Island was in a great hurly burly, they being too great potent factions, the bandying of which against each other threatened a general ruin to the whole State” (26). William Pine “found his authority too weak to repress such disorders” in the vigilante Trevors or the rebellious Phills, “for where the hedge of Government is once broke down, the most vile bear the greatest rule” (26). Governor Pine turns to the Dutch for help, who use their guns to cow and scatter the shocked Phills; with Henry captured and executed the governor’s authority is at least temporarily reasserted. There is little reason to believe, however, that the cycle of criminal acts, rebellion, violent conflict, and defeat will change in the future. In each generation the mulatto Phill family instigates a major civil rebellion, and the Isle’s draconian laws do little to stop them. It is possible that with the characters in the rapacious Phill family, Neville cautions against the perceived dangers of a cosmopolitan or miscegenous state. But whether or not Neville is worried about the effects of race-mixing, the fact remains that the Phill family demonstrates a predilection for rape entirely unchecked by the primitive laws of retribution governing the Isle.

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Much of the fault for the cycle of rape and rebellion, it seems, lies in the law itself. The lex talionis that governs the Isle is primitive and self-consuming— since the punishment is death more often than not, the criminal has a powerful reason to resist the law by any means necessary.35 Moreover, the draconian simplicity of the law pushes families into open armed conflict and intestine broils because adjudication and arbitration is impossible in the absence of a suitably constituted and powerful executive.The Isle of Pines, as a political construction, lacks equity, but unlike his absolutist adversaries, Neville imagines equity as a plausible extension of natural public law, of a balanced and secular constitution elegantly designed or “rightly ordered” to incorporate mortality and mercy under rather than above the law.36 As part the novella’s theoretical description of an ill-designed and inequitable commonwealth, Neville illustrates the consequences of a constitution lacking an executive equipped with the ability to interpret and if necessary to relax the rigors of the law. Harrington had insisted in Oceana, for example, on the necessity of a sole “legislator” to handle and preserve the commonwealth in a state of emergency: “ordinary means not failing, the commonwealth had no need of a legislator, but the ordinary means failing, there is no recourse to be had but such as are extraordinary. Whereas a book or a building hath not been known to attain perfection if it had not had a sole author, a commonwealth, as to the fabric of it, is of the like nature.”37 Such a legislator, importantly, is always created by consent of the governed, is invested with a constitutional office as a gesture of collective faith in the judgment and magnanimity of the executive, and is subject to recall. Neville’s theoretical fiction (the novella) illustrates this Harringtonian thesis—the simple rigor of an unsophisticated law circumscribes the executive function and unbalances the commonwealth, leaving power concentrated in the hands of the mob rather than distributed properly among estates. In the wake of a inter-familial rape, the island is ‘in a great hurly burly [between] great potent factions, the bandying of which against each other threatened a general ruin of the whole state” (26).The prince is powerless without the willing aid of armed Dutchmen: “The Governour William Pine had interposed in the matter, but found his authority too weak to repress such disorders; for where the hedge of government is once broken down, the most vile bear the greatest rule” (26). Had Neville sought simply to demolish the patriarchal theory of kingship, the Pines’ decline into chaos and savagery would have been powerful evidence 35. Theodore Ziolkowski, The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 36. Harrington, Oceana, 321. 37. Ibid., 206

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enough, but Neville is interested to offer a true relation as well as satire. The “hedge of government” necessary to insulate against primitive passions and political hedonism is a robust mixed constitution designed to limit the neo-feudal power of “great factions.” George Pine lacked the art of lawgiving, as we have seen, and the emergence of a political structure was largely improvisational. The founding Pine’s broadest goals were historical and cultural, rather than political; after his wives have all predeceased him, George Pine makes provision for the future by arranging the succession and composing an autobiographical narrative:

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I gave this Narrative (written with my own hand) to my eldest son, who now lived with me, commanding him to keep it, and if any strangers should come hither my chance, to let them see it, and take a Copy of it if they would, that our name be not lost from off the earth. I gave this people (descended from me) the name of the english pines, George Pine being my name. (15)

George Pine’s stubborn nativism is not so easily banished from the scene; the islanders are, improbably, to be known in perpetuity as the English Pines. The founding father’s largest donation to his children is a cultural heritage—not in itself a worthless item—but that heritage must serve unfortunately in the place of a political constitution and a source of lawmaking authority. From Neville’s presentist view, the savagery of the island civil wars illustrate the perils of political and legal reliance on a charismatic past or the original intentions of a lawgiver. Neville’s short prose work, I have suggested, is a “satyr” and “true character”— it is a polemical demolition of patriarchal theories of kingship and an analytical exposition of the need for a balanced constitution and well-framed, equitable rule of law. Like its contemporaries The Indian Emperour and Paradise Lost, The Isle of Pines demonstrates the human cost of savage “sword-law” in a fictionalized narrative of political etiology. Perhaps glancing self-consciously back at his novella, in Plato Redivivus Neville writes that in the years after the Restoration, English intellectuals “have been turning . . . all serious discourse into ridicule” (PR, 177). There is one exception—Milton, whom Neville describes as “a Michael here in our age, who has driven out Lucifer, and restored the true deity to his power” (PR, 177). In Paradise Lost, Michael is the “solemn and sublime” warrior who knocks Satan down a peg in heavenly combat and he is the “heav’nly instructor” who unfolds the grand recit of human history to Adam in Books Eleven and Twelve. By conflating Milton with Michael, Neville imagines Paradise Lost as the centerpiece of a republican literary tradition within which The Isle of Pines is situated, a serious counter-discourse

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intended to replace the violent and frivolous idol of Stuart monarchy with the “true deity” of liberty.

The Great Man as a Work of Art: Henry Vane and Algernon Sidney

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When in Political Theology Carl Schmitt writes that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” he has two failed republics in mind—the Weimar and the English.38 For Schmitt, sovereign power depends on its location above the positive law, and is vested in an individual who alone can decide when a state of emergency (the exception to the rule of positive law) exists. Once the sovereign prince recognizes such an exception, he can and must suspend the rule of law until the emergency is suppressed and the socio-political existence of the state may continue. But as Walter Benjamin recognized, Schmitt’s decisionist theory of sovereignty (haunted as it is by his rationalization of Nazism) entails on the prince a duty to avert the state of emergency at all costs.39 Schmitt’s notion of the exception, the set of circumstances or events that call out for the temporary suspension of law, has important ramifications for the exemplary case in the seventeenth century. For Schmitt, the sovereign decision imparts a representative quality to the exceptional case, nominating it as the demonic other of justice and public safety. When the exceptional case is intangible or abstract, it requires concrete human surrogates ( Jews, Papists, republicans, Fifth Monarchists).40 Because it puts forward an exceptional case or set of events as evidence of the need to suspend law, the decisionist mode can often, in demonizing the exceptional case, unwillingly elevate it into a cause or a program. Put another way, decisionist sovereignty imbues the exception with symbolic capital in a fashion alien to the liberal state.The possibility of radical critique is much more acute when the special case is so imbued with exceptional status: instead of being adjudicated in

38. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Essays on the Concept of Sovereignty, ed. and trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). See also Horst Brederkamp, “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999), and George Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception (New York: Greenwood, 1989). 39. Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osbourne (New York: Verso, 1978), 64–66. For a reading of later Stuart political thought through Schmitt, see Victoria Kahn, “Political Theology and Reasons of State in Samson Agonistes,” SAQ 95, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 1065–98. 40. The obvious point in the case of Weimar Germany is the Nazi nomination of Jews as demonic surrogates (and agents of) economic and social catastrophe. Schmitt’s powerful critique of liberalism is indelibly colored by his support for, and rationalization of, Nazi dictatorship with its consequent atrocity. In the last ten or so years Schmitt has been rediscovered by well-intentioned critics of liberalism, many of whom mount their own arguments from the position of radical democracy. The work of Chantal Mouffe is one example of this: see her The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (New York: Routledge, 1998).

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a public sphere of communicative rationality, the exception becomes through synecdoche the moral antithesis of repressive sovereignty itself. By providing for the razing out of regicides from the Act of Oblivion, by de facto excluding rebels or dissidents from the normal operations of law, Charles II put into question his favored fiction of mercy and also, more crucially, nominated his enemies as representatives in a powerful object lesson against republicanism, disobedience, sin, and usurpation.41 Such a nomination imbued Henry Vane and Algernon Sidney, two of the most famous victims of Charles I’s “reign of terror,” with enormous symbolic capital of which they made much use, re-creating their lives as exemplary fictions, as works of art designed to cultivate a republicanism of the polity and the soul. In this section, I focus on two of the best-known and influential cases of “judicial murder” in the later Stuart period. Henry Vane and Algernon Sidney were each aristocratic advocates for the English republic, each an outspoken promoter of the Good Old Cause who, like Henry Neville, spent some time in exile. But while Neville was moderate,Vane and Sidney were less so. Each man was tried and executed by the agents of Charles II as part of a consolidation of power—Vane died in 1662 with other former republicans associated with the regicide, while Sidney was executed in 1684 after a spectacular treason trial in which his philosophical writings were used famously as a second witness. Around each man there sprung up a passel of lifewritings—memoirs, trial transcripts, panegyrics, satires, theological reflections, autobiographies—and each case was something of a media event. Indeed, each of these “cases” is best thought of as the sum of many components in concert—the nearly mythic performances of each man in the courtroom and on the scaffold, autobiographical writings, and the memoirs, characters, or portraits circulated aggressively in print. The cases of Vane and Sidney rely on a synecdoche akin to that in tragic fiction, where the particular details of a virtuous man’s trial or personal life make possible that man’s translation into a generalized fiction. He becomes a representative individual who is wholly public, embodying at once republican political theory, its grim fate during the Restoration, and its optimistic prolepsis.Vane and Sidney are not simple myths of patriot virtue and idealized aristocratic masculinity; in each case the real flawed subject lingers as a constant presence, a spectral figure graced with the intimacy and pathos not appropriate for public exchange but hardly to be excluded. These two republican dissidents (and 41. Republicanism was, Charles II had decided, the exception that threatened the security of the state. Further, because it was the exceptional threat to the state, republicanism itself (an imagining of the formal political death of the king) would become synonymous with treason and would be anathema to any loyal subject.

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their interlocutors) cultivate by their ethopoesis a model of citizenship based on volitional excellence—the republican vita activa that one may elect to pursue— while regarding the alternative as a shameful path of “apostasy and perdition.”42 Public life, thus imagined as the leading edge of a mode of republican citizenship that would later emerge most visibly in the United States, is at bottom built on the premise that, as Victoria Silver remarks, “political philosophy has a life off the page, a moral entailment . . . in the humanity of its practice.”43 For republicans and other dissenters under the later Stuarts, this “life off the page” was usually fatal. Stephen Greenblatt has shown how in his 1607 trial and execution, Sir Walter Ralegh theatricalized or performed the work of self-fashioning as part of an aristocratic repertory.44 In a superheated political climate, a spectacular treason trial is certainly more likely to take on exemplary status (the 1950s provide us with such examples as HUAC and the Rosenberg trials). In a similar vein, Debora Shuger has argued that seventeenth-century aristocratic lifewriting does not “explore the subconscious underpinnings of identity” or express the intimate psychological inwardness so common in most later lifewriting (biography, spiritual autobiography, novel, memoir).45 Eschewing such detail and the resulting pathos, Shuger suggests that aristocratic lifewriting records a subject’s public rhetorical performances, sayings, acts, and episodes because “speech manifests ethos [and] . . . moral character determines rhetorical praxis.” Public acts thus testify to moral character (a version of inwardness) without the inappropriate or pathetic display of private, intimate experience.46 The formal quality behind, or immanent in, these exemplary republican cases is drawn in part from a longstanding tradition of aristocratic self-fashioning, the public (and sometimes suicidal) performance of excellence come what may. Victoria Kahn has argued convincingly that emotional identification was central to most early modern models of political obligation. Both the sovereign and the subject’s proper relation to each other were imagined in terms of the passions—it was the subject’s duty to love the sovereign with passion, and the sovereign’s duty

42. Henry Vane decries apostasy in his scaffold speech, and throughout all of his recorded utterances; see the collection The Tryal of Sr Henry Vane, kt. (London, 1662). 43. Victoria Silver, “‘Our Author, Who Delights in Monsters’: Sidney’s Discourses on Political Imagos and Royalist Iconography,” in Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Derek Hirst and Richard Strier (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 187. 44. Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1970). 45. Debora Shuger, “Dicta et Vitae: Seventeenth-Century Life-Writing in England,” in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. Robert Post (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Institute, 1998). 46. Silver, “‘Our Author, Who Delights in Monsters,’” 165–72.

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to cherish and love his subjects as a nurturing father.47 Indeed, part of the treason indictment itself calls the accused to account for “withdrawing the true, due, and natural love which he owes the king.” Not surprisingly we find in Vane and Sidney’s cases an alternate idea of affect’s relation to political obligation.The examples of Vane and Sidney substitute a passionate love of country for love of the sovereign, finding that one’s moral debt is to the people of England rather than their titular head. In the individual reader of these cases, the duty to love the sovereign is supplanted by the reasoned adjudication of rights and obligations. Because their cases are constructed to educate sympathetically the audience’s judgment on moral and hence political questions, they try to offer a new model of political obligation based on English confraternity rather than filial subordination to the pater patriae. Sir Henry Vane the Younger (best known in literary circles via Milton’s eponymous sonnet) was a key player in the parliamentary governments of the 1650s and a frequent member of the Council of State.48 Most of his written output came in the form of a set of dense and obscure theological explorations, but it was for his ardent service to the commonwealth that Vane became one of the restored king’s chief targets in 1660. Excepted from the Act of Oblivion,Vane was indicted for high treason under the soon to be well-worn statute 25 Edw. 3—the salient charge of which defines treason as “imagining or compassing the death of the king.” Against a charge of high treason for “keeping the king out of the exercise of his office,” Vane mounted a defense, without counsel, around the statute 11 Hen. 7. This statute, put into law after the Wars of the Roses, was a prop of kingly power, supporting the position that it is unlawful for a subject to inquire into the legality of a king’s de facto or de jure title. 11 Hen. 7 provides relief for a subject who obeys the law of a king de facto before the king de jure is restored—the subject is under the mandate to obey the law until providential action resolves questions of legitimacy.Vane’s defense was that he ought not be prosecuted for obedience to the de facto sovereign power of England, for if in his case 11. Hen 7 is ignored, then the common law itself is abolished as a source of political obligation in favor of the Act of Indemnity. What was a common-law precedent absolving subjects for their obedience to usurpers thus gives way to royal fiat: “The security and safety of all the people of England is by this means made to depend on a pardon, . . . and not on the sure and steady foundations of Common Law.”49

47. Victoria Kahn, “The Duty to Love: Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political Theory,” Representations 68 (Fall 1999). 48. Blair Worden has argued persuasively that Vane is one among many radicals figured in Samson Agonistes; see his “Milton, Samson Agonistes, and the Restoration,” in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration, ed. Gerald MacLean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 49. “Memorandums as to His Own Defense,” in the Tryal of Henry Vane, kt. (London, 1662), 44.

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But because retribution was the intended object lesson of Vane’s trial, the fate of common law was hardly a concern for the prosecution.50 The crown’s lawyers evaded most of Vane’s defense by claiming that Charles II was both king de facto and king de jure since the execution of his father, and that a band of criminals had treasonously kept him out of the exercise of his kingly office but had not changed his legal status as sovereign. But questions of law were really not the point. Vane’s trial was necessary as spectacle but bore little resemblance to adjudication—to expiate the nation of his father’s murder, Charles II demanded blood. In keeping with the king’s imputed desire that Vane “was to be made a publick Sacrifice,” he was quickly found guilty by a carefully chosen jury and beheaded late in June of 1662.51 A contemporary interlocutor (and interested party) like Edmund Ludlow saw the executions of the regicides in their intended context: they are intended “to revenge that wrong done to [Charles I], as to gratify Nero with the sight of that tragedy, the shedding of the blood of those eminent servants of the Lord.”52 Annabel Patterson has contended, agreeing with Burnet and Ludlow, that Vane’s trial and execution were delayed until June of 1662, after the nearly twenty other regicidal trials to heighten its symbolic effect.53 Vane’s case had an immediate impact. Trial transcripts, adulatory and condemnatory squibs, characters, and copies of his scaffold speech were printed almost immediately, as was the primary repository of Vane’s exemplary case, the collection The Tryal of Henry Vane, kt. (1662). This work, most likely assembled by Vane’s biographer George Sikes and intended for popular circulation, puts the trial narrative together with Vane’s memoranda on his case, his bill of exceptions to his conviction, his apology for his life, his occasional speeches, his prayer on the scaffold and his printed scaffold speech (the oration of which was interrupted by trumpets and drums, to prevent his rebellious talk).54 No less an interlocutor than Algernon Sidney provides a revealing character of Vane and speculates as to the reasons for Vane’s execution: He was never a Man that considered what would most likely turn to his advantage; he considered only what was in itself, equitable, true, and just, and would probably

50. On the significance of the trials of the regicides, see Howard Nenner, “The Trials of the Regicides,” in Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Seventeenth Century England, ed. Howard Nenner (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997). 51. Tryal of Henry Vane, 55. 52. Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce Crying from the Watch Tower, ed. A. B. Worden (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), 199. 53. Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism, 119. 54. Sikes’s biography of Vane came out shortly after the trial collection: The Life and Death of Henry Vane, kt (London, 1662).

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contribute to the good of his Country. He was not solicitous about obtaining or meriting the Kings favour . . . nor much concerned at his displeasure: his only aim being not to live long but well; and if he could not be secure of his life he was heartily willing to offer up his life for an everlasting memorial and testimony to truth and justice. So when they saw his mind was infinitely exalted above all the Arts of flattery and never to be enervated by the severest inflictions of punishment; and altho they had slaughter’d a great many noble and brave Men to make way for the Subversion of our tottering liberty, and the Corruption of that virtue which was odious to the Restor’d Prince it was resolved to sacrifice him as a finishing Stroke.55

Unlike Lambert, with whom he is compared in contemporary accounts, Vane consistently refused to betray his conscience or veer from that which was “equitable, just, and true . . . and in the service of his Country.” Lambert’s capital sentence was commuted; Vane’s was not. The Henry Vane who emerges from Sidney’s character is a man of excellence and equity, an example of the magnanimous personal style that prefers voluntarily death to apostasy. In fact, the common claim of almost all of the contemporary writing on Vane makes the point Sidney does above—that Vane willingly consented to his death and imagined it as “an everlasting memorial and testimony to truth and justice.” Here Sidney’s “Character” shares the primary hypothesis of the Tryal collection:Vane’s moral excellence was the cause of his execution and his case provides the graphic evidence of arbitrary tyranny masquerading as the rule of law. The Tryal collection figures Henry Vane as an exemplary case for the public illustration of Charles II’s tyranny. The most striking sections of the collection are those moments of lifewriting when Vane’s ethos is most prominently on display, when his political philosophy and personal character seem to be utterly inseparable, when he looks like a idealized fiction more than a man about to be killed. In his scaffold prayers and occasional speeches, we find only trace evidence of private emotional experience. Rarely do we see Vane’s inner agony at the desolation of his family, only a hopeful prayer for them. Even when Vane sees his children for the last time it is unclear whether we see a wrenching, private exchange or another act of strategic ethopoesis: “kissing his children, he said ‘The Lord bless you, he will be a better Father to you: I must now forget that ever I knew you.’”56 Such stoic piety is almost impossible to imagine, but it is an effective technique for the regulation of an affective response.The messy 55. “The Character of Henry Vane by Algernon Sidney,” in Violet Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger (London: Athlone, 1970), 281. 56. “Occasional Speeches of June 13, being Friday, the day before his Execution,” in Tryal of Henry Vane, 79.

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particular details of personal experience or psychological trauma were neither decorous nor useful as praxis. The spectacle of a virtuous man unjustly killed could easily produce crippling melancholy or maudlin excess instead of cultivating the kind of republican civic deliberation that may redeem the English people from their sufferings under the Stuart kings. The account’s emotional sterility asks us to think in philosophical and political terms rather than emotional ones; the unjust killing of the magnanimous Vane is a profane spectacle, and the critique offered in this lifewriting is fundamentally political rather than religious. By minimizing the affective response, by avoiding the contemplation of the well of loneliness into which Vane’s family will be cast, the author of the Tryal narrative figures the killing as a secular republican sacrifice rather than an explicitly religious martyrdom. One of his speeches included in the trial collection shows Vane imagining the exemplary status of his trial and execution, casting his resistance to the Stuart state apparatus as akin to chastity militant: “he was as much overjoyed [with his sentence] as a chaste Virgin that had escaped a Rape: for, said he, neither flatteries before nor threatenings now, could prevail upon me; and I bless God, that enabled me to make a stand for this Cause; for I saw the Court resolved to run it down, and . . . I resolved they should run over my Life and blood first.”57 Figuring Charles II as a sexually voracious libertine was no great stretch, and the association with the Tarquin princes of pre-republican Rome was no accident. But where Lucrece is raped and subsequently kills herself in a fit of moral grandeur,Vane preserves his chastity despite the persuasive rhetoric of state violence. In both his printed meditations on government and in his occasional speeches,Vane compares himself further to the “remarkable example of Socrates,” whose fame depended on “the laying down of [his] life . . . from the love which [he owed to his] country.”58 It is with the enduring model of Socrates in mind that Vane rejects apostasy: “We can receive no evil but of our selves. We may therefore always say with Socrates, my enemies may put me to death, but they shall never enforce me to do that which I ought not.”59 And since the zealous patriotism that underpins his political loyalty is the key feature of English republicanism, Vane’s ethos is further linked with the political philosophy he refuses to desert: “As a Testimony and Seal to the Justness of [that 57. Ibid., 77; it is just possible that Vane might here imagine his “chastity” in terms of the rape of Lucrece, with a similar role to be played in the republican founding gesture of expulsion of tyrannical, lustful, and flatigious kings. 58. Henry Vane, “Reasons for an Arrest of Judgment,” in Tryal of Henry Vane, 63. On the death of Socrates as a political tragedy see J. Peter Euben, Corrupting Youth: Democratic Culture and Educational Corruption (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 59. Henry Vane, “Concering Enemies,” in the Tryal of Henry Vane, 125.

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glorious cause], I leave now my life upon it, as a Legacy to all the honest interest in these three nations . . . rather than defile my Conscience, the chastity and purity of which I value beyond all this world.”60 Vane is more than an exemplary republican martyr, however; he is presented as imagining his death as a mode of sacrificial lawgiving: “I die in the certain faith and foresight, That this Cause shall have its Resurrection in my death. My Blood will be the Seed from which this glorious Cause will spring up, which God will speedily raise. . . . And if by my being offered up, the Faith of many be confirmed, and others convinced and brought to the knowledge of the Truth, how can I desire greater honour and matter of rejoycing?”61 Henry Vane is here more than a magnanimous man pursuing virtue and justice for his country—his death is the stimulus for the resurrection of the English republican ideal. As we have seen, the notion of the heroic lawgiver was largely attached to patriarchal theories of sovereignty; Vane here imagines himself less as a progenitor than a “seed,” and his death is legible as fuel for the historical inevitability of a worldly state favored by God and designed to cultivate “the knowledge of Truth.” The first part of the poem that closes the Tryal collection cements Vane’s apotheosis:

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Great Soul, ne’re understood Until deciphered by thy Blood A Priest, A Prophet, and a King Systeme of every worthy thing. . . . The English Cause he doth retrieve . . . Which he from th’earth perceiving fled Dy’d, to Return with’t from the Dead.62

Here the logic of Vane’s exemplarity is revealed: his spilled blood deciphers his greatness, revealing him to be a heuristic “systeme of every worthy thing” and an exemplary fiction. Although it is his “lot to stand single, in the witness [he] is to give to this Glorious Cause,” Vane is rendered most general, most fictional in the manner of his death. The account of his execution reiterates the aristocratic insistence that public acts were all the evidence of private character one could want: no signs of inward fear appeared by any trembling or shaking of his hands, or any other parts of his body, all along on the Scaffold. [A frequent witness of public

60. “Occasional Speeches,” 80. 61. Ibid., 79–80. 62. “On the Sufferings of the Renowned Sir H.Vane, Knight,” 1–4, 6, 9–10; Tryal of Henry Vane, 134.

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executions] observed that [Vane’s] Countenance did not in the least change, whereas the Heads of all he had before seen did some way or other move after severing, which argued some reluctancy and unwillingness to that parting-blow; the Head of this Sufferer lay perfectly still upon the separation, [evidence that Vane’s] Death was by the free consent and act of his mind.63

Vane’s behavior on the scaffold is more than aristocratic self-composure; it is the last testimony of an ethos already in public circulation. In his typically bombastic fashion, Sidney reports that upon the scaffold Vane chastised the King, offering a prayer that Charles “may withdraw himself from his most pestilential and flatigious intentions,”64 while Gilbert Burnet observed that the very style of [Vane’s] death indicted the king’s justice: he “died with so much composedness, that it was generally thought, the government had lost more than it had gained by his death.”65 Burnet’s account thus resonates with Vane’s enthusiastic biographer George Sikes, who addresses directly the king thus: “you have gotten nothing by these spectacles. Men return from them more confirm’d in their detestation of you, than terrified from any of their purposes towards you. Their names will be recorded amongst those who have died out of debt to their countrey, by having paid the utmost they owed it. Their worth will be remembered.”66 But the most brilliantly effective strategy in the case of Henry Vane is the repeated insistence, of both the man himself and his numerous interlocutors, on his “free consent” and “hearty willing[ness] to offer up his life” in the cause of justice.Vane’s repeated insistence on his “desire to be dissolved with Christ,” combined with his unflinching comportment at the block and his awareness of the fungible nature of spectacle, gives volition extra rhetorical and affective power. In Ludlow, Sidney, Burnet, and the Tryal, the relentless attribution of “free consent” to Vane makes his dying acts significant as political philosophy. Vane is not just a “publick sacrifice,” a victim demanded by Charles II as satisfaction for the killing of his father. Instead, he consents to be killed and this consent is legible as not just a heroic act of will and piety, but also as an assertion of the sovereignty of the governed. Because Vane “willingly laid down his life . . . [in] a free action of his mind, without any constraints on his body,” his death separates the coercive power of the state from its moral authority and supplies the “testimony of truth” that state power is given by consent rather

63. Tryal of Henry Vane, 95–96. 64. “The Character of Henry Vane by Algernon Sidney,” 282. 65. Burnet, History of My Own Time (London, 1724), 1:164. 66. George Sikes, The Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane, kt. (London, 1662), 136–37.

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than taken and upheld by force.67 It is not Charles II but Henry Vane—by extension the individual subject rather than the absolute sovereign—who has the ultimate power of mortality and mercy in this case.68 In the place of coercive power,Vane’s short political tract “The Peoples Cause Stated” (included in the Tryal) posits donation and consent as the foundations of government: for a rational man to give up his reason and will unto the judgment and will of another (without which, no outward coercive power can be) whose Judgment and will is not perfectly and unchangably good and right is unwise, and unsafe, and by the Law of Nature forbidden. And therefore all such gift, made by rational men, must be conditional, either implied, or explicit, to be followers of their rulers so far as they are followers of that good and right which is contained in the law of the supream Lawgiver, reserving unto themselves . . . their primitive and original freedom . . . as they were before they gave away their subjection unto the will of another. (112)

Rejecting the Hobbesian position that supreme power once given by consent to the sovereign cannot be recalled or “primitive freedom” reasserted,Vane offers here an early theory of the contractarian state, locating the origins of that state in the willing donation of reason and will by rational men. In the tract “Concerning Government” Vane claims that governments are either coercive, hence unjust, or consensual, hence potentially just:

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Men that are born equal come to be made subject two wayes; either by the free giving up of themselves to others, or by others’ violent assuming and exercising power over them . . . as Nimrod the mighty hunter of men, served his fellow mortals.69

Vane’s death by “free consent and act of his mind” does double work: first, it imputes “Nimrodical” tyranny to the “Restor’d Prince” in unjustly “assuming and exercising power” over the English people. Second, and more critically, it

67. Tryal of Henry Vane, 112. 68. Vane’s death bears a close resemblance to the elements of the view of slavery that Locke would later develop in his Two Treatises of Government. For Locke, slavery is the deferral of a capital sentence that results in labor during the course of a slave’s lifetime. At any time such a slave who “finds his bondage too odious may draw upon himself the death he desires by resisting his master’s will.” Although Vane never uses the rhetoric of Stuart enslavement that would become so popular during the American Revolution, he does draw upon himself the death he desires by resisting the absolute will of his royal master. 69. Henry Vane, “Concerning Government,” in Tryal of Henry Vane, 123.

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transmutes the execution from a spectacle of state power into an etiology of government by bringing the idea of rational donation (the “free giving up of themselves”) into full view. As a willing sacrifice for posterity as well as the embodiment of his political philosophy,Vane makes the kind of free donation upon which the rational and just state is founded. He willingly surrenders his life, “reason, and will” in the fashion he outlines in his political writings, imagining the results of this donation as proleptic rather than imminent:“My Blood will be the Seed from which this glorious Cause will spring up.” By insisting so vehemently on his volition, and by reiterating the original donation at the core of government,Vane translates his execution into an act of paideia. His proleptic donation on the scaffold comes to look like more than just an “act of mind”—it is the stuff of exemplary fiction and the center of an “everlasting memorial” which sees republicanism and personal excellence as identical.Vane is a “systeme of every worthy thing,” but the “everlasting memorial” is not of him in particular—his case is, as Sidney points out, a generalized republican memorial to “truth and justice.” Vane’s case reveals the status of the representative individual during these years: he is at once an inimitable model of public life and an exemplary case that helps the audience apprehend the totality of republican moral excellence and the injustice of the “pestilential” Stuarts. The famous 1683 trial and execution of Algernon Sidney cast a long shadow and, taken together with his writings, was instrumental in the development of eighteenth-century American and English republican thought. His Discourses concerning Government (1697) were much more influential in the development of political liberalism than just about any other political text, including Locke’s Two Treatises. As Annabel Patterson and Jonathan Scott have demonstrated, the memory of Sidney’s trial woven together with his persuasive political arguments placed him squarely in the center of a liberal pantheon of martyrs for English birthright liberty.70 Readmitted to England in 1677 after a long exile, Sidney quickly became an enemy of the crown much like Shaftesbury (although reportedly there was bad blood between these two implacable foes of the Stuarts). The pretext of Sidney’s arrest for treason was his alleged involvement in the 1683 Rye House Plot, a scheme in which Charles II and the future James II were to be assassinated on the road back from Tunbridge, with Monmouth succeeding to the throne. The Rye House Plot may have been a snare, an outright fabrication, or an actual plot, but in practice it amounted to a rubric under which a passel of republicans were indicted under 25 Edw.3 for “imagining and 70. See Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 292–359, and Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism, 129–32.

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compassing the death of the king” in a very real way. The most well-known of Sidney’s alleged co-conspirators were Monmouth, William, Lord Russell, and Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex, and in every case witnesses were hard to procure. Russell, whose republican sympathies were never in doubt, was brought to trial first and found guilty of treason after a moment of high drama—as the prosecution was putting treasonable constructions on its scanty evidence, word was delivered to the court that Essex had killed himself in the Tower. This seemed like incontrovertible evidence of Essex’s guilt as well as a powerful testimony of a true and wide-ranging conspiracy.71 Russell was quickly convicted and a week later separated from his head. Sidney was locked up in the Tower during these proceedings (the summer of 1683) while the crown tried to find witnesses and more evidence against him.72 Charles II made no attempt to hide that fact that he wanted Sidney dead as retribution for the execution of the royalist Strafford in a treason trial Sidney had helped to orchestrate in the happier climate of 1680. Sidney’s prosecutors settled on an infamous tactic when they were unable to find the required second witness to corroborate the dubious testimony of Lord Howard. Howard was a turned conspirator caught hiding in his chimney who would not receive his pardon until after “the drudgery of swearing.” Seized with Sidney was a manuscript version of the Discourses, written in part against Filmer’s Patriarcha. This work was the long-desired second witness for the prosecution, who notoriously claimed that scribere est agere, to write is to act. Interpreted as an overt act of treason, some of the manuscript’s numerous anti-monarchical passages were read out of context into the record as evidence of Sidney’s wicked character. Although he instructed himself with the records of Vane’s trial on similar charges, and protested against the unprecedented use of private writings as testimony, Sidney was found guilty and went to the scaffold gloriously in October of 1683.73 After his execution the crowd surged forward to dip their handkerchiefs in his blood.

71. The suicide of Essex was a topic of much dispute and public airing of forensic details in numerous pamphlets (much in the way forensics enter our public consciousness via CNN).While the facts are uncertain, much of the circumstantial detail of the case suggests that Essex was probably murdered. Ashcraft provides an excellent overview of this episode in Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises, 380–95. 72. For background on the Rye House Plot and the circle of radical Whigs during the later Stuart periods see Ashcraft, ibid., and also Melinda Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000). 73. See Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism, 99, Sidney argues that even the Inquisition at its height never stooped to surveil the private thoughts of individuals: until the tyrannical justice of Charles II, “noe tribunall did euer take notice of a man’s priuate, crude, and undigested thoughts,” and even a Spanish monk at the height of inquisitorial frenzy “could be questioned for any such writings, though they contained the most dangerous heresies, if not published.” “The Apology of A. Sidney,” in Works of Algernon Sidney, 12.

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The trial transcript was immediately and surreptitiously printed in London and Holland; it was so popular that the crown rescinded its ban and licensed an edition of The Arraignment, Tryal, and Execution of Algernon Sydney, esq. Sidney’s autobiographical Apologie and his Last Paper (a printed surrogate for a scaffold speech he declined to give) were also widely circulated and sought after hotly. Instructed by the example of Vane, whose speech was interrupted, Sidney chose instead to fulfill the court’s claim that scribere est agere: his Last Paper defends his life and his cause while calling the Stuarts to account for their tyranny. Sidney’s myth was instantly influential. His republican writings and his martyrdom were fused into a heroic totem of liberty that influenced, among others, a generation of American thinkers looking to cast off their own tyrannical overlords. Annabel Patterson and Jonathan Scott have analyzed the legal gyrations of the trial itself and the procedural malfeasance with which the perpetually drunken and notorious Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys and the rest of the court proceeded toward the desired end of execution. I will focus instead on those moments in which Sidney’s tragic mythos took shape, those speech acts in which, as Victoria Silver argues, he “translates his personal jeopardy into a vivid threat against the nation as a whole” and posits himself, like Vane, as an exemplary case that would reveal the “dark and slippery” operations of Stuart tyranny.74 Although the manner of his execution was later changed to simple beheading out of respect for his quality, at the close of his trial Sidney was sentenced to die in gruesome but conventional fashion. Jeffreys could hardly contain his glee as he pronounced the terms of execution—a traitor’s death of hanging, castration and burning of the members before the face, disembowelment, ending with drawing and quartering. But in keeping with his performance at the trial (which Scott has argued displayed remarkable poise for a man given to impetuosity), Sidney translated the sentence into a memorable opportunity for political argument and ethopoesis.75 After the sentence is pronounced, Sidney reached the moving climax of his resistance: Col. Sidney. Then, O God, O God, I beseech thee to sanctify these sufferings unto me, and impute not my blood to the country, nor the city through which I am to be drawn; let no inquisition be made for it, but if any, and the shedding of blood that is innocent must be revenged, let the weight of it fall upon those that maliciously persecute me for righteousness’ sake.

74. Silver, “‘Our Author, Who Delights in Monsters,’” 186. 75. See Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 320–25, and Silver, “‘Our Author, Who Delights in Monsters.’”

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L.C.J. I pray God work in you a temper fit to go unto the other world, for I see you are not fit for this. Col. Sidney. My lord, feel my pulse [holding our his hand] and see if I am disordered. I bless God, I never was in better temper, than I am now! [Then the lieutenant carried back his prisoner].76

This defiant last exchange with Jeffreys is but one of Sidney’s many successful attempts to position himself within a tradition of republican self-sacrifice and aristocratic excellence, and he seems to have been well aware of the profoundly theatrical nature of his trial and impending execution. As Debora Shuger argues of other such public confrontations with royal authority, “the elegance and wit of these sayings acquires strategic value in such perilous contestations because the display of rhetorical skill allows the challenge to authority to be read as evidence of the speaker’s courage, intelligence, and grace under fire.”77 And the gesture of the extended hand may even deliberately echo the Livian account of the patriot Scaevola. Captured and faced with torture, Scaevola thrust his hand into a fire until it was consumed rather than betray the republic, and the spectacle of such zeal cowed the adversary into withdrawing. Like Vane before him (who indeed provided a key model), Sidney’s body witnesses his ethos strategically—at the block as at sentencing, his measured discipline seems the very evidence of gross royal tyranny. As Gilbert Burnet writes, the trial was “universally cried out on, as a piece of the most enormous injustice.”78 Unwilling to be interrupted on the scaffold as Henry Vane had been, Sidney declined to speak publicly at all, perhaps even invoking the trope of tragic silence that Walter Benjamin has identified as a feature of baroque drama.79 Instead, Sidney simply handed his Last Paper to the sheriff and laid his head on the block, and “met his death with an unconcernedness, of one who had set up Marcus Brutus for his pattern.”80 Unlike Vane, who beat the drum of “free consent” once he was sentenced, Sidney’s attitude toward his death was one of cultivated disdain. Since Sidney realized (as did the court) that his fate was already decided when the trial began, and that the king had decided to “put him out of the way,” it might seem unusual that Sidney bothered to enter such a large set of objections, exceptions, and demurrals against his trial procedures as the end approached.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

The Tryal of Algernon Sidney (London, 1684), 65. Shuger, “Dictae et Vitae.” Burnet, History of My Own Time, 1:572. Benjamin, Origins of German Tragic Drama, 109–10. Burnet, History of My Own Time, 1:573.

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Both his “Apology” and his Last Paper are given over to significant procedural arguments, and they try to reveal the gross criminality of the whole juridical enterprise even while Sidney figures his case as a teaching example and an illustrative case “whereby the law was made a snare which noe man could avoide, nor have any security for his life or fortune, if one vile wretch could be found to swear against him.”81 In Victoria Silver’s persuasive account of the trial, “Jeffreys dismisses [Sidney’s] every objection, selectively observing precedent and bending each circumstance to advance a judgment already formed. And to the extent that the evidence used to convict Sidney receives no equitable or impartial representation from Jeffreys, but is rendered arbitrarily conclusive to suit the predilections of his royal master, so the court serves as a cipher for tyranny.”82 Just as he posits his trial as a threat to the nation’s moral health, so too does the court become, by synecdoche, a system of every unworthy thing and a “cipher for tyranny.”The unprecedented use of scribere est agere, for Sidney, has translated the law into nothing more than the exercise of royal will wherein the “tyranny over consciences is principally affected, and the civil powers are stretched unto this exorbitant height, for the establishment of popery.”83 As in Vane’s case, the trial and execution becomes not a conviction but an opportunity for the liberation of conscience, mediated by the display of exemplary ethos and predicated on the conditions of rigorous Stuart injustice. Although, as I claimed above, most of Sidney’s Last Paper is devoted to legal exposition, the last paragraph is quite striking. It posits Sidney’s apotheosis into an exemplary fiction and imagines his “sacrifice to idols” as the lever of moral and political action: The Lord forgive these Practices, and avert the evils that threaten the nation from them. The Lord Sanctify these my Sufferings unto me; and tho’ I fall as a Sacrifice unto Idols, suffer not idolatry to be established in this Land. Bless thy People, and save them. Defend thy own cause, and defend those that defend it. Stir up such as are Faint; Direct those that are willing; confirm those that waver; Give wisdom and Integrity unto all. Order all things so as may most redound unto thine own Glory. Grant that I may Die glorifying thee for all thy Mercies; and that at the last thou hast permitted me to be Singled out as a Witness of thy Truth; and even by the Confession of my Opposers, for that old cause in which I was from my youth engaged, and for which thou hast Often and Wonderfully declared thy Self.84

81. “Apology of A. Sidney,” 30. 82. Silver, “‘Our Author, Who Delights in Monsters,’” 187. 83. “Apology of A. Sidney,” 30–31. 84. Last Paper, in Sidney, “The very copy,” 4.

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Sidney’s prayers, in part a group of rallying cries, imply that his sacrificial death will bring about these ends. Because he has consistently imagined himself as an ethical successor to Vane, another “systeme of every worthy thing,” and because he tried at every moment to emphasize the deeply symbolic power of his death, we can interpret these requests for wisdom, direction, and mercy as the promised after-effects of his execution. This claim hinges on Sidney’s role as a “witness of [divine] Truth,” as the visible expression of divine will that reaffirms God’s preference for the English republic. As witness testimony, Sidney’s life and death both cements divine favor and promises to deliver each of the ends of his prayers. The implication is that Sidney’s death will save the people, defend the old cause, direct the willing, instruct the uncommitted, order the state, and nourish wisdom and moral integrity in the English people. The execution is but the first in a series of wonderful declarations of God’s support of the Old Cause, for which Sidney himself has come to stand as a fictional embodiment of all its virtues. Both Jeffreys and Sidney more or less acknowledged that the charge of treason was less connected to its pretext (the Rye House Plot) than it was an indictment of Sidney’s lifetime engagement in the republican cause. In his closing, Jeffreys roots Sidney’s guilt firmly in his undiminished commitment to republicanism (and king-killing):

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this gentleman proceeds upon a surer foundation [than passion], It is his reason, it is his principle, it is the guide of all his actions, it is that by which he leads and directs the steady course of his life. A man convinced of these principles, and that walks accordingly, what will not he do to accomplish his designs? . . . this is the more dangerous conspiracy in this man, by how much the more it is rooted in him, and how deep it is.85

Here Jeffreys presents Sidney’s unwavering republican ethos as aggravating circumstances of his treason, and in the process illuminates the very nexus of political philosophy and personal conduct underpinning Sidney’s public life.86 By referring to Sidney’s moral principle as the “more dangerous conspiracy,” Jeffreys invites the jury to render a spectacular verdict on that plot, to equate political dissent with treason. As such, Jeffreys acknowledges Sidney’s exemplary status, unwittingly spurring on his apotheosis as a tragic fiction. And in the

85. Speech of Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys, in The Tryal of Algernon Sidney, esq., 52. 86. On Sidney’s rejection of the passions as model for political obligation, see background in Victoria Kahn, “The Duty to Love.”

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“Apology,” Sidney argues that Jeffreys “acknowledged the late pretended plot did not affect me, [and] . . . that he seemed to lay very much weight on the Old Cause, and my engagement in it, with which I am so well satisfyed as contentedly to die for it.”87 Both Sidney and Jeffreys seem content to accept synecdoche through which Sidney’s life has come to stand for a moral and political theory of “heinous king-killing” or “English republican liberty,” depending on your preference. At the beginning of the “Apology,” and at the end of the Last Paper, Sidney proclaims his willing consent to die for a cause in which he has been involved since his youth, and from which he has not swerved: “I [have] from my youth endeavored to uphold the common rights of mankind, the lawes of this land, and the true Protestant religion against corrupt principles, arbitrary power, and Popery.”88 Recognizing that his case will witness the truth of the republican cause, Sidney here as elsewhere introduces his life as evidence of his “guilt.” Fully aware that his reputation will be adjudicated in posterity, Sidney’s repeated references to his lifetime constancy are legible as bids for equity. In a trial so marked by grossly rigorous and inequitable readings of law, manuscript writings, and personal conscience, Sidney’s repeated references to his lifetime commitment supplement his acts of sprezzatura and wit to provide a complete ethical picture of the man, his circumstances, obstacles, motives, intentions, and fate. Taken together, Sidney’s life and manner of death supplies what Kathy Eden calls the “qualifying hypothesis of intention” so necessary for equitable judgment. In a court and climate so marked by rank partisanship and the fury of corrupt judges, Sidney aligns himself in theory and practice with the principle of equity so fundamentally necessary to justice.89 As such, his life becomes an invitation to ethical deliberation over the nature of justice and the quality and extent of the sovereign power over life and death; like Vane’s life before him, Sidney’s life becomes a work of art not unlike a heroic tragedy. The exemplary fictions of Vane and Sidney are positioned on the cusp of a historical change in the representation of the representative individual. Neither the simple aristocratic ethopoesis of the earlier seventeenth century nor the anecdotal and intimate privacy of the eighteenth-century novel’s individual character, these two cases exhibit a fictionalized ethos mediated for the first time by popular circulation in and the “virtual witnessing” of print culture.90 James 87. “Apology of A. Sidney,” 29. 88. Ibid., 1. 89. For the central role of equity in Sidney’s political thought, see Silver, “‘Our Author,Who Delights in Monsters.’” 90. On virtual witnessing see Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3–79.

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Chandler has described the way in which the exemplary case was reoriented during the eighteenth century, as the force of a presentist romantic historicism devalued the teaching power of past examples: “As history comes to be defined by socially constituting movement and movements, moral exemplarity can no longer be understood to operate across period boundaries.”91 The exemplary case loses its power when the past loses its immediacy and its didactic relevance, a condition which follows from the idea that each epoch is idiosyncratic and unique. Republican theory has a great deal of presentism embedded in it, for as we have seen there is little regard for the antiquity of unjust laws or the original intentions of heroic lawgivers. The memory of Algernon Sidney’s death in particular worked across epochal boundaries—Coleridge and John Adams each imagined Sidney in particular as an eminent political theorist whose life and death became a work of art, a principled performance inspired by reflection and calculation.92

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Devouring Patriotism In the eighth of his Addresses to the German Nation, the later-eighteenthcentury German philosopher J. G. Fichte makes a number of striking claims about political belonging. He contends that love of one’s fatherland is the highest and most powerful of political emotions because it satisfies “man’s need to . . . conceive of himself as eternal.”93 As evidence he cites a familiar example: “What inspired the men of noble mind among the Romans, whose frame of mind and way of thinking still live and breathe among us in their works of art, to struggles and sacrifices, to patience and endurance for the fatherland? They themselves express itself often and distinctly. It was their firm belief in the eternal continuance of their Rome, and their confident expectation that they themselves would eternally continue to live in this eternity in the stream of time” (119). The fatherland inspires heroic sacrifice by inviting noble men to “live in this eternity in the stream of time,” but also, for Fichte, love of the fatherland is the highest, in fact sovereign, ethos of a nation. Anticipating later

91. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 172. 92. I am here paraphrasing Jacob Burckhardt’s famous description of the Renaissance view of politics—the “state as a work of art.” See The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860; New York: Random House, 2002). 93. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Addresses to the German Nation,” in Nations and Identities: Classic Readings, ed.Vincent P. Pecora (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001), 119.

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theorists of nationalism, Fichte argues that constitutions or birthright privileges have little emotional appeal when compared with the spirit of love for an eternal homeland:

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But when . . . it is a question of making decisions in new and unprecedented cases, then there is need of a life that lives of itself. What spirit is it that in such cases may place itself at the helm, that can make its own decisions with sureness and certainty, untroubled by any hesitation? What spirit has an undisputed right to summon and to order everyone concerned, whether he himself be willing or not, and to compel anyone who resists, to risk everything including his life? Not the spirit of the peaceful citizen’s love for the constitutions and the laws, but the devouring flame of higher patriotism, which embraces the nation as the vesture of the eternal, for which the noble man joyfully sacrifices himself. (120)

Having established the “devouring flame of higher patriotism” as the sovereign principle, the spirit of “undisputed right to summon and order” that “can make its own decisions with sureness and certainty, untroubled by any hesitation,” Fichte looks with a measure of contempt to the written constitution, that tepid objet d’amour of the “peaceful citizen.” No one loves, I mean really loves, a constitution. Certainly one may admire, venerate, and seek to defend it, but a constitution is not an invitation to dwell eternally in a stream of time with fellow patriots.Written or customary, a constitution embodies the laws, privileges, habits, and judgments of a state without recourse to the emotionally elevated flames of “higher patriotism.” Throughout seventeenth-century English political debate, the unwritten and allegedly immemorial English constitution never managed to command widespread popular love. Defenders of the lex non scripta such as Sir Edward Coke or Lord Chief Justice Matthew Hale were on the whole moderate jurists who struggled against what they perceived as royal encroachments, but did so within the narrow sphere of jurisprudence. Neither Coke nor Hale was a politician, and neither man cultivated celebrity as an adjunct of their legal philosophy. Henry Neville thought that, in the struggle between crown and parliament over sovereign prerogative, a mixed constitution was the only remedy that honored the ancient customs and privileges of the people and their monarchy. But Neville, like his colleague and great friend James Harrington, was too stoical in a moment when the terms of political critique and identification were chiefly affective. Englishmen were more likely to rally around the great anti-royalist shibboleth of “no popery and tyranny” or the mandates of religious faith than they were to heed a common lawyer’s exhortation on behalf of timeless custom. If

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we apply Fichte’s analysis of political emotion, the moderate republicanism of Neville and Harrington does look tepid in comparison with the sacrificial patriot glory of Henry Vane or Algernon Sidney.Where Neville’s Isle of Pines links nativism with bad lawgiving, the cases of Vane and Sidney are the leading elements of a theoretical program in which republicanism acquires a specifically nationalist character while its Stuart adversary increasingly tilts toward an alien continental absolutism. In his hyperbolic 1680 heroic tragedy Lucius Junius Brutus, the playwright Nathaniel Lee revisits the origins of the Roman republic in order to make an argument inspired by English republican nationalism. This strange Exclusion Crisis play describes the painful ordeal of Lucius Junius Brutus, who throws off the mask of idiocy to expel the corrupt Tarquin kings from Rome. Lee’s Brutus is not simply the agent of the expulsion of kingly corruption—his “genius” supplies a kind of hereditary ethics, a coherent and eternal national identity in which law, custom, and government are immanent and reciprocal. After a series of rousing orations over the body of Lucrece, the patrician Valerius describes Brutus as the “guardian genius of the commonwealth, / Thou father and redeemer of thy country” (II, 242–43). The play, and Brutus himself, asserts this conflation of roles—he is simultaneously the exemplary founder of the Roman republic and the redeemer of an extant tradition. Brutus is consistent in outlining his own motivation: he demands retribution not only to uphold republican norms of justice but also to satisfy an enduring Roman tradition: speaking to Titus, he says that “I swear the gods have doomed thee to the grave. / The violated genius of thy country / Rears his sad head and passes sentence on thee” (IV, 497–99). The affective hook of the Brutus story (if not of this particular play) is well known from Livy and the various early modern retellings of the rape of Lucrece. Brutus enforces the capital sentences of his sons in order to establish an impartial foundation of justice: I swear there is no way to quit the grace, To right the commonwealth and thank the gods But by the sacrificing of my bowels. Take then, you sad revengers of the public, These traitors hence; strike off their heads, and then My sons’. No more. Their doom is passed. Away. Thus shall we stop the mouth of loud sedition, Thus show the difference betwixt the sway Of partial tyrants and of a freeborn people . . . O conscript fathers, ’tis on these foundations

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That Rome shall build her empire to the stars, Send her commanders with her armies forth To tame the world and give the nations law.94

The spectacle of Lucius Junius Brutus condemning his good son Titus to death as an ally to Tarquin seems excessively rigorous, especially considering the mitigating factors of the love plot and the revelation of Titus’s honorable, if craven, sentiments. While it struggles to present a plausible Brutus torn by an inner struggle between the flames of republican liberty and the paternal love of his sons, the play’s broader objective is to figure the soul-crushing patriotism of Brutus as an emblem of the pre-existing national character of the Roman people. Moreover, the providential nationalism contained within the end of Brutus’s speech—the foundations of law upon which Rome will “build her empire to the stars”—is republican and imperial. The foundation of which Brutus speaks is not the death of his sons (they are seditious traitors, after all) but is instead the force of will he demonstrates in insisting on their deaths despite the offered clemency. The dynamic expansion of the Roman republic—as a state and a nomos—is propelled forward through history not by a legendary founder but by the genius of the country itself, that timeless spirit of the Roman people that acts through but does not originate in Lucius Junius Brutus. Julie Ellison has read Lucius Junius Brutus as an early articulation of the horizontal logic of republican sensibility, a mode of masculine affection that resists the authority of actual or figural kinship and promotes in its place the imagined community of exsanguinous republican citizenship.95 Such a mode of horizontal comradeship—indeed, of national fellowfeeling—is the lingua franca of the revolutionary generation in the American colonies instructed by the history and political theory of the later Stuart period. Algernon Sidney and John Milton were two of the leading deities in the revolutionary pantheon of liberty, and the violent history of England under the later Stuarts was the chief affective analogy for the American struggle for sovereignty. The Bostonian revolutionary Josiah Quincy, for instance, in his 1775 polemic “Observations on the Act of Parliament Known as the Port-Bill,” saw the Stuart Restoration as a catastrophe for liberty and constitutional security: “Englishmen, who rose with a divine enthusiasm against the first Charles, disgracefully submitted to the usurpation of a Cromwell, and then with 94. Nathaniel Lee, Lucius Junius Brutus, ed. John Loftis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), V, ii, 88–89. 95. Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 23–36.

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unexampled folly and madness restored that odious and execrable race of tyrants, the house of Stewart.”96 When he describes the Stuarts as an “execrable race of tyrants,” Quincy must be paraphrasing John Adams, but the reiteration of the phrase (deliberate or coincidental) is revealing. For Quincy, the later Stuart kings (Charles II and James II) were tyrants bent on crushing the birthright liberties of the English subject: their program survived the Revolution of 1688 and flourished in the hands of Walpole and George III. Against the King’s Caesar, Quincy pits the republican warrior ideal: “America hath in store her Bruti and Cassii—her Hampdens and Sidneys—patriots and heroes, who will form a band of brothers—men who will have memories and feelings—courage and swords—courage shall inflame their ardent bosoms, till their hands cleave to their swords—and their swords to their enemies hearts.”97 Here we have not only a link between feeling and republican comradeship—“men who have memories and feelings”—but also we see Quincy building a revolutionary identity out of familiar figures in the struggle against absolutism. Citing the exemplary patriots Brutus and Cassius from Plutarch’s Lives (ostentatiously avoiding Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar), Quincy paraphrases the famous St. Crispin’s day speech from Henry V, exalts two republicans martyred by the Stuarts, and inserts the local struggle against George III into the seeming timeless struggle between liberty and kingly enslavement. For Quincy, as for John Adams before him, the later Stuart period is familiar and unusually vivid historical evidence of a so-called “clash of civilizations.”The sides in the struggle are unambiguous—on one side lie the liberty-loving defenders of the English constitution and its guarantees of immemorial rights and on the other are the execrable, continental tyrants trying to set up an absolute prerogative over the minds, bodies, and property of Englishmen (and their putative American heirs).

96. Josiah Quincy, “Observations,” in Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, jun.Written by his Son (Boston, 1825), 453. 97. Ibid., 47.

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chapter five

Universal Wolves

Aphra Behn and the English Race

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Shall we render obedience to such a degenerate race, who have no one human virtue left, to distinguish them from the vilest creatures? —Aphra Behn, Oroonoko

As we saw above, the myth of diasporic origins upon which Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida rests its political argument is a national romance, and the Brutus legend is at its core an assertion of a civil pedigree—a choice of inheritance from a tragic culture that lends to its English progeny the qualities of glorious antiquity. It is also quite deliberately a refutation of the barbarous ethnic identity with which the inhabitants of the British Isles had been saddled since at least the writings of Tacitus. The later Stuart kings were not particularly interested in the Brutus myth, and their advocates increasingly found in the English national character not a glorious lineage (in law or ethnic identity) but rather a predilection for merciless barbarian violence, radical independence, and crude brutality. The violent gothic past and its roots in the character of the English race was a massively useful historical claim for Stuart loyalists, insofar as it helped to justify the theory of jure divino kingship at the root of the later-seventeenth-century crises of sovereignty. If the English past was one long chronicle of gothic savagery averse to law and cultivation, then the Stuart kings might be understood plausibly as providential agents of civility and racial discipline. Aphra Behn, the first professional female writer, sometime spy for and consistent ally of the Stuart dynasty, would normally be thought to have little in

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common with a republican like Milton. Behn was a translator, poet, actress, and playwright whose works draw upon the literary conventions of aristocratic romance and pastoral libertinism; toward the end of her career (and life) she became increasingly invested in promoting the theory of jure divino kingship attached to James II. Behn died in 1689, after the departure of James II from the throne of England, a moment in which the Stuart cause had been largely discredited. Ironically, Behn and Milton meet in a poetics of defeat, each assigning the catastrophe of their radically opposed political positions to the barbarous pusillanimity of the savage English race.1 From this view, Behn’s late works in defense of the Stuart theory of sovereignty represent a substantial retreat from the ambiguous portrait of the national character in representative texts such as Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida. Two of her last works, Oroonoko (1688) and The Widow Ranter (1689), while primarily set in the colonial Americas, are responses to the English crises of sovereignty during the reign of James II (1685–1688).2 These two American texts consistently exploit English anxieties of their own barbaric national character as outlined above, of which Behn would have seen ample evidence in the political history of England since the 1640s. Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter argue that a return to rigorous savagery was the inevitable and odious consequence of the republican and Whig theories of a mixed constitutional monarchy, of robust commercial expansion and its subsequent class mobility. Barbarism, a relic of the nation’s gothic past, was latent in English national character—in current parlance we might describe it as a national “genetic predisposition” for merciless violence, lawless insolence, and bad hygiene. In the absence of a sovereign prince above the law, an absolute monarch whose God-given obligation is to ensure a just polity by practicing equitable jurisprudence, the reckless, bloody, and savage national character would burst forth. Indeed, Behn sees the various crises of sovereignty during the later Stuart period as evidence of the contemporary emergence of a barbarous national character whose fully brutal and merciless ascendancy is soon to follow. In these late works, Behn tries to unfold an affectively powerful argument for the style of naturalized absolute kingship that supporters of James II imagined as equitable—in such a program it falls to the prince to sit above the law dispassionately in order to regulate the savage appetites of an untrustworthy people. By 1688, Behn has little faith that the fictional method can cultivate equitable judgment or “judicial comprehending” in the English people, whom 1. For a related discussion, see Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (London: Faber and Faber, 1984). 2. For a recent rethinking of the immediate occasion of Oroonoko, see Richard Kroll, “Tales of Love and Gallantry: The Politics of Oroonoko,” Huntington Library Quarterly 67 (2004).

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she sees mostly as a mob in need of disciplinary control. The closest she gets to a theory of fiction as a “school of equity” comes in the short epistle dedicatory to Oroonoko, where she suggests that her task is to narrate those lives “deserving an immortal Fame” that otherwise “possibly would be forgotten.” Like Lord Maitland, the subject of the dedication, Prince Oroonoko is one of these “Men of eminent Parts [who] are as Exemplary as even Monarchs themselves; and Virtue is a noble Lesson to be learn’d, and ’tis by Comparison we can Judge and Chuse.”3 But unlike the affirmative example of Maitland, Oroonoko is a figure of tragic pathos, a sacrificial victim of the surging violence of the English people. Without an absolute prince exercising his equitable prerogatives as the basis of government, in Behn’s view, Oroonoko’s grisly sparagmos will be reenacted serially as English political life spirals back down into barbarism.

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A Degenerate Race Civilization is difficult. As much as the Elizabethans might have succeeded in regulating and fashioning an English nation, the anxieties of English barbarism were far from banished from the cultural psyche. After the Restoration, the intestine broils and savage violence of the civil wars were more than adequate testimony to royalists that England had not left barbarism behind in the twilight of history. As we know, royalists saw in the “ignorant rabble” an undisciplined mob inclined to violence, greed, and drunkenness, waiting for a chance at regicide, slaughter, rapine, and plunder. But barbarism was hardly limited to the laboring classes. The mob that Dryden, Behn, L’Estrange, and other Stuart sympathizers vilified was thought to be in part the product of English geography, in part the product of a national racial character only recently refined, sanitized, and civilized. Their fear was that such latent barbarism would bloom without the suitable application of political discipline, and their faith was that a strong sovereign dispensing justice and mercy from a position above the law was the only plausible defense against recurrent national backsliding into barbarism. Peter Burke suggests that as a response to emerging discourses of national identity in early modern Europe, aristocrats withdrew from the traditional forms and roles of their indigenous popular culture in order to maintain a suitably vertical and naturalized relationship between themselves and their “natural” inferiors.4 National identity, whether barbaric or civilized, obtains in the

3. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (London, 1688), iv. 4. See Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1978).

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confraternity of all subjects regardless of class.5 If barbarism was the spur that produced representations of an English nation as Helgerson contends, and if aristocrats saw in the horizontality of the idea of nation an erosion of naturalized class privilege as Burke argues, then it follows that the aristocratic withdrawal from popular, national culture is at least in part a flight from an ignorant, acquisitive, and vitiated rabble that has no respect for civil authority. That the lower classes evoked such anxiety in England seems plausible. Old habits of thought die hard and are quite portable. Even when confronted with native people in America or Africa, English merchants and colonists relied first on class as a means to comprehend and sort the people they met.While theories of racial superiority were current and powerful, in most cases they were secondary evaluative indices, as Karen Ordahl Kupperman has argued in her study of seventeenth-century English interpretations of native Virginians.6 When James II inherited the throne in 1685, he sought to restore a royal prerogative that had atrophied under his brother Charles II. The new Catholic king announced his desire to restore Star Chamber and High Commission, and, after the 1686 sham case Godden v. Hales ratified visibly his prerogative to suspend the Test Act, James II announced comprehensive religious toleration in two public declarations. But rather than fostering trade and political harmony as the king had hoped, these declarations were evidence to his foes that James was beginning an overt campaign to return the nation to Rome.When seven of the most prominent high church bishops refused to read the king’s declaration from the pulpit, James II’s kingship entered a period of crisis that would culminate with his 1688 departure from the jurisdiction. Since his open profession of Catholicism in 1664, James had been a source of intense controversy. After his 1685 accession, which plots, intrigues, and Parliamentary action had failed to prevent, James II came to stand for the whole Stuart philosophy of jure divino kingship—he asserted his royal privileges in much the same way that the commonwealthsman guarded jealously his liberties, birthright privileges, and rights inherited from time immemorial. The normative foundation of the royal prerogative—the sovereign’s ability to mitigate or suspend the positive laws when necessary to bring divine law and human law into just harmony—is equity. Advocates like Dryden, Behn, and Roger L’Estrange argued for the prerogative in general and for the specific disinterested judgment of James II by insisting that without a virtuous prince enabled to suspend or dispense with the law, judgments may become irrational, 5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London:Verso, 1992), 7. 6. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980), 121–22.

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rigorous, and systematically unjust. Roger L’Estrange, Charles II’s Licenser of the Press and hence one of the most powerful men in Restoration England, was also one of the most reliable voices of Stuart orthodoxy. From his 1660 attack on Milton, No Blinde Guides, to his ardent defenses of James II and the absolute royal prerogative in 1687, L’Estrange consistently links the “mob rule” and savagery of opposition politics to English barbarism. In his 1687 tract Two Cases Submitted to Consideration, for example, L’Estrange promotes the king’s dispensing power (the prerogative to dispense the law) with a classic description of equity:

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Humane laws are at best, but the Specification of Particular Duties, drawn from the General Lights and Precepts of Nature, and recourse must be had in all cases, to Those Authentick Originals, for the Correcting of False, or Imperfect copies. What’s to be done, where the Letter of the Law draws one way and the Conscience of the Prince another? He must, of Necessity, Dispense with One of the Two Laws. He is accountable to God, for the Breach of Trust, if he does not Act according to his Judgment, for the Good of his Subjects.7

Here is an orthodox statement of the Stuart theory of jure divino kingship at its core—the prerogative is for L’Estrange the only feasible defense against the savage, uncultivated passions of the English people: “the people Judge by their Eyes, their Ears, and shortly, by what they See, Hear or Feel; but the Magistrate reads Effects in their Causes, and it is both the Prudence and Duty of his function to prevent Mischiefs.”Without a prince equipped with prerogative powers, polity declines into an insupportable, fatally oppositional democracy of the passions—“such a government as God never made [in which] Every Will and Tom’s an Umpire of the Controversie; Where Every Body is No Body.”8 Such an ochlocracy, in which a “moody, murmuring, headstrong race” seizes the reins of power and repudiates law and liberty, is just over the horizon, looming as a savage specter against which the Stuart kings stand as a bulwark. It falls to Aphra Behn to make the racialist argument that all the rebellious dissidence, public

7. Roger L’Estrange, Two Cases Submitted to Consideration (London, 1687). In the case Godden v. Hales, the Court’s favorable decision for the king’s dispensing power opens with a similar doxology of equity: “As the laws of God may be dispensed with by God himself, . . . so likewise the law of man may be dispensed by the legislator, for a law may be either too wide or too narrow, and there may be many cases which may be out of the conveniences which did endure the law to be made; for it is impossible for the wisest lawmaker to foresee all the cases that may be or are to be remedied, and therefore there must be a power somewhere able to dispense with these laws. Godden v. Hales, 1686; in Law and the Workings of the Constitution, 2nd ed., ed. W. C. Costin (London: A & C Black, 1961). 8. L’Estrange, Two Cases, 2.

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ingratitude, and treasonable plotting of the last decade was a direct consequence of a barbarous national character reasserting itself.

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O King! Oroonoko is a long spectacle of ingratitude and violence writ large on an alluring transatlantic canvas, a fictional exemplum in which the requisite love and duty commanded by heroic princes fails to stem an unbounded tide of rapacious European barbarism. Dryden’s The Indian Emperour (1664) is set in the Americas in order to highlight the primitive violence of European political society, contrasting the corruption and cruelty of the Spanish Conquest with a relatively benign portrait of Aztec culture. So too does Behn exploit the American scene, with Oroonoko’s principal action set in Surinam and The Widow Ranter set in early colonial Virginia. Behn’s representations of the Americas serve a typically colonial purpose—as at once allegories of, and foils for, representations of the metropole. With the term “salvage ethnography,” James Clifford describes the process by which colonial cultures become fetishized and precious to a metropolitan nation; the colonizing nation seeks to preserve a vanishing or threatened colonial culture in order to cast light on the perceived origins of the metropole.9 Such a process “saves” cherished aspects of an indigenous culture to satisfy the demands of metropolitan nostalgia for similar aspects of its own prehistory. Aphra Behn uses an inversion of such salvage ethnography in her royalist depictions of the American colonies. It is not nostalgia for but anxiety about the primitive origins of the English nation at the core of Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter. While she may idealize the honesty and simplicity of indigenous American cultures, Behn represents Virginia and Surinam as primitive versions of England’s history before its early modern “civilization” where the problem is one of bloodthirsty, violent, lawless, unlettered barbarism. The barbarians are not indigenous peoples but rather the dregs of English culture who find in the Americas free rein for their natural predilections for self-interest, cruelty, mob rule, and lawlessness. Behn uses the colonies as spaces of historical description to point out two crucial facts for her audience—first, that the national civilizing process is fragile and tenuous, and second, that the lack of disciplined absolutist government in the colonies is reactivating barbaric tendencies that the nation has only recently overcome. Earlier in the seventeenth century, Samuel Daniel would express just 9. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography, ed. George Marcus and James Clifford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 98–121.

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this anxiety in his “Epistle: To Prince Henrie,” arguing that colonial expansion and trade would imperil the project of English civilization: “our ymmoderate humours may be made / A prey unto some Gothicq barbarous hand / That shall lay wast out glorie, ruynate / All these erected monuments, that stand / Fraile witnesses of our more fraile estate.”10 The perception is not that the barbarous colonial renegades and criminals will come home to England, but rather that the primitive tendencies already loosed in Surinam and Virginia are emerging in England, spurred on by the seventeenth century’s multiple rebellions and by a welter of subversive theories of political obligation. For Behn, as for Dryden before her, without the check of an absolute sovereign guaranteeing the rule of law and requiring filial bonds of love and duty between subject and sovereign, the English nation’s intrinsic barbarity cannot be contained. Behn sees her republican and Whig opponents as a pastiche of undesirables incapable of government—they are the mobile vulgus, a subversive, noisome crowd of “ignoramus” Whig politicians, the monstrous mercantile middle class, and the “deluded multitude” of the rabble.11 For Behn, while English barbarism may be most explicitly manifest in the undisciplined spaces of the American colonies, the real threat is not in colonial corruption per se but in the Whig-influenced corruption and destabilization of class and governmental authority in England. The development of a more formal Tory ideology in the eighteenth century is directly related to such fears of backsliding into national barbarism. Stripped of many of the overtly repressive aspects of Stuart absolutism, eighteenthcentury Tory ideology construes of royal authority as a legitimate and virtuous means of disciplining a dangerously volatile populace easily subject to demagoguery and enthusiastic manipulation. For Stuart loyalists, any check on royal prerogative leads directly to the ignorant tyranny of the rabble. Royalist Catholic printer Nathaniel Thompson, for instance, in an attempt to win the “deluded multitude” back from democracy and sedition, published a series of irreverent and politically charged “Loyal Songs.” Thompson’s strategy was to win over the “misinformed rabble” not through homiletic or political argument but through the medium of song itself: hearing his loyal tunes,Thompson argued that the people “began to listen; they began to hear to Truth in a song; in time found their Errours, and were charm’d into Obedience. Those that 10. Samuel Daniel, “Epistle: To Prince Henrie” (London, c. 1609–10), 86–90. 11. For an overview of party propaganda between the civil wars and the mid-eighteenth century, tracing respectively the polemical characterization of Cavalier & Roundhead, Whig, and Tory, see T. N. Corns, W. A. Speck, and J. A. Downie, “Archetypal Mystification: Polemic and Reality in English Political Literature, 1640–1750,” Eighteenth-Century Life 7, no. 3 (1982): 1–27. On political appeals to the populace in the 1680s, see Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). All subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text.

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despise the revered Prelate in the Pulpit, and the grave Judge on the Bench; that will neither submit to the Laws of God or Man, will yet lend an itching Ear to a Loyal Song, . . . and often become a convert by It.”12 As a direct challenge to the sedition of democracy, Thompson saw his loyal songs as technologies of manufacturing consent in a malleable public: he argued that these “melodious tingling[s] hath reduced [those] who otherwise had never been brought under the Discipline of Obedience or Government” (2). Thompson’s song “The Whigs Exaltation” expresses the perceived peril of democracy: “the Whigs will teach the Nobles how to bow, And keep their Gentry down / . . . The name of the Lord shall be abhorr’d / For ev’ry Mans a Brother. What reason then in Church or State / One man should rule another? / Thus having peel’d and plunder’d all, / And levell’d each degree, / We’l make their plump young Daughters fall, / And he[y] boys up go we!” (6–7). Another “loyal song” reflects the fear of the rabble in government: “Each Cobler’s Statesman grown, and the bold Rable / Convert each ale-house Board to Council-table” (Harris, 137).We find almost an exact echo of this image in both of Behn’s texts set in the Americas, but particularly in The Widow Ranter, where former pickpockets and cobblers rule Virginia with startling cowardice, treachery, and oafishness. In both works Behn echoes Dryden’s brutal assessment in The Hind and the Panther, of the composition of English colonial society: “through our distant colonies [we] diffuse / The draughts of dungeons, and the stench of stews; / . . . Thieves, panders, palliards, sins of every sort, / Those are the manufactures we export” (557–62). Roger L’Estrange preferred uncomplicated fiction as a medium of unvarnished political education; in the Preface to his Fables (1669), for instance, he argues that “there’s Nothing makes a Deeper Impression upon the Minds of Men, or comes Lively to their Understanding, than those Instructive Notices that are Convey’d to them by Glances, Insinuations, and Surprize; and under the cover of some Allegory or Riddle . . . which is, in truth, no other than a more Agreeable Vehicle found out for Conveying to us the Truth and Reason of Things, through the Medium of Images and Shadows.”13 Both Thompson and L’Estrange saw the need to sway a misinformed rabble with barely indirect persuasion while creating in that audience a fervid, sincere royalist loyalty. Behn’s Oroonoko seeks to achieve this end result, and takes an oblique path through the “Images and Shadows” of tragic prose romance. Much like Dryden’s heroic plays from The Indian Emperour (1665) to Don Sebastian (1689), both Behn’s

12. See the Preface to Nathaniel Thompson, One Hundred and Eighty Loyal Songs (London, 1682). Subsequent references are parenthetically incorporated into the text. 13. Preface to Roger L’Estrange’s Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists with Morals and Reflexions, 3rd ed. (London, 1669), 4–5, 7.

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tragicomic Widow Ranter and Oroonoko rely on the affective force of tragedy as a medium of political education, mobilizing the fear, pity, and anxiety of the reader to promote absolute monarchy as the only defense against the latent barbarism of the English race. Aphra Behn’s two American works bludgeon her opponents with both farcical and scathing representations of “mob rule” and its concomitant elevation of commerce. The nefarious Whig theory of republicanism and contractarian kingship, for Behn, violently corrupts the civilizing project of the nation as it destroys sacred and virtuous royal authority as an institution at home and in person abroad. Oroonoko details the persecution of a virtuous prince at the hands of cruel and rapacious “council-men,” a narrative that would resonate with the recent history of popular rebellion against divine-right monarchy and the contemporary attack on James II’s authority. Oroonoko has been read as an abolitionist tract, a critique of European colonialism, a meditation on Behn’s status as a professional female author, and as an allegory for the regicide of Charles I. Much of the recent criticism on Oroonoko has been focused on the figure of Behn herself and her complicity with or critique of early modern systems of colonialism and gender.14 My intention here is to build on such analyses by positioning Oroonoko within the tradition of pro-Stuart apologetics I gesture toward above, a tradition that links the deconsecration of absolute monarchy, the denaturalization of aristocratic privilege, and the cultural elevation of international trade with ubiquitous violence, faction, and barbarism. In Oroonoko, Behn responds to the threat of constitutional monarchy that Defoe would later describe in “The True-Born Englishman” thus: “if to a king they do the reins commit, / All men are bound in conscience to submit; / But then that king must by his oath assent / To postulatas of the government, / Which if he breaks, he cuts off the entail, / And power retreats to its original” (part II, ll. 814–19). Such a king, subject to the “postulatas of government,” is for Behn merely a puppet of the unruly crowd, which Defoe characterizes as the “original” of sovereignty.

14. See Laura Brown, “The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves,” in The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 41–61. Subsequent references to this article are noted parenthetically. See also Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Margaret Ferguson, “Juggling the Categories of Race, Class, and Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Patricia Parker and Margo Hendricks (New York: Routledge, 1994), 209–24; Judith Andrade, “White Skin, Black Masks: Colonialism and the Sexual Politics of Oroonoko,” Cultural Critique (Spring 1994): 189–214; Anita Pacheco, “Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” SEL 34 (1994): 491–506; and Richard Frohock, “Violence and Awe: The Foundation of Government in Aphra Behn’s New World Settings,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 8, no. 4 (1996): 437–52.

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The Stuart king of most immediate relevance to Oroonoko is James II, who was, as Edmund Burke put it later, a “bad king with a good title.” Haughty, diffident, and too aggressive in promoting Catholicism, James succeeded in alienating most of Charles II’s popular and party support through fiascoes such as the Trial of the Seven Bishops. He strained the bonds of Behn’s loyalty, and while she does maintain Stuart sympathies until the end of her life, the office of a work such as Oroonoko is to defend the concept and institution of absolute monarchy itself rather than James II in particular, as Richard Kroll has recently argued.15 Prince Oroonoko is the perfect vehicle for such an abstraction because he is both transparently foreign and unrelated to James II and transparently virtuous as an ideal monarch. Almost from the moment we are first presented with the figure of Oroonoko, Behn signals clearly that he is an idealized representation of kingship that inheres somatically. Not only is Oroonoko an “expert captain” and the “bravest [of] soldiers,” he is “adorned with a native beauty so transcending all those of his gloomy race, that he struck an awe and reverence, even in those that knew not his quality.”16 Oroonoko’s physical beauty is a sign of his inward nobility— his virtue and suitability for leadership is available to all. Let us consider Behn’s often-cited description of Oroonoko: He was pretty tall, but of a shape the most exact that can be fancied; the most famous statuary could not form the figure of a man more admirably turned from head to foot. His face was not of that brown, rusty black which most of that nation are, but a perfect ebony, or polished jet. His eyes were the most awful that could be seen, and very piercing; the white of them being like snow, as were his teeth. His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His mouth, the finest shaped that could be seen; far from those great turned lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes. The whole proportion and air of his face was so noble, and exactly formed, that bating his colour, there could be nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable, and handsome. . . . Oroonoko was as capable even of reigning well, and of governing as wisely, had as great a soul, as politic maxims, and was as 15. The Trial of the Seven Bishops was a huge gaffe for James II. Put on trial for high treason by the court for refusing the king’s liturgical attempts to reintroduce Catholicism, the Seven Bishops were all staunch royalist High Churchmen representative of Charles II’s most solid political bloc. The unsuccessful treason trial collapsed traditional oppositions within the Anglican mainstream and pointed out very clearly to all but the most committed of Stuart partisans that James II would return England to the Catholic Church at any cost, a fate that the vast majority of English subjects found unacceptable. Richard Kroll argues for a view of Oroonoko as a situational polemic in favor of James II; see his “‘Tales of Love and Gallantry’: The Politics of Oroonoko,” Huntington Library Quarterly 67 (2004). 16. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, collected in Oroonoko,The Rover, and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Penguin, 1992), 79. All subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text.

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sensible of power as any prince civilized in the most refined schools of humanity and learning, or the most illustrious courts. (80–81)

The narrator’s ekphrasis of Oroonoko’s body, as fetishistic in its treatment of detail as it is, establishes several crucial points. The passage is one of only a handful of elaborate and lovingly detailed descriptive inclusions in an otherwise attic and sterile prose narrative (the other moments of baroque detail describe locales and features of Surinam). Such a shift in prose style contributes to the aestheticization of Oroonoko to which the narrative points. Like another aesthetic object (the Indian headdress described in the opening of the narrative), Oroonoko is commodified as an exotic, luxurious, and appealing product of colonial bounty. For the narrator (as for the slave traders he will later meet), Oroonoko is an object given value by his physical character. He is not only beautiful and “exactly formed,” but as an object of art he seems to invite the narrator’s attentive erotic gaze. She pauses over each feature of his body, and then proceeds inward to detail his greatness of soul and refinement. Here Oroonoko is transformed into a kind of colonial fetish; his body at once stands for the exotic products of mercantile imperialism and receives the material and erotic desires of the text’s narrator. As such a fetish, Oroonoko stands for the alluring potential of colonial exploration; as we will see, that beautiful potential is soon sullied at the hands of a barbaric mob.17 Oroonoko’s beauty, even despite the “defect” of his blackness, is the first in a series of signs that indicate his interior nobility and greatness of soul. And, although he has had “some part” of a courtly education and has encountered English and Spanish traders, Oroonoko’s regal comportment is in large part due to his intrinsic and comprehensive greatness. Oroonoko appears in this passage as a synthetic form—he is at once a mixture of African “polished jet” and “rising and Roman” features, of European and African culture such that he does accomplish the narrator’s “standard of true beauty.” As such, Oroonoko is a figure for naturalized aristocratic virtues and royal prerogative—like any king, his greatness of soul and suitability for government are not geographically determined but rather are somatic and visible to all. Behn’s claim that the noble Oroonoko “was as capable even of reigning well, and of governing as wisely . . . as any prince civilized in Europe” (81) bears this out. In Coramantien, Oroonoko is graceful, heroic, honorable, gentle, intelligent, sympathetic, brave, and “admirably adorned . . . in soul and body” (81). Such detail is also nostalgic, looking back on an ideal incarnation 17. Here the traditional distinction between “barbarian” and “savage” is useful; the barbarian destroys the unfamiliar out of spite and fear while the savage simply reacts to the unknown.

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of the ideal king before he is betrayed into a contemporary moment greedily disdainful of royal authority. After he is trepanned into slavery and transported to Surinam, Oroonoko unsuccessfully tries to disguise himself: “he begged Trefry to give him [clothes] more befitting a slave; which he did, and took off all his robes. Nevertheless, he shone through all and his osenbrigs . . . could not conceal the graces of his looks and mien; and he had no less admirers than when he had his dazzling habit on. The royal youth appeared in spite of the slave . . . as soon as [people] approached him they venerated and esteemed him; his eyes insensibly commanded respect, and his behaviour insinuated it into every soul” (108). Here Behn explicitly highlights the fact that Oroonoko is a figure for the ideal sovereign—not only is Oroonoko’s greatness of soul visible and affective, it shines through despite his attempts to disguise himself. Oroonoko “shining through” his disguise directly invokes a common seventeenth-century trope of somatic kingship, a trope common to the Coronation poetry of 1660–61.18 Oroonoko’s inability to hide his right to sovereignty under a suit of osenbrigs echoes the plethora of royal escape narratives that sprung up after the Restoration. The story of Charles II’s escape from the Battle of Worcester quickly became the stuff of popular folklore after 1660—barely escaping parliamentary forces, the king and his retainers shed their royal habits and disguised themselves in common clothes and, depending on the version, darkened their skin with walnut juice or soot to pass unnoticed. But the problem, at least in romantic escape narratives, was that the king’s personal majesty would always shine through. As Harold Weber puts it in his discussion of such escape narratives, the “royal identity depends on a spiritual authority and power that invests the mortal body of the individual king; the true king must reveal himself.”19 It is within such a propagandistic representation of kingship that Oroonoko is positioned; even the abhorrent and seemingly paradoxical fact of his enslavement does not deter potential worshippers. When he arrives at Trefry’s plantation, Oroonoko is greeted with the sincere “veneration they pay to great men” (109) by slaves whom he himself had sold. Instead of anger or contempt at the ostensible agent of their enslavement, the slaves “cast themselves at his feet, crying out, in their language, ‘Live, O King! Long live, O King!’ And kissing his feet, paid him even divine homage” (109). A king is a king, even in chains.

18. See Gerard Reedy, “Mystical Politics: The Imagery of Charles II’s Coronation,” in Studies in Change and Revolution, ed. Paul Korshin (New York: Scolar Press, 1972), 19–42. 19. Harold Weber, Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 43.

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Oroonoko’s aestheticized, graceful kingship is useful as a propagandistic representation of absolutist paternalism, but it is when Behn presents the contemporary alternative to such sovereignty that her critique of Whig ideology is sharpest. To the potential rule of a benevolent Oroonoko, Behn opposes the colonial government of Surinam led by the unrepentantly vicious Byam. It is important to note that Byam and his cronies on the corrupt colonial council are a surrogate and thus de facto government—the real head of state, the narrator’s father, having died on the way to Surinam. In “The Romance of Empire,” Laura Brown’s important discussion of the political and historical sources for Oroonoko halts over the fact that the actual Byam was a Royalist; she concludes (57) that the struggle between Trefry and Byam (a minor one at that) must have been a version of internecine Royalist faction. Brown’s interest in Byam’s politics, as historically laudable as it is, deflects her from a thorough excavation of Oroonoko’s absolutist program. Perhaps we can read Byam’s tyranny as a gesture toward his own kingly affectations (though that hardly makes him a Stuart loyalist), but we certainly must read him as a vicious and unsuitable colonial despot, a barbarian chieftain who mistreats a natural superior. Behn here relies on her audience to read Oroonoko, as Kupperman suggests they would, in terms of class before terms of race. Byam and his underlings are paragons of cruelty, acquisitiveness, rapine, and violence. After being betrayed into slavery by an English trader who twice exploits Oroonoko’s sense of honor, the royal slave describes the colonials that Byam heads as a pack of “rogues, runagades, that have abandoned their own countries, for raping, murders, thefts, and villainies, . . . [who] upbraid each other with infamy of life, below the wildest salvages,” and asks his followers “shall we render obedience to such a degenerate race, who have no one human virtue left, to distinguish them from the vilest creatures?” (126). Immediately after an unsuccessful slave rebellion against the “rogues and runagades,” again Oroonoko is betrayed and enslaved: treacherous, barbaric Byam and the apparently unwitting Trefry appeal to his honor and even draft articles of peace with him before throwing him back in chains. Behn uses the treaty Byam strikes with Oroonoko to evoke her vision of contemporary political realities: first, embodied bonds (honor among generals and aristocrats) or contracts of sovereignty mean nothing to an ignorant and hypocritical rabble. Second, the written contracts between the people and the monarch designed to replace such embodied and intangible promises are subject to betrayal by this rabble.20 Byam rejects the contract and thus the law, clearly preferring the rule of the sword to the rule

20. I am indebted to Jayne Lewis for bringing this point to my attention.

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of law. Once he capitulates, Oroonoko and his adjutant Tuscan are whipped “in the most deplorable and inhumane manner,” after which the colonists “rubbed his wounds, to complete their cruelty, with Indian pepper” (132). They torture a valued commodity with another valued commodity (pepper). The narrator’s representations of Byam and the colonial council contribute to an explicit image of the inappropriate tyranny of the lower class and the vicious: Byam’s council “consisted of such notorious villains as Newgate never transported, and possibly originally were such, who understood neither the laws of God or man, and had no sort of principles to make then worthy the name of men” (133–34). Here Behn is explicitly propagandizing—the colonial council, made up of the dregs and dross of the “English mobile” (134), has no comprehension of the “laws of God or man,” and so they govern with cruelty, violence, and tyranny. It is not at all surprising, then, that the agent of Oroonoko’s execution is “one Banister, a wild Irishman, and one of the council, a fellow of absolute barbarity, and fit to execute any villainy, but was rich” (139–40). To an early modern English audience, Banister’s Irishness would have been a clear reference to the gothic barbarism that had been overcome in England and marginalized in the “Celtic Fringe” of the British Isles. In the seventeenth century (as expressed in works such as Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland or Milton’s Observations on the Articles of the Peace in Ireland ), English audiences saw in Ireland a wild and hostile nation always potentially harboring Catholic invasion forces. So Behn’s description of Banister is loaded with redundancies: given the immediate association between the Irish and the barbarian, here the narrator’s use of “wild,” “a fellow of absolute barbarity,” and “fit to execute any villainy” would seem merely commonplace refinements of an image of gothic barbarism. Banister, as an example of barbarity who “was rich,” exemplifies the turn that Behn predicts English culture will take if the embodied and sovereign rights of the Stuart monarchy are cast aside. Even the moneyed and putatively more civilized will find their gothic tendencies reactivated by the lack of governmental discipline.The spectacle of Oroonoko’s grisly execution by dismemberment, which invokes both loyal narratives of the regicide and the wildly popular Protestant martyrologies like Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, is the final and graphic representation of the triumph of a barbaric “English mobile” over just and graceful royal authority. But there is a second and related target of Behn’s royalist invective—an encroaching commercial ideology. As Brown suggests, “both Charles I and Oroonoko are victims of the same historical phenomenon—those new forces in English society loosely associated with an anti-absolutist mercantile imperialism” (58–59). As an unfavorable representation of individual slavery, the slave

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trade, the colonial plantation system, and the English consumerism that generates all of them, Oroonoko seems to make an anti-commercial critique. And as we have seen, as an agent of social mobility, mercantile imperialism puts representatives of the vicious “English mobile” into power. But the “individual slavery” the text protests is Oroonoko’s; the text quite explicitly sanctions the enslavement of prisoners, trading in slaves, and the colonial system that such commerce supports. Oroonoko himself trades slaves without reservation after winning them in war, and when his fellow slaves capitulate in his rebellion, he denounces them as “by nature slaves, poor wretched rogues, fit to be used as Christians’ tools; dogs, treacherous and cowardly, fit for such masters, [that] wanted only but to be whipped into the knowledge of the Christian gods to be the vilest of all creeping things” (130–31). Here again we see royal authority undermined by treachery; Oroonoko perceives himself deserted by a “rustybrown” rabble who are “by nature slaves” (my emphasis). Oroonoko here is speaking the language of Aristotle’s Politics, a tract which was deeply influential in early modern European political and social theory. Aristotle argues that any person seemingly incapable of reason, whose “function is the use of their bodies and nothing better,” is by nature a slave.21 Easily dismissing his followers, Oroonoko seems neither surprised nor concerned by their preference for the security of enslavement. He consistently considers the rebellious slaves as tools of his own reassertion of his individual sovereignty and liberty; while Oroonoko cajoles them with freedom, he considers them as purely instrumental. Their inability to persist loyally with Oroonoko demonstrates their lack of natural reason; thus they are naturally slaves, instruments “fit to be used as Christians’ tools.” Aristotle’s position on natural slavery enabled early modern theorists of American conquest to intellectually and morally justify the war upon, and enslavement of, countless American and African natives.22 So Oroonoko’s position as an advocate for slavery looks deeply ironic to us. There seems to be a conflict between Oroonoko’s status as a chattel slave and his embrace of natural slavery. But the text does not share this ambivalence, endorsing the right rule of natural superiors like Oroonoko while decrying the unnatural authority of a degenerate race of colonial rapists, thieves, and barbarians. The novella thus lauds a modified-Aristotelian view of natural class status, in agreement with the long-standing Stuart political theory that imagines the sovereign as a merciful, tender father above the law in order to ensure equity, moral prudence, and mercy in government. 21. Aristotle, Politics, ed. and trans. Trevor Saunders and T. A. Sinclair (New York: Penguin, 1981), 1254b16—1254b32, pp. 68–69. 22. Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970).

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A more acute contemporary tension in Oroonoko is between an absolutist theory of slavery and the colonial practice of forced labor. It is difficult for Behn to vindicate the actual slave economy as an example of benevolent paternalism, especially as she seems to have been an eyewitness to slave plantations in her trip to Surinam. But it is easy for Behn to decry enslavement of a natural master, at least one who is relatively removed from the actual horrors of forced slave labor. We must remember that the conditions of Oroonoko’s enslavement are peculiar; we never see him engaged in slave labor, and much of his time is devoted to gentlemanly adventures of eel-grabbing, tiger-hunting, and upriver ethnographic fieldwork. Here Behn recasts slavery as an abstraction, a law that applies to Oroonoko only when he threatens the colonial polity. This gesture allows her to bracket the real conditions of slavery and vindicate a benevolent and paternalistic absolutist program in the abstract while decrying the misery and brutality of undisciplined capitalist barbarism.23 Behn’s narrator’s desires for and fascination with the sundry exotic objects of Surinam and its colonial economy advocates for a well-disciplined colonial project. Consider the fact that the narrative begins with an elaborate catalogue of the goodies extracted from Surinam or the cultural capital the appearance of one such souvenir brings her:

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We trade for feathers, which they order into all shapes, make themselves little short habits of them, and glorious wreaths for their heads, necks, arms, and legs, whose tinctures are inconceivable. I had a set of these presented to me, and I gave them to the King’s Theatre, and it was the dress of the Indian Queen, infinitely admired by persons of quality, and were inimitable. (76)

It is important to note that this headdress is given as a gift by the natives and is not the product of forced slave labor. For all of her apparent interest in genteel honor, the narrator here becomes a debased merchant herself, breaking an honorific gift economy by trading the headdress for “cultural capital” back in London.With her fabulous hat, the narrator wins the admiration of persons of qual-

23. Stephanie Athey and Daniel Cooper Alarcón describe Behn’s critique of the colonial lack of discipline thus: “While the narrator is in favor of colonization and regrets the eventual loss of the colony to the Dutch, she finds the mode of government under Lieutenant Byam and his men to be dishonorable and therefore reprehensible. This is no condemnation of the imperial venture itself, however; both Oroonoko and the white female narrator believe that the ‘noble’ are the rightful rulers of ‘brutes and slaves.’” See their “Oroonoko’s Gendered Economies of Honor/Horror: Reframing Colonial Discourse Studies in the Americas,” American Literature 65, no. 3 (September 1993): 415–43. Also see chapter 1 of Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992), on the text’s ambivalent relationship to slavery.

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ity; clearly the “glorious wreath” of “inconceivable” beauty with an explicitly colonial origin seems to suggest her delighted embrace of a disciplined imperial project. As Brown suggests (52), this passage displays “the period’s fascination with imperialist accumulation” as a synecdoche for colonial exploitation. Brown continues to argue that the many spectacles of plenitude and consumption such as this one “render colonialism unambiguously attractive” (55). But as we have seen, Behn’s narrator has profound reservations about the state of colonial authority and about the way in which colonial trade and labor empowers the merchant class. Perhaps Behn’s embrace of colonial commodities alongside her scathing critique of Whig mercantilism is explained by the paradoxical historical circumstances of the early 1680s. A booming economy of international trade supplied a financially strapped Charles II with increasing customs revenue. So while trade generally moved capital into the hands of a mostly centrist and pro-constitutional body of London merchants, the customs revenue from that trade allowed Charles to move increasingly toward his goal of absolute personal rule.24 The contemporary colonial project was neither to be wholly embraced nor abandoned; instead the filial bonds between the divine-right sovereign and his subjects, naturalized from simple obligation to mutual love and duty, should guarantee discipline and justice abroad. But as Behn points out, the barbarous English, at home and abroad, have abandoned their obligations to love and obey the king in favor of political and commercial hedonism.25 To get at the heart of Behn’s commentary on the pernicious influences of the new commerce, we must return to a crucial aspect of Oroonoko which has gone mostly without elaboration so far in this chapter—the fact of Oroonoko’s blackness. Scholars have occasionally drawn an analogy between Oroonoko and the Stuarts, who were sometimes represented as “black” (i.e., darker in complexion).26 Behn’s use of such an analog seems unlikely to me, especially given the fact that “blackness” of the Stuart complexion was read as a sign of foreign

24. See Richard Ashcraft’s Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 38. Merchants are not always vilified in pro-absolutist literature; in “Violence and Profits on the Restoration Stage: Trade, Nationalism, and Insecurity in Dryden’s Amboyna,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22, no. 1 (1998): 2–17, Robert Markley contends that in Amboyna, for example, a “heroic merchant” is the agent of the “gentlemanly extension of English power” and is dialectically related to the development of English national identity. 25. For more on the turn to “political hedonism” as a mode of political philosophy in Hobbes, see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), and on the subject’s political obligations imagined as love and duty see Victoria Kahn, “The Duty to Love: Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political Theory,” Representations 68 (Fall 1999). 26. For references to the trope of Stuart blackness, see George Guffey, “Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: Occasion and Accomplishment,” in Two English Novelists: Aphra Behn and Anthony Trollope (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1975), and also Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, 75–78.

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status and presumably thus of popery. Even in a tract selling absolute monarchy, highlighting a king’s alien features would be unpersuasive and ill-calculated. Oroonoko’s blackness defeats such easy allegoresis and contributes to the text’s royalist internationalism. The enslavement of Oroonoko, Prince of Denmark, while traumatic, would be less radically internationalist and thus less compelling as royalist propaganda. For Behn all kings command sovereign authority, even black ones. Gallagher argues that his skin of “polished jet” differentiates him from the base, “rusty brown” of other Africans, including his grandfather the king. Oroonoko’s ultimate or perfect blackness is a sign of his exceptional status and his aesthetic purity. As many commentators have observed, although she aestheticizes him as a synthetic form of European and African features, Behn uncharacteristically refrains from lightening Oroonoko’s skin to make him more palatable to an European audience. But Oroonoko’s blackness carries with it much ideological freight—as Gallagher points out, black skin meant, above all, that a person was subject to be exchanged as a commodity.27 It is precisely that blackness which allows Behn to point out the depraved and wrongheaded priorities of a Whig capitalism. There are two models of value mapped onto Oroonoko’s body—one of commercial value, the other of political and moral value.The commercial system within which Oroonoko circulates repeatedly encounters these competing models of value and its agents must choose; either Oroonoko is to be treated as a man of honor and an exemplary monarch, or he is to be treated as chattel, as a valuable commodity to be exchanged and employed for financial gain. Not surprisingly, from the slave trader’s duplicity to Byam and Banister’s cruel barbarism, in every case Oroonoko’s value to the agents of commerce is exclusively financial. Oroonoko’s blackness, his value as chattel, trumps his value as an intrinsically noble and gracious monarch within the acquisitive and debased moral calculus of Whiggery. Within an anti-absolutist mercantile ideology, distinctions of personal value or merit are worthless; as Thompson’s “The Whigs Exaltation” jibes,“ev’ry mans a Brother.” As Oroonoko’s grisly fate suggests, the erosion of such naturalized distinctions of value results in the popular tyranny of the cruel and barbarous “English mobile.” It is important to conceptualize Oroonoko as part of a rearguard pro-Stuart initiative in the late 1680’s and remember that the tyranny of the barbaric mob in the colonies, however problematic, was merely a way of describing the impending tyranny of the vulgar multitude in England. So when Oroonoko poses the question “Shall we render obedience to such a degenerate race?” to his fellow slaves, it is clear that the “degenerate race” is a reference to the common people of England who are unfit to rule. 27. See Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, 77.

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Want of a Governor Behn’s final play, the dark tragicomedy The Widow Ranter, or The History of Bacon in Virginia (performed posthumously in 1689), continues her use of English barbarism to bludgeon the advocates of “mob rule,” even though the revolution of 1688 had derailed the Stuart cause and cast a shadow over the political theory of divine right kingship. Dryden’s epilogue describes the play as a “farce of government”; The Widow Ranter itself illustrates a “degenerate race” turned to government, or as Thompson’s song puts it, “Each Cobler’s Statesman grown, and the bold Rable / Convert each ale-house Board to Council-table.” In colonial Virginia, the custodians of the law are a rabble of drunken and vicious transports, pickpockets, and bankrupt farriers who have only their own petty interests in mind. Set against this gaggle of barbarian buffoons is the “heroic” rebel, Nathaniel Bacon, “a man indeed above the common rank, by nature generous, brave, resolved, and daring.”28 The play is fundamentally concerned with two issues that were particularly salient early in 1689: rebellion and the rule of law. Bacon, tired of the depredations of local native tribes and the inability of the colonial government to act, launches his own assault on the Indians.29 But such action is in fact armed rebellion that threatens the colonial government by pointing out its impotence; in response the colonial council repeatedly tries to ambush and execute Bacon, who wins the support of the other rabble, defeats the Indian armies, and dies somewhat gloriously. The Widow Ranter echoes Oroonoko as a conflict between a warrior-patriot and an explicitly barbarous mob in power. As a post-1688 play, The Widow Ranter laments tragicomically the absence of even the possibility of an equitable and morally prudent sovereign.The play suggests that after 1688 the two options for government are the mob and the self-interested aristocrat. Neither the council nor Bacon possesses the kind of civic duty and political discernment that Oroonoko possesses. Caught between Bacon and the rabble,Virginia’s security depends on a lukewarm prediction of a good governor to come. In keeping 28. Behn, The Widow Ranter, in Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Writings, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Penguin, 1992), 256. Since this edition does not give line numbers, I cite by page numbers in the text. 29. For more on the history of Bacon’s rebellion, see Charles Lynn Batten, “The Source of Mrs. Behn’s The Widow Ranter,” Research in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre 13, no. 1 (1974): 12–18, and Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1997), 61–62. Smith describes Bacon’s 1676 rebellion as a vigilante action against Susquehannock Indians which spiraled into an open rebellion against Governor Berkeley and the colonial government. Under guise of civil defense, Bacon and his followers seized coveted lands from different native tribes but, more critically for Smith, established a “pattern of tensions between colonial land aspirations and imperial policies of restraint, as well as [demonstrated] the failure of royal authorities to hold back the colonists” (61–62).

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with Stuart mythography, the only hope for justice and security rests with a king across the water who will reinstate civic obligations and social order. Margo Hendricks has argued that the play uses the threat of a barbaric, potentially miscegenous Indian other to stabilize and reunify the English colony in Virginia and ratify the genocidal aims of the imperial project.30 While Hendricks is quite correct to point out the genocidal implications of the colonial project, as well as Bacon’s own deep involvement in such ideology, she misreads the play’s central threat (231–37). The barbarians at the gate are not Indians but tailors, panders, and pickpockets. The few representations of Indians in The Widow Ranter are almost all positive from a royalist perspective, particularly because Cavernio and Semernia, the Indian King and Queen, are suitably regal, graceful, and virtuous, while the drunken louts (Boozer, Dunce,Timorous,Wellman, Whiff, Whimsey, and others) who make up the government of Virginia are repeatedly portrayed as base, degenerate, and craven. In fact, as Kupperman suggests, the term “Virginian” itself was a popular slander, suggesting precisely such oafishly inelegant and self-interested colonial behavior.31 Bacon, after his expedition against the Indians, is accused of rebellion by the boorish councilmen, and minions of the council repeatedly try to ambush and execute him. But Bacon naturally escapes to lead his forces successfully against the Indians, where he kills Cavernio and then unwillingly slays his beloved Semernia. Fearing that the battle has been lost, and threatened by the council’s troops, Bacon secures “himself from being a public spectacle upon the common theatre of death” (321) and kills himself in the best heroic tradition. Bacon’s adjutant Daring eulogizes the heroic and just general as a “great-souled man, no private body e’er contained a nobler, [who] could have conquered all America” (322). Even in death Bacon manages to distance himself from the treachery of the council; he avoids the “common” stage of death and in dying honorably ratifies the virtue of a truly brave aristocracy. While it seems that Bacon is a second Oroonoko, his suicide is the result of a misreading of the battle, and in the context of a tragicomedy it is at least partially ridiculous that the victorious general kills himself by mistake. Bacon is

30. See Margo Hendricks, “Civility, Barbarism, and The Widow Ranter,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Patricia Parker and Margo Hendricks (New York: Routledge, 1994), 225–39 (subsequent citations are given in the text), and Margaret Ferguson, “News from the New World: Miscegenous Romance in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter,” in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 31. See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Presentment of Civility: English Reading of American SelfPresentation in the Early Years of Colonization,” William & Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (January 1997): 193–228.

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hardly the transparent vehicle for absolutist ideology that Oroonoko is—his insistence on the points of honor is overwrought, making him look either foolish or tendentious. Despite the objections of his lieutenants, Bacon misreads Parson Dunce, an ineptly treacherous oaf sent by the council to lead him into ambush. Bacon is ambushed but narrowly escapes and even then still clings to a clichéd notion of personal honor. But if Bacon’s adherence to martial honor is sometimes farcical, it is the rebellious aspect of his character that is most politically threatening. Faced with an ineffective civil magistracy, Bacon marshals his own forces to take action. As such he represents the threat of a warrior aristocracy, of a cadre of overmighty subjects who engage in military action for personal or arbitrary reasons.32 Responding to Cavernio’s objection to the English presence in Virginia, Bacon justifies his rebellion in the language of property rights: “finding here my inheritance, I am resolved still to maintain it so; and by my sword which first cut out my portion, defend each inch of land with my last drop of blood” (269). Bacon here sounds suspiciously like a commonwealthsman trumpeting his ancient inherited rights of property, and justifying his rebellion as a defense of those property rights. Here Behn links the rhetoric of the Good Old Cause directly to rebellion and civil chaos; if every subject with some charisma and a militia is able to defend his real or perceived property rights, then there is no chance for civil peace. At the end of the play Bacon mistakenly kills his beloved Indian princess and himself, testifying both to his violence and his idiocy; the only outcome of rebellion in defense of inherited property rights is civil chaos and personal ruin. But the alternative to Bacon is the colonial council, which has access to that selfsame rhetoric of liberty and property: their warrant on the rebel accuses that “Bacon, contrary to law and equity, has to satisfy his own ambition taken up arms, with a pretence to fight the Indians, but indeed to molest and enslave the whole colony, and to take away their liberties and properties” (295). Throughout most of the play, Behn suggests that there is not much of a choice: either the privately motivated warrior aristocrat or the congress of rabble must rule in Virginia. Only the shadow presence of the governor to come, a “gallant man [who is] nobly born” (256), seems to promise the arrival of discipline and justice. Behn is quite explicit in presenting the colonial government as a pastiche of the lower-class mob and the rule of law as a travesty.When the young gentleman Hazard lands in Jamestown, his aristocratic comrade Friendly advises him that 32. For a discussion of the relation between the barbarian and the warrior aristocracy as mutually related threats to the polity, see Debora Shuger, “Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians,” Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997).

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“this country wants nothing but to be peopled with a well-born race to make it one of the best colonies in the world, but for want of a governor we are ruled by a council, some of which have been perhaps transported criminals, who having acquired great estates are now become Your Honor, and [who] . . . possess all places of authority” (256). Hendricks reads the lines “well-born race” as suggestive of the genocidal impulse in the colonial endeavor. Perhaps, but these lines explicitly suggest the need for an educated and civil ruling class to assert its natural authority over ill-born “transported criminals.” Against any claims that individual colonial experience qualifies one for government, once again we find Behn militating for the naturally determined and just rule of the virtuous and genteel.33 And again, as in Oroonoko, we have an image of a surrogate popular government that lacks the proper and presumably regulating authority of a head of state, suggesting a by now familiar English analog. We can here see an echo of Behn’s domestic Stuart loyalism after the flight of James II and the Williamite Succession: England too wants a legitimate governor and waits for the promised arrival of the gallant man across the water. Hazard immediately encounters and quarrels with a triad of illegitimate “Your Honours” in the forms of Dullman, Timorous, and Boozer, whom he reads easily as loutish, drunken “hogherds” (258). In their cups, they point out the lower-class origins of most of the colonial “gentry”: Timorous outs Parson Dunce, another “man of honour,” as a bankrupt farrier and Mrs. Flirt as the daughter of a tailor, while Flirt reveals that Timorous was “broken exciseman . . . [who] came over a poor servant” (259). Dullman, true to his name, then announces his own past as a failed tinker and a transported housebreaker along with Boozer’s history as a “common pickpocket [who] turned evidence” and fled to the colonies “when times grew honest” (259). Perhaps Behn’s most telling commentary on the inability of the lower classes to triumph over their barbarism is in the farce of judicature that unfolds in the first scene of Act III where young Hazard is “tried” for offending the Honourable Justice Timorous shortly after his arrival.34 After convening, the august court of Justices moves to procure a punch bowl “of larger circumference” such that it may not be prematurely emptied when “the bench sits late about weighty affairs” (287), and to ensure an ample supply of punch the court dismisses Justice Boozer from the bench for “drinking too much punch in the

33. Jim Egan reads John Smith as a kind of colonial crypto-Leveller, advocating for individual colonial experience as an administrative credential, and against the kind of class-based credentials Behn would later prefer. See his “‘Hee That Hath Experience . . . To Subject the Salvages’: British Colonialism and Modern Experiential Authority,” Genre 28 (Winter 1995): 445–64. 34. This scene did not make it into the initial staging of The Widow Ranter.

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time of hearing trials” (287). After adjudicating a suit investigating which of the Justices’ wives is the greatest whore, the court turns to Hazard. Timorous describes his brush with assassination at the hands of Hazard, but his claims are not corroborated by Flirt, who testifies that Hazard only drew upon Timorous after being affronted and cudgeled by Dullman and Boozer. In the following comic exchange, Timorous exhibits an obvious inability to comprehend the law—like his fellow Justice Boozer it is likely that Timorous cannot even read. Hazard admits to drawing his sword on Timorous:

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Hazard Timorous Hazard Whiff Timorous Hazard Timorous Hazard

If I did, it was se defendendo. Do you hear that brothers, he did in defiance. Sir, you ought not sit judge and accuser too. The gentleman’s ‘ th’ right, brother, you cannot do it according to law. Gadzoors, what new tricks, new quirks? Gentlemen, take notice, he swears in court. Gadzoors, what’s that to you sir. This is the second time of his swearing.

Not only does Timorous swear in court and misapprehend Hazard’s basic Latin “se defendendo,” but he sits as accuser and judge in defiance of basic legal protocols. But what is most apparent here is not Timorous’s breaches in legal decorum; rather it is the fact that Hazard’s correct objections are entirely lost upon the drowsy court, on the illiterate and “degenerate race” of drunken tinkers and pickpockets. Despite Hazard’s exasperated requests to be heard, Justice Whimsey concludes haphazardly that Timorous “shall be friends with the gentleman [since] this was some drunken bout” (290). Timorous acquiesces and Hazard leaves dumbfounded, asking Friendly, “Is this the best Court of Judicature your country affords?” (290). Wanting only a “well-born race” to govern Virginia, it is. This “degenerate race” of “Your Honours,” threatened by the rebellion of Bacon as well as the arrival of two young gentlemen, fearing that either faction will succeed and thus that the council will be “huffed out of [their] commissions” (261), trumps up a legal pretext and plans to reward Bacon’s “treason” with ambush and murder. They see Bacon as an ambitious threat who clings to a “silly thing called honour” (264), and as a representative of a naturalized gentility that they affect but cannot achieve. In the council’s hands, the law becomes merely a rationale for achieving their desires and whims and not a method of responsible government or effective jurisprudence. As Whimsey suggests, executing the rebel Bacon would be just, “though he fought like Alexander, and preserved the whole world from perdition, yet if he did it against law, ’tis lawful to hang him” (264). While Bacon’s rebellion may save the colony

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from perdition, and technically he is acting against the law, we have little confidence that Whimsey’s grasp of jurisprudence extends this far. Rather in keeping with his character (and his name), this statement indicates the arbitrariness of the law when administered by the vicious. The law of Virginia is expedient for the drunken lawmakers, privately motivated, and thus finally non-binding. While republicans like Sidney or Locke might object that any law arbitrarily imposed on the polity by an absolute authority is privately motivated and thus non-binding, Behn uses the rabble’s barbarous failure to administer the rule of law as support for a divine right theory of merciful Stuart sovereignty.35 Since the people are incapable of elevating themselves out of chaos, by default the task must fall to a benevolent and virtuous king-father, a figure Behn presents in Oroonoko but defers in The Widow Ranter. While there is a “nobly born” governor on the way to Virginia, the play seems finally pessimistic about the fate of Stuart absolutism in a fallen world. Sharing Milton’s anti-populist conclusion in the “Digression,” Behn argues that the people are too vicious and self-interested to tolerate a sovereign possessed of equity, prudence, and moral judgment in his enforcement of the rule of law. Hendricks reads Bacon’s dying injunction for Daring to “make a peace— with the English council—and never let ambition . . . make you forget . . . your duty—and allegiance” as evidence of the unification of colonial society against the Indian menace (235). Such a conclusion argues that bonds of race are stronger than bonds of class. But in the final scene, Behn’s conclusion is decidedly different—valences of class status are still very much in place.Whiff and Whimsey, stripped, are discovered wandering the battlefield after having cravenly deserted their regiment to hide. Behn here imposes the necessary discipline on her Virginian barbarians. Stripped of their genteel uniform,Whiff and Whimsey are subjected to sartorial discipline; they lose their tangible signs of gentility along with their abstract signs (titles, government positions) and return to their suitable state. But the two loutish Justices are forgiven, although their “places in the council shall be supplied by these gentlemen of sense and honour” (324). Timorous, the “broken excise-man” turned statesman follows suit, leaving the council for his plantation, concluding that he “never thrived since [he] was a statesman, left planting, and fell to promising and lying” (324). With the Virginians’ council posts filled by “real” gentlemen of sense and honour like Daring, Hazard, and Fearless, the play closes with the impending just government 35. For a discussion of Sidney and Locke’s use of natural law to theorize rebellion, see Jonathan Scott, “The Law of War: Grotius, Sidney, Locke, and the Political Theory of Rebellion,” History of Political Thought 13, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 565–85. Scott contends that Sidney legitimates armed rebellion, while Locke insists that any absolutist monarch is in rebellion against the polity and thus illegal.

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of a truly “well-born race” and a statement that, in effect, class-inflected virtue will out. Likewise Bacon’s dying words withdraw his rebellion and reject his investment in his inherited property rights, suggesting as well that civil obedience is most desirable. Beyond such a polemical position, the play also stages the dilemma of a subject caught between equally dubious forms of civil government, a position in which the loyal Behn would have found herself when the play was composed. Neither the rebellion of the overmighty Bacon nor the lawful government of the colonial rabble is desirable or just: either the subject must defer to punch-swilling judges or to the private interests of Bacon. In both cases the salus populi is deeply in danger, and there are no safe alternatives for good government. Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter strategically use a perceived national anxiety over a barbaric past only recently civilized to make a critique of a putatively Whig ideology favoring both popular sovereignty and a self-interested or “private” ideology of commerce that entitles the rabble, erodes class distinction, and undoes the social discipline of the state. Behn’s position is that such a corrupt, democratizing ideology threatens not only an appropriate and traditional verticality of class but also denaturalizes the qualities of authority such as moral virtue, equity, and gentility. As a propagandist, Behn argues that the moral calculus of Whiggery is corrupt and politically irresponsible, for it privileges exchange value over virtue, commerce over justice, violence and barbarism over stability, and the rule of the wild and ignorant people over the rule of the educated and just. These “American” texts, which are so critically concerned with forms of government, are not primarily warnings against colonial dissolution, miscegenation, or imperialism. Rather they represent Behn’s more local warnings tuned to a fever pitch, for the barbarians are at the gate in England, and popular rule means that the project of English civilization has failed and chaos is come again.

The Liberal Oroonoko? When in 1695 Thomas Southerne went to adapt Behn’s little-known novella for the stage, he chose to do so in the peculiar Restoration idiom of the divided tragicomedy.36 To the high-plot of Oroonoko’s fight for love and liberty in colonial Surinam, Southerne adds a low husband-hunting plot featuring the 36. Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). On Southerne, see the introduction to Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko, ed. Maximillian Novak and D. S. Rodes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976).

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cross-dressing exile Charlotte Welldon and the boorish yet rich Widow Lackitt. As Srinivas Aravamudan, Joseph Roach, and Laura Rosenthal have suggested, Southerne exploits skillfully the apparent tonal and ethical incongruity between these two plots to flesh out the nexus of marriage and slavery, illuminating the fetishistic nature of property and the ubiquity of commodification in the Atlantic colonial economy.37 Charlotte Welldon’s web of lies and bad faith machinations in the breeches part land her a credulous husband; in the wild colonial setting she improvises her way to financial and amorous satisfaction and achieves a potentially radical mode of female self-possession. This victory, attenuated as it may be, contrasts with the high tragic catastrophe of Oroonoko and Imoinda, whose more dogmatic and perhaps antiquated struggle for an honorable liberty gets them only a bloody end. One available reading of Southerne’s Oroonoko would see the high-plot as the repository of a hopelessly archaic mode of aristocratic honor, a rarified language unsuited to the occasionally playful but always vulgar hedonism of colonial social life. Southerne’s most striking revision is directed at the racialist politics of Behn’s original, a fact that has received a good deal of attention in recent scholarship.38 Perhaps to amplify the frisson of miscegenation in a potential allusion to Othello, Southerne’s Imoinda—the hotly desired “fair slave”—is the white daughter of a European apostate raised in Oroonoko’s kingdom of Angola.39 While I agree with much that has been written on the fact of Imoinda’s whiteness, I would suggest that Southerne makes an equally important excision from the original; he strips outright virtually all of Behn’s angry critique of English barbarism and turns Behn’s deep and urgent advocacy for princely prerogative into a seductive rhetoric that brings on Oroonoko’s demise. While it would be no surprise that in 1695 Southerne would drop out the seemingly reactionary pro-absolutist arguments of the original, the fact that he chose to remove Behn’s savage attack on the English national character is a bit more striking. Southerne shifts the normative thesis of the Oroonoko-plot from absolutist to proto-liberal; he reduces dramatically Behn’s 37. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Joyce Green Macdonald, “Race, Women, and the Sentimental in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko,” Criticism 40 (1998); Laura Rosenthal, Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Suvir Kaul, “Reading Literary Symptoms: Colonial Pathologies and the Oroonoko Fictions of Behn, Southerne, and Hawksworth,” Eighteenth-Century Life 18 (1994). 38. See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), in addition to the above. 39. See Felicity Nussbaum’s excellent discussion of Imoinda’s whiteness in The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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intense factual, historical, and cultural engagement with New World colonialism in order to set his play firmly in the domain of the heroic tragicomedy, the most influential contemporary example of which is Dryden’s 1689 Don Sebastian. Southerne is not interested in imagining a white colonial rabble as an ideological and political threat, although such a demos is present in small doses in his play. Rather, Southerne offers only the generic collision of transnational genteel honor with venal commercial lust, and casts Oroonoko’s resistance not as a fight for sovereignty but rather as a struggle for self-ownership in terms that would make the play a favored fictional component of abolitionism. Oroonoko’s long history as an emblem of the humanitarian crisis of African slavery emerges from Southerne’s play, which I argue is outfitted with the proto-liberal language of self-possession absent in the original and which is deeply skeptical toward naturalized princely prerogative in which Behn rests her last hopes for civility. A “prince / Every Inch of him,” Oroonoko enters Southerne’s play with a critique of his mustache-twirling captor’s false Christianity: “Nature abhors / And drives thee out from the society / and commerce of mankind, for breach of faith. / Men live and prosper but in mutual trust, / a confidence of one another’s truth: / that thou hast violated” (I, ii,). Such an anti-Hobbesian claim that sociability is the binding force of polity gets for Oroonoko only the alliance of Blanford, the sole English gentleman who, like Behn’s Trefry, recognizes the prince’s excellence. But Oroonoko is scarcely interested in discussing moral philosophy of the theory of sovereignty; in fact, one of his first gestures is to erase rather than amplify his princely status. When Blanford presses him for friendship, Oroonoko replies first, “I would forget myself,” and then concedes a bit of data: “Be satisfied / I am above the rank of common slaves. / Let that content you” (233–35). Despite such a cavil, throughout the play Oroonoko is obsessed with self-possession, and he reiterates his mastery and ownership of his own soul at nearly every chance. For instance, shortly after Blanford acquires Oroonoko, the royal slave makes a stern assertion of liberty: Tear off this pomp, and let me know my self: The slavish habit best becomes me now. Hard fare, and whips, and chains may overpower The frailer flesh, and bow my body down. But there’s another, nobler part of me, Out of your reach, which you can never tame. (I, ii, 251–56)

Here Oroonoko differentiates between an ascriptive identity into which he has been unjustly tricked (slave) and the “nobler part of me,” the incorruptible soul out of reach and beyond the frailty of flesh. Such an assertion of absolute

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self-possession, a claim stretched out through the play, comes to be Oroonoko’s mantra. Soon after this moment, he tells Blanford that “I am a slave no longer than I please [and] being just myself, / I am inclin[ed] to think others so” (II, ii, 8–10). Here Oroonoko makes the Lockean profession that he can end his slavery any time he chooses through suicide or “by resistance to his master bringing on the death he desires”; during the lead-up to the abortive rebellion he offers to show himself to his followers to rally support, and after the failed revolt he makes once again a defiant assertion of mastery: “I was not born to render an Account / Of what I do to any but myself.” But as Catherine Gallagher claims of such moments, “the assertion of sovereign possession . . . is prelude to loss.”40 Oroonoko’s reiterations of sovereign self-possession, attached to his melodramatic claim that “it is not always granted to the great / to be most happy,” are at the heart of the play’s affective program. The emotional force of Oroonoko’s loss springs from his status as a man of virtue rather than a virtuous prince. As such, Southerne turns the rhetoric of princely absolutism he finds in Behn’s original into the cause of Oroonoko’s failure and death. Far from an ideology that might insulate the polity from mob rule, in Southerne’s version the rhetoric of prerogative kingship is the empty conceit that draws Oroonoko out of his satisfying reunion with Imoinda and into armed resistance.The loyal Aboan, Oroonoko’s Pylades, solicits his friend for rebellion by reminding the royal slave of his natural status as well as his posterity:

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You must do more, and may with honesty. O Royal Sir, remember who you are, A Prince, born for the good of other Men: Whose God-like Office is to draw the Sword Against oppression, and set free Mankind: And this, I’m sure, you think Oppression now. (27)

Aboan continues by chastising Oroonoko for lying “contented down / In the forgetfulness and arms of Love / To get young princes for ’em” and reminding him of the ubiquitous vulnerability of Imoinda to the lust of the colonials.This is all quite enough to motivate Oroonoko, and he reinhabits his “god-like Office” long enough to lead the slaves in a catastrophically unsuccessful rebellion. Once this princely liberator has been defeated, he reiterates the hateful

40. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, 82.

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Aristotelian condemnation of his followers as natural slaves: “I own the folly of my enterprise . . . to think I could design to make those free, / Who were by Nature Slaves; Wretches designed / To be their Masters’ Dogs, and lick their Feet” (39). This utterance is probably Oroonoko’s low point, and it is legible as the natural outgrowth of his “godlike office” betrayed by a humanity that, in his view, hugs its chains and refuses to claim self-ownership. Shortly thereafter, Oroonoko returns to the language of self-possession that had eluded him as a royal rebel, and it is a short trip from there to his penultimate torture and final dealing of death blows to Imoinda, to the Governour and thereby to himself. Absolutism, as a rhetoric of sovereignty, is antique and damaging; at one point Blanford emits an angry jeremiad against faithlessness, figuring the gentleman’s word of honor as the contemporary equivalent of a sovereign above the law: “there’s no appeal beyond [one’s word of honor] but to Heaven: / An oath is a recognisance to heaven, / Binding us over, in the courts above.” Such an honorable practice is easily accessible, and far from naturalized—it is, in Blanford’s view an ethical choice rather than a natural quality. As he approaches the inevitable end, in a move that would have been unthinkable to Behn or her prince, Oroonoko abjures his divinely authored degree:

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The hopes of empire, which [the gods] gave my youth, By making me a prince, I here resign. Let ’em quench in me all those glorious fires, Which kindled at their beams; that lust of Fame, That fever of Ambition, restless still, And burning with the sacred thirst of sway, Which they inspired, to qualify my fate, And make me fit to govern under them, Let ’em extinguish. (360)

By repudiating jure divino kingship—and indeed by blaming his and Imoinda’s impending deaths on the “glorious fires” of princeliness—Oroonoko inhabits the pathetic office of doomed lover and tragic slave; Southerne has here not only denuded the plot of its now-reactionary ideology and angry critique of English barbarism, but also has increased the affective accessibility of his royal slave. In shifting from an absolutist Oroonoko to a self-possessing one, Southerne may very well be recasting Behn’s narrative to meet the new political circumstances. The years immediately following the revolution of 1688 saw a flurry of heretofore suppressed publications by republican political theorists

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such as Algernon Sidney and John Locke in which the consent of the governed and the notion of the self as individual property gain a great deal of traction. It may be reasonable to see Southerne’s Oroonoko as a proto-liberal play that draws its pathos (and finds its enduring appeal to later generations of abolitionists) from the catastrophe of an African prince whose judgment, self-mastery, and agonizing crisis of love is couched newly in the “liberal” language of humanity writ large rather than in the haughty, naturalizing tones of a discredited jure divino kingship. By stripping out the explicitly racialist arguments of Behn’s novella, in which the national character (English, African, or Amerindian) legitimates absolute sovereignty, Southerne refigures race as a sentimental property in a broader ethical argument for individual self-possession.

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Coda

Robinson Crusoe between Facts and Norms

[Robinson Crusoe] is the universal representative, the person for whom every reader could substitute himself. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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[In Robinson Crusoe,] there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing but a large earthenware pot. . . . Reality, fact, substance, is going to dominate all that follows. —Virginia Woolf

In his reading of Robinson Crusoe, Ian Watt suggests that Defoe’s novel “annihilated the relationships of the traditional social order” by proposing the life of an ordinary person as the vehicle of a largely secular individualism. For although the novel borrows the form of the spiritual autobiography and is supplied with plenty of appeals to divine Providence, Watt contends rightly that religion has no special status in the novel, which is profoundly secular and worldly in its outlook.1 Beyond Robinson Crusoe looms Watt’s broader thesis—that the English novel rises to prominence and prestige in relation to the emergence of an “ideology based not on the tradition of the past, but on the autonomy of the individual, irrespective of his particular social status of personal capacity” (60). In the novel, Watt sees a radical turn away from Greek and 1. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 80–82.

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neoclassical culture with its “intensely social, or civic, moral outlook and [its] philosophic preference for the universal” and toward “the discrete particular, the directly apprehended sensum, and the autonomous individual” (62). On its face, Robinson Crusoe seems a powerful emblem of this innovating epistemological break from tradition and indeed from formal neoclassicism. The novel’s prose style is instrumental and often leaden, but the discrete particular never escapes notice and Crusoe supplies, in often exasperating depth, plenty of direct apprehensions of the material world. Crusoe is no prince or great man; he is an ordinary person whose autonomy is at the narrative and thematic center of the novel. His interests are relentlessly economic rather than geopolitical or reputational. Insofar as he embodies what Watt calls the “dynamic tendency of capitalism itself,” Crusoe is clearly legible as a repudiation of the archaic notions of embodied honor and natural aristocracy that found expression in Behn’s Prince Oroonoko. As Peter Hulme has pointed out, Crusoe is also an imperial entrepreneur whose attitude toward imperial conquest reflects the self-congratulatory and personally acquisitive dimensions of English New World colonialism.2 While Watt’s reading of the novel itself is persuasive, his thesis that Robinson Crusoe annihilates past tradition as part of a broader epistemological break toward secular individualism is misleading. Michael McKeon has provided the most compelling and expansive revision of Watt’s argument in his Origins of the English Novel, wherein he suggests that the novel form commands the unrivaled power to formulate and explain unsettled and socially dynamic epistemological questions of truth and morality.3 In McKeon’s account, such formal authority develops in several stages over many years, and is accompanied by resistance and counter-critique. From this perspective, the celebration of a literary event that annihilates past tradition (Robinson Crusoe) or inaugurates a new one (Pamela) seems impossibly singular and bereft of its descriptive genealogy. It is my contention that Robinson Crusoe, rather than an inaugural or precursor text in the history of the realist novel, 2. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters (London: Methuen, 1986). 3. Important revisions of the Watt thesis, in addition to Michael McKeon’s Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), include Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of English Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990); Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story; The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); William Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Deirdre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

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is best understood as part of the formal language, intellectual program, and “generation style” of Defoe’s predecessors such as Milton, Dryden, and Locke.4 Defoe’s novel contains all the signature elements of the later Stuart literary enterprise. It is perhaps the most famous example of “imaginative originalism” in the early modern period, being an intensely memorable case of both humanity in a primitive state of nature and the ad hoc emergence of political society that forces upon its reader the deliberative contemplation of the origins of property, government, and individual obligations. So too does the novel wrestle with the problems of civility and barbarism; the novel proposes trade as a remedy for New World savagery on the model of England’s own unfinished work of civilizing itself through enterprise and trade.5 Robinson Crusoe, like its predecessors, makes use of formal, thematic, and hermeneutic strategies to cultivate equitable judgment in its readers. Defoe’s novel opens conventionally with the spurious editorial assertion that what follows is a “just history of fact” without “any appearance of fiction in it.”6 The objective here is to distance the text from the frivolity of prose romance and verify the contents empirically—an authenticating trope on display in Neville’s Isle of Pines and elsewhere. However, when in 1721 Defoe turned to answer his critics in the preface of Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (his third installment of Crusoeana), he argues that Crusoe’s story “though allegorical, is also historical; and that it is the beautiful representation of a life of unexampled misfortunes, and of a variety not to be met with in the world, sincerely adapted to and intended for the common good of mankind.”7 Here Defoe describes Robinson Crusoe (both volumes) as a prose version of neoclassical tragedy—the novel is to be understood as a beautiful mimesis of unexampled misfortune adapted for the cultivation of wisdom and the common good, rather than a documentary history of an imaginary character. By figuring Crusoe’s strange 4. “Generation style” is Karl Mannheim’s phrase; see his “The Problem of Generations” in Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskmeti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952). 5. In The General History of Trade, as Maximillian Novak has pointed out, Defoe uses England’s barbarian past as an example of how trade might civilize a savage people; see Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). On the economic ideology of Defoe see Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Aparna Dharwadker, “Nation, Race, and the Ideology of Commerce in Defoe,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 39 (1998). 6. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1719). Subsequent page citations are to the recent Penguin edition: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. John Richetti (New York: Penguin, 2001). 7. “R. Crusoe’s Preface,” in Defoe, Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, ed. Arthur Secord, vol. 13 of the Shakespeare Head Edition of the Novels and Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927–28).

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and surprising adventures as both allegory and historical fact, Defoe hews to the point Dryden had made a generation earlier—serious literature “may resemble truth but it must be ethical.” To his earlier claims of facticity, Defoe now adds a defensive assertion of the work’s literary status: the novel is composed not of mere empirical data but rather of “facts framed to touch the mind.”8 I propose that Robinson Crusoe is designed to “touch the mind” by requiring its readers to sort constantly between facts and norms, between the empirical letter and the universal spirit of Crusoe’s story. Defoe’s novel juxtaposes a radically singular character—Robinson Crusoe—whose mind and horizon of experience is relentlessly empirical with an obviously normative political fable touching the origins of government and the primitive condition of humanity. Crusoe’s narrative itself exhibits a kind of emotional arrhythmia; brief, irrepressible moments of fear or gratitude punctuate an otherwise austere and instrumental presentation of real detail. As he describes it:

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As I walk’d about, either on my hunting, or for viewing the country, the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me, to think of the woods, the mountains, the desarts I was in; and how I was a prisoner, lock’d up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in any uninhabited wilderness, without my redemption: In the midst of the greatest composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm, and make me wring my hands and weep like a child. Sometimes it would take me in the middle of my work, and I would immediately sit down and sigh, and look upon the ground for an hour or two together. (90)

Once Crusoe ruminates on his providential deliverance or his soul-crushing fear, his narrative returns quickly and without grace to the instrumental and often numbing language of fact. Even though in the above moment, Crusoe claims to have disciplined himself past such crippling, unproductive grief, it is not the case: the island episode is dominated by wild and irregular swings of emotional amplitude. The overwhelming panic Crusoe feels upon spotting a single footprint in the sand, for instance, sends him to ground—he holes up in his castle for three days gripped by “the constant snare of the fear of man” (129). But this anxious discomposure is short-lived; in his pragmatic, diligent way, Crusoe sees the footprint as the material evidence of a cannibal visitation and recognizes his good luck in having settled on the other side of the island. From this point, Crusoe offers a brief

8. Ibid.

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editorial on the horrid practice of “eating one another up,” notes his increased caution, and returns to a “good design, which I had once bent my thoughts too much upon . . . [namely] to try if I could not make some of my barley into malt, and then try to brew myself some beer.” When this design fails to capture his imagination fully, Crusoe entertains notions of massacring the cannibals as a reprisal for their “abominable and vitiated passions” and “hellish degeneracy,” but he concludes pragmatically that it is none of his business: Neither in principle or policy, I ought one way or another to concern myself in this affair. That my business was by all possible means to conceal myself from them. . . . And as to the crimes they were guilty of towards one another, I had nothing to do with them; they were national, and I ought to leave them to the justice of God, who is governour of nations, and knows how by national punishments to make a just retribution for national offences. (137)

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In this synthetic redaction of Milton and Las Casas, Crusoe bypasses questions of moral obligation altogether, leaving the cannibals for divine justice so that he might pursue a better pot of ale. Although he examines the case of violent intervention in utramque partem and with reference to the Black Legend of Spanish New World atrocities, Crusoe is disinclined to engage with the language of moral norms or ius gentium for very long, and soon after this episode, he turns to describe the discovery of a dying old goat in an uncommonly useful cave.9 The leaden quality of Crusoe’s imagination along with the novel’s overt political fable allowed Coleridge to see the novel as a sketch of a “representative of humanity in general” rather than a documentary study of a restless capitalist. The novel’s austerity—its lack of psychological inwardness and forensic description—was for Coleridge Defoe’s method for approaching a “greater because more universal” utterance: Had he . . . given his Robinson Crusoe any of the turn for natural history which forms so striking and delightful a feature in the equally uneducated Dampier— had he made him find out qualities and uses in the before (to him) unknown plants of the island, discover a substitute for hops, for instance, or describe birds, etc.—many delightful pages and incidents might have enriched the book; but then

9. Studies of the novel’s imperialism (or its portrait of imperialism) include Hulme, Colonial Encounters; Roxann Wheeler, “‘My man, my savage’: Racial Multiplicity in Robinson Crusoe,” ELH 62 (1995); Gary Gautier, “Slavery and the Fashioning of Race in Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, and Equiano’s Life,” Eighteenth Century:Theory and Interpretation 42 (2001); and Brett McInelly, “Expanding Empires, Expanding Selves: Colonialism, the Novel, and Robinson Crusoe,” Studies in the Novel 35 (2003).

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Crusoe would cease to be the universal representative, the person for whom every reader could substitute for himself. But now nothing is done, thought, or suffered, or desired, but what every man can imagine himself doing, thinking, feeling, or wishing for.10

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Coleridge’s thesis is that the novel’s lack of ornament, the absence of a long and vivid description of one of the (inevitably colorful) talking parrots, for instance, is a deliberate attempt to reject the singularity of Crusoe’s experience. In his view, the novel is designed to replicate by surrogation the sentiments of desolation, necessity, fear, resourcefulness, and hope; it asks every reader to inhabit, rather than sympathize with, the experiences of “Poor Robin Crusoe.” The imputed universality of the novel’s utterance, though, lies in more than its ability to confront every reader with the desire to make a sun hat out of goatskin— through surrogation, Defoe confronts his readers with the circumstances and the sentiments at the root of human sociopolitical behavior—the desire for society and the fear of violent death, the need to sustain life and the ambition to improve it, the pleasure of self-creation and the restraint of self-discipline. Though few subsequent readers would share Coleridge’s assessment, the novel’s intense facticity has never slipped from view. Especially during the island episode there are few particulars that Crusoe does not disclose, including failed projects that illustrate his bad judgment and successful improvisations that highlight his resourcefulness in the face of necessity. In this line, Virginia Woolf sees Crusoe as an embodiment of “shrewd, middle-class, unimaginative thinking who is incapable of enthusiasm . . . has an natural slight distance for the sublimities of Nature . . . and suspects even Providence of exaggeration.” Moreover, Woolf argues that the novel refuses to indulge in sublime grandeur or philosophical meditation: Before we open the book, we have perhaps vaguely sketched out the kind of pleasure we expect it to give us.We read; and we are rudely contradicted on every page. There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing but a large earthenware pot. . . . Reality, fact, substance, is going to dominate all that follows. We must hastily alter our proportions throughout; Nature must furl her splendid purples; she is only the giver of drought and water; man must be reduced to a struggling, life-preserving animal; and God shrivel into a magistrate whose seat, substantial and somewhat hard, is only a little way above the horizon. 10. T. M. Raysor, ed., Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 194, 299–300.

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For Woolf, Crusoe’s relation is an earthenware pot; it is a tangible, unadorned, instrumental object that discloses the functional needs and aesthetic sensibilities of its author while achieving the end of rendering “common actions dignified and common objects beautiful.”11 The unvarnished positivism of Defoe’s novel is, for Woolf, the core of an utterance that may be every bit as satisfying as a soulful assertion of contemplative sublimity. Crusoe’s description of his goat-husbandry is emblematic of such an unadorned and purely instrumental imagination. Having domesticated wild goats and bred a large flock, he encloses pastures and pens and transforms wild creatures into livestock. From his goats, Crusoe receives meat, milk, cheese, candles, headgear, and clothing—all of which, he reminds us, were the result of his natural resource and substantial physical labor: “I that had never milk’d a cow, much less a goat, or seen butter or cheese made, very readily and handily, tho’ after a great many essays and miscarriages, made me both butter and cheese at last, and never wanted it afterwards” (117). While he offers a line of thanksgiving to a merciful God, his grateful words are merely an editorial. “The table spread before him in the wilderness” is filled with food through his own labors in the face of necessity, and while God may have implanted ingenuity in the hearts of humanity at some distant point, Crusoe’s ability to take hold and thrive is fully a feature of his own dynamic and restless will. As autobiography (which it purports to be), Crusoe’s story is austere and suffused with “ruthless common sense”; indeed, as David Marshall has pointed out, his real autobiography is the labored transformation of the island into a “fantastically realistic counterfeit of the world he left behind.”12 But juxtaposed with Crusoe’s relentless facticity and his shrewd, middle-class lack of imagination is the novel’s philosophical ambition to provide normative descriptions of the law of nature, and of property, labor, and the origins of sovereignty. Although scholars such as Michael Seidel and Richard Braverman have argued that the novel is meant to serve as a political critique of Jacobite historiography and its theoretical archive, I propose instead that Defoe’s mythopoetic account of the origins of civil society is designed to be, like a predecessor such as Paradise Lost, a philosophical argument that makes affective and hermeneutic claims upon its readers.13 Defoe rehearses Locke’s thesis that property begins in labor, reiterates the early modern notion that natural law compelled 11. Virginia Woolf, “Robinson Crusoe,” in The Second Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, 1932), 51–59. 12. David Marshall, “Autobiographical Acts in Robinson Crusoe,” ELH 71 (2004): 916. 13. Michael Seidel, “Crusoe in Exile,” PMLA 96 (1980); Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Richard Braverman, Plots and Counterplots (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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humanity into society, and uses Crusoe to sketch out a genealogy of sovereignty, tracing the move of an abstract man from solitude to a primitive oikos and on into a pluralistic polity governed by laws.14 As the novel unfolds, Crusoe acquires the offices and habits of a sovereign, in no small part by leveraging his labor and knowledge to enter into uneven social contracts. Having saved Friday from being eaten all up, for instance, Crusoe is all too happy to interpret a gesture of gratitude as political subordination: “He kneeled down again, kissed the ground, and laid his head upon the ground, and taking me by the foot, set my foot upon his head” (208). This act literalizes a relation of imperial lord and colonial bondsman, sovereign and subject; Crusoe repeats this pattern as new subjects enter his jurisdiction, exacting written promises of obedience and bonds of gratitude that consolidate his power even further.15 The island episode renders Locke’s abstract state of nature in concrete detail, linking sovereignty carefully to the creation and defense of property through labor.16 Read as a work of normative political philosophy, Robinson Crusoe parts ways with the Second Treatise of Government, since Defoe suggests that laws and political societies emerge in contingent, ad hoc fashion in response to straitened circumstance and emergent crises. Leaving behind the abstraction of Locke’s original state of nature, Defoe offers instead the real thing: a condition in which humans band together by consent on uneven terms, with power, prestige, and resources distributed in capricious or asymmetrical fashion. Although it lacks the formal structure and predictable outcome of a heroic tragedy, Robinson Crusoe does seek to cultivate an “equitable denouement” in its readers.17 The novel demonstrates irregular and unpredictable oscillations between the competing languages of facts and norms, between the instrumental

14. The possible emigration of struggling Spanish mariners cast away on the mainland prompts Crusoe to frame articles of political membership: “I gave [the rescued Spaniard] a strict charge in writing not to bring any man with him, who would not first swear in the presence of himself and of the old savage that he would in no way injure, fight with, or attack the person he should find in the island, who was so kind to send for them in order to their deliverance; but that they would stand by and defend him against all such attempts, and wherever they went, would be entirely under and subjected to his commands” (195). On the novel’s engagement with early modern political thought, especially the natural law tradition, see Maximillian Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). 15. For an elaboration on this point, see Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, 43–62. 16. Cf. Novak,“Defoe was delineating the condition of man in the state of nature but also the cultural and political evolution which, by transforming the state of nature, created civilization and government.” Defoe and the Nature of Man, 22–23. Defoe’s debt to Locke has been long apparent, and he provides an even more expansive take on Locke’s political philosophy in his dreadful epic poem Jure Divino (London, 1714). For discussions of Defoe’s political writing in the Whig tradition see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 432–36; and Braverman, Plots and Counterplots, 248–71. 17. McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 125.

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description of Crusoe’s technical achievements or the number of his goats and the mythopoetic account of the origins of civil society. Moreover, the novel makes deep affective claims on its readers through surrogation, asking its readers not to sympathize with Crusoe intimately but rather to inhabit his subject position. The objective is to ask readers to witness, in emotionally powerful terms, a struggle to climb out of primitive and painful circumstances into government and human society. Coleridge read the novel as relentlessly universal;Woolf saw it as splendidly particular. They are both right.

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Index

Abdiel, in Paradise Lost, 89 – 90 Aboan, in Southerne’s Oroonoko, 182 abolitionism, 163, 181, 184 Abraham, in Paradise Lost, 95 – 96 Absalom and Achitophel, 19, 65, 69 absolutism, 2 – 3, 82 – 83, 152, 154, 182 – 83 See also monarchism; sovereignty: jure divino kingship Achinstein, Sharon, 76 –77, 87, 98 Act of Habeas Corpus, 69 –70 Act of Indemnity, 136 Act of Oblivion, 134, 136 Adam, in Paradise Lost, 105 –11 Adams, John, 113 –14, 121, 150, 154 Advancement of Learning, The, 21 Aeschylus, 23, 43 Agamben, Giorgio, 69 –70 Agricola, 15 Albion and Albanius, 69 Alibech, in The Indian Emperour, 47– 48, 52, 54 – 57 Almeria, in The Indian Emperour, 54 – 56, 60 – 61 Alzire, 40 Amboyna, 171n America, colonial and late Stuart republicanism, 113 –14, 125, 135, 143, 145, 153 – 54 See also New World Andromache, in Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida, 70 Anglo-Saxonism, 19 – 21

Apologie (Algernon Sidney), 145, 147, 149 Apologie for Poesy (Philip Sidney), 24 apostasy, rejected by republicans, 135, 138, 139 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 180 Aristotle, 26, 37, 48, 169 and equity, 4 –7, 31n on fictional method, 23 – 24 and “natural slavery,” 183 Ars Poetica, 22 – 23 Art of Lawgiving, The, 124 – 25 Artegall, in The Faerie Queene, 11 Ascham, Anthony, 82 – 83 Astrea Redux, 18 –19, 35, 47 Athey, Stephanie, 170n Augustine, 9 Bacon, Francis, 21 Bacon, Nathaniel, in The Widow Ranter, 173 –75, 177–78, 179 Bacon’s rebellion, 173n Banister, in Behn’s Oroonoko, 168 Banks, John, 64 barbarism and Behn’s Oroonoko, 167– 68, 172, 179 English, 12 – 21, 65 – 66, 69, 117, 155 – 63, 173 –74, 176 –79, 187n tempered by literature, 3 – 4, 12, 30 See also fiction: as civilizing influence

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Behn, Aphra, 3, 34, 69, 122, 158, 159, 162, 180, 181, 184 her political thought, 155 – 57, 160 – 61, 163, 173 –76, 178, 179 See also Oroonoko (Behn); Widow Ranter, The Benjamin, Walter, 31, 46, 133, 146 Betterton, Thomas, 66, 73, 74 biblical criticism and interpretation, 83 – 86 Black Legend, 38, 42, 52, 189 Blanford, in Southerne’s Oroonoko, 181– 83 Bodin, Jean, 14, 16 Boozer, Justice, in The Widow Ranter, 176 –77 Boym, Svetlana, 63 Braverman, Richard, 191 Britomart, in The Faerie Queene, 11, 63 Brown, Laura, 167, 168, 171 Brut legend. See Troy legend Brutus, Lucius Junius, in Lucius Junius Brutus, 152 – 53 Brutus of Alba, 64 Burke, Peter, 157– 58 Burnet, Gilbert, 137, 141, 146 Burroughs, Edmund, 14 Byam, in Behn’s Oroonoko, 167– 68 Caesar, Julius, 15 Camden, William, 63 Capel, Arthur, Earl of Essex, 144 Cases of Conscience Practically Resolved, 53 casuistry, 53 and Dryden, 29 – 30, 42 and Paradise Lost, 104 Catholicism, 49, 50, 75, 158, 164, 168 Cavendish, Margaret, 53, 119 Cavernio, in The Widow Ranter, 174, 175 Chandler, James, 150 Charles I, 81– 82, 168 Charles II, 19, 36, 41, 58, 89n, 114, 115, 134, 136 – 39, 141, 143 – 44, 166, 171 Charles V, 46 – 47 Cicero, on equity, 7– 9, 10 Clarendon Codes, 35, 52 Clarendon, Earl of. See Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon class and Behn, 161, 162, 169, 175 –76, 178 –79 and literary audience, 24 – 29 and national identity, 157– 58 seventeenth-century, 13 clemency. See mercy and clemency Clifford, James, 160 Coke, Edward, 12, 123, 151 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 150 on Robinson Crusoe, 189 – 90, 193

colonialism, 160 – 61, 162 and Behn’s Oroonoko, 165, 170 –71 and race, 158, 167 and Southerne’s Oroonoko, 180 and The Widow Ranter, 174, 178 –79 constitutionalism, as lacking passion, 151– 52 Contract, The, 53, 119 Corns, Thomas, 77–78n Cortez, in The Indian Emperour, 41, 44 – 48, 50 – 52, 54 – 56, 58 – 61 Cover, Robert, 2, 117 Cowley, Abraham, 33 Cressida, in Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida, 71–72 Cromwell, Oliver, 19 Crowne, John, 64 Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, The, 26, 42, 48n Crusoe, Robinson, in Robinson Crusoe, 186, 188 – 93 Cydaria, in The Indian Emperour, 46 – 47, 54, 58 – 61 Cyrus the Great, 24 Daniel, Samuel, 160 – 61 Daring, in The Widow Ranter, 174, 178 Davenant, William, 21, 33, 37, 40, 42, 48n, 62 his literary theory, 25 – 29 Davideis, 33 de Gomberville, Marin le Roy, 43 de inventione (Cicero), 7– 8 de officiis (Cicero), 8 – 9 de Oviedo, Gonzalo, 44, 48n de Sepulvéda, Juan Ginés, 48 – 49 Death, in Paradise Lost, 83, 91– 92 decisionist theory of sovereignty, 133 – 34 Defence of an Essay of Dramatick Poesy, 37 Defense of the Indians, In, 49 Defoe, Daniel, 4, 119, 163 his political thought, 192 on Robinson Crusoe, 187– 88 See also Robinson Crusoe Destruction of Troy, The, 64 diaspora myth, 63 – 64, 66 – 68, 155 Dido and Aeneas, 64 “Digression,” from Milton’s History of Britain, 18n, 178 Dimock, Wai Chee, 34 Diomede, in Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida, 69 Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity, A, 122 – 23, 124 Discourse of the National Excellencies of England, A, 19 – 20 Discourses Concerning Government, 122, 124n, 125, 143, 144 Discourses on Livy, 94, 118 divine law. See law, divine divine right of kings. See sovereignty: jure divino kingship

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Index

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divorce, Milton on, 83 – 84 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, The, 83 – 87 Dolven, Jeff, 11 Don Sebastian, 162, 181 Dryden, John, 1, 3, 17, 25, 26, 33, 122, 157, 158, 161, 162, 173, 181, 187, 188 and English barbarism, 18 –19, 21 and English national identity, 65 –71, 74 and mercantilist imperialism, 41– 42, 44 and monarchism, 35 – 37, 39 – 40, 50 – 52, 69 on role of poets, 29 – 31, 37– 38, 65 – 66, 74 on Shakespeare, 65, 66, 73 –74 on tragedy, 29 – 31, 71–73 See also Indian Emperour, The; Indian Queen, The; Troilus and Cressida (Dryden) Duke, Randolph, 66 Dullman, in The Widow Ranter, 176, 177 Dunce, Parson, in The Widow Ranter, 175, 176 Eden, Kathy, 9 –10, 23 – 24, 85, 149 education Milton on, 76 See also paideia; propaganda, royalist Eikonoklastes, 81– 82 Elizabethan literature, and nationalism, 12, 16 –17 Ellison, Julie, 153 Empson, William, 92, 94 English national character, 155 – 57 See also barbarism: English English national identity, 12 – 21 and Dryden, 65 –71, 74 and Troy legend, 62 – 64 Enoch, in Paradise Lost, 95 epic, 26, 29, 37, 64, 88, 117 “Epistle: To Prince Henrie,” 161 equity Aristotelian view of, 4 –7, 31n and Behn, 156 – 57 Ciceronian view of, 7– 9, 10 defined, 1, 4, 34 and Defoe, 187– 88, 191– 92 as deliberative process, 77, 80, 98 –100, 104 – 5, 187– 88 and Dryden, 30 – 31, 36 – 37, 45 – 48, 50 – 51, 57 and early Christian writers, 9 –10 and fictional method, 3 – 4, 23 – 24 and jure divino kingship, 156, 158 – 59 and Milton, 75 –77, 80, 81– 87, 98 –112 and Neville, 131 seventeenth-century perceptions of, 13 –14 and Sidney, 149 and Spenser, 11–12 See also justice; law; mercy and clemency Erasmus, 85 – 86, 95 eroticism, and The Isle of Pines, 127

211

Escobedo, Andrew, 18n Essay of Dramatick Poesy, An, 37, 69, 71 Essex, Earl of. See Capel, Arthur, Earl of Essex ethics. See casuistry Eumenides, 43, 45 Eve, in Paradise Lost, 103 – 6, 108, 110 Exclusion Crisis, 4, 19, 30, 64, 69, 115, 123 Fables (L’Estrange), 162 Faerie Queene, The, 11–12, 17, 63 Federalist Papers, 87 Fichte, J. G., 150 – 51 fiction as agent of paideia, 23 – 31 as civilizing influence, 3 – 4, 12, 21– 23, 30, 37– 38, 65 – 66, 74, 157, 162 as justifier of law and government, 2 – 3, 117–19 See also imaginative originalism; paideia fictional method and Dryden, 71–73 its similarity to equity, 23 – 24 Figgis, J. N., 117 Filmer, Robert, 32, 91, 122 – 24, 128, 144 Fish, Stanley, 87, 98, 100 Flirt, Mrs., in The Widow Ranter, 176, 177 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 17, 62 Friendly, in The Widow Ranter, 175 Gallagher, Catherine, 172, 182 Gelber, Michael Werth, 19n Genesis Kai Telos Exousias, 82 George III, 61, 114, 154 Germania, 15 God, in Paradise Lost, 91– 95, 96 – 97, 100 –102, 105 – 6, 107 Godden v. Hales, 158, 159n Gondibert, 26, 28, 29, 33 grace, in Paradise Lost, 102 – 3, 111–12 Greenblatt, Stephen, 135 Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, The, 38, 65, 71, 73 Guyomar, in The Indian Emperour, 42, 52, 54 – 58, 61 Gwyn, Nell, 58 habeas corpus, 69 –70 Hale, Lord Chief Justice Matthew, 151 Hall, John, 53 Harrington, James, 33, 118, 120, 124 – 25, 131, 151– 52 Harry, George Owen, 63 Hart, Charles, 58 Hawkins, Richard, 20 – 21 Hazard, in The Widow Ranter, 175, 176 –77 Heads of an Answer to Rymer, 37, 38

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Index

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Hector, in Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida, 68 –73 Helgerson, Richard, 12, 16 –17, 62, 158 Hendricks, Margo, 174, 176, 178 High Commission, 13, 158 historicism and jure divino kingship, 122 – 23 rejected by republicans, 124 – 26, 132, 150 History of Britain (Milton), 18, 33 history, political. See political history, seventeenth-century Hobbes, Thomas, 26, 32 – 33, 57n, 80n, 122, 142 Horace, 22 – 23 Howard, Sir Robert, 42 Howard, William, Baron of Escrick, 144 Hoxby, Blair, 89n Hulme, Peter, 186 Hume, David, 16n Hutchinson, Lucy, 33, 120 Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 35 – 37, 122 imaginative originalism and Defoe, 187, 191– 93 and Dryden, 38, 74 and Milton, 81 nature of, 3 – 4, 34 and Neville, 116 Imoinda, in Southerne’s Oroonoko, 180, 182 imperialism and Dryden, 41– 42 Spanish, 48 – 50, 160 See also Black Legend; mercantilist imperialism incest, in The Isle of Pines, 128 Indian Emperour, or, The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, The, 1, 3, 29, 33, 34, 38, 40 – 44, 74, 160, 162 and equity, 45 – 48, 50 – 51, 57 and sovereignty, 47– 48, 50 – 62 and tyranny, 49 – 50 Indian Queen, The, 42 – 44, 51 Inquisition, Spanish, 144n Institutio Oratoria, 76n Irish, portrayed as barbaric, 168 Isle of Pines, The, 33 – 34, 122, 126 – 27, 152, 187 as imaginative originalism, 118 –19 as political commentary, 128 – 33 ius gentium. See law: ius gentium James II, 114, 143, 156, 158, 164 James, Heather, 63, 67 Jefferson, Thomas, 61, 125 Jeffreys, Lord Chief Justice George, 145 – 49 Jesus Christ in Paradise Regained, 77–79 See also Son, in Paradise Lost Johnson, Samuel, 62

Jonson, Ben, 63 Julius Caesar, 73, 154 Jure Divino, 192n justice Aristotelian view of, 5 – 6 and The Indian Emperour, 56 and Paradise Lost, 98, 100 –112 and Robinson Crusoe, 189 textualized by literature, 34 in Troilus and Cressida, 39 See also equity; law Kahn,Victoria, 2, 52–53, 80n, 85, 98n, 99, 119, 135 King Arthur, or the British Worthy, 21 kingship. See absolutism; monarchism; sovereignty Kneller, Godfrey, 73 –74 Knights, Mark, 25 Kroll, Richard, 116, 164 Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, 158, 167, 174 Lake, Peter, 25 Lambert, John, 138 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 40, 42, 44, 48 – 49, 189 Last Paper (Sidney), 145 – 49 law common law, English, 18, 20, 82, 124, 136 – 37 ius gentium, 47, 49, 50, 189 justified by literature, 2 – 3, 117–18 lex talionis, 23, 43, 50 – 51, 101, 102, 131 Mosaic, 10, 84, 96 – 97, 110 –11, 123 natural, 9, 50, 191– 92 “natural slavery” argument, 48 – 49, 169, 183 portrayed in The Isle of Pines, 130 – 32 portrayed in The Widow Ranter, 175 –78 seventeenth-century, 69 –70, 81 sovereign suspension of, 133 – 34, 158 – 59 U.S. constitutional, 66 See also equity; justice; law, divine; law, origins of; lawgiving; mercy and clemency Law Against the Lovers, 26 law, divine, 50, 75, 189 justifying jure divino kingship, 122 – 23, 158 and Milton, 79 – 81, 86, 95 – 97, 100 –112 law, origins of debated in seventeenth century, 32 – 33, 117–18, 124 Saxon, 20 and seventeenth-century fiction, 3 – 4, 31, 33 – 34 See also imaginative originalism lawgiving in Paradise Lost, 88 – 97 and republicanism, 124 – 26 and Vane, 140

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Laws (Plato), 128 – 29 Laÿamon, 17 Lee, Nathaniel, 3, 33, 115, 152 – 53 L’Estrange, Roger, 18n, 69, 122, 157, 158 – 59, 162 “Letter from Nicholas Machiavel to Zenobius Buondelmontius,” 121– 22 Leviathan, 57n, 116 Lewalski, Barbara, 77, 87 lex talionis. See law: lex talionis lifewriting, seventeenth-century, 134 – 35 Vane’s, 138 – 39 literary theory ancient, 23 – 24 seventeenth-century, 24 – 31 literature. See fiction Livy, 33, 146, 152 Lloyd, David, 13 –14 Locke, John, 122, 143, 178, 184 and Defoe, 187, 191– 92 on slavery, 142n, 182 and state of nature, 32, 118 Loewenstein, David, 87, 88n, 98 Lope de Vega, 40 Lopéz de Gómara, Francisco, 40, 44, 48n Lucius Junius Brutus, 33, 152 – 53 Lucrece, rape of, 139, 152 Ludlow, Edmund, 137, 141 Macdougall, Hugh, 62 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 92 – 93, 94, 125 and Neville, 118, 121 Madison, James, 87, 125 Maitland, John, Duke of Lauderdale, 157 Markley, Robert, 171n marriage Milton on, 83 – 84 and Southerne’s Oroonoko, 180 Marshall, David, 191 McKeon, Michael, 2 – 3, 32, 116, 186 Measure for Measure, 26, 45 mercantilist imperialism, 13, 168 – 69, 186, 187 and Behn’s Oroonoko, 170 –72 and Dryden, 41– 42 mercy and clemency, 1, 6, 43, 51– 52, 83 and The Indian Emperour, 45 – 48 and Paradise Lost, 101–102, 106 Michael, in Paradise Lost, 75, 95 – 96, 109 –11, 132 Milton, John, 1, 20 – 21, 132, 136, 153, 159, 168, 187, 189 and contemporary criticism, 98 – 99 on divorce, 83 – 84 on English character, 18, 117, 156, 178 and equity, 75 –77, 80, 81– 87 and imaginative originalism, 3, 33, 81, 116

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and lawgiving, 10, 88 – 97 and paideia, 76, 79 – 80, 100 his political thought, 76 –77, 80 – 83, 85 – 87, 115 –16 and Troy legend, 64 See also Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained monarchism, 13 –14 and Behn, 155 – 57, 160 – 61, 163 – 64 and class issues, 161– 62 and Dryden, 18 –19, 35 – 37, 39 – 40, 50 – 52, 69 See also absolutism; sovereignty: jure divino kingship Monmouth, Duke of. See Scott, James, Duke of Monmouth Monmouth, Geoffrey of, 17, 62 Montaigne, Michel de, 40, 44, 48n, 50 Montezuma, in The Indian Emperour, 44 – 47, 50 – 52, 54 – 57, 59 Montezuma, in The Indian Queen, 42 – 43 Moses, in Paradise Lost, 96 – 97 Nalson, James, 122, 123 nationalism, 157– 58 English, 12, 19 – 21, 63 and republicanism, 152 – 54 Nazism, 133 Nedham, Marchamont, 82 Neville, Henry, 3, 33 – 34, 134, 151– 52 biographical information, 119 – 21 his political thought, 116 –17, 118 – 22, 124, 132 See also Isle of Pines, The New World, 49 portrayed by Behn, 160 – 61 portrayed by Dryden, 36, 38, 40 – 48, 50 – 52 See also America, colonial; colonialism Nicomachean Ethics, 4 –7 Nimrod, in Paradise Lost, 91n, 93n, 109 Noah, in Paradise Lost, 95 Norbrook, David, 87, 92 – 93, 94, 99, 115 Novak, Maximillian, 187n novels, English, origins of, 116, 185 – 87 Nussbaum, Martha, 31 Odmar, in The Indian Emperour, 54 – 56 Of Education, 76 Oldham, John, 22 – 23 Orbellan, in The Indian Emperour, 55 – 56, 58 – 59 Oresteia, 23, 43 Oroonoko (Behn), 34, 69, 156 – 57, 173, 178, 184 and barbarism, 167– 68, 172, 179 and contemporary criticism, 163 and mercantilism, 168 – 69, 170 –72 and race, 171–72 as royalist apologia, 160, 163 – 67, 172

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Index

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Oroonoko, in Southerne’s Oroonoko, 180 – 84 Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave. See Oroonoko (Behn) Oroonoko, Prince, in Behn’s Oroonoko, 157, 164 –72, 173, 186 Oroonoko (Southerne), 179 as proto-liberal play, 180 – 84 and slavery, 180 – 82 Orr, Bridget, 41– 42 paideia and Dryden, 37– 38, 65 – 66, 74 and fiction, 23 – 31 and Milton, 76, 79 – 80, 100, 107, 109 –110 and seventeenth-century republican literature, 116 and Vane, 143 See also fiction: as civilizing influence pants, not worn by barbarians, 16 Paradise Lost, 33, 34, 76 –77, 78, 81, 132, 191 and equity, 1, 3, 75, 80, 98 –100, 115 –16 and lawgiving, 88 – 97 and nature of justice, 10, 98, 100 –112 and political thought, 83, 87 Paradise Regained, 33, 76 –79 Parker, Samuel, 122 – 23, 124 Parliament of Ladies tracts, 120 – 21 Patriarcha, 122, 123, 144 patriotism, 150 – 51 and Vane, 139 – 40 Patterson, Annabel, 93n, 137, 143, 145 Pauline thought, 84 – 86 and law, 9 –10 and Paradise Lost, 111–12 and politics, 92 Phill family, in The Isle of Pines, 127, 130 Phillips, Edward, 21 Phillips, John, 42 Pincus, Steve, 25 Pine, George, in The Isle of Pines, 126, 128–29, 132 Pine, Henry, in The Isle of Pines, 127 Pine, William, in The Isle of Pines, 126, 127, 130 Pizarro, in The Indian Emperour, 44, 50 – 52, 59 – 60 Plato, 5n, 128 – 29 Plato Redivivus, 121, 124, 129, 132 Pocock, J. G. A., 118, 125 Polexandré, 43 political history, seventeenth-century, 13, 19, 41, 113 –14, 117, 134, 143 – 44, 158 political thought Behn’s, 155 – 57, 160 – 61, 163, 173 –76, 178, 179 Defoe’s, 192 Milton’s, 76 –77, 80 – 83, 85 – 87 Neville’s, 116 –17, 118 – 20 seventeenth-century, 2 – 3, 13, 32 – 33, 114 –17, 136

Sidney’s, 143, 148 – 50 Tory, 161 Vane’s, 141– 43 See also absolutism; imaginative originalism; republicanism; sovereignty Politics (Aristotle), 4, 169 Pope, Alexander, 64 pornography, and Neville, 120 – 21 presentism, and republicanism, 150 Priam, in Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida, 68, 70 Prince, The, 121 print culture, 25, 53, 134, 145, 149 propaganda, royalist, 161– 63, 179 See also theater, and political persuasion property rights, and The Widow Ranter, 175, 179 Proposition for the Advancement of Morality, 28 Protectorate, Cromwellian, 19 – 20 psychomachia, 68, 69, 78 Quincy, Josiah, 114, 153 – 54 Quint, David, 64 Quintilian, 76n race Anglo-Saxonism, 19 – 21 and colonialism, 158, 167 geographical determinism, 14 –18 and The Isle of Pines, 127, 130 “natural slavery,” 48 – 49, 169, 183 and Behn’s Oroonoko, 165, 168, 171–72 and Southerne’s Oroonoko, 180, 184 and The Widow Ranter, 174, 178 –79 See also barbarism: English; English national identity; slavery; Troy legend Ralegh, Walter, 135 rape as figured by Vane, 139 in The Isle of Pines, 127 Rapin, René, 30 Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, The, 115 Reason of Church Government, The, 81 republican literary tradition, seventeenth-century, 115 –17, 132 – 33, 183 – 84 republicanism, 13, 115 Behn’s criticism of, 167– 68, 172, 173 –79 and colonial America, 113 –14, 125, 135, 143, 145, 153 – 54 and exemplary martyrs, 134 – 50 and law, 118, 124 – 26, 131, 132 and Milton, 80, 81– 82, 99 mixed constitution concept, 116 –17, 119 – 20, 126, 132, 151 and nationalism, 152 – 54

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See also republican literary tradition, seventeenth-century requerimiento, in The Indian Emperour, 44, 46 – 47 rhetoric, and Paradise Lost, 98, 100, 104 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 4, 6 –7 Richard II, 12, 45 Roach, Joseph, 41, 44 – 45, 180 Robinson Crusoe as equitable deliberation, 4, 187– 93 as imaginative originalism, 119, 187, 191– 93 as literary event, 185 – 87 Rogers, John, 90, 99, 111n romance, seventeenth-century, 52 – 53, 119 Rosenblatt, Jason, 97, 111 Rosenthal, Laura, 180 Rothstein, Eric, 37 royalists. See monarchism Russell, Lord William, 144 Rye House Plot, 143 – 44, 148 Rymer, Thomas, 21– 22, 30 sacrifice, human, 44 – 45, 49 “salvage ethnography,” 160 Samson Agonistes, 33, 76, 77n Sanderson, Robert, 53, 122 Satan, in Paradise Lost, 80, 83, 88 – 93, 95, 100, 104, 108 –109 satire, and Neville, 118 – 22 Saxons. See Anglo-Saxonism Scaevola, Gaius Mucius, 146 Schmitt, Carl, 133 Scodel, Joshua, 106n Scott, James, Duke of Monmouth, 143 – 44 Scott, Jonathan, 143, 145 scribere est agere argument, 144, 147 Seidel, Michael, 191 Semernia, in The Widow Ranter, 174 Settle, Elkanah, 115 Shakespeare, William, 12, 17, 38 – 40 and Dryden, 37, 65, 66, 73 –74 See also Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) Shakespeare’s ghost, in Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida, 66 – 67, 73 –74 Shuger, Debora, 15, 85 – 86, 135, 146 Sidney, Algernon, 116, 117, 118, 122, 152, 153, 178 as exemplary republican martyr, 134, 143 – 50 his political thought, 124n, 125 – 26, 143, 148 – 50, 184 and Vane, 137– 38, 141, 144, 145, 146, 148 Sidney, Philip, 24, 26, 37 Sikes, George, 137, 141 Silver, Victoria, 80, 87, 88, 90, 135, 142, 145 sin, in Paradise Lost, 83, 91– 92

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slavery and Behn’s Oroonoko, 168 –70 Locke on, 142n, 182 “natural,” 48 – 49, 169, 183 and Southerne’s Oroonoko, 180 – 84 Smith, John, 176n Smith, Nigel, 26 Smith, Rogers, 173n Socrates, 139 Son, in Paradise Lost, 93 – 95, 96, 101–103, 105 –107, 109 soul as figured by Dryden, 70, 73 –74 as figured by Milton, 79 Southerne, Thomas, 179 – 81, 183 – 84 sovereignty and allegiance, 19, 52 – 62, 136 – 37 and Behn’s Oroonoko, 164 – 67, 172 and decisionist theory, 133 – 34 and imperialism, 49 and The Indian Emperour, 47– 48, 50 – 62 jure divino kingship, 117–18, 122 – 24, 155 – 56, 158 – 59, 161, 178, 182 – 84 and Milton, 80, 81– 83 and Paradise Lost, 88 – 92 patriarchal, 52 – 54, 85, 91, 135 – 36 and Robinson Crusoe, 192 See also absolutism; monarchism; republicanism Spanish imperialism, 48 – 50, 160 See also Black Legend Spenser, Edmund, 63, 168 and equity, 11–12 Stalin, 92 Star Chamber, 13, 158 statute 11 Hen. 7, 136 statute 25 Edw. 3, 136, 143 Staves, Susan, 2, 43 Surprised by Sin, 98 Tacitus, 14 –16, 155 Tate, Nahum, 64 Tempest, The (Davenant and Dryden), 26 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, The, 81– 82 Test Act, 158 theater, and political persuasion, 28 – 31 Thersites, in Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida, 67 Thompson, Nathaniel, 161– 62, 172, 173 Timorous, Justice, in The Widow Ranter, 176 –77, 178 Titus, in Lucius Junius Brutus, 153 “To Sir Godfrey Kneller,” 73 –74 “To the Lord Chancellor Hyde,” 35 – 37 Tory political thought, 161

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Index tyranny, 54, 82 – 85, 93, 154 and The Indian Emperour, 49 – 50 and Sidney trial, 147 and the Stuarts, 113 –14 Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida, 39, 67 Van Sloetten, Henry Cornelius, in The Isle of Pines, 119, 126 Vane, Henry, the Younger, 116, 117, 135n, 145, 147, 149, 152 as exemplary republican martyr, 134, 136 – 43 his political thought, 141– 43 and Sidney, 137– 38, 141, 144, 146 Vasquez, in The Indian Emperour, 44, 46 – 47, 59 Vergil, Polydore, 63 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 23 – 24 vita activa concept, 114 –15, 135 Voltaire, 40, 119 Waterhouse, Edward, 17–18 Watt, Ian, 185 – 86 Weber, Harold, 166 Welldon, Charlotte, in Southerne’s Oroonoko, 180 Whiff, in The Widow Ranter, 177, 178 Whig ideology. See republicanism “Whigs Exaltation, The,” 162, 172 Whimsey, Justice, in The Widow Ranter, 177, 178 Widow Ranter, or The History of Bacon in Virginia, The, 69, 156, 160, 162, 163 as indictment of republicanism, 173 –79 Wiseman, Susan, 128 Woolf, Virginia, on Robinson Crusoe, 190 – 91, 193 Zempoalla, Queen, in The Indian Queen, 43, 55

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tragedy, 116, 187 ancient, 23 – 24, 31n and Behn, 162 – 63 and Dryden, 37– 38, 55, 58, 62, 71–73 seventeenth-century, 29 – 31, 37, 67 tragicomedy Southerne’s Oroonoko as, 179 – 80, 181 The Widow Ranter as, 173, 174 –75 treason and treason trials, 52, 59, 135 – 36 Sidney’s, 134, 143 – 49 Trial of the Seven Bishops, 164 Vane’s, 134, 136 – 43, 146 Trefry, in Behn’s Oroonoko, 167, 181 Trevelyan, G. M., 113 –14 Trevor family, in The Isle of Pines, 130 Trial of the Seven Bishops, 164 Trimpi, Wesley, 23 Troilus and Cressida (Dryden), 17, 38 – 40, 64 –74, 155, 156 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 17, 38 – 40, 64 – 67 Troilus, in Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida, 68 – 69, 71–73 Troy legend (of English settlement), 17, 38, 62 – 64, 155 See also Troilus and Cressida (Dryden); Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) “True-Born Englishman, The,” 163 Truth Found Too Late, or, Troilus and Cressida. See Troilus and Cressida (Dryden) Tryal of Henry Vane, kt., The, 137– 42 Two Cases Submitted to Consideration, 159 Two Treatises of Government, 116, 122, 142n, 143, 192

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