Texts and readers in the Age of Marvell 9781526113887

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Texts and readers in the Age of Marvell

Texts and readers in the Age of Marvell Edited by Christopher D’Addario and Matthew C. Augustine

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2018 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 1389 4  hardback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Out of these scattered sibyl’s leaves Strange prophecies my fancy weaves: And in one history consumes, Like Mexique paintings, all the plumes. What Rome, Greece, Palestine, ere said I in this light mosaic read. Thrice happy he who, not mistook, Hath read in Nature’s mystic book.

(Upon Appleton House, lines 578–84)

Contents

Contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations

page ix xii xiv

Introduction Christopher D’Addario

1

Part I: Rethinking texts and readers 1 Impractical criticism: close reading and the contingencies of history  Michael Schoenfeldt

17

2 ‘Small portals’: Marvell’s Horatian Ode, print culture, and literary history Joad Raymond

33

3 Marvell discovers the public sphere Michael McKeon 4 Extraordinarily ordinary: Nehemiah Wallington’s ­experimental method Kathleen Lynch

56

75

Part II: Rethinking context 5 A sense of place: historicism, whither wilt? Christopher D’Addario

95

6 Understanding experience: subjectivity, sex, and suffering in early modern England  113 Derek Hirst vii

contents 7 Debating censorship: liberty and press control in the 1640s Randy Robertson 8 ‘Armed winter, and inverted day’: the politics of cold in Dryden and Purcell’s King Arthur Anne Cotterill

131

149

Part III: Rethinking literary histories 9 The European Marvell Nigel Smith

169

10 Waller, Tasso, and Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter Timothy Raylor

189

11 Marvell’s personal elegy? Rewriting Shakespeare in A Poem upon the Death of O. C. Alex Garganigo

206

12 How John Dryden read his Milton: The State of Innocence reconsidered Matthew C. Augustine

224 

Part IV: Afterword

On behalf of the Age of Andrew Marvell?  245 Steven N. Zwicker

Index251

viii

Contributors

Matthew C. Augustine is Lecturer in Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of St Andrews. With Steven N. Zwicker he is editor of Lord Rochester in the Restoration World (Cambridge, 2015); a monograph, Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–89, is forthcoming from Manchester University Press. Anne Cotterill is Associate Professor of English at Missouri University of Science and Technology. She is the author of Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford, 2004) and of a number of distinguished articles on Marvell, Dryden, and on early modern English women’s writing. Christopher D’Addario is Associate Professor of English at Gettysburg College. His first book, Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007, and he is currently working on a study of the everyday in early modern literature. Alex Garganigo is Associate Professor of English at Austin College. His work on Shakespeare, Milton, and Marvell has appeared in journals such as SEL, Milton Studies, and Criticism. A book on oaths and swearing in Restoration literature – Samson’s Cords: Imposing Oaths in Milton, Marvell, and Butler – will be published by University of Toronto Press in 2018. Derek Hirst is William Eliot Smith Emeritus Professor of History at Washington University in St Louis. A leading historian of seventeenthcentury England, his most recent works include Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (with Steven N. Zwicker, Oxford, 2012) and Dominion: England and its Island Neighbours, 1500–1707 (Oxford, 2012). ix

contributors Kathleen Lynch is Executive Director of the Folger Institute in Washington DC. Her book, Protestant Autobiography in the SeventeenthCentury Anglophone World (Oxford, 2012), was awarded the Richard L. Greaves Prize by the International John Bunyan Society, and she has written widely on early modern literature, religion, and book history. Michael McKeon is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. Among his many outstanding interdisciplinary publications are The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Hopkins, 1987), winner of the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize for best book of the year, and The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Hopkins, 2005). Timothy Raylor is Professor of English at Carleton College. A past president of the Andrew Marvell Society, his publications include Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy (Delaware, 1994) and The Essex House Masque of 1621: Viscount Doncaster and the Jacobean Masque (Duquesne, 2000). Joad Raymond is Professor of Renaissance Studies in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author or editor of more than half a dozen books, including Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), Milton’s Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination (Oxford, 2010), and, most recently, News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2016). Randy Robertson is Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing at Susquehanna University. His first book, Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England: The Subtle Art of Division, was published by Penn State University Press in 2009, and he is now working on the relation between wit and scepticism from the Renaissance to the present. Michael Schoenfeldt is John R. Knott, Jr Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. His wide-ranging publications include The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (Cambridge, 2010), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Blackwell, 2006), and Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge, 1999). Nigel Smith is William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature at Princeton University, where he also co-directs the Center for the Study of Books and Media. He is the author x

contributors of Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (Yale, 2010), editor of the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Marvell’s poetry (2003), and has long been a leading scholar of radical religion in revolutionary England. Steven N. Zwicker is Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St Louis. The author or editor of numerous works on early modern politics, literature, and culture, his recent books include the twenty-first-century Oxford Authors edition of John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (with Derek Hirst, Oxford, 2012), and Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (ed. with Kevin Sharpe, Oxford, 2008).

xi

Acknowledgements

With the exception of the pieces by Kathleen Lynch and Joad Raymond, the essays collected in this volume were first presented at a symposium on ‘Politics and Print Culture in Seventeenth-Century England’ held at Washington University in St Louis in June 2013. That event was made possible by grants from the Center for the Humanities and the Departments of English and History at Washington University, whose support we warmly acknowledge. Peggy Kamuf and especially Kathy Schneider provided much-needed assistance in organising the conference on the ground. For their various contributions to panels and discussions, and for their wisdom and fellowship, it is a pleasure to thank as well Meredith Beales, Gavin Foster, Ann Huse, Joe Loewenstein, Amy Sattler, David Schmitt, Wolfram Schmidgen, Vince Sherry, and Judy Zwicker, among others. We only wish the volume were more capacious, as it would not have lacked for willing hands. At Manchester University Press, Matthew Frost has patiently encouraged this project, and we benefited also from the suggestions of the Press’s anonymous readers. Caitlin Flynn once again proved indispensable in preparing the text. In one form or another, the writers assembled here all owe debts of gratitude to Steve Zwicker, whose contributions as a scholar and teacher of seventeenth-century literature sparked many of the essays in this volume. Such debts are by no means discharged in publishing these essays, but we hope that they record something of the vibrant community to which Steve introduced so many of us, and also the imaginative impact of Steve’s work on our conception of early modern literature and history. It is only fitting that he contributed an afterword to this book, for Steve has, over the course of his career, superbly modelled interdisciplinary collaboration and intellectual exchange. Moreover, at a time when the production of humanistic knowledge has fallen under the shadow of the corporate university, Steve’s pleasure in the writing of seventeenth-century England, xii

acknowledgements and in the work of writing, continues to inspire. For all that he has taught us about the ironies and equivocations of the dedication as a genre, we nonetheless dedicate the essays in this volume to him. C. D. Baltimore, MD M. C. A. St Andrews, Fife

xiii

Abbreviations

ELR HJ HLQ JBS JEMCS MLQ MP NYRB ODNB P&P PBA PMLA RES SEL SP

English Literary Renaissance Historical Journal Huntington Library Quarterly Journal of British Studies Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies Modern Language Quarterly Modern Philology New York Review of Books Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Past & Present Proceedings of the British Academy Publications of the Modern Language Association Review of English Studies Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 Studies in Philology

xiv

Introduction Christopher D’Addario

In the latter part of the seventeenth century, one does not have far to seek for authors who shifted or reversed their political and religious ­affiliations – and apparently beliefs – as the circumstances shifted or reversed around them. Edmund Waller, Abraham Cowley, Thomas Hobbes, and Marchamont Nedham all made their peace with Parliament, and eventually the Cromwellian Protectorate, after the defeat of the Royalist cause in the late 1640s, only to revert their allegiance to the Stuarts when Charles II returned in 1660. John Dryden, that most ‘notorious’ of opportunists, trumpeted the Restoration of the Stuarts less than eighteen months after lamenting the passing of Cromwell, and later, in 1685–86, very publicly changed his religion following the Catholic James II’s rise to the throne. Even John Milton, arch-defender of the Good Old Cause, did not scruple to have his early poems released by the main publisher of Royalist verse, Humphrey Moseley; more problematically, a mere five years after his principled and powerful attack on prepublication licensing in Areopagitica (1644), Milton himself took up the post of government licenser for Parliament. These volte-faces tend simultaneously to trouble us as ethical readers of the past, insofar as we idealise the constancy of our authors, and to enliven us as critics, since we are invited by these reversals to explain them in ways that disarm charges of duplicity or self-interest. Indeed, we can determine much about consensus attitudes towards particular authors by how readily we, as a community of scholars, accept or reject these expiations of what, on the surface, looks to be political calculation. Hobbes’s return to England in 1651 upon the publication of Leviathan has at times been regarded as a personal enactment of the political theories espoused in his treatise; we tend to object strenuously to any charges of opportunism or ideological backsliding on Milton’s part, seeing it as uncharacteristic of his rigorous sense of political and religious principle; as for Dryden, well …1 1

texts and readers in the age of marvell Since at least the 1980s, there has been a steady stream of excellent work on the politics of literature and the literature of politics in seventeenthcentury England: our knowledge of the interplay between literary text and political context has been immeasurably improved by a number of seminal studies, including several by contributors to this volume. Many of these studies have carefully and insightfully explained the reversals that marked various authors’ careers in the mid- to late century. However, for all of this previous work’s sensitivity to the variety of ideological beliefs and the complexity of party affiliations throughout the century, the general tendency has been to view the discursive field of seventeenth-century England in binary terms: republican and Royalist, Whig and Tory, Anglican and dissenter. To their credit, the various monographs on the literatures of royalism, of republicanism, of nonconformity or dissent, have broadened our sense of the depth of political engagement in the imaginative writing of the period while also filling in our understanding of the distinct rhetorics and idioms that these sides deployed as they entered the fray. And yet, as the field of study moves forward and new research obliges us continuously to refine our ideas concerning the politics of individual writers or of particular historical moments, we have begun to move beyond viewing political engagement as purely or even primarily antagonistic. In describing many writers and their positions (and indeed some ideologies) during these years, more recent studies might be characterised as thinking in terms such as labile, uncertain, ambivalent, performative, provisional, or, as Matthew Augustine has framed it, contingent.2 It is increasingly clear, for example, that the term Royalist does not adequately describe Hobbes’s Leviathan and its advocacy for a complete submission to the sovereign as it was released into the London print market in 1651 amidst the controversy over the Oath of Engagement. Similarly, our adherence to these binaries tends to inhibit our ability to identify and characterise some of the sudden and surprising alliances that arose amidst the chaotic and ever-changing circumstances of these years (such as the brief but meaningful detente between some factions of the Levellers and Royalists around 1648–50). This is not to deny the explanatory power of broad ideological terms wholesale; rather, it is to admit that the use of these categories often does not exhaust and can even occlude a text’s possible meanings. Much work in the history of reading in fact now emphasises the ideological diversity of a text’s readers and thus of its potentialities.3 Beyond this growing awareness of readers creating meanings against the assumed political grain, and of texts and authors operating in politically complex and multifaceted ways, trends in literary criticism, such as ecocriticism, affect studies, and network theory, have similarly sought to develop readings of seventeenthcentury texts that complicate but do not abandon the general focus on 2

d’addario: acknowledgements introduction polemic and politics in these writings. These approaches have presented us with authors more complexly, haphazardly, and at times personally motivated, authors whose ideological sympathies seem more fluid or labile than broad categories such as Royalist or republican allow. Behind this rethinking of the contexts in and through which we read seventeenthcentury literature, we might arguably find two assumptions, assumptions not necessarily co-extant and yet not mutually exclusive either: first, that we should recognise that a variety of pressures, including psychological, formal, social, environmental, and geographic pressures, worked on authors alongside the political and the polemical as they wrote; second, that literary texts maintain a distinct relationship with their historical moments, and that, because of their aesthetic ambitions, these texts ask us to look beyond the purely ideological for their meanings even as they seek to heighten or obscure this ideology. We might see then, in more recent criticism on the seventeenth century, a continued effort to refine and redefine the relationship between text and context. This criticism has often provided a more detailed, even pointillist, picture of the environment or back-history into which a text is released; or else it has opened up novel contexts (social networks, communities of readers, built environments) in which to understand how literature means. Many of the essays in this collection contribute to this further refinement of context, while others seek to redefine how we conceive of our relationship to the past. It is thus that much of the thinking in this volume crystallises around the figure of Andrew Marvell, since no author seems more amenable to such novel approaches. It has become a commonplace of Marvell studies to emphasise the poet’s inscrutability, the protean nature of his political stances, the strange and irresolvable turns of thought in his lyrics. The extent to which this inscrutability is praised as a sign of the quality of his writing is a clear indication of the status of indeterminacy in the critical climate at the dawn of the twenty-first century.4 As far as Marvell’s politics are concerned, ever since John M. Wallace’s pioneering monograph Destiny His Choice (1968) and his attempt to identify Marvell as a conflicted loyalist to monarchic rule, various studies have sought to make sense of his movements between Royalist nostalgia and strident republicanism, open-throated liberalism and moderate toleration.5 The most successful of these decipherings have usefully sought to recover Marvell’s shifting political opinions by tracing the writer’s immediate social networks or political relationships at a given moment, thus characterising his loyalties as highly situational and contingent.6 His lyric poems have similarly resisted attempts to locate a cohesive poetics or cast of thought in them, especially when viewed alongside his more overtly political writing. What’s more, their many impenetrable metaphors, images, and allusions 3

texts and readers in the age of marvell both invite and deflect interpretation. These poems, and indeed, almost all of Marvell’s writings, seem particularly genial to novel critical approaches, approaches that might open up new meanings by attending to alternative sexualities, to reading practices, to early modern ecologies, to incremental affects. I do not want to suggest that these new approaches might ‘solve’ the numerous riddles within Marvell’s works; rather, they can help to fill in what many of us intuit as the gaps in our understanding of these enigmatic texts, that vague feeling of insufficiency that comes with almost any attempt at reading Marvell.7 We have titled this collection Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell in part with an eye toward the centrality of Marvell to our contemporary critical moment. Work on Marvell has seen a resurgence in the new millennium, driven by landmark scholarly editions of both his poetry and his prose.8 And while Marvell studies might seem to revivify every seventeen years like a cicada, as Donald Friedman has wryly noted, this latest re-emergence does seem more sustainable and lasting, with scholarship influenced by the expanding fields of ecocriticism, affect studies or the history of the emotions, New Formalism and network theory, turning its attention to a writer whose imagination seems distinctly open to the questions posed by these approaches.9 A number of essays in this volume take up these strains of criticism to read Marvell and his contemporaries in contextually novel ways. More generally, the variety of approaches offered in this collection is representative of both the evolving diversification of critical methodologies in our field as well as the varied tactics that Marvell’s poetry consistently demands of us. However, our title also invites readers to entertain the prospect of placing Marvell at the centre of the literary landscape during the years 1638–1700, not in an old-fashioned effort to reshape the literary canon, but rather as a spur to considering how such placement would shift our perceptions of seventeenth-century literary culture. What happens to our sense of this culture when we take Marvell’s writings as representative of the discursive spirit of the age? Although it would be foolish to suggest that Marvell could displace Milton as the century’s most prominent or recognised writer, a literary historical period that takes Marvell as representative rather than his friend and contemporary surely looks far different from the one we know. Rather than a period marked by strident ideological certainties and literature’s unwavering commitment to partisan, oppositional causes, an Age of Marvell foregrounds the uncertainties and complexities with which writers were faced as the remarkable events of these years moved swiftly around them. It also acknowledges the distinct place that texts with aesthetic preoccupations can hold amidst times of upheaval. An acknowledgement of these uncertainties does not preclude us from 4

d’addario: acknowledgements introduction identifying sincere commitment in seventeenth-century writers (such as Marvell’s staunch defence of religious toleration throughout the 1660s and 1670s) but rather allows us to admit the often localised and at times inconsistent nature of such commitments. The complexities that reside within many of Marvell’s writings remind us that historical individuals do not react unequivocally and evenly to a turbulent reality (or indeed any reality), that distinct, even antithetical, emotions might coexist and serve to motivate someone as he or she acts and reacts to the rush of events. In the essays that follow, several contributors emphasise the variety of motivations, from generic distaste to personal frustration, that lie behind early modern authors’ ideological stances and formal choices, while others offer finer-grained and more multi-sided contextualisations of familiar texts and cruxes, providing new insights into the ways in which these texts interact with each other and with their historical moment. The essays in this collection by no means represent a uniform critical movement. However, they all aim to develop or respond to the innovations, discoveries, and provocations of one of the most assiduous and creative readers of Marvell, and indeed of seventeenth-century literary culture more broadly, Steven Zwicker. All of the pieces that follow are influenced by Zwicker’s invigorating and career-long attention to refining and redefining the precise historical circumstances out of and into which seventeenth-century literature has been produced.10 His work on John Dryden and Andrew Marvell, among others, consistently reveals a remarkable sensitivity to the variety of ideological registers in play at a given moment, to the specific ways in which authors activated and manipulated these registers for polemical purposes.11 A number of essays here, and especially those by Joad Raymond, Michael McKeon, Randy Robertson, Timothy Raylor, and Matthew Augustine, demonstrate a similar sensitivity to the discursive field at particular moments in seventeenth-century literary culture, providing novel insights into the ways in which texts both familiar and unfamiliar entered the cultural fray. In addition to the precision and brilliance of his historicist work, Zwicker has also demonstrated a persistent willingness to push at the boundaries of what historicist scholarship entails, seeking out new ways to sophisticate his and our understanding of authors and readers, texts and politics. Over the course of his career, Zwicker has wonderfully modelled and advocated interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature, working collaboratively with a number of prominent historians, most extensively Kevin Sharpe and Derek Hirst, to sharpen the practices of reading early modern literature within its original discursive matrix.12 More recently, he has also steadily advanced our knowledge of the history of reading, doing much to test and extend the methodologies of this once 5

texts and readers in the age of marvell fledgling field.13 He has also, with Derek Hirst, turned his attention to the affective life of Marvell, placing the psyche at the centre of a more speculative historicist endeavour, while also exploring the limits of the historical record by investigating the uses to which we can put gossip, rumour, and lampoon.14 Fittingly enough, Hirst’s essay in the present volume merges close attention to literary traces with deep archival research in reassessing the evidence of early modern child abuse. More broadly, a number of the essays here, particularly Anne Cotterill’s ecocritical approach to Dryden’s King Arthur, and Nigel Smith’s transcultural reading of Andrew Marvell’s poetry, offer entirely new frameworks within which to read the literature of the past, answering the implicit, and at times explicit, call from Zwicker to be willing always to reassess and redefine what we mean by context. Michael Schoenfeldt and Christopher D’Addario’s contributions similarly supplement and interrogate Zwicker’s varied reflections on the relationship between the aesthetic and the historical, while Joad Raymond illustrates how Marvell’s Horatian Ode can be seen as a distillation and heightening of contemporary pamphlet culture. Finally, Kathleen Lynch’s essay on the notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington demonstrates, as Zwicker’s work in this area has as well, how the study of reading practices can broaden our understanding of early modern imaginative activity, and thus of aesthetic production and of literary genre. In the end, and in response to Zwicker’s work, Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell takes a variety of approaches in its redrawing of the literary landscape of seventeenth-century England, yet through this variety there runs a persistent desire to re-engage with the past by expanding and re-energising our ideas about literary figures and texts and how they encountered and operated in the world. We have divided the collection into three sections in order to foreground the similar sets of questions that animate each group of essays. The essays in the first section, entitled ‘Rethinking texts and readers’, ask us to consider novel ways in which readers, both early modern and contemporary, have conceived of texts and their position in the public world of print consumption and critical practice. This section begins with two essays that invite us to ponder anew the relationship between literary texts and their historical moments. In ‘Impractical criticism: close reading and the contingencies of history’, Michael Schoenfeldt makes a compelling case for a reinvigorated interdisciplinarity that combines attention to aesthetics – and indeed aesthetic pleasure – with contextualisation of the religious, political, or social pressures under which texts are produced, pointing out ‘just how completely formal analysis is tied by tacit but secure stitches to historical scholarship’. Ideally, we should model our studies triangularly, with an eye equally on the writer’s life, the imagination, and the work. Schoenfeldt’s call for a return to an appreciation for the l­iterariness of imaginative writing 6

d’addario: acknowledgements introduction comes out of a sense, echoed by other critics, that among the legacies of New Historicism is a blindness to the variety of experiences that literature provides, usefully noting New Historicism’s relative lack of interest in questions of spirituality, of gender, of poetry, and not least of pleasure. Taking his cue from the rise of New Formalist methodologies, Schoenfeldt makes a case for the importance of the impractical in our reading of literary texts, the importance of developing a critical vocabulary that accounts for the pleasures and pains that the texts we study produce, and of allowing ourselves to be transported by these texts even as we carefully situate them (and their pleasures) in history. Both Schoenfeldt and the next author in our collection, Joad Raymond, draw on the writings of Zwicker’s long-time colleague, the novelist William Gass, to help them formulate the relationship between text and context. While Schoenfeldt conjures up Gass’s representation of the ‘cultural envelopes’ in which poems come as akin to ‘manners at a banquet’, Raymond’s epigraph, from Gass’s The Tunnel (1995), suggests that poems exist as commonwealths of the ‘lost and little things’ of historical memory. Raymond’s essay, ‘“Small portals”: Marvell’s Horatian Ode, print culture, and literary history’, looks to delineate the precise nature of the traffic between public language – the language of pamphlets and newsbooks – and the literary. Through an intensive and highly contextualised reading of Marvell’s most enigmatic of political poems, Raymond identifies in An Horatian Ode a commitment to recording and aestheticising the messy and quotidian particulars (Gass’s ‘lost and little things’) of Cromwell’s rise and the king’s execution. According to Raymond, by including a wealth of precise language from contemporary newsbooks, Marvell polishes these events into something literary even as he reveals his deep commitment to the historical moment. The poem’s power comes not from its ability to rise above the messiness of contemporary events, but rather from its immersion in their details, its immersion in the public pamphlets and polemics in which the London print market was awash around 1650. With this meticulous and fine-grained picture of Marvell’s poem and its relationship to the public print world, Raymond’s essay provides a novel and compelling way for us to conceptualise how literary texts processed and aestheticised the ephemera of history. Michael McKeon’s essay, ‘Marvell discovers the public sphere’, is likewise concerned with Marvell’s lasting awareness of and fascination with the writing and reading public. Through an examination of Marvell’s Restoration response to his print nemesis Samuel Parker in The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–73), and the specific ways in which this response also presented itself as a rewriting of the Duke of Buckingham’s wellknown play, McKeon outlines the massive shift in writers’ perceptions 7

texts and readers in the age of marvell of ­themselves and their audiences that the growing consciousness of an open, public sphere entailed. As McKeon points out, Marvell seems to have intuited this transformation early, and in his Restoration prose we can see an author attempting to negotiate and take advantage of the changing boundary between public author and private life, the ‘virtuality’ of seemingly personal print exchanges. Throughout his essay, McKeon asks us to dwell upon the public sphere as a lived experience, a novel fact of seventeenth-century existence that Marvell sought to represent through his adaptation of familiar forms. His essay thus presents to us a writer seeking literary modes in which to identify and understand a latent, not fully actualised, experience. McKeon’s focus on the virtuality of the public sphere reminds us of the sharply different ways in which readers had begun to interact with printed materials in the second half of the seventeenth century. The final essay in this section, Kathleen Lynch’s ‘Extraordinarily ordinary: Nehemiah Wallington’s experimental method’, provides us with a detailed study of one of these innovative readers, the Puritan artisan Nehemiah Wallington, who kept over fifty manuscript books’ worth of notes on his habits of reading. Identifying in Wallington’s notebooks a clear record of ‘historically situated reading practices’, practices rooted in the scriptural literacy of a lay Puritan as well as his daily meditative writing, Lynch associates Wallington’s spiritual note-taking with the record-keeping of Baconian experimentalism. Wallington, she details, saw his notebooks and their summaries of, references to, and commentaries on his books as the recording of spiritual experience itself, a resource for his own meditations and self-examination. In the process, Lynch’s essay contributes to our history of early modern reading by challenging familiar assumptions about lay literacy, while asking important questions, questions we do not have full answers to at this time, concerning the intellectual habits that such readers took into the study as well as the relationship of these habits to the development of nascent genres such as the spiritual autobiography and the personal diary. Many of the questions pertaining to historical experience raised by our first set of essays are developed and expanded by the next four essays in the section ‘Rethinking context’. Each of these essays addresses the potential pitfalls and opportunities of different forms of contextualisation, in the process offering provisional solutions to the difficult problem of locating emergent or ephemeral experiences in early modern texts. In ‘A sense of place: historicism, whither wilt?’, Christopher D’Addario considers broadly historicism’s new methodologies and frontiers, suggesting there is much to be gained (and perhaps lost) from our growing attention to the more elusive, yet no less decisive, affective and sensory experiences of early 8

d’addario: acknowledgements introduction modern Englishmen and -women. D’Addario ruminates on the possibility of a critical study that takes up place as its organisational principle and thus takes up the non-sequential ways in which texts circulate, expand, and reappear against or across chronological boundaries, in the process raising important questions about our literary historical practices of periodisation. In the end, D’Addario’s essay invites us to accept and even revel in the speculative nature of the historicist endeavour, to embrace the partiality of our recovery of the past as a marvellous and formative experience in and of itself. In what is perhaps the most urgent essay in the collection, Derek Hirst faces head-on the difficulty of recovering the past as he attempts to outline seventeenth-century accounts and perceptions of child abuse in his essay ‘Understanding experience: subjectivity, sex, and suffering in early modern England’. The problems of identifying and recounting the experience of abuse is a pressing contemporary issue, as Hirst notes, and his essay avoids a too-easy presentism by surveying the archive of such abuse as well as the perceptual apparatus according to which the very category of ‘child abuse’ became visible. Hirst’s essay carefully links the language of a series of texts, including a number of Marvell’s writings, to identify a shared vocabulary in which a pressing concern with the disciplinary excesses of the schoolroom is recorded. Hirst notes that these texts increasingly presented to readers a vivid imagining of the details of such debilitating practices. In the process of recovering this shared vocabulary, Hirst raises important questions over the limits of experiential language and whether a culture must identify and name an experience before it can be fully felt. Just as Hirst’s essay deals with child abuse as it emerged into the collective consciousness of the print world of seventeenth-century England, so Randy Robertson’s ‘Debating censorship: liberty and press control in the 1640s’ traces the debates surrounding censorship in the print pamphlets of the 1640s as public awareness of the realities of state control of the press became prevalent. In the first part of his essay, Robertson applies the methods of Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’ in support of his contention that Parliament’s 1643 ordinance, on the whole, successfully restricted the London press’s output when it came into effect that June. In the context of this increased control of the press, Robertson then traces the battles waged in print and in courtroom trials (accounts of which were, of course, then printed) over the liberties, or lack thereof, enjoyed by authors and publishers during this tumultuous decade. Whereas traditional accounts of the English press in the 1640s emphasise the sudden and continued freedoms supposedly enjoyed with the outbreak of hostilities between king and Parliament, Robertson sees in this decade at once a series of victories by the state in its attempts to reign in an unruly print market, as well as 9

texts and readers in the age of marvell a growing chorus of public complaints and challenges to the systems of censorship so long silently accepted. With the final essay in this section, Anne Cotterill’s ‘“Armed winter, and inverted day”: the politics of cold in Dryden and Purcell’s King Arthur’, we move to the final decade of the century and to a time similarly riven by political upheaval and governmental change. However, rather than looking to the open debates in the press over state policies for Dryden’s politics at this moment, Cotterill instead details the precise ways in which this author aestheticises and politicises accounts of extreme weather during the 1680s and 1690s in his opera. Drawing on work in ecocriticism, Cotterill traces the complex series of ‘humoral, religious, political, and other cultural associations’ that coloured these representations of the Little Ice Age. In particular, contemporary reports on the winter of 1683–84 and its Frost Fair on the Thames linked this cold weather with demonic inversion and fantastical, sinful release. As Cotterill shows, Dryden deftly redeploys these associations in his famous Frost Scene, where he connects coldness to the fallen, overly martial world of Williamite England, the warmth of the Stuarts only a distant memory. Cotterill’s essay can stand as a model for its nuanced integration of the environmental and political contexts that inflect a particular literary work. The last section of the volume, ‘Rethinking literary histories’, takes up issues of literary relations between prominent authors of the century, either locating new echoes and thus new meanings in important texts, or else asking us to revise familiar narratives of rivalries and pressures. In what is part of his ongoing effort to redraw the lines of influence that lie behind English vernacular poetry, Nigel Smith in ‘The European Marvell’ asks us to envision the writer as part of an international network of poets who were aware of and wrote in response to each other. So, while Marvell’s well-known picture in Last Instructions to a Painter (1667) of the Dutch admiral Michiel de Ruyter’s triumphant raid up the Medway, with its bizarre mixture of the pastoral and the erotic, should certainly be seen as aligned with domestic critiques of the now emasculated English administration, Smith illustrates how Marvell’s depiction also stands in relation to Dutch representations of de Ruyter’s victory, which emphasised the martial heroism of the Dutch as well as the negative consequences of the English monarchy’s economic policies. In the latter half of his essay, Smith places Marvell alongside the ingenious and unorthodox Spanish poet Luis de Góngora, noting the appeal Góngora’s opacity and difficulty might have had with the enigmatic Englishman. On the whole, Smith’s essay calls on us to reconceive the relationship between English poets and their European vernacular counterparts in the seventeenth century, to move beyond a model of influence rooted in ideals of classical 10

d’addario: acknowledgements introduction imitation to one that incorporates the realities of immediate contact, direct dialogue, and ideological conflict. In ‘Waller, Tasso, and Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter’, Timothy Raylor’s careful tracing of the web of echoes evoked in Marvell’s lament over the Scotsman Archibald Douglas’s death also leads him, through Edmund Waller, to Europe and to the poetry of Torquato Tasso. According to Raylor, Marvell purposefully takes up Waller’s appropriation of Tasso in order to critique his contemporary’s mismanaging of the generic boundaries between romance and epic, symbolic, for Marvell, of the inappropriate conflation of personal passion with state affairs that he finds not only in Waller’s panegyrics but in the monarchy’s policies and in Restoration culture as a whole. Marvell’s poem, with its satiric echoes of a Restoration mode that he also found personally distasteful, thus persistently reminds its readers of the connections between generic confusion, moral depravity, and political corruption. The king was not only an immoral ruler, he also did not understand literary genre. In the process of detailing Marvell’s critical appropriation and rewriting of Waller’s foray into the romantic epic mode, Raylor illustrates the extent to which, for seventeenth-century authors, arguments over genre could simultaneously be political and personal. Alex Garganigo’s essay in turn investigates Marvell’s management of literary echoes, but this time with a focus on the resonances of a single line in his elegy upon Oliver Cromwell and its reference to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1. In ‘Marvell’s personal elegy? Rewriting Shakespeare in A Poem upon the Death of O. C.’, Garganigo explores the significance of Marvell’s registering Cromwell’s death through an allusion to Prince Hal’s remark upon realising that Falstaff lives: ‘I saw him dead’. This line from Marvell’s elegy has traditionally been understood as the poem’s most personal, and Garganigo’s emphasis on its indebtedness to Shakespeare’s play challenges our assumptions about the nature of personal expression, allowing us to see how literary echoes and imitations can actually increase and complicate the emotions of a poetic moment. For Marvell, as Garganigo reveals, the allusion to Prince Hal allows him to layer immediate grief and love for the Protector with a frustration over the Cromwell family’s failings and his own failure to advance his fortunes under the Cromwells. One of the most famous literary borrowings of the Restoration was, of course, John Dryden’s brazen reworking of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) into the often bathetic poetic opera The State of Innocence (1673–74). Matthew Augustine’s ‘How John Dryden read his Milton: The State of Innocence reconsidered’ shifts our notions of just what Dryden thought he was doing when he went to ‘tag’ John Milton’s blank 11

texts and readers in the age of marvell verse, positioning the essay as part of the ongoing re-evaluation of the relationship between these two central figures of Restoration literary culture. Augustine shows how Dryden – rather than assuming an essentially antagonistic stance towards his great poetic rival – brilliantly aligns his own heroic drama, and thus poetic art, with Milton’s high style, yoking attacks on his dramas to all cynical and unsophisticated attacks on grand literary ambition. Through a careful tracing of the patterns of Dryden’s rewriting, Augustine also identifies a concerted effort to transform Milton’s argument in favour of libertarian free will into an ambivalent acceptance of libertine pleasures, Milton’s grand epic becoming a ‘titillating Restoration opera’. With a keen eye for the precise moment in which Dryden’s revision appears in the mid-1670s, Augustine associates this transformation with a more general turn away from heroic Augustanism and towards libertine satire, and in the process encourages us to think through the complex ways in which different cultural forms, here epic and drama, lampoon and satire, interacted at particular historical moments. Throughout his career, Steven Zwicker has remained sceptical of received truths, continuing to seek out new methodologies and new contexts for understanding seventeenth-century English literature, refreshing the world we know but also opening out into ‘Far other worlds, and other seas’.15 The essays in this collection arise from our authors’ own pursuit of novel answers to historically inflected problems of reading and interpretation, of more innovative or more scrupulous ways to bridge the gap between the present and the past. In doing so, they add significantly to the stories we tell about the literature and history of this most fascinating, this most enduringly urgent of centuries. Notes Unless otherwise noted, Marvell’s works are cited from the following editions throughout this volume: The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (Harlow: Longman, rev. edn., 2007); The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. A. Patterson, M. Dzelzainis, N. von Maltzahn, and N. H. Keeble, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).  1 On Hobbes, see Q. Skinner, ‘Conquest and consent: Thomas Hobbes and the engagement controversy’, in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660 (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 79–98. The view of Milton as a writer ‘in permanent dialogue with the plebeian radical thinkers of the English Revolution’ is set forth most influentially by Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1977). On Milton’s role as parliamentary licensor, see A. Blum, ‘The author’s authority: Areopagitica and the labour of licensing’, in M. W. Ferguson and M. Nyquist (eds), Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 74–96; S. Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade

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d’addario: acknowledgements introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 125–53; S.  Baron, ‘Licensing readers, licensing authorities in seventeenth-century England’, in J.  Andersen and E. Sauer (eds), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 217–42.  2 See M. C. Augustine, Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–1689 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).  3 For instance, it was long assumed that the romances that flooded the print market in the late 1640s and 1650s catered to a partisan audience, as modern readers assiduously detected hidden Royalist ideology in the genre’s allegories and allusions. Steven Zwicker’s work on these books’ reception now suggests that they served a more complex affective purpose for readers on both sides of the political divide; see S. N. Zwicker, ‘Royalist romance?’, in T. Keymer (ed.), The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).  4 So, in his biography, Nigel Smith places Marvell alongside John Donne, John Dryden and Ben Jonson in terms of poetic quality, noting that ‘much of that quality has to do with indecipherability, with irresolvable ambiguities, with seeing things all ways at once and yet never really revealing what the hidden author thinks’; Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 3.  5 See, among others, J. M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1968); A. Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), rev. as Marvell: The Writer in Public Life (Harlow: Longman, 2000); W. Chernaik, The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); W. Chernaik and M. Dzelzainis (eds), Marvell and Liberty (New York: Palgrave, 1999); D. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); B. Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Smith, The Chameleon. For a revisionist assessment of this tradition, see M. C. Augustine, ‘The chameleon or the sponge?: Marvell, Milton, and the politics of literary history’, SP, 111:1 (2014), pp. 132–62.  6 From narrowest to widest contextualising view, see D. Hirst and S. N. Zwicker, ‘High summer at Nun Appleton, 1651: Andrew Marvell and Lord Fairfax’s occasions’, HJ, 36:2 (1993), 247–69; N. McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Worden, Literature and Politics.  7 Rosalie Colie began her brilliant study of Marvell, “My Ecchoing Song”: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), with the confession that she was moved to write the book because ‘Marvell’s work was and remains too hard for me; it has never been easy for me to read any poetry, and Marvell’s poems have always seemed to me among the most difficult and elusive I know’, p. vii. Cf. Hirst and Zwicker, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 1: ‘With Marvell it is the very elusiveness and the strangeness of his story that compel attention.’  8 See above under ‘Notes’: Marvell, The Poems, and Marvell, The Prose Works.  9 D. M. Friedman, ‘Marvell sempervirens’, MP, 113:1 (2015), pp. 135–50, at 135. For approaches to Marvell that move away from the strictly contextual-historicist, see D. K. McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (Aldershot: Ashgate,

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texts and readers in the age of marvell 2007); J. Faust, Andrew Marvell’s Liminal Lyrics: The Space Between (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012); Hirst and Zwicker, Orphan of the Hurricane. 10 As an epitome of this approach, see Zwicker, ‘The day that George Thomason collected his copy of the Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, Compos’d at Several Times’, RES, 64:264 (2013), 231–45. 11 See, for example, this insight into the array of discourses deployed against Dryden by his Restoration enemies: ‘Evelyn was not much of an ironist, nor indeed much of a polemicist or gossip, but the significance of this conjuncture – of playwriting, conversion, and prostitution – was not lost on him.  These modes of instability and venality were widely understood to be overlapping, nearly interchangeable sites – and throughout the whole of the age.’ Zwicker, ‘Why are they saying these terrible things about John Dryden? The uses of gossip and scandal’, Essays in Criticism, 64:2 (2014), p.  162. See also S. N. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: The Art of Disguise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); and with Hirst, Orphan of the Hurricane. 12 See Sharpe and Zwicker (eds), Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998); and Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). While Zwicker’s collaborations with Hirst on Andrew Marvell have been noted above, their ‘High summer at Nun Appleton, 1651’ deserves special mention as an example of interdisciplinary collaboration at its finest. 13 See Sharpe and Zwicker’s introduction to Reading, Society and Politics, ‘Discovering the Renaissance reader’, pp. 1–40, as well as Zwicker’s own contribution to that volume, ‘The constitution of opinion and the pacification of reading’, pp. 295–316; see also Zwicker, ‘Reading the margins: politics and the habits of appropriation’, in Refiguring Revolutions, pp. 101–15; ‘The reader revealed’, in S. A. Baron, E. Walsh, and S. Scola (eds), The Reader Revealed (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2001), pp. 11–17; ‘“What every literate man once knew”: tracing readers in early modern England’, in R. Myers, M. Harris, and G. Mandelbrote (eds), Owners, Annotators, and the Signs of Reading (London: British Library, 2005), pp. 75–90; ‘Habits of reading and early modern English literary culture’, in J. Mueller and D. Loewenstein (eds), The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 170–98; ‘The day that George Thomason collected his copy of the Poems of Mr. John Milton’. 14 See Hirst and Zwicker, Orphan of the Hurricane; also Zwicker, ‘Considering the ancients’, in Sharpe and Zwicker (eds), Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); ‘Why are they saying these terrible things about John Dryden?’; and ‘Lord Rochester: a life in gossip’, in Augustine and Zwicker (eds), Lord Rochester in the Restoration World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 79–98. 15 See the poem ‘The Garden’, in Marvell, The Poems, p. 157.

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Part I: Rethinking texts and readers

1

Impractical criticism: close reading and the contingencies of history Michael Schoenfeldt

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. (Anon.)1

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the discipline of English literature has been marked by a largely counterproductive tension between aesthetics and history. For many politically oriented critics, aesthetics was either uninteresting or implicated in the elite practices they deliberately opposed. And for those who focused on aesthetics, history frequently seemed like a distraction from what made the work of art a special kind of utterance, separate from other modes of language. I would like in this essay to think about some of the signal literary engagements in the latter half of the long twentieth century, in order to consider what has been accomplished, what we have left out, and where we may be going next. I would like to suggest, finally, that our analyses have too frequently ignored the decidedly impractical pleasure that emerges from literary activity. I am thinking here both of the pleasure represented by the writers we study, and our own pleasure in engaging with earlier literature. I hope that by bringing our own pleasure out of the closet, we can begin to restore to literary criticism some of the visceral thrill that drew us to it in the first place.2 And this may, in turn, help us convey that feeling of profound intellectual delight to the next generation of students. My somewhat whimsical title is, of course, a variant on I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism, a study in what happens to interpretation when there is no history or context to moor it.3 Richards is a foundational figure in the development of English literature as an academic discipline. In Practical Criticism, Richards completely removed authorial and contextual information from thirteen poems, and then assigned their interpretation to undergraduates at Cambridge. In this exercise, students were asked to analyse a short poem without any information about its authorship, 17

part i: rethinking texts and readers date, or circumstances of composition; the theory was that they would then attend to the ‘words on the page’ rather than crib from biographical and historical contexts. This style of ‘close reading’ inspired what came to be called New Criticism in America and was immensely influential as well in Great Britain. While the objective of the experiment was to encourage students to concentrate on the text alone – a kind of secular sola scriptura – the book actually demonstrates the remarkably creative misreadings that intelligent readers are capable of producing in a deliberate vacuum of knowledge. Encouraging the students to read innocent of received beliefs about a text, the book actually demonstrated the critical importance of context to interpretation. Without the indispensable sifting of random impressions that historical context along with biographical and disciplinary knowledge provide, interpretation becomes a kind of free association running rampant over the text. Meaning, we learn, is invariably situational; without any context whatsoever, a poem is almost entirely illegible, a chimera composed of unrecognisable parts. Practical Criticism exhibits all the virtues and liabilities that imbued this critical practice. In the work of Richards’s most influential student, William Empson, practical criticism provided the basis for a powerful and innovative interpretive method. In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Empson developed his undergraduate essays for Richards into a study of the complex, multiple meanings of poems. Ambiguity became for Empson an evaluative term. He defined ambiguity as ‘any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language’.4 The capacity of a poem to contain profound ideological complexity amid aesthetic unity was a mark of its greatness, and the reader’s ability to register the subtle, contradictory properties of poetic language a mark of his or her brilliance. But Empson never felt that the context of an utterance was necessarily irrelevant to its interpretation. In a wonderful essay on John Donne, Empson interrupts a discussion of the textures of Donne’s poetry to offer an uncharacteristic apology for the need to offer some context: ‘I feel I should apologize for so much “background material”, but with Donne it seems to be mainly doubt about the background which makes a critic reject the arguments from the text of the poems’.5 In order to comprehend the complex textures of such erudite and difficult works as Donne’s, one is frequently driven by the text itself to a quarrel with, or betrayal of, the circumstances from which it arose. Empson’s work had a profound impact on the critical movement known as ‘New Criticism’, whose major exponents viewed poems as elaborate structures of complex meanings to which the critic would devote rigorous attention. Paying little notice to historical context, these critics imagined that the study of literature was a kind of intellectual 18

schoenfeldt: impractical criticism and moral discipline, a sphere of activity unto itself. Analysing a passage of prose or poetry according to New Critical methods required careful, exacting scrutiny of the passage itself. Formal elements such as rhyme, metre, setting, characterisation, and plot were used to identify the theme of the text. In addition, the New Critics also looked for paradox,  ambiguity,  irony, and  tension  to help establish the most unified interpretation of the complex text. New Criticism thrived in the middle of the twentieth century, in part because it mapped well into the classroom of a growing academic discipline, whereby a teacher could convey to spellbound students the mysteries revealed by the craft of close reading. Its account of the autonomy of literature, moreover, provided an approach to literary studies that made a virtue of skirting politically controversial material, and so probably suited the disposition of those conformist times. It was succeeded, at least in America, by theory, as first structuralism (borrowed from anthropology and linguistics) and then deconstruction (borrowed largely from philosophy) swept through English departments. Although it imagined itself as a departure from the mandarin certainties of New Criticism, in many ways deconstruction could be perceived as the reductio ad absurdum of New Criticism. Arguing that all meanings are ultimately unstable and undecidable, deconstruction made the destabilising ingenuity of the reader into an implicit evaluative category of criticism, at least as powerfully as New Criticism had argued for tension and ambiguity. And whereas New Criticism treasured and for the most part practised pellucid prose, in deconstruction the obscurity of the critic’s own writing far too frequently substituted for the profundity of the critic’s insights. Running parallel with the emergence of theory was the rise of feminism and feminist criticism. Particularly in its Renaissance manifestations, feminist criticism offered a dynamic blend of historicism, theory, and scholarship. With painstaking rigor and scholarly deliberation, feminist critics rescued texts and authors that are now a central part of our discussion of the period (Mary Wroth, Amelia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn are just a few of the names that must be on surveys of the period now, and were not in the late 1970s). Feminism also brought new ways of thinking about the status of women and men in canonical works, reminding us of the frequently insidious workings of patriarchy, and the shockingly limited prospects for women. Feminist criticism emphasised that the symbolic violence against women enacted so frequently in Renaissance literature was intimately tied to the real violence against women sanctioned by Renaissance culture. Feminism, moreover, brought a deconstructive suspicion to the gender dynamics of Renaissance literature. The power purportedly bestowed on 19

part i: rethinking texts and readers women over their male lovers in Renaissance love poetry, for example, was revealed to be mere mystification, a strategy for constraining female power and agency. Feminism, furthermore, gave us the tools to explore the damage that inequality does to women, to men, and to the prospects for their possible mutually advantageous relations. As a result, feminist criticism proved to be not just a movement but rather a necessary component of all engagement with earlier literature. Theory and feminist criticism certainly helped shake up the boundaries between literature and culture. Indeed, one could argue that theory in particular whetted the appetite for the very history it rejected, creating a craving for context, for history, and for political significance. Literature seemed far too important to be only about itself. And so historicism returned with a vengeance, advertising its novelty, and perhaps its links to New Criticism in its name – New Historicism.6 Stephen Greenblatt, its founder and leading practitioner, initially framed New Historicism as an edgier, suppler form of the older historicism, one less involved in portraying something like an ‘Elizabethan world picture’, and one more involved in uncovering the sites of ideological contestation and subversion buried in literature. Greenblatt also emphasised that New Historicism should exhibit a greater methodological self-awareness than either the older historicism or New Criticism. Drawing largely from anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, Greenblatt urged interpretations that were fully conscious of their own cultural contingencies. The differences between New Criticism and New Historicism even played out in terms of their preferred genres of literature: whereas New Criticism had focused on poetry, New Historicism centred its attentions on drama. But the continuities were profound, if disguised. Whereas New Criticism discovered its evaluative criteria in tension and ambiguity, New Historicism emphasised the subversion and containment of dominant discourses. In retrospect, moreover, it was perhaps too easy to find subversion and contestation in drama, since without opposition there is no drama. New Historicism was very powerful and seductive (this author was among the many that succumbed to its attractions), but it also had enormous blind spots, which were all the more glaring for the success of its most pervasive claims. Critically, New Historicism for the most part left out religion (although it is often forgotten that the first two chapters of New Historicism’s foundational text, Greenblatt’s Renaissance SelfFashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980), are about William Tyndale, the translator of Luther and the Bible into English, and Thomas More, Catholic controversialist and martyr; and these chapters still thrill and edify). 7 Religion was frequently imagined to be at most a mystification of terrestrial power (rather than the other way around).8 At least in its 20

schoenfeldt: impractical criticism early moments, moreover, New Historicism left out gender. And New Historicism for the most part left out poetry. New Historicism was frequently, and perhaps appropriately, taken to task for its tendency to treat history as a repertoire of arresting anecdotes rather than a complex texture of interlocking discourses and partial documents. It became almost a cliché to open a New Historicist essay with a stunning anecdote whose relevance the critic would then unpack with a rigour and intensity worthy of New Criticism. Although many of its formations were overt rejections of the tenets of deconstruction, New Historicism inherited many recessive traits from the latter. The interpretive destabilisation deconstruction coveted, for example, was transmuted into the subversion New Historicism applauded. Each of these disparate approaches brought something of value to literary study. Different texts, and different elements in the same texts, would respond to different approaches differently. By using them together, we can perhaps develop a fuller appreciation of literary production. When soldered together by a reader eager to apply interpretive pressure, and to use all social, historical, and cultural materials at hand, these myriad approaches can help us begin to apprehend even the most complex texts from the distant past. In this way, close reading and historical context function to conjoin disparate but contiguous and overlapping discourses. Our analyses are much more substantial when we allow these to work together, reading historical documents with the rigor normally bestowed on explicitly literary texts, and analysing literary artefacts amid the various lines of force produced by their culture. And some poets demand both historical knowledge and formal analysis simultaneously. Andrew Marvell, for example, is a writer whose edgy, ironic work is almost impossible to appreciate without deep knowledge of his turbulent context as well as recognition of his formal ingenuity. In their book on Andrew Marvell, Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker (a historian and a literary critic working together) describe their engagement with this agile and elusive poet as ‘an attempt to honor the triangulation of the life, the work, and the imagination’.9 I like the image of the triangle, which implies a kind of equitable emphasis on life, work, and imagination. The word ‘honour’ works brilliantly here as well, suggesting both the high esteem in which writers and their work should be held, and the profoundly civil privilege, which we are too prone to take for granted, of getting to spend time exploring their works. In describing the arduous if convivial labour of such fully contextual reading, William Gass develops an appropriately civil metaphor for this implicitly social practice: ‘The cultural envelopes that poems come in are not always misleading and useless. Sometimes society, psychology, 21

part i: rethinking texts and readers commerce, and custom contribute to a text like manners at a banquet’.10 This sense that disparate cultural phenomena might make differential contributions to our efforts to comprehend texts from the past evinces a richly diverse but concentrated critical conversation. We should not, Gass argues, discard these envelopes that surround our literary heritage, but rather treat them with something of the attention we regularly bestow on their contents. And we should not discard the various methodologies that work to open different cultural envelopes. I would like to argue that the time is right for a reconsideration of the virtues of fiercely close readings that search out rather than suppress their historical underpinnings. Such readings would demonstrate just how completely formal analysis is tied by tacit but secure stitches to historical scholarship. As David Scott Wilson-Okamura argues, ‘to insist on style in a period obsessed with style is not mere formalism; it is good historicism.’11 Indeed, we need only attend to Milton’s thoughtfully politicised statements about his choice of verse form for Paradise Lost to see just how profoundly amalgamated aesthetics and history can be: The measure is English heroic verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in Greek, and Virgil in Latin; rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have expressed them. Not without cause therefore some both Italian, and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme both in longer and shorter  works, as have also long since our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.  This neglect then of rhyme so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to  be esteemed an example  set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.12

For Milton, writing in blank verse is not only an effort to find in English a form and language equal to the glories of the ancients; it is rather a revolutionary act commensurate with reclaiming ‘ancient liberty’ from a ‘troublesome and modern bondage’. It also aligns him with various continental writers (the ‘Italian and Spanish poets’ he invokes) against contemporaneous English fashion. For Milton, rhyme (which he had, of course, practised with great dexterity early in his career), by coercing the meaning 22

schoenfeldt: impractical criticism and truth of verse in order to satisfy a frivolous preference for trivial noise, is implicitly linked to a tyrannical and oppressive politics. Milton’s contemporary John Dryden, on the other hand, manifests a substantially different politics, and embraces the constraint of rhyme as a necessary curb on the boisterous enthusiasms that the English Revolution had loosed. In the dedication of The Rival Ladies (1664), Dryden argues that because ‘Imagination in a Poet is a faculty so Wild and Lawless that like an High-ranging Spaniel, it must have Cloggs tied to it, least it outrun the Judgment. The great easiness of Blanck Verse, renders the Poet too Luxuriant.’13 Dryden contends that rhyme ‘Bounds and Circumscribes the Fancy’, providing an indispensable curb on a potentially anarchic faculty. Dryden, then, shuns as wayward and unruly the very liberty of blank verse that Milton celebrates. As the examples of Milton and Dryden demonstrate, there is an inescapable politics of style. It may not always be announced as explicitly as Milton does – indeed, its tacit formation is often disguised as part of its historical and political determination. As Dryden implies, the heroic couplet that becomes all the rage in the Restoration is the perfect form to represent a culture eager for equipoise and moderation after the violence of Civil War.14 And this sense of the politics of form can cut both ways. When George Herbert writes a poem that looks a lot to us like free verse in ‘The Collar’, with lines that seem not to rhyme at all, it is not a moment of liberation but rather the representation of a choleric temper tantrum: I struck the board, and cry’d, No more.  I will abroad.  What? shall I ever sigh and pine?  My lines and life are free; free as the rode,  Loose as the winde, as large as store.     Shall I be still in suit?  Have I no harvest but a thorn  To let me bloud, and not restore  What I have lost with cordial fruit?  Sure there was wine    Before my sighs did drie it; there was corn  Before my tears did drown it.  Is the yeare onely lost to me?     Have I no bayes to crown it,  No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?  All wasted?  Not so, my heart: but there is fruit,  And thou hast hands.     Recover all thy sigh-blown age  On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute  Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,  Thy rope of sands, 

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part i: rethinking texts and readers Which pettie thoughts have made, and made to thee  Good cable, to enforce and draw,  And be thy law,  While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.  Away; take heed:  I will abroad.  Call in thy death’s-head there: tie up thy fears.  He that forbears     To suit and serve his need,  Deserves his load.  But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde  At every word,  Methoughts I heard one calling, Childe:     And I reply’d My Lord.15

This is a profoundly agitated poem, and its agitation is reflected brilliantly in its jagged, uneven form. Until the final four lines, moreover, the poem denies the reader the aural satisfaction of rhyme. While every line in the poem does rhyme, some are separated by as much as eighteen lines. It is hard to call these rhymes indeed, yet they demonstrate the tacit order that for Herbert suffuses the rebellion, and makes formally possible the poem’s quiet submission. Reading this poem properly, with attention to both form and history, requires that we reconsider our sometimes naive ideas of freedom and order. Although the speaker shouts ‘My lines and life are free’, this is not ‘free verse’. Our appreciation for the art of the poem is increased when we know that ‘choler’ is the humoral fluid thought to precipitate anger in the Galenic humoral paradigm Herbert inherits.16 The remarkable triple pun in the poem’s title – ‘choler’, ‘collar’ (an instrument of punishment and constraint) and ‘caller’ (the voice that calls at the end of the poem) – solicits knowledge from contemporaneous medicine and Herbert’s biography as well as close attention to the text of the poem. Reading with a historically informed attention to form, we realise that, for Herbert, disorder was not freedom, but a kind of internal oppression that Milton would have recognised, and shunned. While Herbert might seem to be disagreeing with Milton’s attitude to rhyme in the Preface to Paradise Lost, both poetic practices emerge out of a conviction that style and form are invariably intermeshed with social and political norms. For Herbert, rebellion looks and sounds like chaos, while for Milton truly revolutionary self-control exhibits the subtle regularity of blank verse, free of the tyranny of rhyme. Some really fine work has been attempted to attend to this rich broth composed of both form and history, seasoned lightly by theory. Much of this work has flown under the tattered flag of what is sometimes called New Formalism. The New Formalist approach seems to entail much of what I have been asking for here – an approach that attends to form, but 24

schoenfeldt: impractical criticism is innocent neither of history nor of the critical developments since the late 1960s. It is perhaps telling that one of its leading proponents, Heather Dubrow, is also a practising poet, since the attention to form invariably entails an appreciation of the writer’s craft, and the multiple forms of agency that go into producing any work of art. As Dubrow argues, form is a ‘product and producer of specified historical moments and eras, as well as the power dynamics within them.’17 Another critic who has never lost sight of the importance of poetic form, Richard Strier, usefully  suggests that formalism works best when conceived as a practice rather than an ideology. Approaching the subject from the field of Romanticism, Marjorie Levinson argues that there is nothing in New Formalism that would prevent it from having a conspicuous political goal.18 If we have learned anything over the last century of the discipline, it is that the various tools of theory, the matter of history, and techniques of close reading can help us parse out the rich and complex relationship that a text inevitably generates with its myriad contexts. Indeed, much work has been engaging with the affective dimensions of Renaissance literature, leading critics to interrogate the relations between our own attitudes to emotion and those of earlier times.19 This inquiry has in fact led us back to some of the materials of the older historicism, against which New Criticism was a deliberate reaction. Books like Lily B. Campbell’s Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (1930) or Herschel Baker’s The Image of Man (1947) discuss with great rigour the psychological and medical materials from the Renaissance that have energised affective criticism.20 While the work has perhaps become less monologic, less likely to declare without scepticism ‘what they thought then’, it has nonetheless continued the analysis of how what the Renaissance called ‘moral philosophy’ informed the prospects of literary representation. One reason for our continuing professional preference for political, historical, and medical readings over aesthetic ones is that they seem more pragmatic, more connected to the world of events. But I would argue that we need to stage a deliberate return to aesthetics, and particularly to the pleasure we receive from the creative deployment of aesthetic form.21 Amid our rages for theory and history and political significance, we have forgotten to attend to, much less articulate, our immense pleasure in reading these texts in the first place. Remarkably, history and politics can play a significant role in this process. My admiration for Milton is all the greater for his abiding display of political courage, and I would argue that his great epic of the fall is an even more magnificent poem for his dedication to what he called ‘the good old cause’. Milton could never have conveyed the poignancy of the failed revolution of the devils had he not known bitterly the failure of the revolution of the saints. 25

part i: rethinking texts and readers While we have been paying attention to the role of affect in the past, then, we have neglected to attend to our own affective engagements with these robustly moving texts. Perhaps this derives from the fact that we share with the Renaissance an embarrassment about our own sources of pleasure, even if we have largely managed to undo the blanket moral condemnation of pleasure that the Renaissance inherited and endorsed. Pleasure is perhaps the most ineffable and impractical goal of reading, but, paradoxically, the more we know about a poet’s life and world, the more capable we are of experiencing those bolts of electricity that leap from a page written in the distant past into our very souls and bodies. In our efforts to uncover the historical dimensions of literature, then, we for the most part forgot to account for those wondrous moments of transubstantiation – the only kind I have ever known – when the metre, and the sound, and the rhyme, and the form, and the content, and the context all come together and produce real magic. Always ahead of the game, William Empson aptly describes the incendiary pleasures of reading splendid poetry in his brilliant and inexhaustible Seven Types of Ambiguity: ‘what often happens when a piece of writing is felt to offer hidden riches is that one phrase after another lights up and appears as the heart of it; one part after another catches fire’.22 Shakespeare will even write sonnets about this practice, asking how his creations might manage the minor marvel of transmuting ephemeral emotion into something that stirs another across space and time.  Sonnet 65 explicitly hopes for ‘this miracle … That in black ink my love may still shine bright’ (line 14).23 How, Shakespeare wonders, does a writer transmit through diaphanous words and transient materials an affection that is even more fleeting than the beings who experience it into something touching eternity. I would argue that we need a critical approach that allows us to appreciate just how historically contingent is this aspiration to eternity. We also need a critical language supple enough to express the complex pleasures and pains such poems articulate, and that can register unabashedly our own complex pleasures and challenges in encountering these luminous texts from the past. Some of that pleasure may derive at least in part from the intellectual gratification of apprehending subtle patterns, untangling intricate syntax and obscure imagery, in carefully wrought writing. Our poet laureate of obscurity and its attendant pleasures was John Donne. Ben Jonson records that Donne even wrote one poem just ‘to match Sir Ed: Herbert in obscureness’. Indeed, Jonson declared that ‘Donne himself, for not being understood, would perish’.24 And Jonson was in part correct, as Donne’s reputation has oscillated wildly over the centuries, reminding us of the historically contingent categories of literary value, and literary pleasure.25 But Donne repeatedly risked obscurity 26

schoenfeldt: impractical criticism because he understood well the intellectual attraction of suddenly comprehending something difficult. Amid their myriad wonders, Donne’s sermons are as close as will get to his ars poetica. In one sermon he describes an aesthetic of deliberate obscurity, praising the rhetorical technique of those teachers who ‘taught the People by parables and darke sayings’. Such teachers ‘had a power and dominion over the affections of their Disciples, because teaching them by an obscure way, they created an admiration, and a reverence in their hearers’.26 Donne suggests that like these great teachers, Jesus ingeniously worked through strategic obscurity: hee astonished them with these reserved and darke sayings, and by the subsequent interpretation thereof, gained a reverend estimation amongst them … For those Parables, and comparisons of a remote signification, were calld by the Jews, Potestates, Powers, Powerfull insinuations.31

Donne here imagines Jesus as perhaps the first practitioner of what would come to be called metaphysical poetry. While John Dryden and then Dr Johnson would ultimately condemn Donne for astonishing his auditors by ‘comparisons of a remote signification’, viewing such as a violation of the emergent principles of Augustan decorum, Donne here praises Jesus explicitly for using obscurity as a powerful homiletic tactic. If heaven can be compared to a mustard seed, perhaps lovers can be compared to the legs of a compass, as Donne would famously do in ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’. And when both startling comparisons are fully worked out, the pleasure is at least as profound as the edification. Authors from the Renaissance occasionally describe their literary pleasures, and perhaps we can take a lesson from them. Sidney called poetry a ‘medicine of cherries’, at once sensuous and salutary.27 In ‘The Churchporch’, Herbert knew that he could use poetry for evangelical purposes, to ‘make a bait of pleasure’, since ‘A verse may find him who a sermon flies, / And turn delight into a sacrifice’. In his essay ‘Of My selfe’ Abraham Cowley has a fascinating account of the origins of his desire to become a poet – it began with the powerful effect of pleasure that a stimulated imagination finds in truly wonderful literature: I believe I can tell the particular little Chance that filled my Head first with such Chimes of Verse, as have never since left ringing there: For I remember when I began to read, and to take some Pleasure in it, there was wont to lye in my Mother’s Parlour (I know not by what accident, for she her self never in her Life read any Book but of Devotion) but there was wont to lie Spencer’s Works. This I happen’d to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the Stories of the Knights, and Giants, and Monsters, and brave Houses, which I found every where there: (Tho’ my Understanding had little to do with all this) and by degrees with the Tinkling of the Rhyme and Dance of the

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part i: rethinking texts and readers Numbers, so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve Years old, and was thus made a Poet.28

This is a remarkable story of the primal love of books, fantasy, and the imagination. Perhaps what we need is a criticism capable of attending with rigour and precision to the ways in which tinkling rhyme and dancing numbers (contra Milton) can produce such abiding pleasure and commitment in the reader. In the novel Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, the narrator exclaims: ‘What a curious vanity it is of the present to expect the past to suck up to it.’29 We do not need the past to suck up to us in order to find pleasure in it. Indeed, one of the many rewards of reading these intransigent texts from the past in their cultural contexts is that it prevents us from liking only those parts of the past that make us feel better about ourselves. We can certainly see in these texts the roots of our own highest aspirations and worst prejudices. But we should never seek out only those moments that vindicate current political concerns. Dealing with texts from the past in a fully historical way prevents us from indulging in the study of the past as a fulfilment of narcissistic gratification. When I first began teaching Renaissance literature, I would try to interest students in early modern culture by grasping desperately at facile relevance. Now I try to show them that the past is wildly, incorrigibly different from our own time, and that those scattered moments of resemblance that do emerge are far from flattering. By studying these strange and wonderful texts from the past amid all the discourses and pressures and anxieties and pleasures from which they emerged, we engage in a deeply impractical criticism embedded in a salutary antagonism between an always elusive present and a decidedly partial past. I certainly do not want to suggest that pleasure somehow escapes the pressures of history that this essay has tried to fathom. While pleasure is perhaps as close to a universal sensation as is imaginable, what gives pleasure is deeply variable and wildly subjective, across individuals, and cultures, and time. Pleasure, of course, is not free from politics; as Michel Foucault among others has taught us, pleasure has a politics, and only by coming to terms with that fact might one be able to ‘counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges’.30 There is, moreover, a profound element of class in the sensations of pain and pleasure, in the Renaissance, as in our day. Pain was, and is, the quotidian domain of the labouring classes. As Robert Herrick reminds the festive labourers at the end of ‘The Hock Cart’, this pleasure is like raine, Not sent ye for to drown your paine, But for to make it spring againe.    (lines 53–5)31

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schoenfeldt: impractical criticism The triple rhyme and fascinating ambiguity suggest that even holiday pleasure only intensifies the suffering of the labourers. And pain has a particular attachment to gender because of the particular agonies of childbirth, and the general oppressions of patriarchy. In Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum (1611), Amelia Lanyer cleverly connects the procreative pain of childbirth and the social agonies of subjection to the salvific pain of Jesus, suggesting that because of their abject cultural position, women have a particularly privileged access to the torments of their saviour.32 Even when it is experienced, moreover, pleasure has trouble making its way into language, and we need to cherish whatever surprising vestiges manage to surface. In her analysis of recipe books, Wendy Wall confesses that ‘Because of my training as a literary scholar, I was surprised to find that early recipe books invited housewives to take pleasure in culinary artifice. So many literary texts echo sermons and conduct books that view housewifery as a moral labor’.33 Like Wall, we need to be more alert to the discourses of pleasure that do emerge, however unexpectedly. And we need to be more aware of how much pleasure is involved in our own literary engagements. We have perhaps cheated pleasure of its full i­ntellectual vocabulary by making it primarily about sex. The ‘unforbidden pleasures’ of reading and eating and cooking and writing and teaching are fully worthy of our most rigorous critical and moral attention.34 A focus on aesthetic pleasure, then, is not necessarily elitist. In our grim, grey world, giving and receiving pleasure can be a robust political act. We need all the tools we can find in order to begin to understand the exuberant, if volatile, interdependence of political and literary cultures in early modern England and beyond. And we need to remember that these tools have different but interlocking occasions and uses. As Zwicker has argued, the book trade was (and is) a commercial enterprise, and ‘the commerce of books reminds us that literature was not only an aesthetic and social enterprise but also part of an exchange economy, and that economics and aesthetics though they may in some deep ways be bound together can work by very different overt logics’.35 Sorting out these various logics through rigorous scholarship, and tracing their subtle and manifest effects on literature, is much of the abiding work of the discipline of literary criticism. While we do so, though, we should not ignore some of the things that drew so many of us to literature in the first place. A practice dedicated to discovering the origins of various literary and cultural phenomena should never forget its own origins, even when those are shadowed by affect and embarrassment. If Practical Criticism completely effaced authorial and contextual information in search of the mirage of a pure reading experience, what we need now is a deliberately impractical criticism, one 29

part i: rethinking texts and readers that would revel in every cultural and formal detail that might be relevant to a decidedly impure but ultimately enriched reading experience. If we are fully alert to aesthetics and attentive to historical meaning, the works will frequently tell us something about how they should be read. And then we may confess without embarrassment our great pleasure at the thrill of apprehending language as form and sound and sense and evidence simultaneously, and do all we can to make that wondrous experience available to others. Notes  1 This intriguing quotation is frequently, and falsely, attributed to Yogi Berra, who really did say, ‘I really didn’t say everything I said.’ I would like to thank Robert Weisbuch and Heather Dubrow, whose incisive comments greatly improved this essay. And I would particularly like to thank my first college English teacher, Steven Zwicker, whose probing questions about the relations between literature and history I am still trying to answer, a few decades later.  2 Two works have been making a point of reinstalling pleasure in our critical conversation. In The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Richard Strier argues that the Renaissance was less dour and more exuberant than criticism tends to allow. In Futile Pleasures: Early Modern Literature and the Limits of Utility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), Corey McEleney finds in both Renaissance texts and Renaissance criticism an ambivalence about pleasures that are not redeemed by narratives of utility.  3 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929).  4 W. Empson, 7 Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), p. 1.  5 Empson, ‘Donne the space man’, in J. Haffenden (ed.), Essays on Renaissance Literature, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1:114.  6 The Power of Forms and the Forms of Power in the Renaissance, S. Greenblatt (ed.), a special issue of Genre, 15.1–2 (1982). We often forget that this approach was originally described as a ‘poetics of culture’ by Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 5. This might have been a more felicitous title, since it suggested that the pressures of close analysis developed in the study of poetry would now be applied to the broader texts of cultural discourse. And in the United Kingdom, similar approaches emerged under the title of Cultural Materialism, drawing largely on the gripping work of Raymond Williams, primarily The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), and Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Interestingly, Greenblatt has spoken of being influenced by Williams when he studied at Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship.  7 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, ch. 1, ‘At the table of the great: More’s selffashioning and self-cancelling’, pp. 11–73, and ch. 2, ‘The word of God in the age of mechanical reproduction’, pp. 74–114.  8 Notable exceptions to this generalisation include D. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the

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schoenfeldt: impractical criticism English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), and The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, Subjectivity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998); and R. Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University Press, 1986).  9 D. Hirst and S. N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 8. 10 W. Gass, ‘Learning from a modern master’, NYRB (20 June 2013), reviewing The Fourth Dimension of a Poem and Other Essays, by M. H. Abrams. 11 D. S. Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 3. 12 J. Milton, The Complete Poems, ed. J. Leonard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 119. 13 J. Dryden, dedicatory preface to The Rival Ladies (London, 1664), in E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg et al. (eds), The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956–2000), 8:101. 14 For a different reading of the politics of the couplet, see J. P. Hunter, ‘Formalism and history: binarism and the Anglophone couplet’, MLQ, 61:1 (2000), pp. 109–29. 15 G. Herbert, The English Poems, ed. H. Wilcox. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). The text in Wilcox’s admirable edition generally follows 1633, the first edition, but in line 21, I have included the correction of the 1638 (fifth) edition, replacing ‘thy cold dispute / Of what is fit and not forsake thy cage’ with ‘thy cold dispute / Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage.’ 16 See my Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 17 H. Dubrow, Deixis in the Early Modern English Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like ‘Here’, ‘This’, ‘Come’ (New York: Palgrave, 2016), p. 121. 18 See New Formalisms and Literary Theory, ed. V. Theile and L. Tredennick (New York: Palgrave 2013); R. Strier, ‘How formalism became a dirty word and why we can’t do without it’, in M. D. Rasmussen (ed.), Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 207–15; the whole volume attests to the power of theoretically informed formal engagement. M. Levinson, ‘What is new formalism?’, PMLA, 122:2 (2007), pp. 558–69. For something of a manifesto of New Formalism, see S. J. Wolfson, ‘Reading for form’, MLQ, 61:1 (2000), pp. 1–16. Dubrow and Strier, incidentally, were co-editors of one of the signal anthologies of New Historicism, The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). See also F. Bogel, New Formalist Criticism: Theory and Practice (New York: Palgrave 2013); B. Burton and E. Scott-Baumann (eds), The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and A. B. Coiro and T. Fulton (eds), Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 19 G. K. Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). S. Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). G. K. Paster, K. Rowe, and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of

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part i: rethinking texts and readers Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and the essays collected in K. Craik and T. Pollard (eds), Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 20 See, for example, H. Baker, The Image of Man: A Study of the Idea of Human Dignity in Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance (New York: Harper, 1947); L. B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930); T. Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1951); and R. L. Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare’s Plays (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1927). 21 In Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), M. K. Blasing offers a provocative account of the psychological origins of some of this pleasure. 22 Empson, 7 Types, p. xi. 23 W. Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. C. Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 24 ‘Conversations with William Drummond’, in Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. G. Parfitt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 464, 466. 25 See N. D. Nace, ‘Donne in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, forthcoming in M. Schoenfeldt (ed.), John Donne in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 26 J. Donne, Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953–62), 7:315–16. 27 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. G. Shepherd, rev. R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 96. 28 The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Abraham Cowley, ed. A. B. Grosart (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1881), 2:340. 29 J. Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (London: Cape, 1984), p. 130. 30 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 157. 31 The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. T. Cain and R. Connolly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 32 A. Lanyer, Poems: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. S. Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). On Lanyer’s brilliantly gendered reading of Christ’s suffering, see my ‘The gender of religious devotion: Amelia Lanyer and John Donne’, in D. Shuger and C. McEachern (eds), Religion and Culture in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 209–33. 33 W. Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern Kitchen (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 266, n. 51. Wall devotes an entire chapter to ‘Pleasure: kitchen conceits in print’, pp. 65–111. 34 A. Phillips, Unforbidden Pleasures (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), argues that by emphasising transgressive pleasures, we underestimate the gratification available from such quotidian sanctioned pursuits. 35 Zwicker, ‘“May You Live in Interesting Times”: the literature of civil war, revolution, and restoration’, in M. J. Braddick (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 469.

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2

‘Small portals’: Marvell’s Horatian Ode, print culture, and literary history Joad Raymond

True poems constitute Kingdoms, Kingdoms of Last, Lost, and Little Things. The true poem is a community of words formed from the clutter of life, and by virtue of its ceremonies the true poem confers citizenship on all the modest items which cover, for instance, a work-torn desk like mine with their concerns: car keys, copper coins, sulfur-colored legal sheets, small gray wires strung from silent black machines, paste, clips, bands, pens, paper cups and calling cards, each item, every name, shifting as necessary to stand for or be replaced by another set of office sit-abouts … William H. Gass1

Literary critics have been exploring the arena of early modern print culture with increasing enthusiasm: enthusiasm for the intrinsic interest of pamphlets and ephemera as part of the imaginative discourse of their times, for their usefulness as a context for canonical texts. No one has done this more elegantly, or with more of an eye to the literariness that remains within the literary-contextualised and unliterary-contextualised text, than Steven Zwicker. Critics have searched literary texts for associations, trace echoes and appropriations from print culture. So common is this in Marvell studies that it has led to a call for improved stress-testing; though it is clear that his poetry does have patterns of echoing that are distinct from those of other poets.2 Critics have identified a wealth of allusions to wider print culture in canonical texts, and begun to map a stratum of public language, the language of pamphlets, newspapers, and political discourse, with which literature traffics, picks up, and discards in its periods. Sometimes, this has been framed in terms of putting literature in a modified version of a Habermasian ‘public sphere’. Less attention has been paid to the – surely necessary and complementary – processes of ‘separation’ and ‘transformation’, if those are the right words. We know that literary texts borrow, appropriate, refashion these other texts, and we know that literary texts sometimes seek to rise above the fray by professing a disdain for the demotic, but how do these texts manage practically to maintain a distance while absorbing? 33

part i: rethinking texts and readers Such critical analysis would benefit from a fuller understanding of the literary nature of political argument and journalism, its cultural location in the sphere of demotic print. In Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (1993), Zwicker observes that in the century between Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (c. 1579) and Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681) literature was not only politicised but also polemicised. The primary vehicle for polemic during these years was the pamphlet, and pamphlets shared with polemicised literature a material self-consciousness, an attention to the form of publication and its cultural associations. So we might similarly argue that in the course of being polemicised literature was in the same period pamphletised.3 Ironically, though, we know a great deal more about the abstruse, refined, metaphysical, erudite, and ambiguous world of literary texts than we know about the mundane, worldly, and immediate business of pamphleteering.4 Such an understanding would shed much light on the interconnections between the languages of literature, political argument, and journalism. We also need, however, an account of the separation between print culture and literary writing, of the valves that govern the movement of words and their aesthetic potential. The literariness of the Horatian Ode Marvell’s An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland is a lesson in the potency of the interplay between interpenetration and separation. It is with good reason that so much criticism has been wrapped up with detecting allusion and echo: Marvell is a magpie, a ventriloquist, a purloiner and transformer of other people’s words. So mistrustful of detection that he would not share a drink with a man in whose hands he would not trust his life,5 when he imparts his poems to his readers he does not trust them with a lyric voice that is markedly his. What characterises Marvell’s poetry is a voice that is at once a tissue of half-quotations, a public language that cannot perfectly be traced back to a particular origin, but seems to be spoken simultaneously by a character standing next to him, in the garden, at Miles’s coffee house, in the Commons’ lobby. This language has been extensively recovered in Nigel Smith’s edition of the poems. The first-person pronouns of Marvell’s lyrics seldom articulate participation in a community, the ‘grammar of commitment’, as Paul Hammond has argued. Instead, ‘He seems to be at once Echo and Narcissus’.6 The same is sometimes true of his prose: the voice of The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) slips between the tolerationist MP’s and that of an orthodox, pious clergyman; and the constituency letters, which Marvell wrote for nearly twenty years, are those of a diligent public servant who is at once a faithful reporter of details and a reticent commentator. 34

raymond: ‘small portals’ The litmus test for Marvell’s personal political allegiances during the 1650s, and the preferred case study for his aesthetics of ambivalence, has long been the Horatian Ode. The exchange between Cleanth Brooks and Douglas Bush between 1946 and 1953 established it as fertile soil for competing accounts of criticism and its proper relationship with historical interpretation; they agreed on the complexity of its characterisation of Charles and Cromwell, though they disagreed over the degree of the poet’s Royalist sympathies and over the appropriate use of evidence in addressing the intentions and meaning of a poem.7 John M. Wallace’s Destiny His Choice (1968) brilliantly situated the poem among the contested political loyalties following the execution of the king. In his account, the poem’s allegiances were clear, and its expression of commitment to Cromwell untroubled by ambivalence even though the support was conditional. Wallace articulated the clearest and most nuanced analysis of the political context; the poniard of a formalist reading was a flimsy weapon against the armour of such scholarship.8 Subsequent to Wallace, critics have been more inclined to find traces of royalism in Marvell’s poem, and though it is no longer described as straightforwardly satirical of Cromwell, it is seen as a divided poem, divided by competing allegiances, political and personal, ambiguity, ambivalence, or finely balanced judgement. Its fault lines lie along the boundaries between Cromwellian and republican sentiments, between Royalist nostalgia and realpolitik, between personal meditation and public deliberation.9 The most persuasive of these critics find in it a negotiation between political submission to the new regime, and former Royalist allegiances and f­riendships, a negotiation that recognises that mid-century politics cannot be reduced to three or more parties.10 Accounts of the famed ambiguities of the Ode, its careful suspension of judgement, nostalgia, classical (and not Christian) framework, balancing of past against future, and juxtaposition of panegyric and elegy, posit a dialogue between competing perspectives, one sentimentally monarchical, the other something else. Robert Wilcher, in a history of Royalist writing in the mid-seventeenth century, presents the Ode’s representation of Charles I as an example of Marvell’s divided attitude to the king, combining limited sympathy with a sense of realpolitik.11 The former is the perspective of emotive royalism; the other is embedded in the language of news and pamphlets during the Engagement controversy. The force of Marvell’s poem lies in part in the way these balance each other; similarly, Brooks wrote that in the poem admiration and condemnation of Cromwell were mutually reinforcing.12 Blair Worden has written fulsomely on how ‘the celebrated poise and urbanity of the poem have been created out of an urgent preoccupation with current political debate’.13 Worden, with 35

part i: rethinking texts and readers David Norbrook, Michael Wilding and others, following Wallace, traced the echoes of the political languages of the times in the poem: Lucan, the Engagement controversy, the voguish (in 1650) Machiavelli, Cromwell’s letters to Parliament.14 For Worden, however, ‘if not a Royalist poem, the ode has roots in keen and bitter Royalist feeling’, and it is the abundances within the poem – its hatred of the regicide, its complex representation of Cromwell, its engagement with political arguments, and the time-bound language of those arguments, its paradoxical impulses – that makes the poem’s poise so remarkable. Yet, the language of ephemera must be transmuted and made timeless in order to be reconstituted as poetry. ‘Language has been immortalized too: the language of ephemeral tracts and newspapers, which is near enough to the surface of the poem to suggest a younger Marvell as close to the world of political journalism as the Restoration MP and Whig pamphleteer were to be’.15 Worden’s evidence speaks more to the close relationship of the poem to contemporary political discourse than to ambivalence or separation, and given the intricacies required to reconstruct the association between verse and the language of the political moment – surely even more difficult for the twenty-first century reader than the allusions to Lucan and Horace – timelessness or immortality do not seem appropriate terms with which to characterise the poem.16 The poem is, in fact, intensely vulnerable to time. The poem absorbs, as several critics have noted, contemporary pamphlet writing about de facto authority, engagement, and political submission. The erect sword that concludes the poem has a longer genealogy in English political-historical writing, but had been given a revised and powerful contemporary valence in Anthony Ascham’s Discourse (1648) and especially Marchamont Nedham’s Case of the Commonwealth (1650), works central to the Engagement controversy.17 However, the separation  between these writings, between imaginative literature and the purportedly non-literary business of news and pamphlets, is more difficult to speak of. For Wilcher and Worden, the encounter between literature and pamphlets or newsbooks is polite and distant; the poet performs alchemy  and the quotidian is made immortal. This account does not, however, describe or define the boundaries between the two. It also assumes that poets understand the boundaries in the same way that twenty-first century critics do. Yet, in Marvell’s Ode one becomes the other, and even if we view this as a one-way relationship entirely – neglecting the s­ elf-conscious use of literary devices in ‘non-literary’ writings, and the way ‘ephemera’ such as newspapers and pamphlets can shape the prevailing aesthetics of the times, which may indeed be governed by quite ­different rules – this process of transformation demands some explanation. 36

raymond: ‘small portals’ Writing about the nature and power of poetry, the late poet and essayist Charlie Williams says the following: I think that the primary business of poetry in our time – or at least poetry as I conceive it – is to offer evidence. We have to know what is there before us, we have to have the facts and to get them straight, because without a clear and at least relatively detailed knowledge of our condition and the condition of our world, how can we expect to accomplish what are our obvious tasks: to confront, to cure or comfort, solace or succor, to change, correct, resolve, take into account, come to terms with, redeem, surmount, transfigure or transform? … How will we save ourselves and save this vulnerable world that so desperately needs to be protected from its protectors?18

Focusing on a short and celebrated passage from the Horatian Ode, in this essay I examine some matter of Marvell’s engagement with the world of pamphlets and journalism, some textual echoes that show the poet, in Williams’s phrase, offering evidence in his poetry. In doing so, I want to push the significance of the intertextuality, and use it as an occasion for addressing some questions: what can it tell us about the literary qualities of the poetry? How is the poem separated from the reporting of the period? Can the poem usefully be a case study not (only?) for ambivalence and disengagement, but (also?) for the dependency of the literary on the nonliterary, or for the very instability of that distinction? Theatricality Most interpretations of the Horatian Ode have at their centre an account of the relationship between the poem’s representations of Cromwell and Charles, though the latter sits like a miniature portrait within the larger picture. It is the allegedly sympathetic representation of the king that forms the bedrock for accounts of the poem’s ambivalence towards Cromwell: … thence the royal actor born The tragic scaffold might adorn, While round the armed bands Did clap their bloody hands. He nothing common did, or mean, Upon that memorable scene; But with his keener eye The axe’s edge did try. Nor called the Gods with vulgar spite To vindicate his helpless right; But bowed his comely head Down, as upon a bed.

(lines 53–64)

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part i: rethinking texts and readers As Wallace argued, cogently and convincingly, this scene is not the heart of the poem but a stage in a clear progression of argument, ‘an incident in a narrative which begins with Cromwell’s extraordinary past and concludes with the expectancy of his glorious future’. Charles’s passive surrender endorses a change in loyalty to the new regime.19 No passage of Marvell’s poetry, not even the worldly First Anniversary (1655), is more like a piece of documentary realism than the portrait of the king.20 The passage adapts the language of theatricality in its presentation of the occasion. Executions were commonly theatrical: they were more or less scripted performances, informed by powerful conventions and expectations cognate to those of a literary genre, that relied on performance and display to communicate a message about soteriology and/or the state.21 Marvell’s ‘royal actor’ and ‘tragic scaffold’ have been interpreted as a gesture towards Royalist sympathies, because of the extensive appropriation by Royalists in the late 1640s of the theatre and theatrical metaphors as a symbol for their cause. From the closing of the theatres by parliamentary ordinance in September 1642, Royalists seized upon ‘high’ literary culture, and the stage in particular, as their particular preserve. Many represented Parliament’s sympathisers as ‘Puritans’ and fanatics, opposed to the theatre, inheritors of the tradition of Puritan anti-theatricalism.22 To assume that Marvell’s theatrical metaphors are necessarily a Royalist gesture is over-hasty on two grounds. First, theatricality and royalism were not identical. Nancy Klein Maguire, in her influential and informative study of the execution, overstates her case in writing that ‘theatrical discourse … was uniquely suited to the Royalists’, and that to present the execution as a ‘tragedy’ was unequivocally Royalist.23 Drama’s alliance with Royalist ideology was not unchallenged. Play pamphlets were used in support of various political positions in the 1640s, including trenchantly anti-Royalist polemics.24 There was no uniform, consistently pro-Puritan or anti-theatrical opinion in Parliament, and the closure of the theatres was rooted in specific concerns about disorder in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of war. The anti-theatrical tradition was moribund by 1642, and its rhetoric must have seemed strangely dislocated from political discourse, and in any case opposition to theatrical performances on religious grounds was not the exclusive preserve of the hotter sort of Protestants.25 The association between the theatre and theatrical metaphors and Royalist poetry and polemic was not fixed, uncontested, unbroken, uncomplicated. Secondly, theatrical metaphors cut both ways. The competing associations of theatre, and the openness of theatrical performance to rival interpretations and appropriations, suggests a different interpretation of Marvell’s ‘tragic scaffold’, in which the actor is less the flawed hero than a player king.26 Someone who had not witnessed the execution could, owing 38

raymond: ‘small portals’ to the transformations in news media over the preceding decade, have read about it. He or she might, for example, have purchased on 5 February a copy of the weekly newsbook A Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages in Parliament. There they would have read a suggestive description: This day the King was beheaded, over against the Banquetting house by White-Hall, The manner of Execution, and what passed before his death take thus … he was accompanyed by Dr. Juxon, Col. Thomlinson, Col. Hacker, and the Guards before mentioned through the Banqueting-house adjoyning, to which the Scaffold was erected, between Whitehall Gate, and the Gate leading into the Gallery from Saint. James: The Scaffold was hung round with black, and the floor covered with black, and the Ax and Block laid in the middle of the Scaffold.27

It was not only Charles’s self-disciplined conduct that was theatrical: his (Puritan?) executors drew on the customs of the theatre for the execution, draping the stage with black hangings, one of the generic conventions of a tragedy in the early modern theatre. The crowd, and the reader of the newsbook would have recognised and understood this visual sign at a glance. The newsbook that reported thus was approved by the parliamentary licenser Gilbert Mabbott.28 There was nothing intrinsically subversive about presenting the execution as a tragedy, in the specifically theatrical sense: this interpretation was encouraged by the arrangements for the execution that had been put in place by a committee appointed by the trial commissioners that represented the will of the High Court of Justice. Having arrived at execution as the only possible outcome of a negotiation in which neither party desired it, king and regicides collaborated on producing a piece of theatre, because it was as theatre that politics and justice were conducted and understood.29 Alexander More declared that the ‘drama’ of the king’s condemnation had to wait until the conspiratorial regicides found ‘willing actors’ and ‘patient spectators’.30 During the trial, the king alluded to Shakespeare’s Richard II; after it, Milton compared him to Richard III.31 Journalists of antithetical persuasions commonly represented the events of the 1640s as a tragedy. The author of the editorials of the Leveller newsbook The Moderate described the king’s plots against his own kingdom: ‘the Scene is laid, and the Tragedie soon after acted by Sea and Land, Domestick and Forraign Enemies, and with fire and sword’. The Royalist Mercurius Pragmaticus, published on the day of the execution, lamented: … the feat is now done, and Law and Equity must both give way: the Trayterous Tragedians are upon their Exit, and poor King CHARLES at the Brinke of the Pitt; The Prologue is past, the Proclamation made, His Sentence is given, and we daily expect the sad Catastrophie; and then behold! The Sceane is chang’d;

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part i: rethinking texts and readers England but now a glorious Monarchy Degraded to a base Democracy. The Play thus done, or rather the WORKE Finish’d; the Epilogue remains, to wit the Epitaph of a slaughter’d King; which I reserve to another Opportunity; hoping Heaven may prevent you, ere your Sceane be finish’d; (as you did those poor Players lately in the middle of their’s; not onely depriving them of their present subsistance, but the meanes of future) …32

This is certainly a Royalist deployment of theatre, but here the tragedians are the regicides and the script is the Parliament’s. The struggle to control the king’s image in 1649–50, between Eikon Basilike and its detractors, provides a nuanced ideological context for Marvell’s imagery. Eikon Basilike, an exculpatory narrative of the king’s reign, interspersed with his prayers, written in first person and purporting to be by the king himself, was the centrepiece for the cult of Charles the martyr. The text began as notes the king had written during his imprisonment, which were turned into a narrative by John Gauden, then perhaps partly revised by the king. Long before Marvell sat to write his Ode, this had become a commercial success, appearing in thirty-five editions, plus related products, in 1649 alone.33 Richard Helgerson argues that it was a ‘verbal icon’ but also a theatrical rather than a textual event, ‘a book that does everything it can to conceal its own bookishness, a book that strives in every way possible to place itself in the category of image and performance’.34 Eikon Basilike in fact avoids the language of theatrical performance; it was Milton who applied this to the king’s literary manifestation, and this fact is of critical significance to understanding the strategies and reception of the king’s book. Eikon Basilike presents Charles as a pious man of conscience, a suffering Christ sacrificed by and for his people. His integrity is fundamental to the exercise. Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler writes that the power of its narrative ‘depends on its presenting an internally consistent picture of one man’s point of view, rather than on its historical accuracy’.35 This is half of the formula: it also depends on the authenticity of the voice, the fact that this is testimony, the testimony of a man who is at once a conscientious, suffering Christian and a king. This is why Eikon Basilike does not, and could not, exploit the rhetoric of performance. While Charles’s followers could (and did) present his exit as a piece of theatre, for his ghost author to have done so would have undermined this central rhetorical manoeuvre of his text. When Commonwealth apologists argued that this was a stage-Charles, a figure reading from a script, these accusations were fiercely contested. The anonymous Eikon Alethine, the first repudiation of the king’s book, written, like Milton’s Eikonoklastes, as a set of animadversions, accused the book of ‘counterfeit[ing]’ the king.36 The author enjoins the reader ‘Hisse therefore this Mime of the 40

raymond: ‘small portals’ Stage’. Discussing the passing of the triennial bill –  the author follows Eikon Basilike’s chapter divisions – he writes ‘Behold at the first drawing the Curtain, how the Scæne is altered! We may already guesse our Poets’ that is, the author of Eikon Basilike’s ‘Comedy will prove a Tragedy, and his so seeming glorious beginning will conclude in a very sad, and bad Catastrophe’.37 Here, tragedy is the genre that the Royalist apologist writes, a false and misrepresenting narrative superimposed upon a set of events that betray the authentic historical facts testified to in the published declarations and papers of the king. Later, accusing the king and his supporters of fomenting tumult while the king was imprisoned at Holmby, he writes that ‘Neither could the vizors so disguise, but that a discerning eye could discover them by their voice, and gesture, who were the principall Whiffelers to bring the late King on the stage, to act the second part of Richard the second’. Not only does the author present Charles as an actor in a scripted interlude, but he reads Shakespeare’s play as an account of an autocratic king who is seeking opportunistically to reinvent himself as a suffering martyr.38 The Royalist response to Alethine, entitled Eikon e piste. Or, the faithfull pourtaicture of a loyal subject (1649), picked up the theatrical metaphor in an engraved frontispiece that shows Charles on a stage as both king writing at a desk and learned man standing backstage, suggesting that Charles was the authentic author of his book.39 Milton, hired by the Commonwealth to repudiate enemy propaganda, also exploited theatrical metaphors. Derek Hirst observes how restrained he is in his use of them, but Milton seems to have preferred the economy of insinuation in this instance (in contrast to the explicit and repeated abuse of Pro populo Anglicano defensio).40 Eikonoklastes conveys both the frivolousness of the court at times of crisis, and the careful stage management of the king’s conduct over the past decade. Milton signally ignored arguments and rumours that Eikon Basilike was ghost-written: perhaps he found greater rhetorical advantage in arguing that this actor-king was not someone else’s fabrication, but was genuinely and personally false. For Milton, the ‘royal actor born’ was, in the tradition of anti-theatrical polemic, pretending to be something he was not. The famous engraving of Eikon Basilike was, he wrote, ‘drawn out to the full measure of a Masking Scene, and sett there to catch fools and silly gazers’, but such ‘quaint Emblems and devices begg’d from the old Pageantry of some Twelf-nights entertainment at Whitehall, will doe but ill to make a Saint or Martyr’.41 Much of the king’s book is poetry, Milton avers, emphasising the breach of decorum rather than his contempt for poetry. Nonetheless, among Charles’s misdemeanours is fostering religious and cultural levity in his court: ‘who knows not the superstitious rigor of his Sundays Chappel, and licentious remissness of his Sundays Theater’. 41

part i: rethinking texts and readers More menacingly, Charles seems to have studied Shakespeare’s Richard III on the counterfeiting religious behaviour. Shakespeare is ‘the Closet Companion of these his solitudes’, and furnishes both Milton with the analysis of tyranny, and Charles with a textbook for accomplishing it.42 As an actor, Charles is unconvincing, reminding the audience that he is merely playing. When he finally succumbs to the need to call a parliament he finds the people ‘almost hissing him and his ill-acted regality off the Stage’. He seeks canonisation, but ‘Stage-work will not doe it’.43 Milton accepts Charles as the author of Eikon Basilike because he wants to present him as a hypocrite, and one aspect of this is his willingness to embrace duplicity, to be a player.44 It is precisely because Eikon Basilike evidences his authentic voice that the king can be shown to be lacking in conscience. For Milton, the king’s book betrayed him in his own words, just as The Kings Cabinet Opened had done in 1645, affecting a considerable, though short-term, propaganda victory for the parliamentary cause.45 Theatricality becomes falsehood, and the attempt to form an aesthetic object undermines political discourse.46 Thus, for Milton and others, to present the king as a ‘royal actor’ was potentially to undermine the narrative of a sincere, steadfast man of conscience. Milton and Marvell were not, as far as we know, acquaintances at this time, though Marvell had read Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, and would be associated with Milton and his Pro populo Anglicano defensio in 1653, the same year that Milton produced a letter of recommendation for the younger man.47 However, it is worth considering the likelihood that Marvell knew Eikonoklastes, and that the king of the Ode is more aligned to Milton’s player-king than Eikon Basilike’s sacrificial lamb. Let us return to Marvell’s ‘erect sword’, which is certainly indebted to Nedham’s Machiavellian Case of the Commonwealth and perhaps also to the ‘forward Sword’ of Lucan’s Caesar:

And for the last effect Still keep they sword erect:

Besides the force it has to fright The spirits of the shady night The same arts that did gain A pow’r must it maintain. (lines 115–20)48

It is also worth noting the following passage from Eikonoklastes: For Truth is properly no more then Contemplation; and her utmost efficiency is but teaching: but Justice in her very essence is all strength and activity; and hath a Sword put into her hand, to use against all violence and oppression on the earth … it were extreme partialitie and injustice, the flat denyall and overthrow of her self, to put her own authentic Sword into the

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raymond: ‘small portals’ hand of an unjust and wicked Man, or so farr to accept and exalt one mortal person above his equals, that he alone shall have the punishing of all other men transgressing, and not receive like punishment from men, when he himself shall be found the highest transgressor.49

Here, the sword is in the hands of Justice and overthrows tyrants. Joseph Jane, in Eikon Aklastos (1651), responded bitterly to Milton’s argument: ‘It’s the drift of the Rebell partie to confirme, and continue their power by the same Arts they have gained it, & deny justice to the memory of his Majest: as before obedience to his Government’.50 To some of which Milton might well have agreed: the sword was indeed necessary to preserve justice, both before and after the overthrow of the king. Perhaps Marvell had read this phrase, and perhaps he knew that a sword had been, after long debate, admitted into the courtroom during the trial of the king as a symbol of justice.51 Marvell’s poem looks forward to such an occasion of necessity, as Cromwell unsheathes his sword in anticipation of a war against the Scots to preserve the Commonwealth. Ambivalence Whether or not Marvell consciously echoes Milton, controversialists used theatrical metaphors both to support and to condemn the king, to identify a Royalist cultural preserve, and to present the king as a hypocrite. Marvell’s poem may be undertaking some of the same work as Milton’s prose, suggesting that Charles’s efforts to preserve an image of himself for posterity involve an element of performance that belies any simple equivalence between outward behaviour and inward sentiment. Marvell’s poised tone does not suggest Royalist writing in the period following the execution. Balance, distance, and ambivalence were not Royalist strategies in 1649–50. In contrast to the measured, neutral voice of A Perfect Diurnall, the Royalist Mercurius Pragmaticus howls: Nay, you may ene goe to rest now, your Great and Acceptable WORKE is done; the Fatall Blow is given, the Kingdome is translated to the Saints – Oh Horror! Blood! Death! Had you none else to reak your cursed mallice on, but the sacred Person of the King? cursed be your rage for it is fierce, and your malice for it is implacable.52

Thomas Corns finds a ‘recurrent sense of horror’ in the Ode and writes that Marvell ‘accentuates the grisliness of Charles’s end’; while Norbook suggests that Marvell (or the speaker in the Ode) conveys ‘the impression of facing the regicide coldly and unflinchingly’.53 To a contemporary, the calm and decorous end of the king, described without exclamation of horror, would have seemed distinctly unsympathetic. Ambivalence and 43

part i: rethinking texts and readers ambiguity were not Royalist modes in early 1649: they were anti-Royalist. The theatrical metaphor enables Marvell to report on the violence, but at the same time to allow distance, an emotional and historical distance, to intervene between the onlooker and the execution.54 It is not a Royalist slasher movie but journalism, reported with an acute eye for detail. It is wrong and anachronistic, misleadingly anachronistic, to find political even-handedness and well-tempered objectivity in the reportage here. Marvell describes the scene without passion, which is itself an ideologically rich, if not a partisan gesture. The bold coolness of the description also reflects the poem’s indebtedness to the news media of the time. The ‘armed bands’ are the cold-hearted and bloody-handed theatrical audience, of course, and they too would have been familiar to the reader of the periodical press: ‘There were divers companies of Foot and Horse, on every side the Scaffold, and the multitudes of people that came to be Spectators, very great’.55 Every contemporary commentator on the event made the point about the presence of armed bands, and it was probably the talk of every tavern from Southwark to Ullapool. They can be seen in numerous woodcuts and engravings from 1649 and after.56 Marvell develops his theatrical metaphor, but he does so through an acute observation of detail. We do not know for certain where Marvell was on 30 January 1649. He may well have been in London, and he might even have been an eyewitness to the events he describes. Alternatively, he could have heard them reported second-hand. Oral transmission was probably the most common source of the news, but some of Marvell’s details suggest that he read an account in a newsbook (and perhaps he read that newsbook to refresh his memory when writing the poem in the summer of 1650), or that his oral source was inflected with newsbook reports. In the middle of the seventeenth century oral, manuscript, and print transmission of news were not independent but shaped and transformed each other in all directions. Even standing before the Banqueting House, unless he were on the scaffold, Marvell would not have heard the king’s final speech. Echoes of this speech in the poem, then, suggest that Marvell read it in a newsbook or printed pamphlet. One of the Ode’s most redolent moments is the dramatic encounter between the king’s eye and the axe’s edge, as if the fortunes of the moment hang upon this encounter; as if the king is gauging whether the blade is of such a subtlety that it can cut, like Will’s knife in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, into a new political world; as if this sightline stages the real historical tournament or history as Hegelian dialectic. Marvell may be referring to or drawing upon what would have been the most famous visual representation of the king, which imaginatively exploits the power of the king’s eyes: the frontispiece of Eikon Basilike 44

raymond: ‘small portals’ (so widely reproduced that I will not do so here). In a composition that resembles an annunciation painting, the kneeling king, grasping a crown of thorns in his left hand, looks up through a window to a crown of glory in the sky.57 The image anticipates Charles’s final public words on the scaffold: ‘I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where no disturbance can be’. He added a single subsequent word, to Bishop Juxton, the even more marketable ‘Remember’, and Marvell recollects the ‘scene’ as ‘memorable’.58 Embedded in these lines is also a pun: ‘axe’s’ is a near-homophone for ‘acies’, the Latin word for blade and keen eyesight, hence the sharper eye tests the blade. Marvell, like Milton, seems to have relished a multilingual pun. However, there is a much more mundane reference here. The king did cast his eyes upon the blade twice during his last moments, as reported in A Perfect Diurnall. According to this report, the king interrupted himself in his last speech: ‘For the King, indeed I will not (then turning to a Gentleman that touched the Ax, said, Hurt not the Ax that may hurt me. For the King:) The Lawes of the Land will clearly instruct you for that’. And even closer to his end: Then turning to the Officers said, sirs, excuse me for this same: I have a good cause, and I have a gracious God; I will say no more: Then turning to col. Hacker, he said, Take care that they do not put me to pain; and sir this, and it please you: But then a Gentleman comming neer the Ax, the King said, Take heed of the Ax, pray take heed of the Ax: Then the King speaking to the executioner said, I shall say but very short prayers, and then thrust out my hands: Then the King called to D. Iuxton for his Night-cap, and having put it on, he said to the Executioner, does my haire trouble you? Who desired him to put it all under his cap, which the King did accordingly, by the help of the Executioner and the Bishop.59

Was the unidentified gentleman who approached the axe seeking to bless it? Was this an act of morbid voyeurism? Was a civil servant checking the arrangements one last time? The decorousness of the king’s ending very much depended on the sharpness of the axe. For if someone had handled the axe and dulled the blade, the decollation would be less clean. The blow would be more painful, and perhaps the executioner would need a second blow to sever the neck. Hence the common formula in pamphlet and newsbook accounts of executions, that the executioner severed the neck ‘at one blow’. A botched execution was not a pretty thing: occasionally, an executioner would end up sawing the last sinews with the blade. Severall Proceedings of State Affaires reported the execution of the Portuguese ambassador’s brother in 1654 thus: ‘When hee kneeled down to the Block, hee laid down his Crucifix at his mouth, esteeming that great Devotion, and in that posture had his head cut off, and was immediately dead upon the blow, but the head was not quite cut off from the body, but hung by 45

part i: rethinking texts and readers some skin, and sinews, or some such like, which by a sliding of the Axe was presently also cut and so severed’.60 A performance like this would not have made for stateliness, grace, or the good end that the king was hoping for. This is why the king repeatedly warned bystanders of the axe: he was moved both by anxiety and by showmanship. And this is why Marvell’s king tries the keen edge of the axe. He wants to know that it is sharp. Dramatised in this powerful poetic encounter – and Charles is still the royal actor here – is a startling literalmindedness. The eyes of Marvell’s king are fixed on something mundane: not a crown of everlasting glory, but the temperamental hardware that will send him to it. This is an earthly portrait of Charles. With what is the king’s eye so keen? His gaze is sharpened by fear that the axe has been blunted. The Latin pun works in two directions. Another of Marvell’s distinctive details, and another which suggests some sympathy with the king, is the graceful image of how the king ‘bow’d his comely Head, / Down as upon a Bed’, a gesture of ‘perfect acquiescence’, so peaceful it suggests historical inevitability, an end to monarchy that is as natural as the image of the sunrise so often used to defend monarchical succession.61 It quietly intimates that the king will not rise in the morning. Nor will his successor, who is conspicuously and emphatically absent from Marvell’s poem. There are many reasons, beyond the calm and admiring description of a king going to his death, why we should find something other than Royalist sentiment here. The image is once again embedded in the material facts of the execution, as indicated in a newsbook report of Charles’s first entrance onto the tragic scaffold: The King making a Passe upon the Scaffold, look’d very earnestly on the Block, and asked Col. Hacker if there were no higher; and then spake thus) directing his speech to the Gentlemen upon the Scaffold.62

The executioner’s block was unusually low, perhaps only six inches high, hence Charles’s objection.63 To stoop so low would be undignified. Yet this height had been decided by the committee making the arrangements, who were concerned that Charles might not cooperate in coming to a good end.64 Were he to offer physical resistance, then it would be easier forcibly to restrain him on a low block. In Marvell’s poem, the king’s final bow delicately reasserts the theme of theatricality conjoined with brute political force, but it also quietly records the concrete particulars of the news. The king bowed down because the block was unusually low, and he remarked upon this, earnest and puzzled, while standing on the scaffold. And he bows his head down as if sleepily to a bed because, as Perfect Diurnall reports, the king wore a ‘Night-cap’ to keep his hair out of the way. 46

raymond: ‘small portals’ Marvell is not alone in attending to these details. Sir John Berkenhead, polemicist and erstwhile editor of the Oxford Royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus (1643–45), published a pamphlet poem entitled Loyalties Tears Flowing after the Blood of the Royal Sufferer, Charles the I. &c. (1649), which deploys some of the same information. Charles is ‘convoy’d to his last Theatre’, where he ‘acts his Passions part’. The speaker notes the king’s attention to the axe: ‘Of’s Scepter did he e’r so tender seem / As of the Ax?’ Berkenhead’s king is, unlike Marvell’s, embracing death as a symbol of his martyrdom, not trying its sharpness. And Berkenhead’s king ‘wish’d … that Block had higher been’ so that the audience could see more clearly ‘how little he ashamed was of shame’.65 Berkenhead’s treatment of these details is at once more and less edgy than Marvell’s: less because their meaning is carefully worked out and applied; and more, because he feels the need to excuse the king’s words on the scaffold. The comparison between Berkenhead’s and Marvell’s poem affords a kind of stress-testing, and suggests that these particulars are consciously extracted from the newsbooks, and deployed in contrasting manners. Marvell’s portrait of the king is measured and reserved, but it is also entirely caught up with recording and presenting the evidence, the quotidian details of the historical moment. It is, in a word, reportage. And yet, it is the reportage that makes the poetry possible. A number of general questions arise directly from these observations about the way this passage of the poem is embedded in observing an historical event, some quite traditional, others less so. What element do newsbooks play in the composition of elegy in 1649? Why do Royalist newsbooks accept the narrative of events as presented in parliamentary newsbooks (though the opposition between Royalist and Parliamentarian needs complicating here, despite the extraordinarily polarised political discourse of 1649), choosing to gloss events rather than re-describe them? How does the expansion of printed news and controversy affect the relationship of the poet to the state? And so on. The explication of the convergence between the Ode and official news reporting demands a richer, more aesthetically – and politically – sensitive explanation than that it juxtaposes Royalist sympathies with Commonwealth realpolitik or that it immortalises ephemera. Even an essay can do more than that. But this explication demands that we go beyond literary criticism and political narratives into the wider domains of political culture and the critical methods required to unpack it.66 Creativity and its little doors What makes An Horatian Ode a poem whose place in the canon of ‘English Literature’ is repeatedly renewed, a poem that continues to stimulate 47

part i: rethinking texts and readers c­riticism and to excite and challenge students? What makes it a great poem? It seems to me that it may have little to do with its balanced perspective or suspension of judgement on a political issue – properties which make for a successful political treatise or arbitration, not necessarily good poetry. Nor is it because it is ‘timeless’ in any simple sense: in many ways, it is vulnerable to time, because its subtle topical engagements faded in the years after its composition, and its political alignments in the centuries.67 Rather, it comes down to the flow through small portals. Derek Attridge proposes ‘invention’, ‘singularity’ and ‘otherness’ as constitutive attributes of literature, or rather Literature, imaginative works defined by their aesthetic capabilities and their ability to tell kinds of truths.68 The perspective of the Ode is certainly singular. Its singularity can be understood less in terms of its uniqueness within the corpus of midseventeenth-century writing about politics and political commitments, and instead in terms of the way Marvell deflects his engagement with his materials by placing a perspective within the poem. This perspective involves the ‘forward youth’, who stands in relation to a series of political decisions, values, words, and in doing so he brings into being these elements of cultural life of 1649–50 in a startling, material, personalised way. And I mean ‘brings into being’, and not just ‘represents’. He is more than a ‘self-imagining’,69 he confers the structure upon what follows: he is a focus, he is created to stand in relation with these disparate things, and, as they come into relation with each other through him, the poem creates an account of history as something that lies immediately ahead, as if the youth stands in a vortex, and his next step will transform his life and perhaps the world entirely. This focus is complemented by the experience of reading that perspective, an experience based on the encounter with the series of disparate materials that the poem brings into being. The materials so gathered transgress the norms of Marvell’s culture, while letting the reader know that this is being done. An attentive reader of the Ode will feel the extraordinary breadth of historical vision and a minute engagement with the political complexities of the moment and also feel the strangeness of the sense of the minute particulars of history, particulars that sit within a frame seldom reconciled to that broader historical vision. This represents a radical (and while we can find Attridge’s triad of ‘invention’, ‘singularity’, and ‘otherness’ in the poem, it is also a testimony to the radicalism of the creative imagination, plucking up matter by the roots) reconfiguration of the perspectives available to the writer in 1650. It also represents a profound novelty, one that goes beyond its formal innovation. The poem changes the cultural field around it. This is clearly not because it had influence on contemporaries, as there is only little evidence for early readers 48

raymond: ‘small portals’ of the poem,70 but rather because contemporaneous writings have their relationship to the historical moment repositioned by Marvell’s transformation of the language through which history is, and can be written. It achieves a privileged place in our histories of that cultural field, not by a lack of commitment, but by a surfeit of it, and by the way it negotiates that commitment. This commitment is not to a party or political cause, but to what Charlie Williams, in the passage quoted above, refers to as the ‘evidence’. Though the poem has a rhetorical structure that breaks down into various stages, and in those stages the nature of the material that Marvell handles subtly and suggestively varies, this commitment to evidence is nowhere more apparent than in the account of the king’s execution. The poem creates a distance from the event by reworking its minute details, absorbed and polished to the point at which we can neither see the original matter nor the process of reworking, but only the product. But the reworked matter, including the newsbooks and pamphlets, is essential to this process, and is one reason why Marvell’s poem seems committed to history, to a historical moment. Why else would the spry rhythm of his alternating rhymed couplets of three and four iambic feet have such a compelling effect, were it not for the fact that both reportage and workmanship are hidden in the effortlessness of the details, the smooth liberty he arrogates to himself within a demanding poetics of bursting and broken containment.71 Far from being irrelevant and wholly sublimated, the newsbook reports, and the language of pamphlets and political argument, are essential to the poem’s aesthetic. The poem is, to appropriate William Gass’s words in my epigraph, a Commonwealth of last, lost, and little things. The poem does not rise above the rubbish of history so much as to record it as ‘memorable’ in all of its particular details; its literary value arises not in spite of but because of its relationship with ephemera and news. Recognising this commitment to the details is not essential to the appreciation of the poem. Nor is the identification of these borrowings from the news media, though I think Marvell anticipated his readers would recognise them, just as he thought they would hear the allusions to the Machiavellian novus princeps, and the reason of state theory underpinning the image of the erect sword. Even as he reached beyond the immediate friends among whom he might have circulated his poem, his imagined horizon is constituted by anonymous readers who shared this basic cultural literacy and engagement with the times.72 But the appreciation of the poem survives the fading of this context because this context is embedded in the poem and its aesthetics. The evidence is thereby in a small measure preserved from loss. The poem looks new to multiple generations of readers because Marvell incorporates his sense of that newness, 49

part i: rethinking texts and readers the sense of otherness and innovation, into the poem. Though the penetration of these other reports into the words of the poem only appears when it is read alongside these (since neglected) texts, this inclusion of evidence, this commitment to the world mediated via print culture that characterises Marvell’s aesthetic here, can hardly be described as ‘inexpressible’ or ‘ineffable’. The efficacy of the poem, its aesthetic purchase, lies in an exchange between what is in the text and what lies (or lay) outside. The otherness within the poem includes the copper coins and paper clips, the books on the forward youth’s desk, the axe, the low block, the nightcap. This is perhaps most evident in the passage describing the king’s execution, and this, as much as the crypto-Royalist agendas that flourish in anglophone criticism, may help to explain the fascination this passage has elicited. But it is not restricted to this section: the quotidian stuff of history is suffused throughout the poem.73 Marvell did not anticipate the loss of all this junk, but it does not matter, for the sense of its importance survives within the poem. In this sense, its ‘literariness’ is not an absolute, but relational, relative to the reporting of the news in cheap print; news and pamphlets are not transmuted or transcended, because they are, as traces of the news culture around Marvell, inside the poem as well as outside. What is most profoundly inventive in Marvell’s poem is not his prosody or his weighing of political allegiance, but his commitment to the evidence, to the messy, non-literary material that he reworks, to history as a witnessed event, to the Commonwealth of the quotidian. In expressing this, the Ode conveys the sheer excitement that contemporaries felt when reading the news, and to recognise this is to pay tribute not only to Marvell’s poetry, but to the prose of Samuel Pecke, Marchamont Nedham, and other newswriters who preceded him.74 I began by suggesting that as critics and historians we would benefit from working towards a more capacious account of intertextuality – one that articulates the similarities and differences between an allusion to Ovid and an echo of a newspaper – and a more precise account of the way literary writing is separated from, or separates itself from, other imaginative forms of writing in print culture, including the political polemics and modes of journalism that have increasingly been occupying the critics. One metaphor for this process might be the valve, a portal that controls and shapes the flow of matter around a system. The term is not strictly speaking an anachronism: the first edition of Thomas Blount’s Glossographia, published in 1656, did not include the word, but the second edition of 1661 offered the following definition: ‘Valves (Valvæ) folding doors or windows’.75 The shift suggests the word had some topical currency. Perhaps what lent it topicality was the English publication of William Harvey’s Anatomical exercises … concerning the motion of the heart of blood in 1653. Harvey does 50

raymond: ‘small portals’ not speak of ‘valves’, however; he writes that to ensure circulation ‘it was necessary that [the heart] should be serv’d with four locks or doors’, and that similar mechanisms were distributed throughout the whole, animated system: the portals were merely made, lest the blood should move from the greater veins into the lesser and tear or swel them; and that it should not goe from the centre of the body to the extremities, but rather from the extremities to the centre. Therefore by this motion the small Portals are easily shut, and hinder any thing which is contrary to them; for they are so plac’d and ordain’d, that if any thing should not be sufficiently hindred in the passage by the hornes of the foremost, but should escape through a chinck, the convexity or vault of the next might receive it from passing any further.76

Harvey’s description is all the more tentative and probing because he cannot appeal to a shared mechanical understanding of a valve, instead describing a ‘horn’ that catches the reverse flow and closes the portal, perhaps leaving open a chink, hence permitting the escape of blood that will be caught by the next portal; it suggests one means by which the metaphor of the valve could be enlarged to comprehend a contemporary, non-anachronistic account of the movement of the association and separation between modes of writing. The flow is unidirectional because closed at certain points, though these closures are imperfect. After continuing through the circuit, the same blood returns, transformed to the original vessel antecedent to the valve. The contested boundary between cheap print and choice poetry is one such small portal. This is a metaphor, and therefore can only conduct us to better understanding rather than to any truth, but perhaps it will do to describe the flux of print culture into a poem that remakes what it receives and separates itself from the system in which it operates. And perhaps it might help colour that other metaphor that dominates models of understanding the relationship between poetryas-action and polemic and journalism, the public sphere, one that posits a set of human processes working within a non-human arena of idealised transparency and unproblematised communication. Notes  1 W. H. Gass, The Tunnel (1995; Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1999), p. 642.  2 J. Loxley, ‘Echoes as evidence in the poetry of Andrew Marvell’, SEL, 52:1 (2012), pp. 165–85, at 167.  3 J. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 368–81 and passim.  4 Though, see J. Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); also J. Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge

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part i: rethinking texts and readers University Press, 2013), and Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (London: Ashgate, 2004).  5 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Wood F39, fo. 414; J. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 2:54–6.  6 P. Hammond, ‘Marvell’s pronouns’, Essays in Criticism, 53:3 (2003), pp. 219–34, at 234, 220.  7 Reprinted in W. R. Keast (ed.), Seventeenth-Century English Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 321–58; and partly in M. Wilding (ed.), Marvell: Modern Judgements (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 93–124.  8 J. M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 69–105.  9 N. McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 222. 10 See, for example, McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, pp. 221–58; N. Smith (ed.), The Poems of Andrew Marvell (London: Routledge, 2003), and Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) 11 R. Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 287–8. 12 C. Brooks, ‘Marvell’s “Horatian Ode”’, in Keast, Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, p. 337. 13 B. Worden, ‘Andrew Marvell, Oliver Cromwell, and the Horatian Ode’, in K. Sharpe and S. N. Zwicker (eds), Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of SeventeenthCentury England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), p. 150. 14 D. Norbrook, ‘Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” and the politics of genre’, in T. Healy and J. Sawday (eds), Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 147–69, and Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 245–71; M. Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 114–37; L. L. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1643–1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 52–6. 15 Worden, ‘Andrew Marvell’, pp. 150, 169. 16 Ibid. p. 176. 17 See E. E. Duncan Jones, ‘The erect sword in Marvell’s Horatian Ode’, Études Anglaises, 15 (1962), pp. 172–4; Wallace, Destiny His Choice, pp. 69–105; A. Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 59–94; and Smith, Literature and Revolution, pp. 276–94, among others. 18 C. K. Williams, Poetry and Consciousness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 98. 19 Wallace, Destiny His Choice, p. 78. 20 For reportage in The First Anniversary, see J. Raymond, ‘Framing liberty: Marvell’s First Anniversary and the Instrument of Government’, HLQ, 62 (2002), pp. 313–50. 21 J. A. Sharpe, ‘“Last Dying Speeches”: religion, ideology and public executions in seventeenth-century England’, P&P, 107 (1985), pp. 144–67; T. W. Laqueur, ‘Crowds, carnival and the state in English executions, 1604–1868’, in A. L. Beier et al. (eds), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 305–55.

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raymond: ‘small portals’ 22 Smith, Literature and Revolution, pp. 70–92; Zwicker, Lines of Authority, pp. 37–59; S.  Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–16. 23 N. K. Maguire ‘The theatrical mask/masque of politics: the case of Charles I’, JBS, 28 (1989), pp. 1–22, at 8, 11; cf. the Royalist perspective implicit in E. Sauer, ‘Papercontestations’ and Textual Communities in England, 1640–1675 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 45. 24 See M. Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (1980; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 239–57; M. Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 228–50; J. Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 201–10; Wiseman, Drama and Politics, pp. 19–49; R. Willie, Staging the Revolution: Drama, Reinvention and History, 1647–72 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 25–51. 25 See D. S. Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 201–20, and ‘Performances and playbooks: the closing of the theatres and the politics of drama’, in K. Sharpe and S. N. Zwicker, Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 167–84. 26 Though we disagree in some conclusions, this account of contested political culture largely agrees with and is influenced by K. Sharpe’s ‘“So Hard a Text”? Images of Charles I, 1612–1700’, HJ, 43 (2000), pp. 383–405, and Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 3–37, 415–59. 27 A Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages in Parliament no. 288 (29 Jan.–5 Feb. 1649), 2315. 28 Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper, pp. 54, 69–71; J. Raymond (ed.), Making the News: An Anthology of the Newsbooks of Revolutionary England, 1641–1660 (Moretonin-Marsh: Windrush Press, 1993), pp. 203–52. 29 S. Kelsey, ‘The death of Charles I’, HJ, 45 (2002), pp. 727–54, and ‘The trial of Charles  I’, English Historical Review, 118:477 (2003), pp. 583–616; D. Hirst, ‘The drama of justice’, in D. L. Smith, R. Strier, and D. Bevington (eds), The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 245–59; see also Maguire, ‘Theatrical mask’, p. 18. 30 Complete Prose Works of John Milton (hereafter CPW ), 8 vols, general ed. D. M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 4:1055. 31 Kelsey, ‘Death of Charles I’, p. 748 and n. 103; cf. the allusions to Macbeth in Milton, Political Writings, ed. M. Dzelzainis, trans. C. Gruzelier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 4, 6, 26. 32 The Moderate 11 (19–26 Sept. 1648), Pragmaticus 42 (23–30 Jan. 1649), both in Raymond, Making the News, pp. 211, 243. This Pragmaticus is not by Nedham. 33 F. F. Madan, A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike of King Charles the First, Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, n.s. 3 (Oxford, 1950); P. Knachel (ed.), Eikon Basilike (Ithaca, NY: Published for the Folger Shakespeare Library by Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. xx-xxxii. 34 R. Helgerson, ‘Milton reads the king’s book: print, performance, and the making of a bourgeois idol’, Criticism, 229 (1987), pp. 1–25, at 9. 35 E. S. Wheeler, ‘Eikon Basilike and the rhetoric of self-representation’, in T. N. Corns

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part i: rethinking texts and readers (ed.), The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 124. See also Sharpe, ‘Images of Charles I’, p. 392; Raymond, ‘Popular representations of Charles I’, in Corns, Royal Image, pp. 47–73. 36 Eikon Alethine. The Pourtraiture of Truths most sacred Majesty (London, 1649), sig. Ar. 37 Ibid. sig. A4v, p. 26. 38 Ibid. p. 100; this seems to me a better reading of Shakespeare’s play than those that find a positive image of the king and an endorsement of sacral monarchy. 39 M. Grossman, ‘The dissemination of the king’, in Smith, Strier, and Bevington, Theatrical City, pp. 260–81; Maguire, ‘Theatrical mask’, p. 10. 40 Hirst, ‘Drama of justice’, pp. 249–50. 41 The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. 6: Vernacular Regicide and Republican Writings, ed. N. H. Keeble and N. McDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 282 (CPW, 3: 342–3). 42 Ibid. 6:289–90, 291 (CPW, 3:358, 360–1). 43 Ibid. 6:287, 385 (CPW, 3:355, 530). 44 Eikonoklastes ‘argues theatricality as falsehood’, writes Zwicker, Lines of Authority, p. 55. 45 Raymond, ‘Popular representations’, pp. 57–60; Sharpe, ‘Images of Charles I’, pp. 390–1; L. L. Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 42–67. 46 Zwicker, Lines of Authority, pp. 37–59. 47 G. Campbell, A Milton Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 84, 145, 147. 48 For Lucan, see A. Marvell, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith /Harlow: Longman, rev. edn, 2007), pp. 268–70. 49 Milton, Complete Works, 6: 414–15 (CPW 3: 584–5). 50 J. Jane, Eikon Aklastos: The Image Unbroaken (1651), p. 12l. It seems unlikely that Jane echoes Marvell; most likely is that both echo Nedham. 51 S. Kelsey, ‘Staging the trial of Charles I’, in J. Peacey (ed.), The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), p. 82. 52 Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 43 (30 Jan.–6 Feb. 1649); in Raymond, Making the News, p. 249. 53 T. N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 228, which also quotes Norbrook, ‘Marvell’s “Horatian Ode”’, p. 159. 54 Zwicker, Lines of Authority, p. 42. 55 Perfect Diurnall no. 288, p. 2315. 56 A Dialogue, Or, A Dispute betweene the late Hangman and Death ([London], 1649); also appears on the title-page of The Confession of Richard Brandon ([London], 1649). 57 Grossman, ‘The dissemination of the king’, pp. 276–7. 58 Perfect Diurnall no. 288, p. 2317. 59 Perfect Diurnall no. 288, pp. 2316, 2317; Raymond, Making the News, p. 247. This same report was printed in other newsbooks. 60 Raymond, Making the News, p. 316; see also pp. 302, 303, 307. 61 ‘[P]erfect acquiescence’ is L. D. Lerner’s phrase, quoted in Wallace, Destiny His Choice, p. 80; for Royalist sunsets in 1649 and after, see ibid. p. 135. 62 Perfect Diurnall no. 288, p. 2315; Raymond, Making the News, p. 248. 63 See, for instance, To the Sacred Memorie of the Crowne of Majestie (London, 1649), with engraving showing the low executioner’s block.

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raymond: ‘small portals’ 64 C. V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (London: Collins, 1964), pp. 189, 193; S. R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, 4 vols (London: Windrush Press, 1986–87), 4:323. 65 [J. Berkenhead], Loyalties Tears Flowing after the Blood of the Royal Sufferer, Charles the I. &c. (London, 1649), p. 5. 66 For a different approach to similar materials, see J. Raymond ‘The daily muse; Or, seventeenth-century poets read the news’, The Seventeenth Century 10 (1995), pp. 189–218. 67 The same is true of Marvell’s The First Anniversary (1655), a poem more obviously engaged with news, and one that deliberates through a language of precise allusion that disappeared along with the political moment that created it. 68 D. Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004). What follows has been profoundly influenced by Attridge’s work. 69 D. Hirst and S. N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 136–7. 70 Evidence surveyed in Hirst and Zwicker, Orphan of the Hurricane, pp. 171–3; also Smith, Poems, p. 267. 71 J. Creaser, ‘Prosody and liberty in Milton and Marvell’, in G. Parry and J. Raymond (eds), Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge: Boydell, 2002), pp. 37–55. See also Smith’s observation that the poem situates ‘Lucanic enormity inside Horatian restraint’, Marvell, Poems, p. 270. 72 For a fascinating account of the role of this imagined horizon to the production of literature, see P. Strohm, The Poet’s Tale: Chaucer and the Year that Made the Canterbury Tales (London: Profile Books, 2014). 73 As Smith’s excellent notes make clear, Marvell, Poems, pp. 273–9. 74 Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, pp. 98–160. 75 T. Blount, Glossographia, or, A Dictionary (London, 1661), sig. Ss4v (sub ‘valves’). 76 The Anatomical Exercises of Dr. William Harvey professor of physick, and physician to the Kings Majesty, concerning the motion of the heart and blood (London, 1653), pp. 41, 75.

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McKeon: Marvell discovers the public sphere

3

Marvell discovers the public sphere Michael McKeon

At the Rainbow Coffee-house the other day, taking my place at due distance, not far from me, at another Table sat a whole Cabal of wits; made up of Virtuoso’s, Ingenioso’s, young Students of the Law, two Citizens, and to make the Jury full, vous avez, one old Gentleman … [T]hey all laughing heartily and gaping, … I was tickled to know the cause of all this mirth, and presently found, it was a Book made all this sport; the Title of it, The Rehearsal transpros’d. E[dmund] H[ickeringill,] Gregory, Father Greybeard, With his Vizard off (London, 1673), p. 5

By the close of the 1660s, the Restoration Settlement had become decisively unsettled. Efforts to unify state and church after twenty years of Civil War and Interregnum were soon frustrated by loyalist dissatisfaction, reported plots, and scattered popular uprisings. The Cavalier Parliament rejected Charles II’s attempts to comprehend religious differences within a restored Church of England, passing a series of punitive acts (1662–65) that transformed Puritan sectarians into nonconformists and dissenters by requiring them to take Anglican Communion if they were to engage in public worship or hold civil and military office. One of these acts, the 1664 Conventicle Act prohibiting non-Anglican religious assemblies, was renewed with harsher penalties in 1670. The king’s darkest motive, the indulgence of Roman Catholicism, was repudiated by Parliament and most other English people, and the Parliamentary response to his 1672 Declaration of Indulgence was so hostile to both Catholics and Dissenters that he withdrew it the following year. Reports that Charles and popish members of the court circle were negotiating the replacement of Anglicanism by Catholicism with Louis  XIV in exchange for supplies in the face of Parliamentary recalcitrance circulated as early as 1664, anticipating the terms of the Secret Treaty of Dover (1670). Distrust of the king and his heir, James, Duke of York, was deeply rooted not only in their crypto-popery (which in James’s 56

mckeon: marvell discovers the public sphere case soon became overt) but also in the Stuart legacy of absolutism, especially as manifested in a willingness to assert the royal power to dispense with acts of parliament. Stuart foreign policy was equally unsuccessful in overcoming the divisions of Civil War. Under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–54) had won major naval and commercial concessions from the United Provinces and been celebrated as a patriotic affirmation of English might. The Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–67) ended in disaster. A trade war fomented by a conspiracy of court ministers, the Parliamentary Committee of Trade, and the monopolistic Royal Company trading into Africa, it was opposed by most unaffiliated merchants. In 1665–66 England and especially London suffered terrifying and profoundly demoralising plague and fire. In the following year, naval hostilities culminated in the humiliating and unopposed Dutch raid on the English fleet at the very mouth of the Thames. The significance of these events lies not only in themselves, but also in the fact that they were to different degrees publicly known.1 Although the 1662 Licensing Act extended earlier policies of prepublication censorship and required that printing presses be authorised by the Stationers’ Company, after 1640 the publication and circulation of print had gained a momentum that would not be seriously moderated. The technology of movable type was invented two hundred years before the Restoration period. Only around that time, however, did the properties and influence of print as a virtual medium of communication come to suffuse English culture sufficiently to warrant the notion that it was a ‘print culture’. We tend to conceive virtual entities less as fictional than as notional, not so much made up as made of mental attributes, concepts, and emotions. Print is an essential feature of what we have learned from Jürgen Habermas to call ‘the public sphere’. This is a new kind of public, which bears an important relation to the traditional public, the actual state and its political apparatus (for we use the same word to designate it) but which should not be confused with it. Habermas does not attempt a precise chronology, but the turn of the eighteenth century and the periodical essays of Steele and Addison solicit our attention as the moment when the actual public – the English monarchy, the royal household, governmental ministries and administrations, and Parliament – began to be shadowed by an alternative, collective, and notional sort of ‘public’, ‘the sphere of private [that is, non-governmental] people come together as a public’.2 By the end of the century, the virtual entity ‘public opinion’ was well on its way to playing the central role in policy-making that it does at present. Unlike the actual public, the public sphere is self-authorised in the sense that it has no ontological grounding 57

part i: rethinking texts and readers beyond its own self-consciousness. That is, the constitution and continuity of the public sphere are coextensive with matters of consciousness: to ask how people come to inhabit the public sphere is the same thing as asking how people come to think of themselves as inhabiting the public sphere. It coalesced and expanded through actual meetings and conversations of people, most famously in coffee houses. But the most important force in its constitution was print, whose agency in the emergence of the virtual public sphere dovetailed with that of the actual space of the coffee house, where conversation often enough was stimulated by reading printed material. So, the public sphere was both an actual and a virtual phenomenon. How can we assess consciousness, or the incremental development of consciousness, of the public sphere? The epigraph to this essay describes an encounter, perhaps imagined, that has all the elements that we, like Habermas, are likely to associate with the paradigmatic scene of Steele and Addison’s public sphere. Like Mr Spectator, the speaker distances himself from, so as to overhear, a coffee house conversation about matters of church and state that is mediated by a publication. Like Isaac Bickerstaff, the speaker imagines these private citizens to be exercising the ‘fantastical’ but real authority of public officials, a judiciary ‘Jury’ or ministerial ‘Cabal ’.3 The fact that Hickeringill so closely rehearses the coffee house scenario that was to become famous three decades later in the pages of the periodical essay confirms its importance by anticipating the appeal of the actual coffee house (the Rainbow had a real existence) as a virtual evocation of actual public deliberation. But what’s entailed in this anticipation? Were Steele, Addison, et al. influenced by Hickeringill’s scenario in the formulation of their own, or does it offer evidence that Hickeringill himself was conscious of the public sphere? And anyway, why print in particular? Why not script, which is also a virtual medium? Only oral communication is ‘actual’ – that is, face-to-face discourse between embodied speakers who are physically present to each other. The difference made by print is that its productions constitute an abstract totality, the knowing but unknown ‘public’ that is by definition impersonal and indeterminate. Moreover, the virtuality of print is deepened, as that of script is not, by the supposition of its putatively open-ended dissemination. This was only in part because printed objects commonly circulated (as manuscripts commonly did not) as abstract and impersonal commodities, whose readership was therefore indeterminate except in quantitative terms. In Defoe’s expansive metaphor, ‘Preaching of Sermons is Speaking to a few of Mankind: Printing of Books is Talking to the whole World’.4 Yet the impersonality of printed exchange imposed on the author an unprecedented burden of personal and ethical obligation. This might 58

mckeon: marvell discovers the public sphere seem at first unlikely. Speaking in the present to those present involves the explicit personality, specificity, and punctuality of unmediated interchange, of direct address and counter-address. By talking to the whole world of ‘the public’, printed publication might instead appear to participate in a general collectivity of address that obviates all situational stipulations. But in fact the author who writes for a virtual public is obliged by its abstract indeterminacy to assume the opposite – namely, its constitution by a full and variegated spectrum of readers who instantiate the concrete particularity characteristic of actual individuals. Of course, the rhetorically skilled speaker can shape that spectrum of actual readers to the lineaments of a virtual ‘reading public’ best suited to the occasion. Nonetheless, it is with the emergent idea of a virtual public (as with the equally modern virtuality of ‘society’) that individuation, and the modern category of the individual, become not simply plausible but necessary. Traditional oral address assumes the homogeneity of a collective whose concrete totality obviates rhetorical differentiation and individuation. The open-ended character of print readership confronts authors with a loss of control over what they have written because of the indeterminacy of who reads it and how they construe it. Moreover, it is under these new conditions of public address (although resulting also from other factors) that the condition of privacy comes into being. Before the era of print culture, ‘privacy’ is negative, the ‘privation’ or ‘deprivation’ of the presence of or access to the elite body of a collective. The modern condition of privacy connotes a positive, ethical, and subjective sense of freedom from (but also vulnerability to) public encroachment.5 By publishing a message print makes it public, but it also thereby makes it private and vulnerable to exposure. This was true not only for those whom polemical authors aimed to expose, but also for authors themselves, for whom print, through the option of anonymity, made privacy possible, but also thereby its liability to public disclosure. The printed publication that Hickeringill refers to in the epigraph is The Rehearsal Transpros’d by Andrew Marvell, published in two parts in 1672 and 1673, which responded to several works by Samuel Parker: A Discourse on Ecclesiastical Politie (1669), A Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiastical Politie (1671), ‘Preface’ to John Bramhall’s Vindication of Himself and the Episcopal Clergy (1672), and A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transpros’d (1673). My aim in this essay is to suggest that in the way Marvell engages with Parker we can sense a subtle intuition of the existence and nature of the public sphere as with hindsight we have come to understand it. Of course, Marvell lacked full distance on the phenomenon of the public sphere because he wrote in the very process of (and thereby facilitated) its emergence into cultural consciousness. Even so, Marvell’s 59

part i: rethinking texts and readers insight in some respects may deepen our own understanding of it. But although in a different sense, Marvell was responding not only to Parker but also to the Duke of Buckingham’s farce The Rehearsal, and it will be fruitful to ask how the one response may have aided in making the other. The Rehearsal What does Marvell’s intuition of the public sphere have to do with his decision to associate Parker’s polemic with The Rehearsal (hereafter referred to as R), the runaway hit farce that was staged in 1671 and printed in 1672, six months before the first part of The Rehearsal Transpros’d appeared?6 Written by George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham and several others, R has customarily been seen as a satire of the genre of the heroic drama, and of Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada in particular, a highly successful example of the form in two parts, staged in 1670 and 1671 and printed in 1672. That Buckingham aims centrally if not exclusively at his literary and political rival Dryden is suggested by a number of factors, most directly by the name of the play’s protagonist, Bayes, usually and persuasively read as an allusion to Dryden’s appointment as poet laureate in 1668. Buckingham’s farce is a dense tissue of largely burlesque allusions to disparate authors, texts, and literary conventions, a showcase of formal heterogeneity. True, its preoccupation with The Conquest of Granada, and with the bombastic and histrionic excesses of heroic drama as such, is undeniable. But both the play and the genre provide a volatile vehicle for that formal heterogeneity that superintends Buckingham’s farce and is intimately related to its representation of a rehearsal. One expression of this volatility is the disposition to ‘transprose’, a term Marvell borrows from R. The play begins as two gentlemen, old friends re-encountering each other in a London street, happen upon Bayes, a playwright who is about to attend the final rehearsal of his latest composition. Questioned on his craft, Bayes explains the cardinal ‘Rule of Transversion’. When he comes across a book that contains some wit he translates it from one medium into another: that is, he transverses it: ‘if it be Prose, [I] put it into Verse, … if it be Verse, [I] put it into Prose.’ One of the two friends observes that ‘putting Verse into Prose should be call’d Transprosing’, and Bayes agrees. What do you do with it? asks the other gentleman. ‘Make it my own’, says Bayes. ‘‘Tis so alter’d that no man can know it’. So transversing and transprosing are two ways of fulfilling, in the particular terms of literary medium, the general strategy of transposing, a method of substituting for what is someone else’s possession one’s own.7 Incidentally providing the likely inspiration for Hickeringill’s anecdote in my epigraph, Bayes then illustrates his second rule, the ‘Rule of 60

mckeon: marvell discovers the public sphere Record’: ‘I come into a Coffee-house, or some other place where wittie men resort, I make as if I minded nothing; (do you mark?) but as soon as any one speaks, pop I slap it down, and make that, too, my own.’ But don’t people object to having their work stolen? They don’t notice, Bayes replies. Hence his third ‘Rule for Invention’, which he applies to selections from his compendious ‘book of Drama Common places’. ‘[B]y leaving out a few words, or putting in others of my own, the business is done’ (1.1.102, 105–8, 114, 77–78, 123–24 [400–1]). So Bayes steals from other writers by three methods: he transposes between verse and prose; he records witty remarks overheard in coffee houses; and he alters texts entered into his drama commonplace book. Seventeenth-century culture, which had not quite ceded the norm of imitation to that of innovation, did not disapprove of plagiarism as strictly as we do, and many authors indulged even in this particular technique for obscuring the fact of their theft. Still, Buckingham was not the only one who thought, perhaps in a sour grapes mode, that Dryden took the practice to an extreme.8 The replacement of verse by prose or prose by verse has the purpose of facilitating plagiarism, of making someone else’s book ‘my own’, and this has an obvious relevance to our awareness that R is what I’ve called, perhaps too generously, a dense tissue of allusions. But replacement, understood as an alternation between verse and prose within R, claims our attention far more forcefully than does replacement as R’s borrowing from other texts. The alternation of verse and prose is common in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. During the Restoration it becomes less so for a number of reasons, including the long-term development of a preference for prose in drama as well as narrative, and the shorter-term conviction, especially evident in heroic drama, that only verse (and rhymed verse at that) is adequate to the expression of elevated subjects and emotions.9 No doubt these two factors have some relevance to Buckingham’s use of prose and verse in R. But the reason we register the alternation between verse and prose in R with the volatile force of an oscillation is that their use is keyed to another formal difference, between two distinct dimensions of speech. Discourse about the theatrical presentation of the play that is being rehearsed (that of Bayes the author-director, the two gentlemen, and those players whom Bayes momentarily addresses about the ongoing performance) is given in prose; discourse within the dramatic representation that is being performed (that of the players playing their roles) is given in heroic couplets. Because of the nature of the action – a dialogue between rehearsers and rehearsed, form and content, the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of the play – the threshold between two distinct dimensions of speech is continually crossed and re-crossed. In effect Buckingham creates an experience of crossing formal thresholds that has become a familiar signature of modern art. 61

part i: rethinking texts and readers What I am calling a formal volatility is of course built into the nature of a rehearsal, which is both a performance and a preparation for a performance. The repeated interruptions of performance by preparation entailed in actual on-stage rehearsal are under normal conditions experienced by participants as contributory to but distinct from the performance. However, because the stage performance of R would not be experienced by its audience as a rehearsal, the distinction between its two dimensions, emphasised by the difference in media, might likely encourage a gestalt oscillation between the perception of the play as a performance and as a rehearsal. This is also the dominant experience of reading R – perhaps even more so because in the absence of all the other visual and auditory variables at the disposal of the director, the stark intrusion of prose into heroic couplets may have a more powerful effect on the reader. In any case, R’s considerable humour features Bayes’s repeated (prose) interruptions of scenes under rehearsal in order to give directions and advice that, in his unquenchable quest for the new, invariably fall between the fatuous and the pathologically stupid. And the fact that the (verse) action of the rehearsed play shares some of these latter failings, many of them reminiscent of heroic drama, reinforces the effect of reflexivity that subsists whenever, as in R, the self-conscious recognition of artistic form is made explicit and thematised at the level of content. Much modern art, from Fielding’s to Buñuel’s, implicitly credits this collapse of difference to the experimental sophistication of the author or director. But in R it seems more like a symptom of the author-director Bayes’s narcissistic self-regard, expressed through his inability to tell the difference between the two media, between the two dimensions of discourse they signify, ultimately between theatrical presentation and dramatic representation. Each time the threshold is crossed we feel Bayes in his towering vanity to be entering into his own play as its star player. The apotheosis of this casting decision comes at the end of Act 4. The stage has been cleared of players, but when one of the gentlemen asks: ‘But, Mr. Bayes, pray why is this Scene all in Verse?’ Bayes replies in iambic pentameter, in violation of R’s organising principle but in affirmation of his own greatness: ‘O, Sir, the subject is too great for Prose’. He underscores this message in his words to the other gentleman, which directly follow – ‘I’l make that God subscribe himself a Devil’ – then adds, desisting from verse but not from vainglory: ‘That single line, I gad, is worth all that my brother Poets ever writ’ (4.2.73–4, 78–80 [440]). The epilogue with which R concludes is, formally speaking and as Restoration custom dictates, in heroic couplets, but it ends in a substantive protest against rhyme: ‘We have these ten years felt its Influence; / Pray let this prove a year of Prose and Sence’ (p. 453). This is the voice not of confusion 62

mckeon: marvell discovers the public sphere but of complaint, and should be associated with the authorship not of Bayes but of Buckingham and his collaborators. The same must be said of the play’s prologue (spoken by the player John Lacy, the original Bayes), which begins: We might well call this short Mock-play of ours A Posie made of Weeds instead of Flowers; Yet such have been presented to your noses, And there are such, I fear, who thought ‘em Roses.     (lines 1–4 [396])

These couplets affirm the play’s parodic intention, and can be read to suggest that even within the audience to which they were spoken could be found some dull enough to mistake agent for object of parody, and satire for praise. Such a confusion would be on the same level of stupidity as Bayes’s confusion of presentation with representation, and the prologue’s target seems clearly to be Dryden and the other authors who are parodied by the play. Even so, among the few recorded responses to R are accusations that Buckingham himself was guilty of the same faults as those he parodied, among others plagiarism. To make ‘one’s own’ what is someone else’s is a good if minimal characterisation not only of theft but also of parody.10 The Rehearsal Transpros’d Samuel Parker published the works that Andrew Marvell answered at the turn of the 1670s, as the divisive developments in church and state that I began by describing were gaining force. A young and ambitious divine, during the course of his exchange with Marvell Parker was preferred several times, rising two decades later, by the grace of James II, to his highest appointment as Bishop of Oxford. Throughout his career Parker strenuously promoted Erastian principles and the eradication of nonconformity. Marvell, a luminous poet of the first order, turned his attention in the 1650s to longer poems in praise of Oliver Cromwell, whose employment he entered in the latter years of the decade. He was returned to the last Protectorate Parliament in 1659 and again to the Cavalier Parliament in 1661. As corruption and religious persecution dogged the restored monarchy during the 1660s, Marvell continued to write poetry in a political vein, but now in sharply satirical opposition to the current regime. The Rehearsal Transpros’d (hereafter referred to as RT) was his first prose publication. His last, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England, marked a radical turn in his views of Charles’s policies in church and state. It was published in 1677 shortly before his death as its anonymous author was being sought 63

part i: rethinking texts and readers for prosecution, and it was highly influential in fuelling the opposition that fired the Exclusion Crisis of the immediately following years and the deposal of James II in 1688. The third of Parker’s polemics against nonconformists, Buckingham’s farce, and the first part of Marvell’s response to both were all printed in 1672. Marvell’s title The Rehearsal Transpros’d, names not his own polemics but those of his antagonist, implying that Parker plays a role similar to that of Buckingham’s Bayes, which is the name Marvell gives Parker throughout RT. Marvell’s text is peppered with references to Buckingham’s, and in a passage of several pages he makes clear his delight at the popularity of his borrowings, most of all the name Bayes itself (pp. 283–6). Marvell even goes so far as to claim, to my eyes implausibly, that he did not ‘make use of the Rehearsal so much in order to make merry with’ Parker as to show him that there are other books besides Scripture that are sufficiently known to readers to be turned to ridiculous ends without incurring the charge of profanity (p. 283; see also p. 200).11 In Marvell’s scheme, Parker’s prose tracts are therefore to be seen as transprosing the verse farce R: not the authorial creation of Buckingham but the authorial identity of Bayes as Buckingham embodies him in prose, and in interruptive relation to his own play. The oscillation between verse and prose that marks Bayes’s confusion of presentation and representation has a formal equivalent in the alternation between roman and italic fonts that Marvell introduces to ensure accuracy in communicating Parker’s views on the relationship between the state and the tender consciences of its citizens: ‘[T]hat I might not involve the thing in generals, but represent undeniably Mr. Bayes his performance in this undertaking, I shall write down his own Words and his own quod Scripsi Scripsi, as they ly naked to the view of every Reader’ (p. 91).12 Of course this formal alternation lacks the flagrancy it has in R because its substantive force is not to obscure semantic difference but to enhance it. In R, the volatility of the relation between prose and verse owes to its signification that the fundamental boundary between the dimensions of the outside and the inside, between the actuality of theatrical presentation and the virtuality of dramatic representation, is unstable. However, in RT, the difference between roman and italic fonts marks the boundary, within the uniform field of print, between Marvell and Bayes, the subject and the object of interpretation. Marvell’s imitation of Buckingham is neither a parody nor a theft; but the formal proximity of the two texts is highly pertinent to the concerns of both authors with the ambiguities of intertextuality. For Marvell as for Buckingham, parody is an important technique for throwing into relief what each would criticise in their respective Bayes figures. Moreover, each of those figures arrogantly employs a degree of parody himself, 64

mckeon: marvell discovers the public sphere although that displayed by Buckingham’s antagonist tends to retreat into the ruder precincts of parody as theft. Parody is distinctive as a satirical mode in that it requires of the author a speaker whose deft imitation of the adversary provides the basis for criticism, and it works by carefully calibrating the ratio between adversarial imitation and criticism. Parodic virtuosity achieves the effect of something like auto-exposure, the speaker’s voice imitating with such delicate excess the voice of the adversary that it can make criticism appear to emerge from the very nature of the object being criticised. The heterogeneity of Buckingham’s target – heroic drama broadly represented by that of Dryden – gives him an ample, but not a precisely identifiable, object of imitation, and the hilarity of R can be chaotic even as to the generic identity of what is being evoked. As the italic passages in RT enable us to see, Marvell’s imitation of Parker is more sharply focused, allowing him to extrapolate from the voice itself to the narcissistic fantasies it appears to warrant. Owing to the confessional and doctrinal character of his debate with Parker, moreover, the mediation of author and speaker, crucial to Marvell’s parodic technique, is intimately analogous to the mediation of the literal and the figurative that is central to the interpretive technique of figuration, as well as to the mediation of the material and the spiritual that is bound up with the hermeneutic technique of accommodation.13 Parker’s cynically confident deployment of figuration and accommodation is also a chief target of Marvell’s critical intelligence. This intricately analogous interplay of terms – those of parody, figuration, and accommodation – gives Marvell a potent weapon for exposing Parker’s arrogance that is absent from Buckingham’s armoury. My point here is not that Marvell is a more skilful controversialist than Buckingham (although I think he is), but that the conjunction of Marvell’s polemical brilliance and Parker’s absolutist devotion to religious persecution led Marvell to sense the emergence and potential power of a virtual realm of the real, somewhere between human imagination and divine spirit, that was available for occupation. Necessary for this was the intuition of a new realm of critical interpretation, and of the new terms requiring mediation, the actual and the virtual and the public and the private. Also needed was a recognition of the difference made by print. Inept parody as self-exposure The viability that the official persecution of religious minorities had attained by 1670 was all to Parker’s liking. His polemical railing against nonconformity was remarkable in its extremity, not only a savage brief for state policing but wildly intemperate in rhetoric and style. Parker is especially fond of inept but vicious efforts at ‘exposing and personating the 65

part i: rethinking texts and readers Nonconformists’ – that is, parodying dissenting discourse, which he takes to be corrupted by enthusiastic figures of speech that hypocritically elevate the self-love of the speaker (p. 51). Marvell’s strategy is to personate the personator through counter-polemical raillery. His self-conscious insistence on the empirical actuality of print, which I’ve mentioned, is a foil for Parker’s oblivious and fraudulent materialisation of language through metaphor. But it is also an outgrowth of Parker’s deep but ambivalent preoccupation with publication. Marvell’s sensitivity to the significance of print, which helps foster his consciousness of the public sphere, is to some degree an effect of Parker’s sensitivity to it.14 RT opens by quoting, from Parker’s Defence, a valediction to publishing, which tries to hide his habitual self-regard in a rhetoric of selfdeprecation that is sabotaged by gratuitous figures of sexual desire and propagation. If answering his nonconformist critics is ‘the Penance I must undergo for the wantonness of my Pen’, he writes, ‘I am reformed from my incontinency of Scribling, and do here heartily bid thee an Eternal Farewell ’ (p. 43). However, Parker returned to print only a year later, in a ninetythree-page ‘Preface’ to Bramhall’s Vindication: ‘From a Writer of Books’, Marvell remarks, ‘our Author is already dwindled to a Preface-monger’, a literary form Marvell associates with mercenary brutality, likening it to selling tickets to a bear-baiting (p. 44). Parker admits that the preface ‘must be ravish’d out of his hands before his thoughts can possibly be cool enough to review or correct the Indecencies either of its stile or contrivance’. Furthermore, he is concerned ‘in matters of a Closer and more Comfortable importance to himself and his own Affairs’. Marvell can only conclude from this promiscuous language that Parker thought ‘[‘t]was fit that all business should have given place to the work of Propagation’, for ‘the Race and Family of the Railers should be perpetuated among Mankind’. Hence the real cause of his return to publication ‘must be a Female’. But isn’t publication itself a means of self-perpetuation? By this logic it was ‘to gratify the Importunity of the Bookseller [i.e. publisher]’ that Parker ‘hath brought forth this Preface’ (pp. 46, 47). In the face of such devious double entendres Marvell observes: ‘He is now growing a very Enthusiast himself’; then elaborates: Some Man that had less right to be fastidious and confident, would, before he exposed himself in publick, both have cool’d his Thoughts, and corrected his Indecencies: or would have considered whether it were necessary or wholesome that he should write at all. […] But there was no holding him. Thus it must be, and no better, when a Man’s Phancy is up, and his Breeches are down; when the Mind and the Body make contrary Assignations, and he hath both a Bookseller at once and a Mistris to satisfie: Like Archimedes, into the Street he runs out naked with his Invention (pp. 47–8).

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mckeon: marvell discovers the public sphere So Marvell the author becomes Marvell the speaker, whetting his imitation of Parker to the knowing edge of parody by indulging Parker’s figuration of indecent exposure in the actual public as exposure in the virtual public of print. Soon after, wondering why Parker ever should have entered print, Marvell tells the story of his rise to prominence, ‘rise’ being the operative word. As a young man Parker was placed as chaplain in a noble household, where ‘all the domesticks … allow’d him by common consent, to have not onely all the Divinity, but more wit too than all the rest of the family put together. This thing alone elevated him exceedingly in his own conceit, and raised his Hypocondria into the Region of the Brain: that his head swell’d like any Bladder with wind and vapour’. And in this condition Parker, who we already know is ‘of an amorous Complexion’, turns his attention to the gentle ladies of the household, who ‘perceived he was a Rising-Man’. ‘[D]ividing his Day among them into Canonical hours, of reading now the Common-prayer, and now the Romances’, Parker soon finds that ‘[t]he Sympathy of Silk began to stir and attract the Tippet to the Pettycoat and the Petticoat toward the Tippet. The innocent Ladies found a strange unquietness in their minds, and could not distinguish whether it were Love or Devotion’. Parker’s chaotic figures of speech, we begin to see, express a more fundamental confusion of the flesh with the spirit, amor with caritas, books of romance with the Book of Common Prayer, the petticoat with the Anglican tippet. Yet Marvell does ‘not hear for all this that he had ever practiced upon the Honour of the Ladies, … For all this Courtship had no other operation than to make him stil more in love with himself: and if he frequented their company, it was only to speculate his own Baby in their Eyes’. In an oblique view of fin amor, Marvell figures literal non-consummation as narcissism.15 But Parker soon finds a more effective technique of self-reflection, typographical virtualisation. ‘Nothing now would serve him’, Marvell concludes, ‘but he must be a madman in print’ (pp. 75–7). Whether phallic erection or upward mobility, Parker’s ‘rise’ accommodates the corruption of ‘spiritual’ self-elevation. The confusion of bodily signifiers with spiritual signifieds in Parker’s figures bespeaks his failure as a personator of nonconformists because, Marvell suggests, the enthusiasm he attributes to nonconformists is clearly his own. ‘I thought his profanation of the Scripture intolerable’, Marvell writes. ‘For though he alledges that ‘tis only in order to shew how it was misapplied by the Fanaticks, he might have done that too, and yet preserved the Dignity and Reverence of those Sacred Writings, which he hath not done’ (p. 200). I have described the delicacy of excess required of successful parody that both imitates and criticises. But if parodic imitation lacks the crucial intensifiers that take the speaker’s voice just slightly 67

part i: rethinking texts and readers beyond that of the adversary, criticism will be overbalanced by imitation, author and adversary will bleed into each other, and readers will take the parody as an instance of what it aims to expose. Parker’s failure as a parodist certainly has this effect. However, for Marvell it seems to result not only from rhetorical ineptitude but also from a basic onto-theological confusion. But it is a paradoxical confusion, because Parker’s ecclesiastical persecution of religious dissent hinges on a refusal to acknowledge any accommodation of spiritual salvation through the physical acts of dissenting worship. Public conscience and insignificant sacraments The Reformation freed Christian doctrine from the alien authority of the Roman pope, but it thereby risked subjecting doctrine to the regional authority of national institutions like the Church of England. In Marvell’s critique, Parker exploits the status of Anglicanism as the national church by defining as narrowly as possible the subject’s liberty of conscience from civil constraints. The spiritual supremacy of the church is ensured by the absolutist supremacy of the state. To this end and with breathtaking literalism, Parker confines the realm of conscience to the mind: This is the Prerogative of the Mind of Man within its own Dominions; its Kingdom is intellectual, and seated in the Thoughts, not Actions of Men … Liberty of Conscience is Internal and Invisible … In cases and disputes of Publick concernment, Private men are not properly sui Juris, They have no power over their own actions: they are not to be directed by their own judgments, or determined by their own wills, but by the commands and determinations of the publick Conscience (pp. 92–3).16

Parker’s public is the state, not the public sphere, and its authority is political and comprehensive (hence at one with patriarchalism: conscientious subjects are to their monarchs as femes coverts are to their husbands17). In the terms of Marvell’s parody, Parker’s public concupiscence lays claim to conscientiousness. By Parker’s logic, nonconformist belief that is publicly expressed through the materiality of words or actions – by speech or publication, let alone by conventicles – is not conscience but sedition, and the tender consciences of nonconformists have only the Anglican sacraments for their material expression. So for dissenters, the separation of the material from the spiritual denies them all means of accommodating their knowledge of the divine spirit by the things of this world. This was of course the legal means by which most Puritans were obliged to become dissenters and nonconformists. Marvell adopts a reasonable tone in remarking that his adversary’s dichotomising approach to the accommodation of spirit by matter is based 68

mckeon: marvell discovers the public sphere more deeply on his inability to tell the difference between them. ‘The Church of England’s definition of a Sacrament’, Marvell writes, is ‘[t]hat it is an outward visible sign of an inward spiritual Grace,’ a signifying relationship that is authorised as an accommodation of spirit by matter. But not all ‘Symbolical Ceremonies’, Marvell points out, are sacramental, and with deadpan wit he remarks that the ‘Nonconformists object to some of the Rites of the Church of England under the name of Symbolical or significant Ceremonies’, ‘and they complain that these things should be imposed on them … as want nothing of a Sacramental nature but Divine Institution’. He then patiently lays out the logic of dissenting protest: ‘And because an Humane Institution is herein made of equal force to a Divine Institution, therefore it is that they are agrieved’. The problem is ‘that things indifferent, and that have no proper signature, or significancy to that purpose, should by command be made necessary conditions of Church-Communion’ (pp. 150, 151–2). The analogy between the accommodations claimed by defective church ceremonies and the significations claimed by defective figures of speech is clear enough, especially in Parker’s absolutist politics, for which the authority of human law, presumed to accommodate God’s will, is sufficient without it. In fact, Parker makes this analogy explicit in a remarkable passage that Marvell quotes: ‘[T]he Magistrates power of instituting significant Ceremonies, &c. can be no more Usurpation upon the CONSCIENCES of Men, than if the Sovereign Authority should take upon it self … to define the signification of words’ (p. 156). Marvell calls this the ‘Transubstantiation of Language’ (p. 158), and he sees the insignificant Anglican sacraments as akin to Roman Catholic idolatry. Printing as liberty and license This collapse of the figurative into the literal, of spirit into matter, finds its parallel in Marvell’s treatment of the technology of print. When, in the passage I discussed earlier, Parker feigns modesty about his return to publication, he makes the unlikely claim that he is ‘none of the most zealous Patrons of the Press’. Nevertheless, Marvell suggests one reason this may be so, in an apostrophe to the printing press that begins as parody but modulates into comic raillery: The Press (that villanous Engine) invented much about the same time with the Reformation, that hath done more mischief to the Discipline of our Church, than all the Doctrine can make amends for. ‘Twas an happy time when all Learning was in Manuscript, and some little Officer, like our Author, did keep the Keys of the Library. […] But now, since Printing came into the World, such is the mischief, that a Man cannot write a Book but presently he is answered. […] There have been wayes found out to banish

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part i: rethinking texts and readers Ministers, to fine not only the People, but even the Grounds and Fields where they assembled in Conventicles; But no Art yet could prevent these seditious meetings of Letters. Two or three brawny Fellows in a Corner, with meer Ink and Elbow-grease, do more harm than an hundred Systematical Divines with their sweaty Preaching. […] O Printing! how hast thou disturb’d the Peace of Mankind! that Lead, when moulded into Bullets, is not so mortal as when founded into Letters! (pp. 45–6)

If the actual state is the public conscience, the public sphere is its virtual supersession. In this apostrophe, Marvell makes wittily explicit the virtuality of print, hence both the silliness and the sagacity of figuring it as a battlefield. Protestantism is the religion of the Book because it uses print to liberate scripture from Church monopoly so that it can be read by the priesthood of all believers without ecclesiastical mediation. So the virtual communications of the press enable nonconformity to escape the actual persecutions of the state church. Later on, however, Marvell describes the painful case of conscience he has experienced in using Parker’s strategies to answer him. What Marvell comes to realise is that the virtuality of print obscures issues of responsibility that cannot be ignored when verbal exchange occurs face to face. And although Parker’s ethical apparatus is too rudimentary for this compunction to register, Marvell begins to see that in giving Parker some of his own medicine, he, too, has become ethically compromised. In the second part of RT Marvell continues to attack his antagonist’s brutality and the bloated fantasies of rectitude that support it. But he also begins to reflect that the virtuality of print is all the more personally threatening for its seeming impersonality. Public circulation inevitably evades private responsibility, whether by its very structure, which disembeds communication from personal interaction, or by encouraging personal malice through a presumption of impunity. Even apart from the masquerades of anonymity and parody by which it may be accompanied, print’s supposed depersonalisation of the texts it puts into circulation instead makes the private public, and invites its licentious personalisation. You cannot kill letters, but you can kill reputations. Because of the distance between authors and readers, Marvell argues, publication is ‘an envious and dangerous imployment’. And ‘he that does publish an Invective, does it at his utmost peril […] For it is a praedatory course of life, and indeed but a privateering upon reputation … [H]e that once Printed an ill Book has thereby condenc’d his words on purpose lest they should be carried away by the wind; he has diffused his poyson so publickly, in design that it might be beyond his own recollection: and put himself deliberately past the reach of any private admonition’ (pp. 236, 238, 240).18 For Marvell the liabilities of printed 70

mckeon: marvell discovers the public sphere invective are too great: the author’s loss of control over what he writes, the adversary’s loss of control over his reputation, the reader’s vulnerability to collateral damage, the community’s loss of its essential glue, collective responsibility. And he resolves that ‘‘tis better that evil Men should be left to an undisturbed possession of their repute, […] then that the Exchange and Credit of Mankind should be universally shaken, wherein the best too will suffer and be involved’ (p. 237). A corollary of Marvell’s dismay at discovering the ethical liabilities of virtual exchange is his regret at having treated the virtual Parker as an adequate guide to the actual, and rallied an author ‘whose person I was so far ignorant of, that I could only take aim at his errours’. He fears that like Parker’s, his own parody has failed: in effect that his own righteous exposure of Parker has impersonated too closely, and thereby reproduced, Parker’s licentious exposure of nonconformists; that his virtual speaker’s criticism of Parker has collapsed into his actual authorial imitation of him. And before he is done Marvell asks ‘pardon of whosoever may have innocently mistaken my Book’ (p. 247). But his change of heart is signalled most concisely on the title page of Part II of RT. The first part had been published anonymously.19 A year later, the second part, inscribed ‘by Andrew Marvel’, takes responsibility for his book by personalising it, at least in the virtuality of print, with his proper name (title page, p. 222). Anonymity might plausibly be seen as the limit case of public-sphere authorship, the substitution of a speaker’s sheer virtuality for the actual individual. Marvell’s second part seeks to reverse this act. Print as parody So the depersonalisation that is a consequence of published communication is surprisingly personal in its repercussions – which may be only to say that virtual activity can have actual consequences. Of course, publication need not facilitate the kind of parodic impersonation both Parker and Marvell engage in; but there is a suggestive parallel between the liminality of print depersonalisation and the liminality of parodic impersonation. As publication negotiates between the actual and its virtual projection, parody negotiates between the author and her projected speaker. And although this is hard to imagine from within our print-saturated culture, we also might say that at this critical moment in the history of cultural production, print is by its nature parodic, because it requires the author to personate herself – that is, to depersonalise and abstract herself from her actual, face-to-face speech context – in order to address a virtual readership that necessitates the awkward mask of a persona in part because it consists of no one in particular. I think Marvell is keenly sensitive to the way the 71

part i: rethinking texts and readers author’s parodic projection of a speaker is overlaid, in print, by the actual individual’s public projection of a virtual voice, intensifying the ethical burden of address. I say this in part because Marvell seems to me for the most part the model of an ethical subject. The spirit in which he retracts the worst of his aspersions on Parker – ‘I am too conscious of mine own imperfections to rake into and dilate upon the failings of other men’ – is true to the characteristic honesty and grace of his poetry, notably the palinode ‘The Coronet’ (p. 241). But Marvell also seems as conscious as one might be at this time of the massive adjustment underway in the experience and understanding of the nature of social being, of which the idea of the public sphere is one harbinger. Of Parker’s answer to the first part of RT Marvell writes that ‘his whole book is, according to his usual Address, a Letter to me, & it concerns my Civility to return an Answer to every part of it. […] And he hath promised me the Press shall be open; neither would I therefore be behind hand with him in courtesie.’ But a caution to the reader is necessary, ‘not to be misled by a pestilent way that he has of Youing me, and so making me an Epidemical person, affixing thereby what hath ever, he pretends to have been said or done by any in the Cause of Non-conformity at any time to my account: although it hath never enter’d into my Book or Imagination, and he had been more kind, if, as sometimes he does out of civility he had Thou’d me to the end of the Chapter’ (pp. 266–7). The epistolary mode would continue to dominate printed discourse for many decades before its decline definitively acknowledged the anachronism of its ‘thouing’ that its conventionality papered over. Marvell, alive to the vicissitudes of form, seems bemused by Parker’s invitation to join him in the courteous civility of personal epistolary exchange while addressing him in the ‘epidemical’ second person plural, whereby Marvell spreads unchecked to infect a multitude by representing it. His objection is of course to being held responsible for the discourse of a collective for which he has not even purported to speak. But although Parker himself seems unconscious of the interplay of the actual and the virtual, the private and the public, that is increasingly evident in the public sphere of print, I have made the case that Marvell is, as here, quite attentive to it, if also uncertain about its ethical implications. Over the course of this essay, I have developed the quite notional hypothesis that a genuinely innovative but latent framework of experience, what we now call the public sphere, might become manifest in and available to cultural understanding and practice not only through the material conditions on which its emergence depended, but also through the intuitive adaptation of familiar forms of speech and writing. I have suggested that Marvell’s acute attention to the structurally similar interpretive techniques of which he was a master – techniques of mediating the 72

mckeon: marvell discovers the public sphere relation of the literal to the figurative, the material to the spiritual, and the author to the speaker – enabled him to synthesise from these mental operations a consciousness of something that was unknown but analogous and intuitively experienced. This was the relation of our actuality to a realm of the virtual that hovers at the edge of textual awareness under the aegis of print, a realm that has also emerged through other conjunctions of technology and techne and that is the mark of modern life. Notes Parts of this essay have previously been published in ‘Swift’s debt to Marvell: parody, figuration, religion, and print culture’, in K. Juhas, H. J. Real, and S. Simon (eds), Reading Swift: Papers from the Sixth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013), pp. 149–58. That material is reworked here by the kind permission of Wilhelm Fink. In the above text, The Rehearsal has been abbreviated to R, while The Rehearsal Transpros’d is referred to as RT; for the editions used, please see notes 6 and 7.  1 The summary account of events in the first two paragraphs above is documented by hundreds of contemporary printed sources in M. McKeon, Politics and Poetry in Restoration England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), chs. 2–4.  2 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger with the assistance of F. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, ([1962]) 1989), p. 26. The commentary on Habermas’s idea of the public sphere is vast. For a fuller account of my own understanding see M. McKeon, ‘Parsing Habermas’s “Bourgeois Public Sphere”’, Criticism, 46:2 (Spring 2004), pp. 273–7.  3 R. Steele, Tatler, 144 (11 March 1710); Bickerstaff also assumes here the role of public ‘Censor’. Elsewhere, Bickerstaff convenes in his pages a virtual ‘Court of Judicature’: e.g. see 110 (22 December 1709). D. F. Bond (ed.), The Tatler, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). On Mr Spectator’s posture, see J. Addison, Spectator, 1, 10 (1, 12 March 1711). D. F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). This takes Hickeringill’s insight into the quasi-official status of the public sphere a step further by imagining the function of the (in this case periodical) press itself, and not just coffee house habitués, to be the consideration of cases of social impropriety whose ‘criminality’ the state judiciary is unwilling or unable to try. The word ‘Cabal ’, a version of Cabbala, is in its specifically political sense an acronym derived from the first letters of the last names of five powerful, conspiratorial, and contemporary ministers to Charles II.  4 Daniel Defoe, Preface to The Storm (London: G. Sawbridge, 1704), sig. A2-r (font reversed).  5 For a full discussion of these ideas, see M. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), ch. 2 and passim; on privation and deprivation see pp. 9, 228.  6 See ‘Chronology’ in A. Marvell, The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. A. Patterson, M. Dzelzainis, N. von Maltzahn, and N. H. Keeble, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:xliv-lii. All citations of RT will refer to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text.

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part i: rethinking texts and readers  7 George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, Plays, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings, ed. R. D. Hume and H. Love, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1.1.87, 94–5, 96–7, 101–2 (p. 400). Further citations of R will refer to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text.  8 See L. H. Martin, ‘Dryden and the art of transversion’, Comparative Drama, 6 (1972), pp. 3–13.  9 Debate about the relative merits of dramatic prose, blank verse, and rhymed verse was complex and ongoing during the Restoration period, but in the present case the selection of one medium or the other has a simpler significance. 10 See The Rehearsal, pp. 359, 635. 11 He makes this complaint earlier in RT. 12 According to the editors, the Latin tag, meaning ‘What I have written, I have written’, is the statement of Pontius Pilate on delivering Christ to execution (see John 19:22). 13 Treating accommodation as a special case of figuration, I refer to the controversial view that scripture tolerates the use of the material things of this world to figure what is invisible and unknowable, the spiritual realm of the divine. 14 See RT, pp. 284–6, where Marvell takes up and refutes Parker’s misguided fixation on the ‘Chronology’ of the several publications that contribute to their debate with comparable zest. 15 For two very different poetic reflections on this psycho-sexual nexus with which Marvell was intensely preoccupied see ‘The Unfortunate Lover’ and ‘Daphnis and Chloe’. 16 I have included within this quotation from Parker the un-italicised passages that Marvell does not quote. See Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie … (London, 1669), pp. 89, 91. Parker’s distinction between private conscience, and public conscience or state law, was made most famously by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (London, 1651), p. 169 (ch. 29). 17 For the common law doctrine of coverture see Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, in Four Books, 12th ed. (London: A. Strahan and W. Woodfall, 1793), 1:15, 3:441–5. The patriarchalist analogy between the state and the family enjoined on subjects a subordination to the magistrate analogous to that of family members to the male head of the household. 18 One of Margaret Cavendish’s characters makes the same point from the opposite direction of not print but orality: ‘[T]hose subjects that are only discourst off, in speach, flyes away in words; which vanisheth as smoak, or shadows, and the memory or remembrance of the Author, or Oratour, melts away as oyle, leaving no sign in present life …’: Lady Sanspareille in Youths Glory, and Deaths Banquet, in Playes (London: A. Warren, 1662), Act 2, Scene 5, pp. 131–2. 19 In print publication, anonymity is a default position that many seventeenth-century authors occupied for a range of reasons. Theoretically possible in scribal publication, anonymity was unlikely owing to coterie circulation. The Stamp Act of 1712 (10 Anne, c. 18) tried unsuccessfully to prohibit anonymous publication. For some typically negative reactions to it see McKeon, Secret History, pp. 93–4.

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Extraordinarily ordinary: Nehemiah Wallington’s experimental method Kathleen Lynch

It constrained me to write a nother Booke … and this which I write is not by human larning but that which I senchably feele and know by my own experience …

‘An Extract of Several passages in my Life’1

For a few decades now, we have been reading over Nehemiah Wallington’s shoulder as he read and wrote, and we have been doing so in the wake of Paul Seaver’s landmark study, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (1985). Seaver introduced Wallington to us as ‘a London Puritan artisan whose long life (1598–1658) left almost no discernible impact on his time. Yet, he was nevertheless in almost every respect an exceptional Englishman.’2 Seaver’s excitement about having Wallington as a new focus for a social history of the artisanal class in England was as palpable as it has been infectious. Since then, this citizen of London, Presbyterian elder, and Parliamentarian has been marshalled as an eyewitness to the doctrinal and ecclesiastical polemics of civil war London, to the affective relations of the family, to the consumption of news, to the collection of letters as a source of invention, among many other kinds of studies.3 With fifty manuscript books written over a period of nearly forty years, there is so much for which Wallington can be called upon to witness, to illustrate, to exemplify, or to provide evidence. Seaver estimated the total volume of Wallington’s writing at well over 20,000 pages. David Booy,  who edited The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–1654, confirms that the seven extant manuscript notebooks alone contain over 3,200 pages. In this essay, I argue that to take the full measure of this extraordinarily ordinary Englishman, we need to take fuller account of Wallington as a non-elite reader and writer. Only when we shift our attention from what he is witnessing to the constructedness of his witnessing can we 75

part i: rethinking texts and readers begin to think what it would mean to add Wallington to a constellation of extraordinarily productive note-takers. Consequently, we could also better understand a fuller range of reading and writing practices in early modernity. This is the critical moment to make that turn to a fuller account of Wallington’s methods of writing. In a range of scholarly fields, we have seen renewed attention to reading and writing practices. In The Order of Books (1994), Roger Chartier called for this reorientation of focus as he identified a new chapter in the work of the history of the book, an ‘approach that combines textual criticism, bibliography, and cultural history’.4 Wallington is a key exemplar of an English mode of historically situated reading practices – a mode growing from scriptural literacy and daily meditational writing habits. Along with Chartier, Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker also encouraged us to see the book as itself a ‘complex object’, one that activates physical as well as mental relations with a world of ideas.5 All of the elements of a book’s composition, construction, and production are also ways of structuring meaning. Still, as Zwicker has cautioned, ‘Like other modes of consumption – like eating, or listening, or looking – reading seems to deny its material premise.’6 In large part, it is the hunt for material traces of early modern reading and writing practices that has sent so many scholars into local archives, special collections, and rare book libraries in the decades since Chartier issued his call to action. What we often find in archives and special collections libraries are not only the richly meaningful objects of printed books and fair copies of manuscripts, but also the ‘foul papers’, messy, often unfinished documents, of mixed authorship sometimes, and perhaps of no easily discernible function or genre. There is no doubt that the physical qualities of these items also provide rich clues to their abilities to activate social and intellectual networks, but the ratio of noise to signal can be daunting. And once their codes are cracked, further application to other materials can be uncertain. I am thinking of miscellanies, commonplace books, notebooks, writing books, daybooks, and journals. It is this body of materials that I turn to here, with the intent to place Wallington in a new way in our bibliocultural material histories. I will focus on two elements of his observational method: a juxtaposition of organisational schemes – one chronological, the other topical – and a habitual commitment to the bound blank book. We can begin to unfold the complex webs of meaning of what Wallington himself called simply his ‘books’ from these two starting points. Wallington gave these books descriptive references such as a ‘record’, a ‘memorial’, a ‘gathering’, or a ‘bundle’. In the 1650s, he increasingly adduced the language of ‘experience’, likely under the influence of the 76

lynch: extraordinarily ordinary Independents, whose gathered congregations used experience as an authorising principle for their narratives of spiritual assurance. I provisionally accept the larger category of note-taking as a means of gaining some cross-disciplinary perspective on Wallington’s reading and writing practices. The nature of note-taking is a renewed subject of scholarly inquiry – whether in service of humanistic eloquence, Baconian scientific practice, an aid to memory, or an early stage of writing. By attending to messy notebooks, we gain access to all kinds of organisational strategies for managing knowledge, many of them improvisational, many evolving out of older humanistic practices (and sometimes arguing against those older humanistic practices while still based in them). These analyses operate across various knowledge domains. Peter Stallybrass and colleagues’ study of erasable tablets, for instance, gave us new insight into the ephemeral nature of note-taking, and helped us see freshly a longer gestational process of writing as well as the role of notes that are quick and impromptu by design.7 Or, in Richard Yeo’s study of the observational methods of Baconians, a ‘new kind of note-taking’ in the area of emerging scientific methods of observation became ‘central to the compilation of empirical natural histories’.8 A new form of collective knowledge creation through experimental observation emerged through these practices. Focusing on humanist pedagogy, Ann Blair has emphasised the importance of institutional instruction to the standardisation of method. Printed reference books also furthered the standardisation of organisational schemes. Much of this scholarly work has been done in the areas of humanistic training and scientific method. By and large, it has not yet taken into account the parallel work on the array of godly devotional practices in non-elite cultures, developing in a more ad hoc fashion at the same time, and facing the same religious and political crises of authority as, for instance, the Baconian and Hartlib circles. Here, I contribute to a collective survey of a number of settings, forms, and categories of information that require management, ‘each of which posed distinctive practical, intellectual, and political challenges’, as Blair notes. By focusing on an extraordinarily ordinary individual, I also wade right into the ‘problem of exceptional evidence’, as William Sherman frames it. Even without quite knowing how to describe a singular object as representative, we hope that it can ‘shed light on larger logics (structural, social, and symbolic) that only can be glimpsed in their particular manifestations’.9 So here goes: Wallington is already well positioned in the world of emerging devotional reading and writing routines. Kate Narveson and Andrew Cambers are among the scholars taking up the tools with which to survey the material culture of an immaterial practice in the devotional 77

part i: rethinking texts and readers realm. Both of their approaches to Wallington’s method work across fault lines of clergy and laity, or, as one might put it, the trained professional and the dedicated professor of religion. In Narveson’s study of the practices of reading and meditational writing of the laity in an emerging writing culture, for instance, Wallington exemplifies an intentional search for ‘precepts and promises’, applications to his own life.10 In her examination of Wallington, Lady Grace Mildmay, and others, Narveson argues that independent thinking does emerge from the highly prescriptive forms of self-study. For Narveson, that’s the compelling reason to turn to these materials, mostly manuscript, mostly private, but completing full circuits of individual reading and writing practices that structured emerging world views. Alternatively, Andrew Cambers presents a study of godly reading practices that is alert to the situations in which reading occurs and the communities that are thereby fostered. Sites range from the closet and the kitchen at home to the church and the bookshop abroad. Cambers places Wallington’s reading in the study, a largely masculine reserve that frames methods of reading and writing that in many respects imitate the professional reading and writing styles of the clergy – and that therefore begin to bridge the practices that until then separated the professional cleric from the godly professor. Cambers’s attention to the scenes of production complements Narveson’s study of the means of early modern devotional practices. We know Wallington had a study. In ‘A Record of Gods Marcys’, the earliest of his surviving writing books, Wallington reveals that his study was a private place, locked with a key, when he reports that someone broke into his house one Sunday when the family had gone to church. But the study could not have been a male retreat, dedicated solely to Wallington’s writing. It was a porous space – with a desk for his daughter Sarah and some ready cash in the drawer of his desk.11 Also, there are as many references to his closet as the place of daily early-morning prayer. We have to be cautious not to apply a simplified division of functions (and gendered access) among domestic spaces. When it comes to studies, we take the existence of a private study for granted in our analyses of those identifying with the learned cultures of early modern Europe. A writer had tools and the necessary accoutrements for a writing life. Some created purpose-built structures, from full libraries like Montaigne’s, decorated with maxims from classical authors. Others commissioned machinery to manage the consultation of multiple books at a time. Think of Ramelli’s book wheel, constructed to hold up to twenty volumes securely, and which he promoted as especially helpful to those suffering from gout.12 There were workmanlike versions of a study, as 78

lynch: extraordinarily ordinary well. Jan Comenius depicted a ‘scholar in his study’ in Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1672). The description presents a ‘student, apart from men, [who] sitteth alone, … to his Studies, … he readeth Books, which being within his reach, he layeth open upon a Desk and picketh all the best thought out of them into his own Manual’ (p. 200). This is the classic humanist student, applying the commonplacing methods of extracting texts and organising them under standard heads so as to create a personal repository for argument and oratory. It is difficult at best to establish grammar school attendance for someone of the artisanal class like Wallington. But there is also a persistent assumption that schooling and manual labour would have fallen on opposite sides of a formational divide. For instance, in an aside on the lasting effects of a template for intellectual work established at a young age, Lorraine Daston commented that such a template of motivated reading applies especially to the bookishly learned, ‘those who – for reasons of class, gender, and the cultural status of literacy – would have learned bookish skills before or to the exclusion of manual ones’.13 This is true enough, and the a­ pplications – and reframing – of the template of learning styles and subject matters in the grammar school are a source of new insight into cultural forms as seemingly distant as the professional theatre or as refracted in the styles of women writers, especially aristocratic women who may have had access to the grammar school curriculum through private tutors. Added to the scarcity of evidence, such conceptual divides help keep the lay literate out of our histories of reading and writing. Wallington did go to school. He tells us so, without providing any particulars.14 We know he was a regular buyer of books and news-sheets. But he also proclaimed his turn against whatever ‘book larning’ was imparted at school (as in the epigraph to this essay). Certainly, there are no traces of a Latin curriculum in his subject matter. Unlike Montaigne, Wallington does not have precepts from Cicero, Sextus Empiricus, and Lucretius, among others, to hand. Or if he does, they are not to the purpose. Perhaps his compositional style was shaped by early grammar-school training. But one gets no sense of copiousness as its own goal in the cause of eloquence. Rather, scholars have tended to worry about the potentially pathological indications of his ‘exhausting hyperconsciousness’ of the self-imposed task of observations on the self.15 In any event, presumably, a more direct influence on Wallington’s writing style would have come through his lifelong attendance at sermons and participation in godly discourse. Still, as we situate Wallington as a mid-seventeenth-century reader and writer, we need to ask what habits of intellectual work did he take into his study? How did his encounters with pedagogical disciplines mix with other sources of authority, like godly preachers and authors of pastoral guidance? 79

part i: rethinking texts and readers For a closer study of Wallington’s working methods and organisational strategies for his writing, we can use an evidentiary mix of the surviving writing books and Wallington’s reports of the entire corpus in one of his later books. For then we can see the juxtaposition of his framing ­strategies – with chronology and topicality each having a functional role. We can also see some of the indicators and consequences of his acceptance of the bound blank book as his vehicle. These include a dependence on running heads and page numbers, with tables of contents coming at the ends of books and representing recursive rereadings of earlier books. A study of Wallington’s organisational methods will also highlight in comparison a lesser attention to or dependence on the alphabetisation of commonplace topics, or of indices and marginal notes, for that matter. Most importantly, we will see that Wallington’s notational activity is not preparation for something more polished or finished. It is the process itself that fully supports the maxim he might have adopted: my book is my self. Collectively and over time, his books constitute a memory palace – with such elements as size and colour of covers and pages operating mnemonically. Fortunately, one of the surviving books was his summa, ‘a Book of all my writting Books’ (p. 9). This one book – the 47th in his list, the one he expected to be his last – teaches us to read them all. He has a fresh blank book to hand. It is an extra thick quarto volume, bound in leather, with two blind-tooled lines around each cover, and with evidence that there had been two clasps. There is no title inscribed on the spine or elsewhere. There is a running head spread across page openings for the first 220 pages (approximately half the book): ‘a Treatice Containing an Extract of Several passages in my Life and a Collection of Severall Treatices’. Now, it is MS. V.a.436 in the Folger Shakespeare Library. When we open the book, no outer leaf of paper presents itself as a pristine zone of transition or protective wrapper. Rather, at the top of the verso of the first leaf, ‘Nehemiah Wallington / 1654’ is roughly centred on two lines. On the recto of the next leaf, in a place we might expect to find a title, Wallington began instead at the very top of the page, ‘To the Christian Reader’, and he commenced to describe the objective of this ‘one booke more’ that he intends to write. Next, beginning with Arabic and then moving into Roman numerals, he lists the ‘Names of these Books that I have written’. Over five bound pages and one half-page insert (the latter seemingly an afterthought with several titles he had overlooked), he numbered and described fifty books that he has written, beginning with one in 1620 that recorded his ‘gatherings’ from scripture to illustrate the widow’s mite.16 After thirty-four years of writing, Wallington is taking an inventory of his books. These are not the books written by others that he read, though 80

lynch: extraordinarily ordinary he estimates having read over two hundred books.17 Wallington may well have the whole set of his books immediately to hand in the study as he undertakes to describe one after another in 1654. In the list, each is dated according to time of composition, and the list is ordered roughly chronologically. But chronology is not the only organisational factor. The descriptions allude to the contents categorically – ‘some special graces for the prepairing to goe to ye Lords Supper’ (XV, 1639) or ‘Examples of Gods Wrath upon those that have brok his Command’ (XXX, 1645). By the time he reaches number eleven in the list, he begins to add a physical description to many entries, as in ‘A thin paper book with a parchment cover’ (XXII), ‘A Doubl booke with a read cover’ (XXVIII), ‘a Book with Clasps’ (XXXV), ‘A book with a red cover and blew Leaves’ (XXXIX), or ‘A Long Book with a black cover and clasps’ (XLI). There are important questions about how to understand Wallington’s claim that he has ‘written’ all these books, when the list freely mixes transcriptions of letters, parliamentary proceedings, and ‘The History of Francis Spira’ with writings more familiar today as diary-like.18 Seaver grappled with category issues in Wallington’s writing – which books count as what kind of thing – and David Booy had to grapple with them all over again in editing selections from the surviving books, with a bias to the autobiographical.19 But separate categories are not signalled by the books themselves, apparently, with titles on spines, for instance. Neither is the set entirely uniform. But the lack of uniformity in blank books (his raw materials) may be one key to a strong mnemonics of association of content and the physical characteristics of a book. It is a commitment to the bound blank book that drives Wallington’s need to develop a highly personalised memory palace for himself out of his books. In her influential The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Mary J. Carruthers noted that while the conventions of humanist invention created a personal inventory of memorable phrases or models of speech, a reliable method of retrieval was required, as well, for the inventory to be functional. The point I’m stressing is that the physical properties of the books themselves act as guides to the content. And the book he begins in 1654 (not the last, as it turned out) is the written index to them all, even as this volume will exceed the limits of his organisational strategies, as had so many of the previous volumes before – when it inevitably yields to further note-taking and recording of experiences. There may be an implicit indexing function in the distribution of topics across individually bound volumes. But indexing was not part of Wallington’s vocabulary of book-making. And I submit that is partly because alphabetisation was not one of his characteristic organisational strategies. Rather than organising a multiplicity of alphabetised 81

part i: rethinking texts and readers c­ommonplacing topoi within one bound blank book, Wallington designates each volume as the container for a single topos. And yet, to the extent that indexing is functionally an exercise in cross-referencing and retrieval, this volume is effectively an exercise in meta-indexing. It is the ultimate exemplar of the method Wallington pursues in the study of ‘marks’ and ‘evidence’ of the state of his soul. There is a strong chronological drive, with notes inevitably being recorded sequentially in time. But there is a countervailing pressure of returns and fresh perspectives on lasting spiritual needs. Wallington’s interest in particular conceptual categories for his observational notes evolves over time, with a growing emphasis on records of God’s mercies. But throughout, we perceive the discipline of observation and the imposition of a method through which the writing inscribes God’s word on his heart. Wallington’s observations on his devotional life do not appear to be part of a continuum of writing, one orientated to a more polished, final product. There is not much surviving evidence for the possible preliminary steps Wallington might have taken – as in the quick observation in an erasable tablet, for instance, shorthand notes from a sermon, or the keeping of a ‘wast’ book. These are what Ann Blair called ‘first order notes’.20 In ‘A Record of Gods Marcys’, Wallington notes that the book was preceded by a ‘paper’ in which he recorded several of the observations which he decided merited rewriting in a more lasting form. And there are occasional references to a ‘day book’. At the other end of the writing process, there is also a gap in our understanding of his intentions. Or at least, there is no reason to believe that these notes were intended as assists in a different kind of publication or end product, the second order arrangement that the sense of ‘first order’ implies. The uncertainty about the projected end of Wallington’s writing looms large among the reasons it is so hard to place writings like these in our histories of genres and disciplines. Notes tend to make sense as providing insight into the larger (and longer) process of which they represent one stage. Rather than pointing to some more elaborate or polished product, this series of writing books matter to Wallington for themselves. He uses his best penmanship, in a Roman hand, ‘that others maight benifet by it as well as I’.21 These are closely written books, fairly clean. He takes pride of authorship in them, and he considers them to be the items of highest value in his estate. As early as 1630, he included a ‘will’ at the end of his ‘Record of Gods Marcys’ that indicated as much. He prefaces the will with anxieties about his suicidal impulses.22 He appoints executors, and he articulates his expectation that his widow will receive her third of the estate. But he makes it clear that what he really has to give are ‘such precepts to you as myself have received of the Lord (which I have recorded 82

lynch: extraordinarily ordinary it in this booke)’.23 Addressing his ‘wife and loving frends’, he continues, ‘Now you know, what my life [hath] bin, even full of sorrows … and this booke is a witnesse of some of my sorrows both inward and outward’.24 ‘Witness’ is a key word here, as it reveals that Wallington’s note-taking is more than an aid to memory. It is also an account of memory at work, an exploration of memory’s operations. Memory needs the assist of wayfinders. In some respects, the conventional guides to the contents of a book are present in Wallington’s writing, but not entirely. They are also present in such a way as to emphasise that the construction of such aids may be retrospective – and contingent. For instance, Wallington did not leave margins for topical annotation, at least not consistently.25 ‘An Extract of Several passages in my Life’ is written margin to margin, from the top of the page to the bottom. He thereby forecloses one set of navigational aids. He does not provide an alphabetical index. Rather, after the volume is written, one or more tables of contents at the end are added as finding aids. There, the controlling organising factor is sequential pagination. With these tables, he leaves a record of what previous observations he found especially useful at the point of rereading. Re-inscription became the key to the formation of memory. Some of Wallington’s contemporary note-takers pasted passages from printed materials into their notebooks. Others mixed in printed pamphlets in full. For the most part, Wallington did not, though there are several examples of newsbooks. Neither does he characteristically work with small slips of paper to be organised later under topical heads. As some of his contemporaries in other knowledge communities came to understand, that method had the virtue of providing content adaptable to various contexts. In fact, in 1640, while Wallington’s longitudinal study of the self was well under way, Thomas Harrison created a system for managing accumulated slips of paper with experimental observations. His ‘arca studiorum’ was a purpose-built cabinet that provided hooks on which notes taken on small slips of paper could be hung. Each hook could be reserved for a topic organised alphabetically.26 For Samuel Hartlib, the ‘masterstroke’ of the system was the ability to organise and reorganise a series of observations intended for collectively accumulated knowledge.27 Harrison’s cabinet was popularised when Vincent Placcius published a translation illustrated with his ‘scrinium literatum’. But as Ann Blair notes, the potential for the rearrangement of notes under different heads was limited, as 3,000 alphabetical headings were inscribed on lead plaques, with another 300 slots left blank for additions. Enthusiasts of the system seemed not to notice that any additions would likely disrupt the alphabetical arrangement of the topics.28 83

part i: rethinking texts and readers In contrast, Wallington maintained the integrity of the container (the bound blank book) in which his observations were first recorded. For that, he was all the more dependent on his navigational aids. We might say Wallington had an indexing mentality, but not an indexing practice, at least not as we know an index to be an alphabetical list of topics and page references. Rather, Wallington depends on his summarising tables of contents. At the end of ‘An Extract of Several passages in my Life’, where we might expect an index, there are instead two separate tables of contents. The first is one ‘to find out some things of what I did Collect out of my Wretten Trettices’, proceeding in order of pagination. The next is a more distilled set of ‘observations’, drawn out of a still later reading of the volume. This set of observations also illustrates Wallington’s proclivity for list-making, as they include, for instance, ‘9 Causes of Sloth’, ‘18 Remedies against Discontent’, and ‘13 Rules how we may glorify God’. These are retrospective descriptions of the book, rather than an outline at the beginning to guide one’s reading. Retrospectively, the enumerative lists also perhaps act as multipliers, magnifiers – or at least confirmations of the lessons learned. Even without the language and strict functionality of a topical index, we could still see ‘An Extract of Several passages in my Life’ as a nested set of indices. For this book comprises a five-page annotated list of previous books written, embedded in a ten-page explanation of the purpose of the current book. Then follows a two-hundred-page walk through that list of fifty books, distilling lessons to epitomise them all. Once that process is complete, a new chapter of daily observation begins with a new title and a new agenda, signalled by a running head that settles into a pattern of ‘experienced Marcys of Faith &’ ‘Returne of prayers’, as composed from 28 May 1654 through 31 December 1654. It matters that chronology was not the overarching organising principle because this kind of work has been retrofitted into a history of the diary. Surely, Wallington’s writing represents one of the channels that fed canonical diary-keeping. Just as surely, we can see Wallington struggling to develop regular notational practices, with all of his observations anchored in a time and place. But the crucial point is that chronology was never the prevailing principle for Wallington. Wallington’s practice confirms Adam Smyth’s argument in Autobiography in Early Modern England that there were juxtapositions of chronological schemes in many early autobiographical works. Studies of the note-taking practices of elite cultures also emphasise collective action. This is another area in which we can see Wallington’s activity shadowing or mimicking more professional knowledge communities. We know Wallington circulated his books and indeed gave several 84

lynch: extraordinarily ordinary away, including to his sister and wife. His books serve the spiritual needs of an intimate family circle. We also know Wallington had a more public role in the community of the godly in London, and his experience is a valuable witness to how ecclesiastical controversies affected the lives of ordinary people. Indeed, he got caught up in one landmark controversy. In 1638, he was called by the King’s attorney to testify in Star Chamber about his sources. He was very excited to be part of the same ‘bill’ that indicted Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick for seditious libel.29 Wallington’s place in the rapidly splintering groups of nonconformists has been described from a variety of perspectives with degrees of precision. Seaver presented Wallington as ‘a conventional Puritan of the second generation [those coming of age in King James’s reign]’.30 For Ann Hughes, too, Wallington is an ‘orthodox’ member of the godly.31 He was not immediately of the circle of rabid anti-sectarian Presbyterians like Thomas Edwards, but he was still not above circulating the stories about the sectarians baptising cats to which Edwards gave authority by printing them in Gangraena.32 For Peter Lake, Wallington is the Puritan layperson ‘precisely as he or she could now be extrapolated out of, or was indeed constructed at the time by Denison’s sermons’.33 However we place Wallington in the community of London’s godly, he was not as consumed with the details (or the language) of the process of assurance, as he might have been had he been a sectarian. But given the obvious obsession with reading the signs or looking for the marks or the evidence of grace, he’s not different in kind from those sectarians. By several decades, he predates the fuller flowering of narrated spiritual ‘experiences’. But he develops this record of godly experience as his legacy, to be passed along, imitated, compared, and perhaps conflated with others. In his highly idiosyncratic writing, there is still an opening to a wider set of these kinds of testimonies and a participatory sense of collectivity. If Wallington did achieve some level of comfort over time, as Peter Lake suggests he did, it is surely because his sources of comfort were so highly tuned to his own needs. In these books, writing creates an intense feedback loop that does not look healthy to twenty-first-century eyes. But there is also the undeniable lifelong accumulation and distillation of pastoral resources. He did not call himself an intelligencer, as his contemporary Samuel Hartlib did, but he played the same role among the godly of his acquaintance. And unlike so many who dabbled in spiritual selfexamination and left unfinished books as evidence of their abandonment of the practice, he understood the exercise to be the very essence of his spirituality. Far from archiving his devotion, he was establishing a repertoire, a living testimony of repeated acts of the performance of ­godliness. 85

part i: rethinking texts and readers His building pride in his discipline and his gathered set of resources for spiritual direction is evident in the summary statement that comes at the end of his review of his books in ‘An Extract’: yet I must say and for ever be it spoken to the praise of my God that by his marcy I did receive much good in the Looking over and Collecting these my written Treattices I now receive fruit by my own Labours for those that concarne me in my partickeler. Some they instrucke me in shewing me my corrupt nature and wofull Condition and the use of meanes to come out of it Some shews mee my grate Error in Looking to much on my Selfe promising. … Some of my books incourg and strengthens and directs me in the way that is called holy, and sets me on in duty. Other books that I have wretten shew how I have walked with God they humble me very much in thoughts that I was better in former time then now, … some other books they speake of my Markes or Evidences for heaven, as they comfort me, So they set me upon Examination And many of other books some in particular marcys And others marcys to ye land in generall / All which drives me. And directs to Jesus Christ And Stirrs me up to much Thankfullness in praising and glorifying of my God. (pp. 205–7)

In ‘Discovering the Renaissance reader’, their introduction to Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, Sharpe and Zwicker noted that while literary critics may have led the way back to the archive and the rare book library, literary history was not necessarily prepared to fold archival findings into its own information management systems. For literary history has traditionally been written in terms of genre.34 At the level of genre, there was not yet a category for Nehemiah Wallington’s writing. Indeed, as Kate Narveson has stressed, Wallington exemplifies an emergent writing culture in early modern England, one whose impact on the habits and consequences of reading and writing cultures is only beginning to be fully accounted for. Wallington came to understand himself as an early adapter. This is confirmed in the pleasure he noted after writing down the advice he heard in a sermon by Hugh Peters to keep a daybook. There’s a manicule in the margin there. Or, as Wallington would say, he ‘handed’ the passage and drew a box around his own comment: ‘This matter deliuered did like me well because by God marcy I practis it already and I doe intend to begin to doe it in a more exact maner.’35 There is no doubt Wallington was exacting in his commitment to recording God’s providential acts. He accumulated a set of records, observations, memorials, experiences – all terms he used to describe his books. By the time he began the 47th notebook (‘An Extract’), he was trying out ‘treatice’ as a title. That choice of term is in accord with the OED’s first definition of the word: ‘a book or writing which treats of some particular subject’. The OED specifies an early, more generalised connection with works of literature. But its 86

lynch: extraordinarily ordinary definition also highlights attention to method: ‘one containing a formal or methodical discussion or exposition of the principles of the subject’. Surely in his search for a category that describes his accomplishment, Wallington turns to this term with the sense that he has provided a full exposition of his subject – which is to say that he has fully witnessed and fully recorded God’s mercies and warnings over his adult lifetime. Wallington came to understand that he was recording his experience as such. With rigorous and sustained self-examination, he was also laying foundations for one of the key discourses in which early moderns came to understand experience as a narrative form – the spiritual autobiography. Wallington’s responsiveness to the materials available for his observations (the blank book) and his experimental groping towards a comprehensive organising system (warnings in one book, encouragements in another, cross-references throughout, repeated rereading of his notes) earn him, in my assessment, the generic marker of autobiography before ‘autobiography’.36 There is no need to try to settle here the origins and limits of English autobiography. But if we begin to identify a historically situated set of generic markers as influenced by material practices, we can better see the writing of Wallington and others as a generative force behind the creation of early modern written records of the self. Tom Webster turned to the notion of a ‘technology of the self ’ to explain the ways writing maintained ‘and indeed constructed’ the early modern godly self.37 For others, Wallington’s written observations now seem like a precursor to the database – with systematic and machine-assisted ways of storing and retrieving knowledge. The ways early moderns grappled with these challenges throw light onto our contemporary technologies for gathering, storing, and retrieving information. At the level of intellectual history, a shared understanding of the limits of the human intellect established a rough methodological correlation between post-Baconian experimentalism and spiritual experientialism.38 But it was falling apart. Still, on its own terms, the study of literate vernacular, scriptural method is becoming an exciting frontier for scholarly work. We have new materials with which we can examine some received traditions – that radicalism was a lower-class phenomenon, that new forms of written meditation on one’s experience were associated with radical forms of religion, that these were always politically threatening. With that notable exception in 1638, Wallington was under the radar of perceived threat to the social order. The question of his ‘profession’ – so alarming for the learned when commoners like John Bunyan (or, God forbid, women) take up preaching – is not so much an issue when practised in the privacy of home and shop. But still we have to admit this 87

part i: rethinking texts and readers activity was not exactly private. His family and friends were well aware of it; they alternately worried about it and expressed some pride in it. His writing merged into or informed other family forms of devotion. He did not hesitate to offer advice to his minister, and indeed he was a member of the Fourth London Classis. From the start, Wallington wrote with an audience in mind, even beyond his family. All extant books begin with ‘To the Christian Reader’.39 All show evidence that he would read them over with his son-in-law late in life, and all have the son-in-law’s taking of possession after Wallington’s death clearly marked with a signature and date under Wallington’s own signature and date on the verso of the first leaf. The place of this ostensibly inward-looking work in a larger supportive community can help us achieve more nuanced understandings of the porous boundaries of public and private. Wallington’s books also help us examine the boundaries between manuscript and print again, from the perspective of the literate but not well-educated layman. Here, we can note that early in ‘An Extract of Several passages in my Life’, he says some people urged him to publish in print. When he demurs that others have done this better than he has, I think he understands implicitly – and with no loss of confidence in what he has produced – the value of more controlled circulation. The book carries pastoral authority for him. This complex object itself activates contact from individual to individual, in a circle of godly family and neighbours. Its singular presence imbues the book with an almost talismanic power. From the beginning and throughout, Wallington’s goal was to write and keep writing until the lessons of faith were fully inscribed in his heart. Note-taking is often examined as an aid to memory. I suspect that Wallington understood fairly early on that his writing was forging pathways into memory exercises. He was developing muscle memory through the work of inscription. No less than Harvey the physician or Herbert the poet, Wallington understood the heart to be the essential organ of man’s inner life, and he was tracking every beat. Certainly, heartsease was his enduring quest. In the second, shorter table of contents with which he ends ‘An Extract of Several passages in my Life’, Wallington essentially underlines the lessons he took from a rereading of the book in 1658. The last item in the table of contents is ‘4 Ways the Spirit of God writs in beleevers hearts. P. 511’ And on page 511, one does find a somewhat self-congratulatory note of his having taken encouragement from a sermon of Mr Barker’s on 2 Corinthians 3.3. This is the passage Wallington has been explicating for his entire adult life. In it, Paul has urged his correspondents to think of themselves as ‘epistles of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the 88

lynch: extraordinarily ordinary heart’. Musing on the point that it is ‘the Spirit and the Spirit alone that is the Gospel is writen on our harts’, Wallington asks himself, ‘How doth the Spirit of God write on a belevers hart?’ He answers with a list. As important as the content of that list (opening the eye of our understanding, softening our hearts, bestowing faith, and beating down ‘carnall’ reason) is, again, his disciplined method of summarising – and so summoning anew the evidence and the conviction. Some twenty pages on, Wallington comes to the end of this volume. He has managed to bring together a variety of ends, beginning his entry for 30 December 1654 with ‘And now the day, the weeke, the month and the yeere, this booke nay my very Life all drawes to an ende’ (p. 537). He expresses ambivalence about starting a new book, reasoning that it is good work and that it is ‘some trouble to mee not to write’. He resolves – not for the first time – not to purchase a new book, but instead ‘some times to write in one ende of my writing book, that hath some wast paper Called the Travilors Meditation which I was a writing in the yeere 1632’ (p. 537).40 At the very end of his life, then, Wallington circles back to the beginning of his enterprise. Each of the extant volumes contains notes from his rereading in 1658, the last set just weeks before his death in September of that year. As long as Wallington’s heart continued beating, he continued to inscribe his faithful self in his books. Notes Original spelling throughout, except for regularisation of i/j and u/v.  1 N. Wallington, ‘A Treatice Containing an Extract of Several passages in my Life and a Collection of Severall Treatices’, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.436.  2 P. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 1.  3 For instance, on Wallington as a reader of news-sheets, see J. Raymond, ‘Irrational, impractical and unprofitable: reading the news in seventeenth-century Britain’, in K.  Sharpe and S. N. Zwicker (eds), Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 194, 198, 203, 205.  4 R. Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 3.  5 Sharpe and Zwicker, ‘Introduction: discovering the Renaissance reader’, in Reading, Society and Politics, pp. 6–9.  6 S. N. Zwicker, ‘The reader revealed’, in S. A. Baron (ed.), The Reader Revealed (Washington: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 2001), p. 11.  7 P. Stallybrass, R. Chartier, J. F. Mowery, and H. Wolfe, ‘Hamlet’s tables and the technologies of writing in Renaissance England’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 55:4 (2004), pp. 379–419.  8 R. Yeo, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 23.

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part i: rethinking texts and readers  9 W. H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 108–9. 10 K. Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and SelfDefinition in an Emerging Writing Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), p. 116. 11 N. Wallington, ‘A Record of Gods Marcys’, Guildhall Library MS 204, p. 470***; D.  Booy (ed.), The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–1654: A Selection (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), p. 84. 12 Ramelli was a military engineer in the service of Henry III of France. In Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli (Paris, 1588), the book wheel is featured alongside water-moving machines, mills, portable bridges, and others. In this context of things engineers can do with wheels, the book wheel takes on the aspect of sprezzatura. 13 L. Daston, ‘Taking notes’, in ‘Focus: scientific readers’, Isis, 95 (2004), p. 444. 14 See, for instance, a casual reference to ‘twelve or thirtenne yeere agoe when I went to scole’ in an anecdote about his conscience bothering him about stealing money from his father, Wallington, ‘A Record’, p. 9. 15 Narveson, Bible Readers, p. 115. 16 In an appendix, Seaver prints the list and analyses the output categorically and chronologically. 17 Wallington, ‘An Extract’, p. 188. 18 He seemed to write the History of Spira at least twice, including in his very first notebook. 19 See Booy, Notebooks, pp. 1–29. 20 A. M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 65. 21 Wallington, ‘An Extract’, p. 9. 22 Wallington, ‘A Record’, p. 507. 23 Ibid. p. 507. 24 Ibid. p. 509. 25 The pages of ‘A Memoriall of God’s Judgments’ have inked margins; British Library, Sloane MS 1457. 26 Yeo, Notebooks, p. 113. N. Malcolm, ‘Thomas Harrison and his “Ark of Studies”: an episode in the history of the organization of knowledge’, Seventeenth Century, 19 (2004), pp. 196–232. 27 Yeo, Notebooks, p. 116. 28 Blair, Too Much to Know, p. 94. 29 Wallington, ‘A Record’, p. 472. 30 Seaver, Wallington’s World, p. 16. 31 A. Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 328. 32 Hughes, Gangraena, p. 126. 33 P. Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 76. 34 Sharpe and Zwicker, Reading, Society and Politics, p. 9. Blair credits literary critics for leading the way back into the archive for authorial papers. 35 N. Wallington, ‘The Growth of a Christian’; British Library, Additional MS 40883. 36 The first section of Adam Smyth (ed.), A History of English Autobiography (Cambridge:

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lynch: extraordinarily ordinary Cambridge University Press, 2016). See further my chapter there, where some points of this essay are given in summary form: ‘Inscribing the early modern self ’. 37 T. Webster, ‘Writing to redundancy: approaches to spiritual journals and early modern spirituality’, HJ, 39 (1996), p. 40. 38 As explored in S. Rivett, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 39 The book of letters, I think, is an exception. But that one might have lost pages in rebinding. 40 Number 6 on his list, and sadly not surviving.

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Part II: Rethinking context

D’Addario: A sense of place

5

A sense of place: historicism, whither wilt? Christopher D’Addario

It seems a reflection of the predominance of a particular brand of ­historicism, one rooted in an assumption of linear causality, even at times teleology, that a majority of monographs on early modern literature organise themselves chronologically. Indeed, we can begin to recognise how firmly this assumption still sits at the centre of much historicist thinking if we attempt to imagine a study with an entirely different set of organising principles, one that attends rather to a particular place and the intellectual and cultural productions that emanate from its environs. For example, Norwich and its nearby towns in England have been at one time or another the home of Thomas Nashe and Ian McEwan, Julian of Norwich and Kazuo Ishiguro, Thomas Browne and W. G. Sebald. I will turn my attention to the last two in a moment, but let me delay the present for a minute by pausing over the possibility of a study that connects all of the above authors through their geographic proximity, that examines the literary output of a specific location rather than a specific period, that takes place as its overriding structural context rather than time. Not [Insert Abstract Noun Here] and [Insert Abstract Noun Here] in Early Modern Literature, but rather in East Anglian Literature, or else in the Literature of Southwark. Now this kind of exploration might at first seem better fitted for the Travel section of the Sunday New York Times, but we might seriously ask whether a careful trans-temporal study of place that attends to the geographic or ambient resonances of, say, Norwich and its surrounding environments can illuminate in useful ways the circumstances of these texts’ production as well as their aesthetic, social or affective interests. What kinds of questions would best animate such an experiment at its most responsible? Is it significant that Browne and Sebald travelled through the same Norfolk landscapes, with their often eroding structures and persistent haze of particulates? Is it significant that they inhabited the same geographic ‘exoskeletons’, to use Manuel DeLanda’s phrase, 95

part ii: rethinking context geographies that are layered with the sediments from multiple moments, populated by materials that contain multiple temporalities?1 Does it mean anything that Browne’s skull, which in an ironically cruel twist had been disinterred from its original resting place in St Peter Mancroft Church, apparently resided in the same hospital that Sebald clearly visited when writing The Rings of Saturn?2 Almost immediately, when considering this kind of place-focused critical study, it becomes clear that chronology need not be, indeed, perhaps should not be, its organising principle. Rather, a study that considers the influence of the Norfolk environs as central to the literary productions of its inhabitants might structure itself around the distinct geographic zones in the area (coast, city, heath) and the sensoriums of each, or else around the architectures of everyday experience (home, church, workplace) and the spaces of the domestic, economic, and religious lives of Norfolk’s residents. Whatever the prevailing arrangement for this study, the stories that it told would proceed very differently than those of most literary scholarship we see today. Instead of plots of development, of progress, of decline, or even of contextual depth, we might have narratives that emphasise trans-temporal proximities, accident and coincidence, or recursive back-­ formations driven by a shared sense of place. Instead of exploring ‘before’, ‘after’, ‘because’, this study would conceive of the relations between texts in terms of ‘next to’, ‘around’, ‘within’.3 As soon as we attempt to conceptualise the relationship between texts and authors in these terms, it becomes clear just how far from customary critical practice and methodology such a study would be, how dominant chronology remains to our notions of literary history. As Jordan Alexander Stein has clarified, these histories remain wedded to a conservative conflation of history and time, to a linearity that renders other histories invisible.4 These accounts organised around lines of influence, the progressive careers of individual authors, the sequential passage of years, preclude us from recognising the non-sequential ways in which books affect readers haphazardly across period boundaries and outside the consecutively arranged movements of our existing literary genealogies. Our picture of Milton the emerging revolutionary poet and pamphleteer who matures into the great heterodox writer of Paradise Lost seems as much beholden to the demands of biographical storytelling (much of it constructed by Milton himself) as to the variegated realities of the production and consumption of his work.5 An approach that is attuned to the micro-histories and uneven temporalities of the reception of his work would note, for example, that most of Milton’s early poems first appeared to readers in the midst of his pamphleteering, not before it, and would have been read alongside not only his radical prose but also the Royalist-tinged poetry that it stood alongside in Humphrey Moseley’s 96

d’addario: a sense of place catalogue. As Steven Zwicker has wonderfully illuminated, when the 1645 Poems are considered within the highly specific context of weeks and days, and not the broader temporalities of Revolution and Restoration (or poetic career, for that matter), we can come to see ‘how different registers of experience might be imagined to inhabit texts that we know very well from other models of interpretation’.6 A study that keeps place as its presiding genius might contribute to locating these ‘different registers of experience’, might open up the possibility of texts circulating, expanding, assembling, and reassembling, in decidedly non-sequential ways, affecting, and being affected by, readers across and outside of our traditionally linear historical narratives.7 In choosing Norwich as the location for my hypothetical study, I am certainly distorting how easy this kind of tracing of trans-temporal influences through place might be. As in Sebald and Browne, especially, we would be hard-pressed to find two writers more attuned to the ways in which the pasts of a particular place are always returning to its present, emerging from its soils, or haunting its corners. In fact, Browne and Sebald could serve as tutelary figures, even theoretical guides, to such a study of place. In Austerlitz, Sebald’s last novel, published in 2001, the titular character lyrically ruminates, as he is wont to do, on the strange and ephemeral connections between the past and the present: It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.8

That Austerlitz imagines the interactions between present and past spatially is unsurprising considering Sebald’s fascination with the layers of memories that inhabit particular locales. Even more germane to an examination of the methods of historicism is Austerlitz’s sense of the freedom with which the traffic across the years occurs. While Sebald’s character does seem sceptical of the extent of our influence over the dead, his overall sense of an open and fluid movement between the present and the past, between the historically-minded and history, suggests a more constant yet haphazard communion than our prevailing historicisms might allow. Three hundred and fifty years earlier, Browne similarly would imagine and inhabit a past both imminently present yet variably accessible. Much of his most luminous thinking on the recoveries and losses associated with the passage of time in Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial ruminates on the incessant 97

part ii: rethinking context and inevitable fading of knowledge from the historical register. In fact, the final chapter is a sustained meditation on this theme as Browne contemplates the power of the ‘Opium of time, which temporally considereth all things’.9 For Browne, we have irretrievably lost more of the past than history contains – a loss that grows with every passing moment. However, Hydriotaphia, a work that was prompted by the discovery of forty or fifty urns in a field near Old Walsingham, also testifies to the way in which the distant past keeps re-emerging in the present. With its astonishing array of references to the quotidian details of the practices of previous cultures and individuals, this treatise, along with its companion piece The Garden of Cyrus, is remarkable for the depth with which it imagines and observes the details of both the antique and contemporary worlds as well as the ease and swiftness with which it moves between these worlds. The past returns insistently in Browne’s imaginings, but it also does so both vividly and associatively, its precise details emerging as daydreams that then quickly recede from the page. In the rest of my essay, I will explore the growing challenges to and revisions of prevailing historicisms in the criticism of early modern literature while also at turns suggesting how Browne and Sebald’s sense of the powerful yet surprisingly discontinuous ways in which the past acts upon us might inflect these challenges as well as our work as literary historians generally. Just as Sebald envisions in Austerlitz the stereometric proximity of the past to the present, since the beginning of the twenty-first century or at least since Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes’s calls for the creation of a presentist Shakespeare, one that celebrates our situatedness in the now rather than attempts to overcome it, a growing chorus of literary scholars have denied the radical differentness of the early modern period. Historicism’s old insistence on the necessity of always recognising the unbridgeable gap between now and then, even as we must attempt to speak the past’s language, has come under sustained attack.10 Anachronism, an accusation that was once the deathblow to any hopeful journal article, is now often paraded as a virtue, even if born of necessity. One prong of this attack has focused on the worry that such rigid emphasis on the differentness of the past, and thus on the specialised historical knowledge necessary for communing with it, will eventually succeed in making early modern literature irrelevant to the present. A variation of this critique, presented in typically irascible fashion by Stanley Fish, is that the best of this scholarship, in its careful emphasis on the political and social contexts out of which literature is produced, consistently ignores this writing’s aesthetic achievement.11 Fish is concerned specifically with Milton scholarship, and he laments that by ignoring the literariness of Milton’s writing we allow these texts to be subsumed into the accumulations of history, strip 98

d’addario: a sense of place them of their privileged and timeless status. This handwringing over the imminent irrelevance of literary studies and literature itself, it should not go unnoticed, has coincided with the crisis in the humanities, where every discipline has felt the need to justify its own existence. Inevitably, many of the calls for a presentist early modernism have the nervous air of selfpreservation about them. It is not a coincidence that Fish’s worries over the perils of historicism came in a Milton Studies issue that attempted to convince the initiated ‘why Milton matters’. Nonetheless, Fish’s concern over the literary historicist’s tin ear draws on a long-standing critique of New Historicism: that it elides any formal differences between the literary text and other writing.12 Whereas most New Historicists saw any assertion of these differences as ideological, a misguided attempt to remove cultural artefacts from the workings of power, Fish and, it has to be said, an increasing number of other critics have sought to reaffirm the literary value of these texts. Aesthetics is no longer a dirty word in English departments, and indeed, as I will elaborate below, its artful workings have become an intense area of study and theorising. A more trenchant critique of historicism’s insistence on the radical fissure between past and present has emphasised the impossibility of accessing this distant past without bringing the present with us. Drawing especially on Hayden White and Benedetto Croce’s work, Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes have argued that all of our knowledge of history is necessarily conditioned by the culture, language, and ideologies of the current moment.13 Hawkes would have us celebrate and embrace our present situatedness. These critiques usefully remind us of the colonising dangers of attempting to speak for the past – something Stephen Greenblatt and other New Historicists have characterised themselves as doing and which comes through in their anecdotal style, no matter how ‘thick’ a description one provides of the cultural phenomenon under scrutiny.14 Despite the value of this reminder, however, these responses also understate New Historicism’s, and more so Cultural Materialism’s, at least theoretical investment in a self-conscious examination of early modern culture. From the start, its major theorists, including Greenblatt and Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore, admitted their own presentleaning biases and rejected any mystification of their own perspective as an objective or natural one.15 While this self-reflection may have diminished as New Historicist praxis spread, the methodology’s clear grounding in Foucauldian historiography lent it a deep awareness of the incommensurable fissures between the present and the past. More recently and more carefully, Madhavi Menon and Jonathan Goldberg warn against the comforts of historical difference and its distancing of the past. Rather than a historicism that definitively closes off the past from the present, or else just 99

part ii: rethinking context as reductively equates them through notions of timeless similarity, Menon and Goldberg call for an ‘unhistoricism’ that is open to the unpredictable and haphazard ways in which the two periods might variously deviate or converge.16 Menon and Goldberg’s ‘unhistoricism’, in its hybrid insistence on at times difference and at others similarity, at least theoretically avoids what Andrew Hadfield sees as the two major pitfalls of presentism: the tendency to intellectual solipsism or lazy teleology.17 In its useful refusal to settle the constantly shifting and often internally incongruous ideologies of both the present and past, this critique does offer a complexity lacking in much New Historicist work that assumes a unified and homogeneous discursive field at any one particular historical moment.18 And yet, if we are looking for a historicism that rethinks the place of early modern texts in their culture and ours, that re-imagines how literature operates in history, we might need to look elsewhere. Menon and Goldberg’s unhistoricism often seems more of a critique of Foucault’s history or else of David Halperin’s, for example, and as such places the text into the familiar and perhaps comforting contours of the various histories of ideologies within which New Historicism has so fruitfully worked. Whatever the shortcomings or limitations of these presentist critiques, their questioning of the boundary between past and present, their suggestion of this boundary’s porousness, has certainly contributed to the valuable reconsideration of periodisation that has proliferated.19 To be sure, periodisation has been under fire for quite some time; as far back as 1996, Lawrence Besserman started the essays in The Challenge of Periodization by noting that periodisation was ‘not in good shape’, citing Fredric Jameson’s observation of its ‘totalizing nature’ as ‘fatally reductive’.20 However, the increasing entrenchment of the term ‘early modern’ in place of ‘Renaissance’ has re-energised the desire for some self-reflection on the implications of this ambiguous term and the drawing of period boundaries generally. As Jeffrey Cohen and others have usefully asked, does the phrase ‘early modern’ suggest a definitive break between this period and the current one, or does it rather gesture to the continuities between then and now?21 Cohen is a mediaevalist and it is unsurprising that many of the more trenchant critiques of the prevailing state of periodisation, from scholars such as Kathleen Davis and Carolyn Dinshaw, have come from those who study this earlier period.22 As these scholars have noted, it is nearly impossible to avoid thinking teleologically when invoking the phrase ‘early modern’, and in doing so, we construct an impermeable and rather arbitrary boundary between what matters to the present and what does not – with mediaevalism obviously on the wrong side of that divide. While the peril for mediaevalists of the term ‘early modernism’ is a relegation to the scrapheap of history, for us early 100

d’addario: a sense of place modernists the danger is a tendency to situate early modern writing often inaccurately in a radically changing historical moment, to connect a text’s concerns to a vaguely historicised ever-nascent early capitalism, or everburgeoning public sphere, or always emerging middle class. Much of the appeal of ‘early modern’, as David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller have pointed out in their introduction to The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, is its fluidity, its ability to help us to work around or ignore traditional boundaries, such as 1642 or 1558.23 Indeed, the term seems to have become increasingly and remarkably fluid, able to cover studies as chronologically divergent as Bruce Boehrer’s Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature, which begins with Ariosto, and Wolfram Schmidgen’s Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England, which ends with Locke and Defoe. The expansion of the early modern period, and we might add the long eighteenth and long nineteenth centuries, beyond just academic opportunism, reflects a growing dissatisfaction with traditional historical divisions, a growing desire to propose alternative temporalities and genealogies for the literature of the past.24 The older period boundaries, boundaries that remain institutionally ensconced in the MLA Job Information List and the Norton Anthology for instance, are without a doubt rooted firmly in the contours of an exclusively English political history. We might ask to what extent these decidedly English divisions remain salient to the stories that we tell about early modern literature considering the mounting push for a broader archipelagic or comparatist understanding of the contexts in which writing was produced and consumed.25 To what extent does 1642 maybe not disappear but at least partially fade from prominence when Anne Bradstreet or William Drummond are included in our accounts of the development of genre and literary form? And if we want to trace the French influence on seventeenth-century British literature, surely 1651–53 – the years in which Thomas Hobbes and William Davenant, Abraham Cowley and Edmund Waller, all returned to England in the aftermath of the Oath of Engagement – will seem easily as important as 1660. While 1660 provided the important high political drama of the return of Charles II, its prominence in literary history occludes the individual climacterics of authors who lived across this divide and whose personal or political fortunes might have followed an entirely different chronology. If we turn away from political history and towards the history of reading and reception, to the changing ways in which readers experienced books, the moments of radical discontinuity might appear even more distinct. As Steven Zwicker’s research on book imprints before and after 1660 has shown, the landscape of printed books looks quite similar before and after the return of the Stuarts.26 1642 101

part ii: rethinking context becomes pivotal, not only for the outbreak of open hostilities between king and Parliament, but also for the breakdown in the mechanisms of censorship and the attendant outpouring of printed materials into the bookstalls of London.27 We might also draw an important line in the mid-nineteenth century, when trade binding overtook bespoke binding as the dominant method of collating books, thereby removing much of the control over the appearance and collection of texts out of the hands of the individual bookseller or reader. It would be easy to continue this dismantling of our traditional divisions and redrawing of periods, using perhaps the distinct ruptures of the history of colonialism, or else the history of science, as my basis. Indeed, as Michael McKeon has pointed out, the very act of reifying categories such as early modern or eighteenth-century literature invites rather than closes down these types of intellectually productive questions.28 Collectively, these questions over important boundaries and alternative chronologies caution us against the usefulness of definitively identifying particular texts as ‘of’ a specific period, of imposing a diachronic homogeneity that at the very least unconsciously encourages us to posit a text as either representative of or resistant to the predominant modes of a broadly defined period zeitgeist. The complexities and multivalences of Paradise Lost, for example, do not seem entirely well served by our attempts to force it into either Renaissance or Restoration. Periodisation also encourages, when done thoughtfully, a self-consciousness about our own historical situatedness. Benedetto Croce has importantly noted that all periodisation draws attention to the subjective ways in which we make historical judgements, draws attention to what Susan Stewart has called these judgements’ ‘orientation toward an intelligible version of both the present and the future’.29 What’s more, built into any attempt to periodise is an argument for and about historical change; the long extant resistance to the practice might also be a theoretical resistance in many critical circles to any interpretation of the past that suggests such transformations. Much historicist work, and New Historicism especially, with its tendency to emphasise vertical depth over horizontal coverage, and its theoretical alignment with a Foucauldian suspicion of continuity and change, has remained suspicious and even uninterested in historical process.30 Indeed, we might consider that the growing tendency for these literary historical periods to expand their boundaries might also actually be an effect of the anxiety over and indifference to accounting for historical change. As we have become more concerned with addressing a particular text’s valences at a discrete contextual moment, we have also become more hesitant to create the types of narratives that would entail delineating a sequence of writings as part of a definable movement or age. 102

d’addario: a sense of place Whatever the methodological sources for the ever-expanding nature of our literary historical periods, these boundaries will take on an entirely different contour, or even fade from our narratives, if we consider intertextuality similarly to how Sebald and Browne consider the uneven but powerful relationship between past and present. This intertextuality would not resort to conceptualising the literary text as existing frozen, beholden to and influencing a distinct point in history. For some time now, the traffic between literary texts, especially in early modern England, has been understood to take place in the much broader context of the London print market as a whole.31 The time might be ripe to put these aesthetic texts back into conversation with each other in order to see what this conversation might look like to us today. I am not proposing an old-fashioned literary history with its sequential tracing of influence, its gestures to a slowly and ever-evolving set of artistic traditions occasionally broken by imaginative genius. Rather, this return to literary history would entail a novel sense of temporality, one that is non-sequential, attuned to the possibilities of multiple older texts or traditions, from a variety of centuries, coexisting and coagulating at later dates.32 Instead of clearly marked periods separating out authors and placing them antagonistically against each other (Wordsworth v. Dryden, Johnson v. Donne), this new literary history would seek to identify how the sediments, the skeletons, as well as immediate predecessors and the anticipation of future readers, appeared and reappeared in both expected and entirely surprising forms at a variety of moments.33 Alexander Nagel has posited that artistic influence is inherently anachronistic, not timeless but rather multiple, in the manner in which it operates down through the years.34 If we charted, in historically responsible ways, the distinct iterations of literary forms, of textual production, of artistic borrowings and thefts, new chronologies for entire styles, genres, and individual relationships would become possible.35 In many ways, this approach would have much in common with concurrent work in the ethics of reading, interested in allowing the text, in Marshall Grossman’s phrasing, to be ‘many things and one thing in its time, our time and the time between’.36 The literary history that would emerge from this approach would not be constrained by the boundaries of a set of contiguous years; it would instead range over centuries, tracing as yet untold stories of rediscoveries, strange revivals, or surprising influences and reappropriations as these forms crossed oceans, time periods, and cultural lines. In doing so, it would help us to understand that the affective experiences of individual texts are and were not only beholden to placing them in relation (early, middle, late, symptomatic, anomalous) to an easily definable set of contemporaneous texts, that multiple meaningful temporalities necessarily coexist within them as these works are consumed, revised, revived, or ignored. 103

part ii: rethinking context The picture of culture that we could construct from such a literary history might also contribute to the ongoing reconsideration of much New Historicist work’s tendency to conceive of a culture, and the literary text within it, as monolithic at any one particular moment. The New Historicist essay stereotypically begins with some bizarre incident or arcane historical document because it assumes that this incident or document, as well as the Shakespeare play or Jonson masque, can serve as a synecdoche for a set of broad cultural principles that the astute critic can brilliantly tease out given enough ingenuity. This type of examination of the historical moment in essence replaces the diachronic homogeneity of periodisation with an equally distorting synchronic homogeneity.37 On the one hand, the hermeneutic circle embodied in this approach can encourage us to reduce the social and cultural information gleaned from a text to what Kristin Ross has called ‘ornamental drapery’, a purely decorative set of historical circumstances that merely confirms the status of the literary masterpiece.38 On the other, it erases any purported differences between literature and other cultural texts, such as royal pageants, sermons, or political pamphlets. While this erasure, for many, was one of the primary benefits to the New Historicist approach, as I have noted above, there has been an increasing effort to reassert the unique complexities of literary texts, to identify their distinctive aesthetic and phenomenological effects on readers. New Formalism has embodied perhaps the most prominent and direct reaction to New Historicist notions of textuality; however, critics working in the areas of cognitive science, neuro-aesthetics, the ethics of reading, affect theory, and historical phenomenology have similarly turned their attention to the precise workings of imaginative writing, the ways in which literary texts radically reorganise perception, or else subtly negotiate prevailing ideologies.39 Writers have sought to identify precisely how these art forms embody a certain structure of feelings that represents aesthetically to its audience what it feels like to experience the world.40 The ease with which we can generate an even incomplete list of these new approaches focused on the precise phenomena generated by the literary text can usefully illuminate just how far we have moved towards embracing the multiple encounters and perspectives present in each historical moment and each early modern text, how much, in certain critical circles at least, experience has triumphed over theory. It is a vision of the past that focuses on the resonant artefact or the remnant of experience, that has come down to us through the years, and in this way its glances recall the evocative meditations of Sebald or Browne with which I began this essay. This engagement with the ephemeral materials or phenomena of experience has taken a number of different forms: Bruce Smith’s experiments in historical phenomenology, Mary Crane and Evelyn Tribble’s 104

d’addario: a sense of place work reading Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of cognitive science, Jonathan Gil Harris’s explorations of the multiple sedimentations built into the materials and architectures of London, Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker’s turn to the psychological and the affective in their study of Andrew Marvell, not to mention the pronounced re-emergence of performance studies and the continued robustness of the history of reading.41 Without a doubt, much of this work has been animated by a range of philosophical approaches that collectively ask us to focus our attention on the dynamic movements of the quotidian, on the subject’s immersion in his or her external world, and, finally, on this immersion’s affective resonances. In its attention to the particular and the affective, rather than the discursive and the ideological, these studies have invaluably expanded our notions of how literature emerges into the world and how it continues to act once there. This is not to say that ideology should be effaced from our stories about early modern texts. The experience of reading the Eikon Basilike in 1649 was certainly inflected by the discourses of patriarchy and martyrdom, of absolutism and jeremiad; but it was also inflected by the material realities of the edition one was reading – plain vellum or gilt-tooled red Morocco leather, unbound or collated with Milton’s Eikonoklastes; by where one was reading it – in a closet in the Louvre or in an alehouse near St Paul’s; by whether one had witnessed Charles’s execution or had read news of it two weeks later in Edinburgh. To attend to these specific realities is to admit into history the messiness of affective experience and all of its challenging complexities. In addition, a historicism rooted in an awareness of the affective and the material can also help us to re-imagine the individual’s particular encounters with early modern literature, help us to reconceive just how texts have worked on their readers, how powerful responses to writing can emerge or re-emerge suddenly or linger surprisingly. There has been a growing fatigue in literary criticism with what has been called, in its association with Marxist and Freudian praxis, the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, those familiar interpretive moves that reveal a text’s submission to and dependence on an all-powerful structural context.42 Different approaches, including those rooted in the affective experience of reading or spectating, as well as those historicisms engaged with New Formalism and the ethics of reading, have sought to move us beyond this critical disposition, to admit that texts acted upon and continue to act upon their readers in powerful and often transformative ways. While I am personally hesitant to return literature to its privileged status as timeless bearer of aesthetically beautiful truths, I do think that a desire to recount the history of the seductions and surprises of the encounter with the early modern text can bring us closer to the multiple and often ephemeral 105

part ii: rethinking context meanings produced by a book at any one moment, as well as the ways in which these evanescent textual meetings can persist, fade, or re-emerge as the text moves through history. However, these stimulating new approaches to early modern writing pose some methodological challenges in their attempts to access past affects or precise aesthetic experiences. While the recreation of the full experience of watching The Alchemist at the Blackfriars in 1610, or else the experience of reading it in the third folio in 1692, does seem a compelling, if uncertain, path for historicism to take, the creation of these affective micro-histories does incline us first of all to the essayistic, the experimental, and the fragmentary.43 We foray back in time, create snapshots of moments, individually particular stories of a never fully conceptualised past. Considering New Historicism and Cultural Materialism’s at least originally clear investment in challenging the ideological obfuscations of older literary studies, we might hesitate over whether this turn to the aesthetic or to the particular is also a turn away from the political in our own work. There is a strain of conservative New Formalism that openly disavows placing poems in history, seeking to draw a sharp demarcation between art and politics.44 Thankfully, most work emphasising a renewed attention to literary forms in early modern texts maintains a strongly historicist bias, seeking to understand aesthetics and poetics as a historically specific and shifting set of values; and yet, it is worth worrying over whether the turn to aesthetics, or early modern object studies, or theatrical phenomenology, or quotidian and incremental affects, can result, if done thoughtlessly, in a political quietism that is especially unwelcome in our contemporary moment.45 As a whole, however, these newer examinations of early modern experience and its relation to the literary have resisted the siren call of an antiquarian nostalgia. In fact, at their best, these studies have invaluably expanded our understanding of the subtle and local workings of early modern power and resistance, have shown how artistic work is inflected by and can inflect everyday perceptions and practices that are inevitably and unevenly immersed in political and religious ideology, in economic systems, in traditional and untraditional social customs. Perhaps more problematic from the perspective of historicist methodology is that, with varying degrees of self-reflection, many of these approaches assume, or have to assume, historical continuities, even essentials, in affective response, cognitive systems, or human perception more broadly.46 Those working in neuro-aesthetics and cognitive cultural theory especially have been more overt in their cross-period conceptualising of how literature works on our brain, or how innate cognitive structures inflect a variety of texts. In Feeling Beauty, for example, G. Gabrielle Starr applies her neurological findings across poets ranging from George Sandys to 106

d’addario: a sense of place Elizabeth Bishop.47 Going further, in his contribution to the Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, Patrick Colm Hogan argues for a return to the study of literary universals based on the supposedly commonly applicable models of cognitive psychology.48 Most early modern critics working in these areas, however, are more concerned with opening up the literature of the past to novel conceptions of lived environments or aesthetic experience, more interested, that is, in historicising cognition, or affect, or theatrical phenomenology. These studies, first of all, contribute to alternative histories – histories of the emotions, or else of subject–object relations – that challenge models of historical change and literary creation entirely reliant on the impersonal and often distant movements of political or religious ideology.49 Many of these studies go further, seeking to understand how these affective regimes or shifting ontologies were experienced and felt by individuals. In her suggestions for a study of the effects of the scientific revolution, Mary Thomas Crane, for example, turns away from traditional intellectual historiography to propose identifying the quotidian perceptual shifts that these advances in knowledge might have occasioned.50 Similarly, Drew Daniel, in identifying an Empedoclean renaissance, seeks to comprehend the emotional consequences of believing in Empedocles’s materialist ontology, asking: ‘What does it feel like to affectively inhabit the belief that the world and the people within it are  – only – transient assemblages of matter?’51 Daniel answers this question by detailing the connections that early modern writers made between Empedocles’s philosophy and his suicide, connections that suggest how they affectively inhabited Empedocles’s worldview. In this case, the link that Daniel establishes is rooted in writers associating an atomistic philosophy with suicide; however, we can only speculate that this textual association arose out of a specific structure of feeling caused by Empedoclean ideas. This is not to dismiss Daniel’s suggestive and skilful reading, but rather to admit the impossibilities of fully accessing past affects or emotions – ephemeral states that often leave only ethereal and oblique traces on the historical record. We can identify links between textual representations of emotions; we can recreate the physical experience of watching King Lear at the Globe. But these historical re-enactments still leave us short of knowing definitively what it felt like in 1606 to watch Lear cry out over Cordelia’s lifeless body. Much of this work has admitted to the speculative nature of these investigations into past states of mind, comfortable with occupying this space even as they uncover the historical traces of the phenomenology of the theatre, or of medical theories on cognition and emotions. And indeed, perhaps this diffidence towards the partial or hypothetical recovery of the affective lives of early modern individuals focuses too intently 107

part ii: rethinking context on the gaps between present and past, gaps at some level inherent in all historical inquiry, as Sebald and Browne are at pains to remind us in their meditations. Instead, we might more fruitfully think of our efforts at recovery, however partial (in both senses of the word), as ‘sublime historical experience’, to use Frank Ankersmit’s term.52 Rejecting the need to judge our relation to the past in terms of truth and falsity, Ankersmit argues that our necessarily biased attempt to discover and recover the past comprises a highly valuable, marvellous, and formative experience in and of itself, indeed, is the essence of experiencing history. From Ankersmit’s perspective, the pronounced move to recover early modern emotions, affective states, or quotidian life, however ephemeral, would be lauded for its novel evocations of hitherto unimagined areas of the past, for its ability to make us feel the past anew, even as we recognise its inaccessibility. Perhaps this stance, viewed empirically, gives too much ground to the iniquity of oblivion, too easily conceding our inability to access history through ostensibly objective facts. Viewed more radically, however, a historicism that embraces and accepts our studies as novel reimaginings of the past, even as it requires an honest engagement with the historical record, could allow for a constant renewal of our relationship with history itself, a constant renewal of the recognition of what we no longer are. Notes 1 M. DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve/Zone, 1997), p. 27. Jonathan Gil Harris discusses DeLanda’s use of this term and applies it to a series of theories and poems across temporal periods in ‘Four exoskeletons and no funeral’, New Literary History, 42 (2011), pp. 615–39. 2 Sebald ruminates on his search for Thomas Browne’s skull in this hospital in one of his opening fugues in The Rings of Saturn, trans. M. Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1999), pp. 9–11. 3 E. Sedgwick in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 8–9, cites the need to think in terms of the preposition ‘beside’ in our analysis of culture as a way around linear and dualistic thinking. 4 J. A. Stein, ‘American literary history and queer temporalities’, American Literary History, 25:4 (2013), pp. 855–69, at 859–63. 5 T. Fulton questions the assumption of direct and unified progress in a writer’s life in his review essay, ‘Speculative Shakespeares: the trials of biographical historicism’, MP, 103:3 (2006), pp. 385–408, at 400. 6 S. N. Zwicker, ‘The day that George Thomason collected his copy of the Poems of Mr.  John Milton, both English and Latin, Compos’d at Several Times’, RES, 64:264 (2013), pp. 231–45, at 243. 7 Georgina Born details how Karin Barber’s work, specifically her book The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics, emphasises such a view of textual influence and exchange.

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d’addario: a sense of place See G. Born, ‘Making time: temporality, history, and the cultural object’, New Literary History, 46:3 (2015), pp. 361–86, at 369–70.  8 W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. A. Bell (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 185.  9 The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. G. Keynes, 4 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1964), 1:166. 10 T. Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (New York: Routledge, 2002); H. Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and H. Grady and T. Hawkes, ‘Presenting presentism’, in H. Grady and T. Hawkes (eds), Presentist Shakespeares (New York: Routledge, 2006). See also Paul Stevens’s critique of Grady and Hawkes in ‘The new presentism and its discontents: listening to Eastward Ho and Shakespeare’s Tempest in dialogue’, in A. B. Coiro and T. Fulton (eds), Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 11 S. Fish, ‘Why Milton matters; or, against historicism’, Milton Studies, 44 (2005), pp. 1–12. 12 For an overview of and response to this oft-repeated critique, see S. Cohen, ‘Introduction’, in S. Cohen (ed.), Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). As Cohen points out, in one of the foundational essays of New Historicism, in a special issue of Genre, Stephen Greenblatt insisted that even with the turn to historical context his approach would not abandon the study of form (see Greenblatt, ‘Introduction’, The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance, Genre, 15 (1982), pp. 3–6). It should also be noted that Greenblatt’s work has shifted in later years to focus on the autonomy of the author and the literary work. See especially his Shakespeare’s Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 13 Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present, pp. 3–5, and Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne. 14 See especially on the anecdote and its access to historical reality, A. Patterson, ‘Foul, his wife, the mayor, and Foul’s mare: the power of anecdote in Tudor historiography’, in D. R. Kelley and D. H. Sacks (eds), The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); C. Gallagher and S. Greenblatt, ‘The touch of the real’, in C. Gallagher and S. Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 35. 15 Most theorists of New Historicism are careful to admit their own role in providing a voice to these cultural texts, even as they claim a Geertzian enhancement of the past. See, for example, S. Greenblatt in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 20, and more directly, J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. viii. 16 M. Menon and J. Goldberg, ‘Queering history’, PMLA, 120:5 (2005), pp. 1608–17. 17 A. Hadfield, ‘Has historicism gone too far: or, should we return to form?’, in Coiro and Fulton (eds), Rethinking Historicism, pp. 28–31. 18 This critique has usually been couched in terms of a critique of New Historicism’s use of the anecdote as representative of a cultural structure writ large. See, for example, J. Drakakis and M. Fludernik in their introduction to a special issue on present uses of and challenges to New Historicism (Beyond New Historicism?, Poetics Today, 35:4

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part ii: rethinking context (2014), p. 498), as well as N. Parvini, Shakespeare’s History Plays: Rethinking Historicism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 11. 19 For which, to start, see the two forums in the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, 13:2–3 (2013); C. Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); E. Hayot, ‘Against periodization; or, on institutional time’, New Literary History, 42:4 (2011), pp. 739–56; K. Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and the special issue Medieval/Renaissance: After Periodization, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37:3 (2007). 20 L. Besserman, ‘The challenge of periodization: old paradigms and new perspectives’, in L. Besserman (ed.), The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 3–4. 21 J. J. Cohen, ‘In the middle of the early modern’, JEMCS, 13:3 (2013), pp. 128–32, at p. 128; see also T. DiPiero and D. Looser, ‘What is early modern?’, JEMCS, 13:2 (2013), pp. 69–71. 22 See Davis’s Periodization and Sovereignty and C. Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, and her comments in the roundtable discussion ‘Theorizing queer temporalities: a roundtable discussion’, GLQ, 13:2–3 (2007), pp. 177–95. 23 D. Loewenstein and J. Mueller, ‘Introduction’, in D. Loewenstein and J. Mueller (eds), The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 4–6. 24 For a clear example of this dissatisfaction and the debates around currently defined periods, see the online discussion on the MLA Executive Committee’s Draft Proposal of 11 September 2013 to merge the four discussion groups that make up the years 1500–1800 (accessed 15 May 2016): https://groupsdiscussion.commons.mla.org/ draft-proposal/. 25 See especially John Kerrigan’s Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1603–1717 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Nigel Smith’s work on the European contexts of English literature, including ‘England, Europe, and the English Revolution’, in L. L. Knoppers (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 29–43; ‘Exile in Europe during the English Revolution and its literary impact’, in P. Major (ed.), Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and its Aftermath, 1640–1690 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 105–18; ‘Transvernacular poetry and government: Andrew Marvell in early modern Europe’, Marvell Studies, 2(1):6 (2017), pp.1–26; and his essay in this volume. 26 See S. N. Zwicker, ‘Is there such a thing as Restoration literature?’, HLQ, 69:3 (2006), pp. 425–50. 27 For some of the statistics on this breakdown in censorship and its impact on print output, see Robertson’s essay in the present volume. 28 M. McKeon, ‘Theory and practice in historical method’, in Coiro and Fulton (eds), Rethinking Historicism, pp. 56–7. See also on the benefits and necessities of periodisation, A. Scaglione, ‘The periodization of the Renaissance and the question of mannerism’, in Besserman (ed.), The Challenge of Periodization, pp. 95–6. 29 S. Stewart, ‘Preface to a lyric history’, in M. Brown (ed.), The Uses of Literary History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 206. She makes this point in her

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d’addario: a sense of place discussion of Benedetto Croce’s thoughtful analysis of period in Theory and History of Historiography, trans. D. Ainslie (London: George G. Harrap, 1921). 30 S. Cohen, ‘Introduction’, in Cohen (ed.), Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, p. 11. 31 This despite the work by Nigel Smith, noted above, and others, that places these texts in the context of their continental contemporaries. 32 Born, ‘Making time’, p. 369. 33 For a wonderful analysis of the swirl of relationships between two distant, presumably antagonistic, writers when we begin to look for the ‘magical avenues of communication’ between literary texts, see Sanford Budick’s study of Wordsworth and Dryden, ‘Counter-periodization and chiasmus: the case of Wordsworth and “the days of Dryden and Pope”’, in Besserman (ed.), The Challenge of Periodization, pp. 107–32. 34 A. Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012), pp. 23–6. 35 While much has been said about the Lucretian Renaissance lately, Drew Daniel’s piece on the Empedoclean Renaissance models the kind of subtle tracing of imaginative structures and affective influences I am envisioning here (‘The Empedoclean Renaissance’, in P. Cefalu, G. Kuchar, and B. Reynolds (eds), The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, vol. 2 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 277–300). 36 M. Grossman, ‘Limiting history’, in Coiro and Fulton (eds), Rethinking Historicism, p. 76. 37 The set of critical moves that expand analysis outward from the anecdote to the culture at large has led some to compare New Historicist approaches to New Critical close reading practices. See, for example, Stein, ‘American literary history and queer temporalities’, pp. 857–8. 38 K. Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 11–12. See also R. Felski, ‘Context stinks!’, New Literary History, 42:4 (2011), pp. 573–91. 39 For the New Formalist reaction against historicism, see Marjorie Levinson’s overview of the approach, ‘What is New Formalism?’, PMLA, 122:2 (2007), pp. 558–69. 40 Many of these approaches are influenced, often indirectly, by the philosophies of Whitehead and Langer, among many others. For Whitehead and Langer’s philosophies of aesthetics, see A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1933), especially Part IV, and S. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Macmillan, 1953) and Problems of Art (New York: Macmillan, 1957). 41 B. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) and Phenomenal Shakespeare (London: WileyBlackwell, 2010); M. T. Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), and E. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); J. G. Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); D. Hirst and S. N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Work in early modern performance is too numerous to mention, but to begin with see F. Karim-Cooper and T. Stern (eds), Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2014); A. P. Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); J. Low and N. Myhill (eds), Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642 (London: Palgrave

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part ii: rethinking context Macmillan, 2011); S.  Werner (ed.), New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). For work in the history of reading, see E. Evenden and T. S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); J. T. Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); J. A. Dane, What is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). 42 See Wolfram Schmidgen’s comments on this interpretive position in Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 156–7. 43 Henri Lefebvre begins his monumental critique of everyday life with the difficulties of negotiating between the essayistic and the generalising; see Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. J. Moore (New York: Verso, 2002), p. vii. 44 See, for example, E. Rooney, ‘Form and contentment’, MLQ, 61:1 (2000), pp. 17–40. 45 Striking is Patricia Fumerton’s admission to serving political penance with her second book for the elitism of her study of high-cultural material and literary artefacts, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See also J. G. Harris’s concerns that New Materialism equates to a consumerist fetishisation of objects in his ‘The new new historicism’s Wunderkammer of objects’, European Journal of English Studies, 4:2 (2000), pp. 111–23. 46 Julia Reinhard Lupton has characterised, uncritically, Bruce Smith’s historical phenomenology as drawing on ‘cross-epochal’ continuities in perception and affects (‘The affordances of hospitality: Shakespearean drama between historicism and phenomenology’, Poetics Today, 35:4 (2014), pp. 615–33, at 616). 47 G. G. Starr, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013). 48 P. C. Hogan, ‘Literary universals’, in L. Zunshine (ed.), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 37–60. 49 See Sharon Achinstein’s concern with a history of emotions in ‘Medea’s dilemma: politics and passion in Milton’s divorce tracts’, in Coiro and Fulton (eds), Rethinking Historicism, pp. 181–208. 50 M. T. Crane, ‘Analogy, metaphor, and the new science: cognitive science and early modern epistemology’, in Zunshine (ed.), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, pp. 103–14. 51 Daniel, ‘The Empedoclean Renaissance’, p. 279. 52 F. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

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Hirst: Understanding experience

6

Understanding experience: subjectivity, sex, and suffering in early modern England Derek Hirst

Towards the end of Upon Appleton House, Andrew Marvell seems to display himself, or rather himself-imagined-as-tutor, on the banks of the River Wharfe. He there presents a simulacrum of what Edwardian readers might have called ‘self-abuse’ as he contemplates his young tutee, Mary Fairfax. The sexually charged puns, as well as the very self-conscious tone heard there and heard repeatedly in his verse – in Appleton House, in Dr Witty, in Young Love, in A Picture of Little T. C. – when he flaunts the figure of the child, cannot but sound an alarm to modern readers sensitised by too many scandals of child abuse. Yet, though we assume modern standards to be quintessentially different from those of the past, the alarm may not be simply that of our own time, for Marvell’s language seems at least to suggest some awareness of transgression.1 Of course, readers of Marvell’s writings must always ask themselves whether they are adding their own meanings to his words or whether the author in fact offered textual warrant; when the author is one preternaturally fascinated by subjectivity and perception as Marvell undoubtedly was, dilemmas are to be expected. Such dilemmas become the more troubling when the subject is the potentially explosive one of the erotic availability of the child. The drama and danger of that topic today are as clear as is its fascination in the seventeenth century for Marvell and we must suppose for others as well. The signs of unease, or at least the language declaring a certain self-consciousness, that Marvell disclosed, suggest that there is a case for considering the cultural status in seventeenth-century England of practices that today we think of as constituting child abuse. For it is only by exploring surviving traces – in Marvell’s work and beyond – of attitudes to the sexuality of the child that we may establish the possibilities that were available to Marvell and his contemporaries and thus free ourselves of the charge of presentism, as well as prurience, when we seek to ascribe meaning to Marvell’s writings. 113

part ii: rethinking context Can we be certain of what it is we would pursue in an inquiry into childhood and sexuality? All the integers are open to question – child, erotic availability to (it must be presumed) an older observer, abuse. Each of those categories would be, and is, suspect even in our modern world with its record-keeping and its abundant theorising: how much more when applied to the seventeenth century? When Steven Zwicker and I sent an early version of our Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane, to Cambridge University Press, the manuscript was rejected on the advice of what the Press described as an anonymous ‘senior reader’ who questioned whether there was any evidence for the angst of subjectivity and suffering that we there imputed to Marvell. This is not to deny that there may have been good grounds to reject the manuscript as it then stood, but it is to challenge the claim that there was no evidence for the main argument of trauma that we advanced then and have advanced since. It seems well enough established by now that there were recognisably child victims in early modern England of what we would today call abuse; more to the point of this essay is evidence that contemporaries were capable of recognising abuse as abuse, for that shows us that the category is not simply a modern construct. More interesting still, at least in a Marvellian perspective, is the possibility of detecting self-awareness, subjectivity, and thus even of measuring some meanings of cross-generational erotic attachment in the England of Andrew Marvell. The child seems, conceptually at least, the most straightforward term in our cluster. Textual and forensic evidence alike demonstrate beyond doubt the presence of the young in early modern sexual practices, still more certainly in early modern sexual fantasies. These may have featured youths who would have been thought ‘children’ in our terms, but were they so in the eyes of contemporaries? Historians of gender and sexuality are finding in court records a trickle of cases of sexual assault on prepubescent girls in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (before that, the evidence is simply too sparse to assess). Since throughout this period menarche was assumed to set in around fourteen years of age, and since legally girls could be married at twelve, we may identify there an upper age-limit to ‘abuse’ of the female ‘child’. Indeed, there is some evidence that contemporaries even cued their fantasies to such differences, as in the tribute by the Caroline court poet Thomas Carew to a girl, perhaps groomed for service, ‘whose kisses, fast’ned to the mouth of three score years and longer …, renew the age’: she was, Carew carefully tells us, thirteen years old.2 It was presumably the manifest ‘unripeness’ of girls even younger which occasionally provoked angry parents to prosecute. Such encounters, criminal and courtroom alike, have not gone unnoticed: Martin Ingram asked some time ago about the violation of young 114

hirst: understanding experience girls, and Garthine Walker has recently thrown light on the processes and prejudices that ensured the courtroom acquittals of their assailants.3 There has been less research, and for reasons that may seem obvious but ought not, into the abuse of boys. Only a single case of what was later called ‘sodomitical rape’ shows up, from 1694, in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, and no reports have surfaced from the scantier archives of other jurisdictions around the country.4 Of course, neither with ‘boys’ nor with ‘girls’ can fantasy be discounted. When Shakespeare gave the name ‘Eros’ to Mark Antony’s page in Antony and Cleopatra, he typed a relationship; we encounter similar dreams in verses by the Restoration Earl of Rochester: ‘There’s a sweet soft Page of mine / Can doe the Trick worth Forty wenches’ (Love to a Woman) and ‘But Carve thereon a spreading vine / Then add Two lovely Boyes; / Their Limbs in amorous folds entwine, / The Type of Future Joyes’ (Nestor). But the fate of the Earl of Castlehaven’s luckless page, buggered only to be executed in the notorious scandal of 1631, reminds us that these attachments might go beyond fantasy.5 Such figures were ‘pages’, not ‘children’. Of uncertain age, they had left their natal homes to go into service, and so were probably in a similar category to Carew’s thirteen-year-old girl: they were thought to be fair game, in other words. Fair game or not, what was done to such youths might still seem ‘abuse’. The dictionaries show that – however much we may believe that distinctions have become uniquely sensitive in our modern period and that such moral discomfort was simply not felt in the seventeenth century – the category of ‘abuse’ was in fact available then; it may indeed have been fairly widely used. Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1661) and The Ladies Dictionary (1694) each contain entries to ‘catamite’ and ‘Ganymede’ as ‘a boy hired to be abused contrary to nature’.6 Dictionary-compilers seem therefore to have assumed that people – ‘ladies’ among them – knew what abuse was, and sexual abuse at that (‘contrary to nature’); they seem to have assumed too that the undoubtedly moral category of abuse made sense in their seventeenth-century English terms. But we need to qualify what those terms may have been: this was ‘boy’ abuse, not quite the ‘child abuse’ of the modern scandals. A cursory survey of the Early English Books Online (EEBO) whole text database7 indicates that ‘boy’ was much less common in early modern usage than ‘child’, and while the agerange implied by ‘boy’ (a slightly pejorative term), is sometimes unclear – we might think of Aufidius’s explosive slur against a thoroughly mature Coriolanus in Act 5, Scene 6, of Shakespeare’s play of that name – ‘boy’ did usually identify the young. Was it then merely a gender differentiator within the much larger, and no less chronologically imprecise, category ‘child’? In fact, the term ‘boy’ often constituted a sexual as well as a 115

part ii: rethinking context gender category, or so Shakespeare’s Coriolanus assumed of Aufidius’s usage. If ‘boys’ were abused contrary to nature, that was perhaps what at least some ‘boys’ were thought to be for.8 The calculus was not quite straightforward: there is a revealing moment in John Dryden’s lavish 1697 translation of Virgil where he dedicates to Sir Robert Howard, the brother-in-law with whom he had such tense and complicated traffic, a brutally explicit engraved plate of the castration of Cydon. The lines keyed to the plate make sexual abuse all too clearly the charge; they also carefully cast Cydon’s ‘boy’ victim as prepubertal: ‘The wretched Cydon had receiv’d his Doom, / Who courted Clytius in his beardless Bloom, / And sought with lust obscene polluted Joys: / The Trojan Sword had cur’d his love of Boys’ (Aeneid X, lines 449–52).9 It seems likely, though, that what moved Dryden was not concern for the emotional or psychological toll on ‘the child’ but the aesthetic and perhaps too the moral depravity of the putative abuser, Howard. The perfunctory tone of the dictionary definitions and the silences elsewhere suggest that their sense of ‘abuse’ may have been little more than a formal aesthetic, while their references to a commercial relationship (‘hired to be abused’), with its implied social denigration and imputation of voluntarism, also declare an unconcern with the human meaning – the felt meaning for the child, or at least for a certain kind of child – of such encounters. For other kinds of children, for children whom we might otherwise somehow find ourselves thinking of as ‘ours’, sympathies could be enlisted. The careful attempts to prohibit sex with settlers’ children on the thinly-peopled frontier – in Bahamian Eleutheria from the late 1640s, as Jonathan Sawday is currently discovering, and in the laws of the New Haven colony in 1656 against ‘acts of unnaturall and shamefull filthiness’ with any ‘Child of either sex’10 – and the absence of such explicit prohibition in England itself may suggest that at least where adult female populations and thus conventional sexual outlets were in radically short supply contemporaries were prepared to assume that sexual abuse of the non-mercenary young might occur; conversely, of course, where radical social engineering was under way, perhaps it seemed possible at last to proscribe what may have been otherwise a quotidian evil. But even allowing for such exceptions, what could be said of the dependent and victimised male, other than that perhaps he should not have been where he was? Anyway, what evidence are we likely to be able to secure when, in cases that fell within England’s buggery statutes, both parties might face execution? – after all, the Castlehaven scandal showed that this sanction, though rare, was no empty threat.11 In fact, whether for buggery or not, there could be few complaints of maltreatment: young males were subject to the possessory rights and expectations of their employers and subject 116

hirst: understanding experience too to the general conviction that they were properly exposed to occasional rough handling by older males affirming their own manhood or their Christian vigilance against youth’s sinfulness.12 As well, the common-law hardening under judicial prompting in the later seventeenth century of the ancient Roman-Law convention that the age of rationality, and thus of legal testimony, was fourteen meant that complaints from the young were less likely to be heard even than they had been before the time of Judge Hale.13 Like street children ‘spirited’ away to servitude in the Americas, the brutalised young of seventeenth-century England are lost to view. Is there then nothing more to be said? We should pause, like some congressional investigators before us, at the meaning of ‘sex’.14 We are at last recognizing that the modern focus on full-frontal copulation has never exhausted the range of erotic possibilities. As Marvell knew well, there were many sites and modes of erotic expression and attachment, and thus perhaps of sexualised abuse if not necessarily of sex abuse. One such site, renowned for its conjuncture of fierce power and no less fierce idealisation, was surely the schoolroom. In the later seventeenth century the imagination of pupilhood could stir a range of emotions, and the great Protestant moralist Richard Baxter, in a work published in 1681, likened the bond between tutor and pupil simply to that between ‘Christian Man and Wife’.15 The relationships were not alike, of course, since physical discipline was a more obvious feature of schoolroom than of household relationships. This was probably even more true north of the Border, where the Calvinist elders of the early modern Scottish Kirk strove to shut down what their English neighbours called ‘dame schools’, in the plausible belief that the men who staffed established schools beat their charges more than did those too-tender women of the dame schools.16 What might relationships shaped by the lash have been like? It is a question with a bearing on anybody in that world – a category that at least professionally included Andrew Marvell – concerned with pupilhood. Even John Locke, who was bitterly opposed to beating in the schoolroom, urged loving fathers to beat their sons occasionally to toughen them, ‘to accustom them to suffer Pain’.17 Discipline has been much written about by modern scholars, but it has been thought of in experiential terms less often: as the French historian Pierre Bonassie observed, ‘The history of punishments has never been written’.18 The late Lawrence Stone, for example, saw beatings as conventional in English schools, but though he condemned the beaters he took a fairly brisk approach to the beaten.19 He did not ask a question that may seem obvious: what did a beating mean? Few have tried to answer that question. One who did was the agricultural writer Thomas Tusser, who seems to have suffered at 117

part ii: rethinking context Eton in the mid-sixteenth century and offered his own account in Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (1573): ‘Fifty-three stripes given to me at once I had / For fault but small, or none at all. / See, Udall, see, the mercy of thee, to me, poor lad’20 – ‘Udall’ here was Nicholas Udall, once Master of Eton College. Since it had been in the early 1540s that the  Privy  Council  ordered Udall removed on a charge of buggery,21 Tusser seems to have long nursed the smart. But the literary scholar Alan Stewart in 1997 argued strenuously to correct that impression, contending on the basis of chronological slippages in the (notoriously unreliable) dating  of  college and school admission registers in the Tudor period that Udall could not have taught Tusser personally, and accordingly that ‘Udall’ was perhaps Tusser’s scholar’s shorthand for a mere Latin grammar text.22 Implausible though his argument may seem, Stewart’s concern to minimise the physical aspects of Tusser’s time at Eton demands attention, since it may suggest that schoolroom abuse of such a brutal kind was unknown. But in a loser’s account of a power struggle at Westminster School with the formidable Dr Richard Busby in the 1650s, Edward Bagshaw, deputy master and later Nonconformist clergyman, was quite categorical about the dangers – moral to the teacher, physical to the child – of the prevailing educational regime. He made reference to ‘an Execrable Fact’ committed by Busby’s nephew John Busby, ‘for which he was forced, or rather suffered to fly’. The younger Busby, Bagshaw went on, ‘a Worthless and an Infamous person [who] taught here’, also abused ‘the Liberty of Whipping to such an Excess and Extravagance of severity, that I do grieve for the Practise, but I blush to think of the Cause of it’.23 Bagshaw’s reference to that ‘Execrable Fact’ may impute to the younger Busby an act of buggery; whatever that ‘execrable fact’ at Westminster, Bagshaw was more interested in the violence that Busby junior inflicted. ‘Poor little boys … receive 30, or 40, nay sometimes 60 lashes at a time for small and inconsiderable Faults’, he observed; he observed too the apparently sexual urge that underlay those blows: ‘I blush to think of the Cause of it’. Indeed, Bagshaw generalised this condition as he reflected on the ‘Indignity’ of his own experience of beating in the schoolroom, and he urged that schoolmasters employ assistants not to help with the teaching but to help with the whipping, ‘that so we might not both be Judges of the Fault, and Executioners of the Sentence, for fear Passion, or something worse, do exasperate the Penalty’.24 Can we infer what that ‘worse’ was from the famous engraving in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs of a sweating Bishop Bonner in his orchard in the 1550s, codpiece bulging as he belaboured the naked buttocks of a sturdy heretic while an attendant hid his face?25 The matrons of ancient 118

hirst: understanding experience Rome who employed officials for the specific purpose of flogging their slaves may thus not have been inflicting the ‘shocking’ abuse that is sometimes imagined; 26 rather, they may have been avoiding the appearance of a very different, and no less shocking, kind of abuse. They were certainly followed in such a self-denying course by those paragons of the Continental schoolroom, the Jesuits, who insisted on the appointment of a classroom ‘Corrector’ who was not to be a member of the Society.27 The erotics of violence were indeed a familiar theme. As Alan Stewart and others have pointed out, the capacity of the master’s rod not just to bloody but to shame the pupil had long been a subject of satirists’ and balladeers’ amusement, and maternal distress.28 The Jesuits’ separation of powers was and remained a convention sadly missing from English schoolrooms. In the excited and expansive print world of the later seventeenth century these issues seeped into genres other than satire. Bagshaw’s was not the only voice to be raised in reflective, and as we shall see even reflexive, mode. In 1663, Marchamont Nedham – a former republican newsbook-writer now seeking rehabilitation in a more conservative monarchical order – urged educational reform, the political advantages of schools properly aligned to ‘our late blessed and wonderful Restauration’, and the national gains to be had from fostering a spirit of disciplined inquiry. Nedham trod carefully: lest anybody think he was still some Commonwealthsman from a decade earlier he took pains to disclaim any concern for ‘the little dirty Infantry, that swarmes up and down in Alleys and Lanes’.29 The deficiencies of schooling, he assured watchful readers, lay in widespread carelessness rather than deep structures; they lay as well in a reliance on the rod that deadened the will to learn. But – and here Nedham agreed with Bagshaw – discipline also distracted schoolmasters who took it on themselves to lash the bodies of their pupils rather than leave them to the beadles: Indeed the great indiscretion and intemperance of Masters in that, hath brought a very great contempt and hatred upon the Profession it self: and not to speak of the ill use some have made of it to lewdness (of which Instances are not wanting, but that they are odious) it being a kinde of uncovering nakedness. (p. 14)30

By folding into the shame of those who would uncover nakedness not only the pedagogues who exposed and beat their pupils but also those too-observant critics who felt drawn to particularise in order to condemn, Nedham neatly distanced himself from the indelicacies of inquiry.31 To judge by the speed with which the passing slur caught the eye, there was substance to Nedham’s claim that ‘instances’ of ‘­lewdness’ were ‘not ­wanting’. Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, perhaps the defining text 119

part ii: rethinking context of the Restoration moment, in 1663 won fame with its burlesque of Nonconformist ways; the second edition, published in 1664 – that is, after the appearance of Nedham’s Discourse – picked up and politicised the latter’s charge. In a passage new to the 1664 edition, Butler has Hudibras’s squire Rapho turn against his Presbyterian master a lesson on the hypocrisy of self-denial when the only flesh that the self-proclaimed godly sought to mortify belonged to others: As no man of his own self catches The Itch, or amorous French-aches, So no man does himself convince By his own Doctrine of his Sins. And though all cry down Self, none means His own self in a literal sense. Beside, it is not only Foppish, But Vile, Idolatrous, and Popish, For one man, out of his own Skin, To frisk, and whip another’s Sin: As Pedants out of School-boys breeches Do claw and curry their own Itches.      (pp. 100–1)32

Rapho’s Frenchifying of ‘the Itch’ declares sex rather than mere hypocrisy the heart of the charge. His very matter-of-factness makes Rapho all the more convincing as a witness to Nedham’s complaint about the occupational appeal of flagellation.33 Equally significant, the economy and succinctness of his rhyme ensured a continuing audience. But Butler’s Hudibras is above all about partisan politics. The most notorious linkage of political partisanship and schoolroom abuse came in 1672 when Andrew Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d seized on Butler’s anti-Presbyterian complaint. Marvell turned Butler on his head to impute a particularly voyeuristic abuse to the emphatically Anglican persecutor-and-disciplinarian Samuel Parker: boys know they must ‘down with their breeches as oft as he wants the prospect of a more pleasing Nudity’.34 It is no wonder that Butler retaliated viciously in 1673 when he alleged sexual as well as political failings of Marvell’s own.35 But it was not politics alone that drove this new concern for the body of the child. In 1669, from a partisan position apparently far from Marvell’s proto-Whiggery,36 the anonymous Childrens Petition: Or, A Modest Remonstrance of that Intolerable Grievance our Youth Lie Under in the Accustomed Severities of the School-discipline of this Nation, minced few words as it contrasted ancient tyranny favourably with ‘the more voluptuous dominion’ enjoyed by modern schoolmasters; as well, it urged the horror that even Turks must feel under treatment that forced ‘Schools to be not meerly houses of Correction, but of Prostitution’ (pp. 7, 17). The Petitioner – manifestly no child but a highly educated adult – invoked 120

hirst: understanding experience Butler admiringly when he asked, Will you hear that shrewd Author of Hudibras make the discovery? The Pedant in the schoolboyes breeches Does claw and curry his own itches.   (lines 15–17)

With those verbs, the Petitioner pointed to the compulsion that drove the abuser. ‘Experience does tell us how every light occasion is taken, with what appetite they come to it, as soon as the flesh is bare, these Jarfalcons are perching over us’ (pp. 6–11, mispaginated). It is tempting to ask whether it was those gyrfalcons that caught Andrew Marvell’s eye – fascinated as he was with eroticised birds of prey37 – when he wrote his assault on Parker the Anglican a couple of years later. For there, Marvell’s claim – that boys were sacrificed to the voyeuristic lusts of their teachers – no less stressed the instinctual. But the Petitioner went further and tried to identify just how the compulsion worked. While those appetites, which are natural, have their end, and receive a completion and redress in the attaining of that end, the appetite which is unnatural is infinite, and it is a thing the thought whereof is intolerable to us, that our sufferings and smart must encrease, according to the ebb and flowing of those desires, which have no current this way in nature to satisfaction & a surcease. (pp. 20–1)

The Petitioner may here have been hinting that, in deterring the more obvious forms of satisfaction, the buggery laws might have shaped and distorted the conduct of the abuser. What makes the Childrens Petition so extraordinary is not just the scorn for the abuser – after all, Dryden was to manage that in his Virgil – but the acute observation of the victim and of the experiential meaning of abuse. ‘When we that come to School together, shall see this lad’ – perhaps ‘more pretty, sprack [lively, alert], and ingenuous then others’ – ‘taken out by his Master, and have about half a dozen, or half a score lashes given him by authority of that sentence, Non castigo te quod odio habeam, sed quod amem [I beat you not that I loathe you but that I love you], with repetition of the Quod amem, at every lash; What shall we think of such liking?’38 But the Petitioner had answered his own question. ‘Our secret parts, which are by nature shameful, and not to be uncovered, must be the Anvil, exposed to the immodest eyes and filthy blows of the smiter’ (p. 7). The Petitioner seems at his most precocious when he focuses on the pain and the shame, on the ‘little ones … ready to make away themselves, rather than to endure the iteration of these torments’ (p. 15). This is not just a deeply felt but a closely observed language. ‘What need of this privacy? Why is the Boy or Girl retired from their fellows, and why so long a preachment then made over the Bare in a Corner?’ (p. 24) Citing the ancient world’s leading edu121

part ii: rethinking context cational theorist, Quintilian, for corroboration,39 the Petitioner points to deformed passages, and uncouth words, which do fall from, or happen to, those that are beating, which leave such impressions of shame and surprize on the more ingenuous and bashful, that no advantage which can be obtained by any Master, is able to recompence the mischief already suffered, if it be onely in debasing the Spirit, and rendring themselves vile in their own imaginations. (pp. 29–30)

This shameful recognition of half-hidden gratifications – ‘deformed ­passages … which do fall from, or happen to, those that are beating’ – is twinned with an uncanny awareness of the complicated traffic of pleasure and pain that extends the human consequences of abuse into the next generation: ‘We [the children] have many times had our apprehensions filled with terror, our mouths with crying, and our eyes with tears for the present smart which hath vanished … It afflicts us much more, that the seeds of the same corruption which is practised in the Earth, should not be unsown in our own hearts’ (pp. 66–7). In such seeds we can readily see taking shape the clerical and schoolmasterly protagonists of Marvell’s semi-autobiographical fantasy, The unfortunate Lover: ‘as one Corm’rant fed him, still / Another on his Heart did bill’, leaving the Orphan devastated and yet drawing blood in his own turn.40 And we can see too why it is so easy to cast Marvell – like the principals in so many modern abuse cases – as both victim and perpetrator.41 The Petitioner offers, as well as startling analysis of victimhood, an acute psychopathology of the schoolmaster. ‘Young men ordinarily, who are in the heat of their blood, as of their parts … are received to the office  … a dangerous permission, which brings mens corruption, and temptation so unheedfully together.’ Power and ‘opportunity under the pretence of justice’ combined to invite the young schoolmaster – likely unmarried  – to inflict corporal discipline ‘on those parts which stir his original corruption’.42 The infection, because bodily and sexual, was all too natural; it was also, he concluded grimly, contracted in the socialisation of the schoolmaster: ‘the tribe of these men … are sure to catch [it] (as fast as we Boys that do but come together, catch our itch) of one another.’43 And it was in social formation that the Petitioner located the obstacles facing whistle-blowers and reformers, then and now. Why the long silence, within Parliament and without? In Parliament, there are many Gentlemen of excellent parts, and ingenuous reflections, and who some of them are not so old as to forget what was unhandsome, and yet we never hear of something tendred for the regulation of schools. Is it because you can indeed remember no stories? Or, that the impressions do yet last, that you must not tell tales from thence? (p. 23)

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hirst: understanding experience Nearer to home lay a deeper helplessness, and one that seems oddly familiar today: if some of our more sagacious Friends become sensible of somewhat by our complaints, and so send for, or go to our Masters to reprehend what is amiss; they are not able to call the thing by its name, but in modesty speaking a little against their over-rigour, or the like, they leave the beam untouched; and so the person, for want of plainer rebuke, is but … hardned by it. (p. 68)

The pressures for silence triumphed. The Anglican outcry that greeted Marvell’s opportunist and scandalising charge against Parker the clerical bully in 1672 may have deterred others from voicing their concerns;44 perhaps as well, the weight of Richard Busby, ‘that Transcending Rabbi’, kept the lid on. ‘There are such stories that might be told out of Westminster School, now the Dreadful Venerable Bard thereof is dead [in 1695] … and the like Noted Schools, that would make a Heart of Stone to Bleed’, averred the next challenge to the ‘Voluptuous Dominion’ of the schoolmaster. Lex Forcia (1698) did not add greatly to the analysis, though it certainly added currency.45 Much of its text was taken directly from the Childrens Petition, and like the Petition it was couched as a call to Parliament; the second edition, of 1699, was explicit on the institutional context: ‘Printed for a Number to be Sent, or Presented to Parliament-Men. And the rest to be Sold only by the Book-Sellers in Westminster-Hall (where such come) and no other-where else; there being but a few Copies in all to be Sold.’ But despite that claim to economy and selectivity, there was not only a second edition but a third, also in 1699, and this one looks in a different and much more prominent direction. It was ‘addressed to the several societies for the reformation of manners in London, and others here throughout the kingdom’. These were to use ‘their timely endeavours to get a bill prepared (and some members to countenance and move it) against the sitting of Parliament, to that end’. In other words, the pamphleteer intended a public as well as a Parliamentary campaign.46 And Lex Forcia certainly provided detail to excite its wider audience: After my first School-Master, and another, had left the School, a Young Master was put in, who was a kind of Ingenuous Man, as I had thought, and of another make, but after he came to this Calling, he soon Improves, and Learns the Trick, insomuch that he would sometimes have a Forme of Boys stand, with their Breeches down, and Shirts up, or sometimes go up and down the School Bare, and he slash them as he pleased. Oh, there is no man, if once turn’d Pedant, is to be trusted with such a sort of Power as this. (p. 17)

The author and publisher clearly anticipated that the figure of the traumatised child could galvanise reformers – and not surprisingly, to judge by the pamphlet’s closing plea for a statute, ‘That all Children that go 123

part ii: rethinking context to School shall wear Drawers, and that they be never Whipt but with their Drawers on’ (p. 28). That plea spoke to concerns bitterly expressed by Thomas Dunton, the popular essayist and self-styled ‘Rambler’, in a printed tirade of 1691 against schoolmasters: ‘Dos n’t every fibre of your Buttocks tremble, as Busby’s [Westminster School] boys do when they meet him agen, as oft as you reflect how often those filthy Fellows have bin peeping in ‘em?’47 The excited tone of Lex Forcia caught the attention of the leading modern authority on early modern education, indeed on early modern social and cultural formation generally. In a celebrated 1976 lecture, Sir Keith Thomas focused sympathetic attention on some fairly robust assertions of students’ demands as he charted schoolboys’ efforts to bar out brutal masters from their school-rooms. It is worth paying some attention to his argument, which has implications for our estimates of the possibility of early modern self-consciousness. In the course of a superb exercise in source recovery and assimilation, Thomas singled out the Childrens Petition for its ‘searing exposure of the sexual perversions involved in corporal punishment’. But then he concluded that we should disregard other potential bearings of the pamphlet: the Childrens Petition ‘had a semi-pornographic character, which became more apparent when it was republished with alterations [in Lex Forcia], and its bona fides is questionable’.48 The judgment is puzzling, and not least because this ‘semi-pornographic’ pamphlet contains few of the conventional erotic allurements of the era;49 still more puzzling is Thomas’s logic: how does a work published thirty years later clarify the motives behind a publication of 1669? Although we should not be persuaded by the first-person plural phrasings of The Childrens Petition, we have as yet no grounds to dismiss its claims of reportage, whether those of alleged ‘fact’ or more certainly those of imagined experience. For a brief moment in the later seventeenth century there were thus some who were willing to take seriously the abuse sustained by the child.50 The most extraordinary piece of self-reflection, Andrew Marvell’s The unfortunate Lover, unpublished in his own lifetime, is sui generis, a work of privacy as well as of genius, and its survival into the world is difficult to explain satisfactorily.51 Its argument accordingly offers little purchase to those attempting to generalise. But we might imagine that others besides the near-Socinian Marvell were escaping in those years from the disciplinarian strictures of Calvinism and were left freer to question convention.52 And also there was partisanship and the press. In several cases – from the earliest anti-pedagogue, John Cleveland the royalist poet and journalist in the 1640s,53 through Bagshaw, Butler, and the Marvell of the attack on Parker – intensified partisanship invited observers to find scandal that they might once have passed by; meanwhile, expanding access to the press 124

hirst: understanding experience gave them an opportunity. Perhaps too, the remarkable and remarkably publicised sexual scandals of the Restoration Court – and, from a very different quarter, the fierce interest of pulpit warriors in the 1640s and 1650s in denouncing the sexual foibles and profligacies of their foes – may have sensitised and emboldened a generation of critics to the social reach of debauchery.54 Possibly most important of all is the situation of Marvell and the Children’s Petitioner alike at the cultural watershed which saw the gradual displacement of what has been called Thomas Laqueur’s ‘One-Sex model’, in which buttocks and thighs of whichever gender, though not necessarily of whatever age, were fungible, by a now more familiar world of adult sexual preferences and attachments.55 Of course, there was also the forum provided by an increasingly assertive Parliament. The Childrens Petition, like Lex Forcia, expressed hopes aroused in the seventeenth century by Parliament’s reformist role, though such hopes were predictably vain. At the end of the day, the distinguished legal historian Richard Helmholz can assure us that as far as he can tell the early modern child had no rights.56 The recent publicity given to a lawsuit of 1600 in which a father tried and failed to regain custody of his thirteen-year-old son, kidnapped with the Queen’s warrant to serve on the stage, underscores the helplessness of child and parent alike.57 Holly Brewer’s exploration of what seems like the closing of the common law courts to children with Judge Hale’s emphasis on the entrance into rationality at the age of fourteen suggests how helplessness may have intensified over the course of the seventeenth century as the church courts were steadily pushed out of business.58 It is presumably no coincidence that the trial record of the solitary pertinent case in the Old Bailey records (of 1694) of a sodomised youth identifies the victim (who was judged likely to die of his injuries, and not at the hands of the hangman) as ‘Anthony Bassa, Dutch Boy, of the age of 14 years, and upwards’.59 Younger than that and he surely would not have had his day, foreshortened though it was, in court. How many other hapless youngsters were excluded? Not for nothing does the word pupil derive from pupillus, or orphan. Could the young speak meaningfully – or, perhaps as revealing, be imagined as speaking – of their own understanding and experience? The problem here is of course that while the Childrens Petition was later said to have been ‘presented by a Lively Boy … to the Speaker’, the pamphlet was manifestly written by an adult.60 Like so many modern testimonials, it purports to represent memories – or are they constructions? – of abuse. Unlike some modern survivors’ recollections, it was not sworn to in a courtroom and its first person voice is plural, not singular. Its status as evidence must depend on the credibility of the details: and as Thomas himself noted, there is abundant evidence that schoolteachers did beat 125

part ii: rethinking context mercilessly.61 Its status must depend as well, and surely most importantly, on our sense of whether such an articulation of selfhood and suffering as the pamphlet offers was possible in the seventeenth century: on that question, the Childrens Petition is perhaps its own guarantor. Indeed, the Petitioner’s ability to articulate an experience for which he and his friends had no name, though he knew enough to differentiate it from ‘over-rigour, or the like’, challenges Lawrence Stone’s emphasis on the primacy of the written text (in this case, French-inspired pornography) in the development of transgressive practice (flagellation), 62 and challenges as well the common assumption that an experience needs to be identified in order to be felt. It might be noted that difficulties of terminology handicap modern complainants, and perhaps no less. We should remember too that, although talk of trauma can shade easily into exaggeration and excess, such shading does not mean there was no trauma. Contemporaries did know that tutors, like ‘bedfellows’, sometimes became rapists.63 In the Atlantic world, the New Haven colony’s 1656 sodomy law offered amid its alarm some instructively inclusive categories of offence and victim;64 in the world of the schoolroom and its analogues, the Childrens Petition and Marvell’s The unfortunate Lover demonstrate understandings of abuse and its consequences as acute as that of any ‘modern’. Edward Bagshaw, deputy master at Westminster School, was not therefore merely fantasising when he recognised that ‘something worse’ than ‘Passion’ sullied him when he wielded the rod. If such understandings were available, and at least some in early modern England did construe, and even experience, the experience of abuse as just that, then can we take refuge in the comfortable assumption that Andrew Marvell was, if not weird in his imaginings, then at least outrageously singular? All the signs are that English society was in the early throes of its shift away from the ‘One Sex model’ towards a world shaped by an awareness not just of individuality but of sexuality as sexuality, and of sexuality too as conscious orientation. In such a world, Andrew Marvell as here presented – and surely as self-represented – would have found himself a space, though we might wonder where. Voluntarism and consciousness might almost have been his watchwords; on the other hand, would his tendency to idealise not just the young but also men of power have finally pulled him back to an older vision, fractured indeed in its application but at least offering a dream of unity of body, mind, and soul? 65 Notes 1 See D. Hirst and S. N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 74–102; see, more particularly, Hirst and Zwicker,

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hirst: understanding experience ‘Marvell and lyrics of undifference’, forthcoming in M. Dzelzainis and E. Holberton (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell (Oxford University Press). I am indebted to Steven Zwicker for many conversations on this and other topics, and indebted too to all those who participated in the 2013 symposium in St Louis for their comments and their feedback: it was a model occasion.  2 T. Carew, ‘The Second Rapture’ (1640), lines 7–17.  3 M. Ingram, ‘Child sexual abuse in early modern England’, in M. Braddick and J. Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 63–84; G. Walker, ‘Rape, acquittal and culpability in popular crime reports in England, c.1670–1750’, P&P, 220 (2013), pp. 115–42, esp. 124–35. For a more wide-ranging assessment of such topics, see S. Toulalan, ‘“unripe” bodies: children and sex in early modern England’, in K. Fisher and S. Toulalan (eds), Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 131–50, and S. Toulalan, ‘Child sexual abuse in late seventeenth and eighteenth century London: rape, sexual assault and the denial of agency’, in K. Honeyman and N. Goose (eds), Children and Child Labour: Diversity and Agency, 1750–1914 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 23–43.  4 Old Bailey Project, t16940524–20: Mustapha Pochowachett, Sexual Offences > sodomy, 24 May 1694. The category ‘sodomitical rape’ was applied by a later cataloguer, not by a seventeenth-century reporter, though the term sodomitical was certainly in use at the time, as any attention to anti-Catholic propaganda will show.  5 See C. Herrup, A House in Great Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). The execution of both parties was not it seems the invariable outcome of buggery cases: in the 1694 case cited above, the perpetrator, a Turkish sailor, was executed while the victim was not, though the court noted that the latter was likely to die of injuries sustained in the attack.  6 T. Blount, Glossographia (1661) (no pagination) sub verba, and N. H., The Ladies Dictionary (1694), p. 94.  7 Published by Chadwyck-Healey.  8 For ‘boy’ as a general term of abuse, see P. Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England 1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 101–2.  9 J. Dryden, The Works of Virgil (1697), p. 511. I am indebted to Steven Zwicker for this reference, and for pointing out that Dryden’s language is harsher than Virgil’s original. Puberty was often assumed to begin later for boys than for girls. 10 New Haven’s Settling in New England (London, 1656), pp. 23–4; I am indebted to Jonathan Sawday for sharing with me his findings on Eleutheria. 11 Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder; see also above, note 5. 12 A. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 127–51; S. Amussen, ‘Punishment, discipline, and power: the social meanings of violence in early modern England’, JBS, 34:1 (1995), pp. 1–34. 13 H. Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), esp. pp. 206–8. 14 The reference here is of course to then-President Bill Clinton’s claim, in his impeachment proceedings over the Monica Lewinsky affair in 1998, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’. 15 R. Baxter, A Second True Defence of the Meer Nonconformists (1681), p. 155. See A. Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton:

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part ii: rethinking context Princeton University Press, 1997), for extended discussion of the pedagogic model and the expectations attached to it. 16 I owe this point to the kindness of Margo Todd. 17 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. J. W. and J. S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 178–9; see also E. Foyster, Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660–1875 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 69. 18 Pierre Bonassie, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe, trans. J. Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 17–21 – though Amussen makes a beginning in ‘Punishment, discipline, and power’. See n. 12 above. 19 L. Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), esp. pp. 163–5. 20 T. Tusser, Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry, 2nd edn (1573), f. 90. 21 See the entry ‘Udall, Nicholas’ in the ODNB. 22 Stewart, Close Readers, pp. 116–21. 23 E. Bagshaw, A True and Perfect Narrative of the Differences Between Mr Busby and Mr Bagshawe (1659), pp. 1, 20. 24 Bagshaw, A True and Perfect Narrative, p. 20. 25 J. Foxe, Actes and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Dayes (1563), p. 1689. 26 N. Mckeown, ‘Greek and Roman slavery’, in G. Heuman and T. Burnard (eds), The Routledge History of Slavery (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 28. 27 The Jesuit insistence on the appointment of a ‘Corrector’ is clear in their Ratio Studiorum. Of course, the Jesuits did not set the tone for all Catholic education, and their Ratio was presumably not followed to the letter even in all Jesuit classrooms, but it did assert a standard: The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599, trans. A. P. Farrell: http:// www.bc.edu/sites/libraries/ratio/ratio1599.pdf (p. 99). 28 Stewart, Close Readers, pp. 84–121. 29 M. Nedham, Discourse Concerning Schools and Schoolmasters (1663), pp. 2, 13–14, 16. 30 Nedham, Discourse Concerning Schools, p. 14. 31 At Westminster, Bagshaw had noted ‘in behalf of the School’, ‘the thing being so notorious’ – his syntax leaves wholly obscure whether by ‘thing’ he meant ‘the Practice’ or whatever ‘the Cause of it’ was that made him ‘blush to think of’ – ‘was neither complained of, nor thought fit to be reformed’. But this was what he said in print after the fact; whether he said the same in the showdown in front of the School’s governors we have no way of knowing, but it seems unlikely from his account. Bagshaw, True and Perfect Narrative, pp. 1, 19–20. 32 S. Butler, Hudibras, 2nd edn (1664), pp. 100–1. 33 This aspect of the practice is ignored in N. Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 34 A. Marvell, The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. A. Patterson, M. Dzelzainis, N. von Maltzahn, and N. H. Keeble, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:82. 35 [S. Butler], The Transproser Rehears’d (1673). Those failings centred on Marvell’s alleged sexual incapacity. 36 The Petition reportedly emerged from quarters close to the Licenser – who happened to be Marvell’s great foe, Sir Roger L’Estrange – and the Commons’ Speaker: see Lex Forcia: Being a Sensible Address to the Parliament, for an Act to Remedy the Foul Abuse of Children at Schools (1698), p. 3.

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hirst: understanding experience 37 See especially Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress, line 38. For a remarkable modern reflection on birds of prey and sexualised violence in a schoolmasterly setting, see the remarks on T. H. White in H. MacDonald, H is for Hawk (London and New York: Grove Press, 2014). 38 Childrens Petition, pp. 45–7. Around 1610, one anonymous Westminster schoolboy suggested that masters made choice of their class-room respondents, and thus of their likely victims, ‘by the feare or confidence in their lookes’: L. Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), p. 34 – I am grateful to Amy Sattler for this reference. 39 Edward Bagshaw had also turned to Quintilian: True and Perfect Narrative, p. 19. 40 Hirst and Zwicker, Orphan of the Hurricane, pp. 74–102. 41 See the evident uncertainties of Hirst and Zwicker on this point: Orphan of the Hurricane, pp. 90–7. 42 Childrens Petition, pp. 53–4, 63–4. By ‘original corruption’, I take it that the Petitioner was referring to the doctrine of Original Sin. 43 Childrens Petition, pp. 44–5: italics in the original. 44 For the Anglican outcry, see N. von Maltzahn, An Andrew Marvell Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), esp. pp. 134–46. 45 Lex Forcia: Being a Sensible Address to the Parliament for an Act to Remedy the Foul Abuse of Children at Schools, Especially, in the Great Schools of this Nation (1698): the comments about Busby and about Westminster School are found at pp. 8, 15. 46 WorldCat lists a total of thirteen extant copies of the various editions, a number that suggests significant print runs. 47 T. Dunton, A Voyage Round the World (1691), p. 60. 48 Thomas’s Stenton Lecture was published in 1976 as Rule and Misrule in the Schools of Early Modern England (Reading: University of Reading, 1976): the quotation is from pp. 15–16, where Lex Forcia is identified as the place of republication of The Childrens Petition. 49 For an account of the later seventeenth century’s conventions, see S. Toulalan, Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). The Childrens Petition and Lex Forcia in fact had the same publisher, one who, as a bibliographic essay published ten years before Thomas’s lecture had noted, was ‘not some obscure bookseller’ but had ‘risen to the top of the trade’ and ran in fact a high-end operation with presumably little contact with the margins of the publishing world. Indeed, the output of Richard Chiswell, the publisher in question, leaned towards what we might call the Anglican Enlightenment, as befits Lex Forcia’s (presumably knowing) account of the genesis of the Petition close to the heart of the Restoration establishment. C. B. Freeman, ‘The Children’s Petition of 1669 and its sequel’, British Journal of Education Studies, 14:2 (1966), p. 219. Chiswell’s output can be tracked in WorldCat. 50 It is true that there may have been other, earlier, such moments, but the surviving source material does not allow us to judge. 51 See Hirst and Zwicker, Orphan of the Hurricane, esp. ch. 3. 52 A near-Socinian Marvell is increasingly the representation of the leading Marvell scholars, M. Dzelzainis and N. von Maltzahn 53 Hirst and Zwicker, Orphan of the Hurricane, pp. 80–1. 54 I am grateful to Steven Zwicker for discussions on this theme.

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part ii: rethinking context 55 See above all T. King, The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750: Volume 1, The English Phallus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), for this transition and its timing. Laqueur’s influential work is of course Making Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 56 R. H. Helmholz, ‘And were there children’s rights in early modern England?’ International Journal of Children’s Rights, 1 (1993), pp. 23–32. 57 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22938866 (accessed 17 June 2013). The 1600 case is in fact not quite the novelty journalists have seemed to imagine: see Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, p. 43, and D. Baldwin, The Chapel Royal: Ancient and Modern (London: Duckworth, 1990), pp. 117–18. Tusser offers some corroboration of Henry Clifton’s vain protest at the theft of his son when he reports, ‘Then for my voice, I must (no choice) / Awaye of force, like poesting horse, for sundry men / Had plagards then, such childe to take: / The better brest, the lesser rest, / To serve the Queere, now there now here.’ With his spelling of ‘Queere’ for ‘quire’, or ‘choir’, Tusser punningly conjured ‘the Queene’, for the commission (‘plagard’/placard) by which he suffered was a royal one; the proximity in his verse to Udall the beater and bugger, a mere two stanzas away, was perhaps adventitious. T. Tusser, Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry, f. 90. 58 Brewer, By Birth or Consent. Judge Hale was, it should be stressed, merely tightening and applying Roman Law and Canon Law assumptions. 59 Old Bailey Project, Reference Number t16940524–20: Mustapha Pochowachett, Sexual Offences > sodomy, 24 May 1694. 60 Lex Forcia (1698), p. 3. 61 Rule and Misrule, passim. 62 L. Stone, ‘Libertine sexuality in post-Restoration England: group sex and flagellation among the middling sort in Norwich in 1706–07’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2:4 (1992), pp. 511–26, esp. 520–5. For an important corrective, see S. Toulalan, Imagining Sex, esp. pp. 92–131; see too S. Amussen’s attention to ‘Whipping Tom’ in 1681 London: Amussen, ‘“The Part of a Christian Man”: the cultural politics of manhood in early modern England’, in S. Amussen and M. Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 219. 63 The great German legal theorist Samuel Pufendorf, in a work published in English translation in 1698, likened the forcing of conscience – not unfamiliar territory to early modern Europeans – to what ‘a Guardian may be said to do, when he commits a Rape upon a Pupil committed to his Management’: S. Pufendorf, Of the nature and qualification of religion in reference to civil society (1698), p. 172. And in 1694 it was a ‘bedfellow’ who raped and nearly killed Anthony Bassa: Old Bailey Project, Reference Number t16940524–20: Mustapha Pochowachett, Sexual Offences > sodomy, 24 May 1694. 64 New Haven’s Settling in New England, pp. 23–4. 65 See Hirst and Zwicker, Orphan of the Hurricane, passim.

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Robertson: Debating censorship

7

Debating censorship: liberty and press control in the 1640s Randy Robertson

For many years now, historians have engaged in fierce debates over the extent and efficacy of censorship during the 1640s. Such debates have a distinguished history, as scholars over the last century have taken up various, sometimes widely divergent positions on the topic of censorship in Civil-War England. Some of the older monographs still have value. William Clyde’s early-twentieth-century account of the Civil War and Interregnum press, for example, is more nuanced than the Whiggish title of his book, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, would suggest; he argues convincingly that periods of freedom alternated with periods of constraint.1 Fredrick Siebert reaches a similar conclusion in Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776, which has three useful chapters on the 1640s.2 In The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, Joseph Frank rather hastily dismisses censorship as an obstacle to publication before 1649.3 Similarly, though he gestures towards the legal restraints of the 1640s, Christopher Hill emphasises the press’s nearly untrammelled freedom during this decade.4 The great D. F. McKenzie concludes in his study of the early modern book trade that censorship was relatively mild for the entire period spanning 1641–1700.5 Striking a different note, Dagmar Freist judiciously observes of the early 1640s that ‘What has been widely accepted as the “collapse of censorship” was not [a] collapse of censorship and definitely not a deliberate freedom of the press, but a competition for control among those in power’.6 More recently, Jason McElligott has urged scholars to view censorship not as a series of events but as a ‘dynamic process which takes place over time’, a practice with varying degrees of rigour.7 The question of censorship’s efficacy in the 1640s is an important one, and, doubtless, the debate will rage on. In this essay, I will touch on the impact of press controls during the Civil Wars, but my chief aim is to analyse the ways in which the twin issues of censorship and press freedom imbued the discourse of the 1640s. The conflict among modern scholars 131

part ii: rethinking context about censorship in that decade is a pale echo of the din that surrounded the topic during the Civil Wars. Since the advent of printing, there had been spectacular instances of censorship – book burnings, for example, and the pillorying of authors – and such spectacles had entered public discourse. David Cressy shows that Tudor and early Stuart monarchs often used public book burnings as dramatic performances of royal power and official displeasure, though he observes as well that some book burnings took place indoors, precisely to avoid publicity.8 Censorship and the burning of books were, after all, open to interpretation, and the crown could not always control the way people read such displays of authority. Cyndia Clegg highlights James I’s use of spectacular censorship, including book burning, and moreover, she demonstrates that from around 1628 the practices and policies of Caroline censorship became topics of public discussion.9 In the 1640s, however, a new kind of publicity surrounded censorship. Newsbooks frequently reported on it, authors detailed instances in which their works had been censored, and some even sought to contest parliamentary censorship, most famously Milton in Areopagitica. In what follows, I want to sketch the ways in which censorship both moulded the public sphere and wove itself, along with the notion of free speech, into the fabric of public discourse in the 1640s. The publicity attending censorship had a double edge: on the one hand, it served to impress on readers the limits of free expression; on the other hand, the resistance to press legislation resulted in a contest over the very idea of censorship itself. In 1641, Parliament overturned the royal licensing regime, and until 1643 the two Houses dealt with the press by issuing stopgap orders and by summoning offending authors, printers, and booksellers in an ad hoc fashion.10 The press during this period was not free, as some have implied, but constraints were considerably looser than they had been under Charles and Laud’s administration. The case of the poet John Bond illustrates both the chaos of the book trade in the early 1640s and parliamentary attempts to reimpose order.11 In a work entitled The Poets Knavery Discouered, in All their Lying Pamphlets, which dates to 1642, Bond opens by noting that Parliament has appointed a ‘select Committee for the restraint of all Libels’ and offers what amounts to an Index of forgeries in the succeeding paragraphs.12 He enumerates title after title of what he deems poetic fiction: false news, false attributions – the pamphlets he cites are in one way or another scandalous and, moreover, feigned. However, it turns out that Bond was himself engaging in similar cheats at around this time. Parliament cited two pamphlets that he had written in letter form as if from the queen, one to Lord Digby and the other to Charles I.13 On 29 March 1642, Parliament examined Bond and found 132

robertson: debating censorship him guilty of ‘making a scandalous Letter in the Queens M[a]jesties name, sent from the Hague to the King at York’, as one newsbook reported.14 In the Letter to the king, Bond comments freely on foreign affairs, alleging, for instance, that ‘the States of Holland doe not well accord with the Prince’. On a subject closer to home, he claims that the King of Denmark was poised to invade England because of the troubles there and that the Kings of France and Spain, as well as the ‘States of Venice’, were building up their navies for a similar purpose.15 For ventriloquising the queen and thus arrogating royal authority, and also, presumably, for spreading false rumours, the House of Lords sentenced him to the pillory and consigned him to prison.16 In his Perfect Diurnall, Samuel Pecke commented on this episode, noting that the Lords ordered the seizure and public burning of as many copies of Bond’s Letter as could be found.17 Later in 1642, Bond himself published a pamphlet on the affair, The Poets Recantation, placing his own offence in a wider context. The pamphlet is an odd mixture of poetry and prose, apology and book history: The inumerable multitude of Pamphlets, which have been surreptitiously inserted above this twelve months and halfe to the ignominious scandal of the State, did not only exasperate his Majesties just indignation against them, but also highly incensed his Parliament against the same. [Parliament] … intended to inflict exemplary punishment on the Authors thereof. And it being my hard fortune, or rather misfortune to bee found culpable in one peculiar Letter; (though thousand more scandalous Libils; and more invective against the State have beene published, whereof I am innocent) yet was I exposed … to the publike shame of the world; as the sole contriver of them all. I confesse impartially, I acknowledge the sublimity of my crime, and errour … It was notwithstanding no voluntary Act of criminall offence in me, but rather an astimulation, and inducement of impendent and urgent necessitie … Moreover I speake before God, and the whole world, I was suggested to write the same by a calumnious instigator.18

Bond’s apology is equivocal: he acknowledges his fault but maintains that he was prompted to write the offending pamphlet at the instigation of others; he suggests that the authors of rafts of other offending books and pamphlets have escaped unscathed; and he laments that, as he puts it in a later passage, he has ‘suffered exemplarily for all’. It is striking, however, that Bond does not so much defend himself as accuse others, and he certainly does not offer a defence of free speech or a free press. What is more, while in The Poets Knavery he casts poets as ‘lyers’, thus siding with Stephen Gosson over Philip Sidney, in his Recantation, Bond styles himself a poet, indeed writing part of his recantation in verse. Such split identities were not uncommon in the 1640s; they apparently reflected, even as they gave rise to, the cultural and political conflict of the period. By the same token, Bond’s ambivalence about the press was scarcely unique: many 133

part ii: rethinking context writers complained of the vile polemics that issued daily from the London presses and yet entered the fray themselves.19 Parliament attempted to curb the growth of print by issuing a series of orders, culminating in the Licensing Ordinance of June 1643. While some have dismissed the 1643 Ordinance as a dead letter, the measure had a discernible impact on press output. To demonstrate this point, I will draw on data from The British Index, a bibliographical project on which I have been working for several years. The Index details, to the extent possible, all instances of official challenges to books and pamphlets from 1641–1700.20 The following chart indicates the number of works challenged or suppressed in a given year (the dark grey bar) as against the total number of publications in that year, excluding serials and periodicals (the light grey bar).21 The chart offers what Franco Morretti would call a ‘distant reading’ of censorship in the 1640s.22 Such an aerial view does not, of course, replace what Jason McElligott terms ‘close contextualization’ of the problem, but we can draw certain inferences from it.23 The relationship between the two bars needs to be read carefully: in 1642, 168 works out of 3,666 were challenged or suppressed (4.6%); in 1643, 41 out of 1,835 (2.2%); in 1644, 63 out of 1,206 (5.2%); and in 1645, 32 out of 1,174 (2.7%). These figures suggest that despite the high percentage of challenged works in 1642 (4.6%), censorship was relatively ineffective in that year, as the total number of publications was astronomical (3,666).24 In 1643, however, while the percentage of censored publications dips to 2.2%, the publication total drops to 1,835, just over half that of the previous year, suggesting that the 1643 Licensing Ordinance was preventing obnoxious works from appearing in the first instance – exactly the goal of licensing. In the following two years, press output diminishes further, owing in part, perhaps, to the 1643 Ordinance. 4000 Censored

3500

Total

3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0

1641

1642

1643

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Chart 1  Number of publications censored or questioned, 1641–50

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1650

robertson: debating censorship ESTC totals by month, 1643 (esmates) 300 250 200 150 100 50 0

Jan.

Feb.

Mar.

Apr.

May

Jun.

Jul.

Aug. Sept. Oct.

Nov.

Dec.

Chart 2  ESTC totals for 1643

To break the publication data down a bit further, I have attempted to calculate the number of publications per month in 1643. It must be admitted that such estimates are fraught with peril, and I would stress that the numbers in Chart 2 are rough approximations. Using ESTC’s database, I have relied on George Thomason’s dates, as well as the dates in many titles and imprints, to come up with the totals. Some of the 2,299 ESTC publications for 1643 have no obvious date markers; these are not included in the graph.25 Parliament passed an order regulating printing on 9 March 1643 and the better-known ordinance on 14 June 1643.26 Publication totals drop markedly in April and July, but of course correlation does not prove causation. It is nevertheless possible that the two parliamentary orders applied a brake to the London presses. Of those 1643 publications that bear a date, the total number of publications from January through June is 1,074, whereas the total number of publications from July through December is 604, suggesting that the June ordinance may have had some effect on the book trade.27 A consideration of newsbooks complicates this picture somewhat: the number of newsbook titles declined in 1643, 1644, and 1645, yet the total number of issues rose in 1643 and 1644, dipping only slightly in 1645.28 Nevertheless, the licensing and registration of newsbook issues jumped sharply in the wake of the 1643 Ordinance despite the steady decline of registration rates over the course of the seventeenth century.29 The effect is striking: the newsbook licenser Henry Walley’s name litters the pages of the Stationers’ Register from late June 1643 through mid-April of 1644, and from that point the licensers John Rushworth and Gilbert Mabbot’s names appear continually through 1645 and beyond. When Rushworth later referred to the press as ‘without control’ during this period, he was, 135

part ii: rethinking context therefore, evidently speaking in relative terms.30 As Carolyn Nelson and Matthew Seccombe observe: ‘When Parliament consolidated its power in 1643, it was relatively successful at controlling the periodical press in London; the Royalists depended on their own safe haven in Oxford.’31 Yet, if the 1643 measure slowed the tide of print, it certainly did not stop it, nor did it stop authors from complaining about the suppression of their work. Milton is only the most famous example: partly because of Parliament’s suppression of his divorce tracts, he complained in Areopagitica of licensing in general and the 1643 Ordinance in particular. Other writers preceded and followed Milton into print on these issues. For instance, the religious Independent Hezekiah Woodward, like Milton, encountered trouble with Presbyterians in Parliament. In December of 1644, the warden of the Stationers’ Company testified before the House of Lords, citing Woodward and Milton as the authors of ‘scandalous books’.32 Parliament responded by suppressing Woodward’s Inquiries into the Causes of our Miseries (1644), a pamphlet defending Independency, and in the following year, Woodward published an account of the episode in Soft Answers unto Hard Censures, which is an apology in the classical sense, a defence of his previous work. In Soft Answers unto Hard Censures, Woodward argues in favour of religious toleration, as Milton does in Areopagitica. Yet, unlike Milton’s famous tract, Woodward’s apology does not include a systematic attack on licensing. Although he writes that he took umbrage at the Stationers’ wardens’ seizing his book, Woodward notes that he had tried to have the Inquiries, the original work in question, licensed: For first, I sought for a Licence, but could not obtain it, though my manner is to yeeld up my papers to be corrected, as the Licenser, in his better judgement shall think fittest. And indeed so an Author should do, for he is worst able to judge of himself; and he may slip with his pen as soon as with his tongue, which the Licenser, by adding or leaving out a word, may help, and reconcile the Authors words and his meaning. Therefore no man I think, is more willing to crave judgement and submit unto it, then I am. And with this kinde of Licensing, any spirit can well close. But for a Licenser to withdraw his hand, out of prejudice to that, he will not read; or because it may not suit with his judgement, This gives an offence sure, which ought not be given.33

Woodward claims that he was forced to publish his work without licence, noting further that many licensed books and pamphlets are far more objectionable than his: I observed bookes passing abroad with Licence, which I thought were wanting to Truth in part; and to right Reason, more wanting; and to the Law of Charity wholly wanting, all throughout: Yet these have their Licence.

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robertson: debating censorship I thought now, That sith I craved leave and could not have it; I might take leave, and the liberty to speak the Truth. (p. 3)

Like many others in this period, Woodward thus argues for freedom of speech not in the abstract but in his own case, though his views on the matter are complex; in the first passage quoted, he seems to regard the licenser as little more than an editor. Indeed, he criticises the ideological use of licensing, so there is an element of principle driving his argument. The Stationers’ Company, however, was unmoved: when Woodward tried to publish the second part of the Inquiries, it was seized at the press, and though he projected six parts to the work, only parts one and three appeared.34 Woodward’s case demonstrates once again that even though the 1640s witnessed an unprecedented freedom of the press, that freedom was far from total. Although Woodward differs from John Bond in attacking the censors who suppressed his work, it is significant that, like Bond before him, he insists that he has been unfairly singled out: Onely this I must minde them [the Stationers’ wardens] of here, That their Dealing with my Book and Me, layeth an Engagement upon them … To deal with other Bookes filled with blasphemies from top to bottom; And with Doctrines contrary to the Minde and good Word of God: with known Malignants … Pests and Plagues in City and Countrey, To deal with them, and these as they Dealt with me, and my Book. (p. 2)

Thus, even though he stops short of promoting a free press, Woodward strikes a note of protest about the arbitrariness of the licensing system and the haphazard enforcement of the law. Such complaints provided oblique buttresses for more philosophical defences of free speech, including Milton’s. In Areopagitica, Milton too highlights the arbitrary nature of censorship, which is governed, he maintains, by the whims of the licenser.35 Milton’s tract is, of course, far more than a plaint about the vagaries of the licensing system. But if Milton’s is the most luminous, and the most enduring, plea for free speech from this period, it was neither the first, nor, for his contemporaries, the most influential. Milton’s lyceum eloquence gave his Areopagitica lasting power, but the so-called Levellers’ demotic style was arguably a more effective weapon in the pamphlet wars of the 1640s. In The Compassionate Samaritan, the first edition of which was published several months before Areopagitica, William Walwyn writes in support of an unfettered press, and other Levellers followed suit. The Apostle perswadeth those who[m] he instructed to try all things: These [persecutors] allow not things to be compared, they take liberty to speake what they please in publike against opinions and judgements, under what

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part ii: rethinking context nick-names they thinke fittest to make them odious, and write and Print, and licence the same … but stop all mens mouthes from speaking, and prohibit the Printing of any thing that might be produced in way of defence and vindication; and if any thing bee attempted, spoken or published without authority or licence, Pursuivants, fines and imprisonments, are sure to wait the Authors, Printers and publishers.36

Walwyn’s more bellicose colleague John Lilburne attacked the system of press controls in similar, if sharper, terms. In A copie of a letter … To Mr. William Prinne Esq, which dates to 1645, Lilburne inveighs against Prynne and the ‘Black-coats’, a metonym for the Presbyterian ministers in the Westminster Assembly: you, and the Blacke-Coates in the Synod ) have not dealt fairly with your Antagonists in stopping the Presse against us, while things are in debate, yea robbing us of our Liberty … in time of freedome, when the Parliament is sitting, who are sufficiently able to punish that man (whatsoever he be) that shall abuse his penne.37

Notice that at this point, not even Lilburne is willing to champion total freedom of speech; he observes that the sitting Parliament is ‘sufficiently able to punish that man … that shall abuse his pen’. Yet he remonstrates against the licensing machinery that allows Prynne and company to publish what they wish while binding the hands of any who oppose them: truly it argues no … valour in you nor the Blacke-Coates, by force to throw us downe and ty our hands, & then to fall upon us to beat and buffet us, for if you had not beene men that had been affraid of your cause, you would have been willing to have fought and contended with us upon even ground and equall termes, namely that the Presse might be as open for us as for you, and as it was at the beginning of this Parliament, which I conceive the Parliament did of purpose, that so the freeborne English Subjects might enjoy their Liberty and Priviledge, which the Bishops had learned of the Spanish Inquisition to rob them of, by locking it up under the Key of an Imrpimatur, in whose tyrannicall steps the Synod treades, so that you and they thinke you may raile at us cum privilegio, and ranke us amongst the worst and basest of men, as rooters up of Parliaments and disturbers of States and Common welthes.38

Parliament examined Lilburne about the Letter to Prinne and committed him to prison. In The Lyar Confounded, Prynne published an account of this affair, including a lengthy discussion of Lilburne’s publishing activities, the discovery of the secret presses on which Lilburne’s work was printed, and Lilburne’s various examinations before Parliament.39 Such a publication of Lilburne’s offence was designed, of course, to impugn the author of the Letter and to vindicate Prynne himself, but the details about press seizures and Parliament’s actions against Lilburne in The Lyar Confounded also served to admonish those who would spread sedition in 138

robertson: debating censorship print. Nonetheless, Prynne’s actions afforded Lilburne ‘another opportunity to propagandize by publicizing his sufferings’, which he did in The Copy of a Letter … to a Friend.40 At least two readings of the incident were available. Prynne was scarcely alone in bringing instances of censorship to the public eye. As I noted previously, newsbooks continually reported on the suppression of books, pamphlets, and other newsbooks. Ministers routinely condemned the temerity of authors and publishers, but in doing so, they acknowledged the freedom of the press. For instance, in a sermon that he delivered before the Lord Mayor of London, Edward Terry complained, ‘oh the boldnesse and liberty of the Presse, if wee consider those odious Pamphlets it often squieseth out’.41 Terry narrows his sights on the progeny of Martin Marprelate: Richard Overton’s ‘Martin Marpriest’ and those he dubs ‘Martin Marprince’ and ‘Martin Marpeople’. Lifting his rhetoric to a fever pitch, he lambastes the various Martins and highlights an especially odious recent publication, the Leveller Remonstrance. Like the Marpriest pamphlets, the ‘Remonstrance’ that Terry cites, the Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (1646), was Richard Overton’s work. Terry’s remarks indicate once again the public perception of the Levellers as an existential threat even as they demonstrate the scope of the Levellers’ cultural influence. It is significant that Terry’s sermon was printed with the title Lawless Liberty. The pamphlet contest between Joseph Hunscot, the Stationers’ Company beadle,42 and William Larner, a Leveller printer and bookseller, crystallises the dialectic between censorship and the struggle for freedom. Hunscot and Larner traded barbs in print over the circulation of Leveller works, hence publishing their debate to a wider audience. As a ‘freeman of England’, Larner insisted on his right to publish the works for which he was charged.43 Hunscot, for his part, published a pamphlet on his seizure of Larner’s secret press, requesting from Parliament both remuneration for his services and protection from the enraged ‘libelers’ whose pamphlets he had suppressed.44 Censorship, therefore, not only restricted the public sphere, it suffused it, reminding writers, printers, booksellers, and readers of the limits on free expression. On the other hand, once censorship entered public discourse, authors, printers, and booksellers such as Overton, Walwyn, Milton, Lilburne, and Larner were able to contest it. The crucial point here is that at moments in the 1640s, the government lost control not just of the presses but of the discourse surrounding censorship.45 Lilburne’s 1649 treason trial represents perhaps the most dramatic contest over censorship of the entire decade. Lilburne and his cohorts had long harried those in power, no matter what form that power took – king, 139

part ii: rethinking context Westminster Assembly, Parliament, and army – and Lilburne often found himself in prison. In 1649, amid rumours of his shifting into the Royalist camp, Lilburne, along with other Levellers, faced off against the Council of State. With the publication of the Second Part of England’s New Chains Discovered (March 1649), the government acted decisively, arresting and interrogating Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn, and Thomas Prince.46 The government took several months to build a case as the accused waited in the Tower, though Lilburne continued to attack the Republic in print.47 Finally, the state brought Lilburne to trial at the Guildhall on 26 October 1649, two days after a true bill had been found. The government’s case focused on Lilburne’s publishing activities between the date of his arrest and the trial itself, arguing that his books fell afoul of the treason acts promulgated in May and July 1649.48 Cromwell and the Council evidently hoped that they had left Lilburne enough rope while he was in prison to hang himself. In the long prelude to his swearing in, Lilburne demands ‘liberty of speech’ (or ‘free liberty of speech to speak for himself’, a typically emphatic, if redundant, phrase).49 He desires that the doors be open to the proceedings; somewhat surprisingly, the judges grant his wish (p. 5). The crier and the clerk read out significant portions of the four allegedly treasonous works in the indictment: An Indictment of High Treason Against Oliver Cromwell, An Outcry of the Young Men and Apprentices of London, The Legal Fundamental Liberties of the People of England, and A Salva et Libertate. Thus, the trial amounted to a public reading of the most seditious parts of Lilburne’s work, as the courtroom was open to the public.50 More than once the attorney general, Edmund Prideaux, apologises for having the abusive language in Lilburne’s books read aloud (pp. 99, 108). Such a procedure was even more awkward than Prideaux suggested, as it left an odd logical gap in the government’s case. Lilburne notoriously insists that the jurors are judges of law as well as fact, dubbing the judges mere ‘ciphers’ and ‘Norman invaders’, thus invoking the ancient constitution (pp. 121–2, 140–1). Justice Jermin replies, ‘Was there ever such a damnable blasphemous heresie as this is, to call the Judges of the Law Cifers?’ (p. 122). A moment later, Jermin again corrects Lilburne: ‘Let all the hearers know, the Iury ought to take notice of it, That the Iudges  … have ever been the Iudges of the Law … and the Iury are onely Iudges, whether such a thing were done or no, they are onely Iudges of matter of Fact’ (p. 122). Yet, if jurors were to decide only on the facts, why are so many ‘treasonous’ passages from Lilburne’s writings read aloud in court, not just in front of the judges but the jury as well? After all, the judges had access to the written indictment, which itself 140

robertson: debating censorship quotes generously from Lilburne’s pamphlets (pp. 56–66). If, as the judges repeatedly maintained, the members of the jury needed to decide only on the fact of publication, surely they did not need to hear extensive parts of Lilburne’s work. Indeed, if the transcript is accurate, Justice Jermin’s instructions to the jury contain a fatal ambiguity: ‘you are to judge, whether in all those books there be not by Mr. Lilburne, a trayterous fact committed’ (p. 149).51 The language leaves room for the jury to interpret law as well as fact: on one reading, Jermin directs the jury to ‘judge’ whether Lilburne committed a ‘traytorous fact [i.e. act]’, that is, whether he committed treason.52 What is more, the judge effectively places jury members in the role of licensers after the fact – they are responsible for determining whether Lilburne’s writings constitute treason. Several exchanges between the court, the attorney general, and the prisoner hinge on freedom of speech. Here is one of many salvoes on Lilburne’s part: ‘I must confesse it is a very hard task for me to contest with the present power, whose Agents have free liberty to say against me what they please, and I am denied and that upon my life, all the priviledges of an English man’ (p. 101). Later, Prideaux observes that ‘Mr. Lilburn hath been very free in his writing, in his speaking, in his printing, and it now riseth in judgment against him, and the law must now give him his due’ (p. 144). Yet, when he paraphrases the Treason Act that Lilburne allegedly violated, Prideaux unwittingly deconstructs the ‘free commonwealth’ that he purports to defend: ‘My Lord … here is the Act, that doth declare the Common wealth for the future to become hereafter a free State, and the other [Act] declaring that fact to be Treason, that shall say it is tyrannicall or unlawfull’ (p. 85). Orwell and Yossarian are laughing: it is treason to declare this new free state ‘tyrannical’. At various points, Lilburne challenges the treason law under which he is being tried: Sir, by your favour, I shall desire to addresse my self in one word to you, which is to desire that the Jury may read the first chapter of Queen Mary, in the Statute book, and the last clause of the Chapter of the thirteenth of Elizabeth, where they shall clearly see … that they abhorred and detested the making of words or writing to be Treason, which is such a bondage and snare, that no man knows how to say or doe, or behave himself. (p. 147)53

Indeed, many of the passages from Lilburne’s works that were read aloud in the courtroom ring with pronouncements on freedom and bondage. The audience proved receptive: as the author of another account of the trial, Truths Victory, puts it, ‘Here they began to read over his Books, which pleased the People as well, as if they had acted before them one 141

part ii: rethinking context of Ben Iohnsons Playes, for their excellency, I shall give you the names of them, desiring all well affected People to buy them; because they are filled with  Law  and  Truth.’54 The trial had apparently served as an advertisement for Lilburne’s books! After a forty-five-minute recess and one juryman’s unsuccessful request for a ‘Cup of Sack’, the jury returned to the courtroom with a decision. The transcript limns a moving scene of the verdict announcement and its aftermath. Declaring Lilburne ‘Not guilty’ of all charges, the foreman answers the clerk’s incredulous follow-up questions on the prisoner’s guilt with a resounding ‘No’. The transcript continues, ‘No’ being pronounced with a loud voice, immediately the whole multitude of People in the Hall, for joy of the Prisoners acquittall gave such a loud and unanimous shout, as is beleeved, was never heard in Yeeld-hall, which lasted for about a halfe an hour without intermission: which made the Iudges, for fear, turne pale, and hange down their heads; but the Prisoner stood silent at the Barre, rather more sad in his countenance then he was before. (p. 151)

‘Sad’ here probably means sober or serious.55 Pauline Gregg asks two good questions about Lilburne’s muted response to the verdict: ‘Was he perhaps thinking of his old friend Jehovah, who once more had entered into him with his own self? Or was he merely humble in the presence of such support and affection as the people gave him?’56 We can add one more query, with a slightly cynical turn: was Lilburne disappointed that he did not become a martyr for his writings?57 Whatever the answers to these questions, the trial, designed as an exhibition of state power, became in many ways a spectacle of free speech. In a gesture of defiance, Clement Walker and the printer Henry Hills published a transcript of Lilburne’s trial shortly afterwards, advertising the government’s failure, a spectacular failure of censorship. The government dropped the charges against Lilburne’s fellow travellers William Walwyn, Richard Overton, and Thomas Prince. In her superb monograph on the Levellers, Rachel Foxley observes that ‘The celebratory fires that greeted Lilburne’s acquittal in his treason trial … revealed that the Levellers had not lost their cultural power overnight’ (p. 194).58 Lilburne’s views had a thorough airing in the courtroom and beyond. Famously, a medal was struck to memorialize his victory. Engraved in the coin is the motto, “John Lilburne saved by the power of the Lord and the integrity of his jury who are juge of law as wel as fact.” 59 Yet, it is worth remembering that the new republic decimated the Levellers as a political force. After the treason trial of 1649, many of the Levellers retired from political life. Overton did not publish anything until at least 1653, when Vox Plebis came out, but B. J. Gibbons observes that 142

robertson: debating censorship ‘there is no firm evidence’ for the attribution of this pamphlet to Overton, nor for the Leveller petitions sometimes ascribed to him.60 Walwyn ­produced nothing for a year; he published a brief pamphlet on jury trials around December 1650.61 It is noteworthy, however, that the work’s title page bears the phrase ‘Published by Authority’, and indeed the pamphlet was licensed.62 Walwyn was now playing by the rules. Thomas Prince went quiet altogether after 1649, even though he survived until 1657. Of the Leveller authors, only Lilburne remained obstinate.63 Clement Walker landed in deep trouble, both for the trial transcript and for his tracts against Independency.64 He died in prison. Appended to Walker’s trial transcript is the petition To the Commons of England, Assembled in  Parliament.65 One passage serves as a fitting postscript to the trial: It was also expected upon the prevailing of the Army, and the reducement of this honourable House, That the Printing-Presses should have been fully opened and set at free liberty, for the clear Information of the People, the stopping of them having been complained of as a great oppression in the Bishops times, and in the time of the late unpurged Parl. rather then such an Act against all unlicensed Printing, Writing or Publishing, as for strictnesse and severity was never before seene in England, and is extreamly dissatisfactory to most People. (p. 163)

The reference is to the Licensing Act of 20 September 1649. Raymond aptly calls the 1649 Act a ‘Rubicon’.66 Many newsbooks disappeared, and for those that remained, many subjects were off limits.67 Commentators noticed the shift in content: ‘In January 1650, a royalist newswriter remarked that newsbooks … “so timorously” … intermeddle with the public concernments of the infant Commonwealth, that they hardly deserve the expense of so much time as to read them’.68 The trend in 1649–50 is clear. To return to the first chart above, 2,309 titles, excluding serials, were published in 1648, the second-highest yearly total of the decade from 1641–50; but in 1649 some 131 books and pamphlets out of 1,549 met with an official challenge, which amounts to 8.5%, the highest percentage of the decade. Without question, Royalists and Levellers caused serious trouble for the Council of State through much of 1649, but in 1650, the total number of books and pamphlets dropped to 1,314, and opposition newsbooks ceased to be a threat. Thus, while censorship was not airtight, it could be quite effective. Rather than regarding the 1640s as a period of unbridled freedom, it would be more accurate to view the decade through the lens of the various debates about censorship that unfolded in a nascent and fragile public sphere. These debates branched in several directions and ranged across a spectrum of opinions. The struggle for the freedom of the press was not 143

part ii: rethinking context straightforward, progress was not linear, and proponents of a free press in the 1640s lost more battles than they won. Notes  1 W. Clyde, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press: From Caxton to Cromwell, 1934 (New York: Burt Franklin, reprint 1970).  2 F. S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952).  3 J. Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper: 1620–1660 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 32.  4 C. Hill, ‘Censorship and English Literature’, in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, vol. 1 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), p. 57.  5 For an alternative view, see R. Robertson, Censorship and Conflict in SeventeenthCentury England (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009), Introduction.  6 D. Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion, and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London, 1637–1645 (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997), p. 30. In his book Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution, Jason Peacey has usefully examined the ways in which print permeated English society in the 1640s, yet he exaggerates and oversimplifies the ‘collapse of censorship’ during this period – a phrase that appears several times in his book without further discussion (Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 1, 3, 94, 115, 137, 251, 264).  7 J. McElligott (ed.), Censorship and the Press, vol. 2, 1640–1660 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), p. xx.  8 D. Cressy, ‘Book burning in Tudor and Stuart England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 36 (2005), pp. 359–74.  9 C. Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Press Censorship in Caroline England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 10 M. Mendle, ‘De facto freedom, de facto authority: press and Parliament, 1640–1643’, HJ, 38 (1995), pp. 307–32. 11 Nigel Smith, Michael Mendle, Dagmar Freist, and Tue Andersen Nexo have also taken up Bond’s case: Smith, Literature and Revolution, 28-29; Mendle, ‘De Facto Freedom’, 325-29; Freist, Governed by Opinion, 65; ‘Between Lies and Real Books: The Breakdown of Censorship and the Modes of Printed Discourse During the English Civil War’, in The Use of Censorship in the Enlightenment, ed. Mogens Laerke (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 78-82. 12 J[ohn] B[ond], The poets knavery discouered (London, 1642), sig A2ff. 13 [John Bond], A copie of the Queens letter from the Hague in Holland to the Kings Maiesty residing at Yorke (London, 1642); [John Bond], The Queen’s Maiesties gracious answer to the Lord Digbies letter [1642]. 14 Samuel Pecke, A perfect diurnall of the passages in Parliament, 23rd March-4th April 1642. Thomason / 36:E.202[1]. 15 [John Bond], A copie of the Queens letter. 16 See The British Index, 4 March 1642; 28 March 1642.

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robertson: debating censorship 17 S. Pecke, A perfect diurnall, 23rd March-4th April 1642. 18 J. Bond, The Poets Recantation, Having Suffered in the Pillory the 2 of April, 1642 … (London, 1642), pp. 1–2. 19 For a paradigmatic example, see [Anon.], A Press Full of Pamphlets (London, 1642). 20 See R. Robertson, The British Index, www.academia.edu/1598680/The_British_Index. For a prefatory note on the sources and methodology behind the Index, see www. academia.edu/372922/Prefatory_Note_to_The_British_Index_1641–1700. 21 The yearly totals of Wing titles (the light grey bar) come from J. Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4, 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 779–84. Hereafter CHBB. 22 F. Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013). 23 J. McElligott, Royalism, Print, and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007). 24 Of course, this is not the final word on the matter, as the number of publications in 1642 might have been higher still if Parliament had not tried to control the press. 25 The ESTC totals include serials and periodicals, which is one reason why the number of ESTC titles for 1643 (2,299) exceeds the 1,835 figure from the previous chart, which includes only Wing titles (books, pamphlets, and separates), not serials or periodicals. I have done my best to account for abbreviations (‘September’ is often abbreviated ‘Sep’, ‘Sept’, ‘Septem’, ‘Septemb’, and even ‘7bre’) and Latin spellings (‘Ianuary’, or ‘Ian’, and ‘Aprillis’, for example). I have also tried to exclude redundancies (for instance, publications that include more than one month in the title or that have ‘September’ in the title and ‘Sept.’ in the imprint). I have tried, as well, to eliminate red herrings (for example, I have pared away entries that have the verb ‘may’ or parliamentarian ‘Thomas May’ rather than the month of May). Finally, I have attempted to deduct publications that actually date to 1643/44, but errors, no doubt, remain. 26 J. McElligott, Censorship and the Press, 2:63–4, 72–7. 27 Extrapolating outward to the 2,299 ESTC total for 1643, the Jan.-Jun. tally would be 1,471, the Jul.-Dec. tally 828. The English Parliament approved the controversial Solemn League and Covenant on 25 September 1643, which may explain the October uptick in publications. I suspect that the January-March totals are a bit inflated, as I doubt that cataloguers have identified all of the Jan.-Mar. “1643” publications that use Lady Day dating. If the Jan.-Mar. totals are inflated, then the March 1643 Printing Ordinance had a limited impact on the book trade. 28 C. Nelson and M. Seccombe, Periodical Publications, 1641–1700 (London: Bibliographi­ cal Society, 1986), pp. 12–13. For the ‘mean monthly average each year’, see Nelson and Seccombe, ‘The creation of the periodical press, 1620–1695’, in CHBB, p. 534. 29 G. E. B. Eyre and C. R. Rivington (eds), A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers 1640–1708 (1914; Gloucester, MA.: Peter Smith, reprint, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 58ff. Hereafter abbreviated as SR. On the general decline of registration across the century, see J. Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) p. 170. 30 Quoted in J. Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper, p. 270. 31 C. Nelson and M. Seccombe, ‘The creation of the periodical press’, p. 539. 32 The British Index, 28 December 1644. 33 Hezekiah Woodward, Soft Answers unto Hard Censures … (London, 1645), p. 3. When summoned before Parliament, Woodward confessed that he had tried and failed to have

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part ii: rethinking context the Inquiries licensed but that he had published it nonetheless (The British Index, 28 December 1644.) 34 The British Index, 28 December 1644. 35 See R. Robertson, Censorship and Conflict, ch. 3; G. Kemp, ‘Areopagitica’s anniversary: Henry Parker and the Humble Remonstrance’, in G. Kemp (ed.), Censorship Moments (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 36 W. Walwyn, The Compassionate Samaritane (London, 2nd edn, 1644 (Wing W681A)), p. 88. This passage forms part of the section entitled Good Counsell, itself published separately in mid-1644, as William Haller notes. For Walwyn’s remarks on the press in the first edition, see The Compassionate Samaritane (London, 1644 (Wing W681B)), pp. 47, 60–2, 70–1, 78–9). 37 John Lilburne, A copie of a letter … To Mr. William Prinne Esq. (London, 1645), p. 2. 38 J. Lilburne, A copie of a letter, pp. 2–3. 39 William Prynne, The Lyar Confounded (London, 1645). For more details on this episode, see The British Index, 17 January 1645; J. McElligott, Censorship and the Press, 2:133–4. 40 J. Lilburne, The Copy of a Letter … to a Friend [London: Larner’s press at Goodman’s  Fields, 1645], esp. 12ff.; F. S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press, p. 199. For more on this episode, see; Pauline Gregg, Free-Born John: a Biography of John Lilburne, (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1961) ch. 9; J. Peacey, ‘Lilburne and the Long Parliament’, HJ, 43 (2000), pp. 629–30. 41 E. Terry, Pseudeleutheria. Or Lawlesse liberty … Imprimatur. John Downame. (London, 1646), p. 13. 42 See the British Book Trade Index (BBTI), http://bbti.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/details/​?traderid=​ 36111. 43 A true relation of all the remarkable passages, and illegall proceedings … against William Larner (London, 1646); see also Every mans case (London, 1646), a broadsheet; J. M., Every mans case (London, 1646), a short pamphlet. 44 J. Hunscot, The humble petition and information of Ioseph Hunscot stationer (London: s.n., 1646). 45 Space does not permit a comprehensive discussion of the Levellers’ campaign for a free press, but the following works include arguments and remarks against censorship (the list is by no means exhaustive): W. Walwyn, A Helpe to the Right Understanding of a Discourse Concerning Independency (London, 1645), pp. 8–9; R. Overton, The Araignement of Persecution (London, 1645), pp. 2, 10; J. Lilburne, Englands Birth-Right Justified (London, 1645), Preamble, pp. 8–9 (on preaching), 10–11, 23 (on petitions), 42–43; Walwyn, Tolleration Iustifi’d, and Persecution Condemn’d (London, 1646), p. 2; Overton, A defiance against all arbitrary usurpations (London, 1646), p. 26 (‘The publishers to the reader’, perhaps written by Overton – after all, Overton was a printer as well as an author, and the Leveller movement depended on the press); To the Right Honourable and Supreme Authority of the Nation, the Commons in Parliament Assembled (London, 1647; Thomason / 62:E.392(20b)), p. 5; Overton, A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (1646), pp. 123, 128; The Case of the Armie Truly Stated (1647), p. 207; The Hunting of the Foxes (1649), p. 364; To the Right Honourable, the Supreme Authority of this Nation, the  Commons  of England in Parliament  Assembled (1649), pp. 322, 326–30, all in D. Wolfe (ed.), Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1944) (the 1649 petition, which first appeared

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robertson: debating censorship 19 January, is anonymous but names Lilburne, Larner, and Overton); J. Lilburne, Englands New Chains Discovered (1649), pp. 162, 167; The Second Part of Englands New Chaines Discovered (1649), p. 184; W. Walwyn, Walwyns Just Defence (1649), p. 384, all in W. Haller and G. Davies (eds), The Leveller Tracts 1647–1653 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944). See also the Leveller sympathiser Gilbert Mabbott’s reasons for quitting his licensing post (originally published in A perfect diurnall for 21–28 May 1649 and quoted in F. S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press, pp. 217–8); and D. Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 238–9, on the freedom to petition. 46 J. Lilburne, R. Overton, T. Prince, The Picture of the Council of State (London, 1649); Gregg, Free-Born John, ch. 22; The British Index, 27–28 March, 1649; 2–3 April 1649. 47 The Council threw out a few conciliatory gestures, and Lilburne was even allowed to visit his family when they were afflicted with smallpox, but he ended up rejecting the government’s overtures: T. C. Pease, The Leveller Movement (Washington DC: The American Historical Association, 1916), p. 290; Gregg, Free-Born John, 286–87, 294; A. Sharp, ‘John Lilburne’, ODNB. 48 For the treason acts, see C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (eds), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1911), vol. 2, pp. 120–1, 193–4. 49 Theodore Verax [Clement Walker], The triall, of Lieut. Collonell John Lilburne ([London], [1649]), p. 2. 50 For more on the ways in which Lilburne’s defence was a public performance, see S. Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 42–58. 51 The continuation of the speech offers a similar invitation to the jury (p. 149). On the accuracy of the trial transcript, compare A. Patterson, ‘“For Words Only”: from treason trial to liberal legend in early modern England’,  Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, 5 (1993), pp. 398–99, with J. Heron’s MA Thesis, ‘The trial of John Lilburne October 1649: a new perspective’ (Canterbury Christchurch University, September 2013), available online at http://create.canterbury.ac.uk/13292/1/13292. pdf. Heron makes a good case that the transcript was carefully constructed for rhetorical purposes. Patterson may overestimate the transcript’s veracity, but Heron perhaps exaggerates the differences between Walker’s account of the proceedings and other extant records of the trial. 52 On ‘fact’ as ‘act’, see OED, ‘fact’, definitions under ‘A’. 53 Part of this passage is also quoted in A. Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 114. On the injustice of a treason law against words, see also Certaine observations upon the tryall of Leiut. Col. John Lilburne, [S.l.: s.n., 1649], pp. 11, 14–15. 54 Truths Victory (London: Printed in the fall of Tyranny, 1649), p. 4. Thomason’s date is November 16. Like Walker, the anonymous author of this pamphlet evidently sympathised with the king (see, e.g., p. 5). Their advocacy of Lilburne is not surprising; despite fighting against the Cavaliers, Lilburne opposed what he regarded as the show trial and execution of Charles. The comment on Ben Jonson also serves to remind the reader that the theatre had been suppressed. 55 See OED I.3a and 3c. 56 Gregg, Free-Born John, p. 302.

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part ii: rethinking context 57 While I have profited from Thomas Corns’s and Sharon Achinstein’s readings of Lilburne’s rhetoric, I am unwilling to go as far in my cynicism as Corns, who regards Lilburne’s legal tactics as pettifoggery, or Achinstein, who in an unguarded moment refers to Lilburne as a ‘first-class demagogue’. To be sure, Lilburne did split legal hairs, and he did grandstand, but his arguments add up to more than cavils and demagoguery. Thomas Corns, Uncloistered Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 144-46, discussing Lilburne’s pre-trial tangles with Prideaux and the Council of State; Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 43. 58 R. Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 194. See also K. Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 438, 451; Gregg, Free-Born John, 301–2. 59 Gregg, Free-Born John, 301–302. A juror in Lilburne’s 1653 trial cited these very lines in justifying the decision to acquit Lilburne in that case (Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 58). Simon Stern helpfully pointed out to me that, as in Lilburne’s 1649 trial, the Bushell case (1670) took up the question of the jury’s role and created an even broader opening for jury nullification than did Lilburne’s (email communication, 21 Dec. 2017). The eighteenth-century jurist Francis Hargrave cited Lilburne’s case in his remarks on Bushell (Thomas Howell, State Trials [London, 1816], vol. 6, 1013–14n.). 60 ODNB, ‘Richard Overton’. 61 W. Walwyn, Juries justified (London, 1651 [1650]). The pamphlet’s first sentence is telling, as in it Walwyn acknowledges his recent silence. 62 SR, 1:356. 63 See Gregg, Free-Born John. Nonetheless, the government’s rhetorical campaign against Lilburne continued; see J. Peacey, ‘The hunting of the Leveller: the sophistication of Parliamentarian propaganda, 1647–53’, Historical Research, 78 (2005), pp. 15–42. The bookseller William Larner was of the same kidney as Lilburne: despite repeated imprisonments, Larner continued to publish unlicensed books in 1649 and beyond (see The British Index for 11 March 1650, 6 August 1653, 5 October 1653, 27 August 1655; ODNB). 64 The British Index, 24 October 1649; 6 December 1649; A. Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism, p. 113. 65 Published separately as Wing T1391. 66 J. Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper, p. 77. 67 C. Nelson and M. Seccombe, Periodical Publications, pp. 12–13; C. Nelson and M. Seccombe, ‘The creation of the periodical press, 1620–1695’, in CHBB, p. 542; F. S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press, pp. 217–25; J. McElligott, Royalism, ch. 6, esp. pp.  173–82; J. McElligott, Censorship and the Press, 2: 205–10, 233–51; K. Sharpe, Image Wars, p. 409. 68 J. Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper, p. 77.

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Cotterill: ‘Armed winter, and inverted day’

8

‘Armed winter, and inverted day’: the politics of cold in Dryden and Purcell’s King Arthur Anne Cotterill

I begin at the icy centre of Dryden and Purcell’s semi-opera King Arthur, which likely premiered in London in the summer of 1691 at the beginning of what climate historians call the ‘very cold 1690s’.1 There, in Act 3, Scene 2, in King Arthur’s first masque and most celebrated musical interlude, generally called the Frost Scene, an image of England transformed into a frozen wasteland – into the barbarous northernmost reach of the world complete with a cold-hearted rapist – flashes before the audience like a subliminal vision until the white landscape vanishes and the more comforting English April returns.2 Though visually and aurally dazzling, deceptively easy to skate over, the Frost Scene preserves in its ice a clue to the politics of King Arthur. The masque brilliantly crystallises the moral and political implications of the violence of northern cold for England, which is fondly imagined as a temperate garden enjoying spring’s melting, fertile warmth. Such an opposition of winter–spring and cold–warmth, a political language throughout Dryden’s career, has been hitherto unexplored in his work. The association of wicked magic and cold in Osmond’s masque was understandable to an early modern audience familiar with the traditional Christian alignment of cold and the far north with Satan, of severe weather with witchery and the demonic.3 Beyond the early modern period, however, King Arthur has been enjoyed for Purcell’s music but little understood. As Charles II’s laureate, Dryden had originally conceived the Arthurian theme for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Charles’s Restoration in 1685, the Stuarts tracing their ancestry to Arthur. But unknown events led the poet to set King Arthur aside for at least five years that included Charles’s untimely death in February 1685, the brief rule of Charles’s Roman Catholic brother James II and Dryden’s conversion to Rome while in James’s service, the flight of the unpopular James to the haven of Louis XIV’s court at the arrival in England in November 1688 149

part ii: rethinking context and subsequent takeover of Dutch Stadholder William of Orange and his wife Mary, eldest and Protestant daughter of James, and finally, the poet’s loss of position at court and transformation into a heavily taxed papist harried by government censorship. Dryden’s preface assures us he has altered ‘the first Design’ so as ‘not to offend the present Times’ (6:12–13) and that the Queen had given the semi-opera ‘Her Royal Approbation’ (7:14). Yet while claiming harmlessness, the poet leads us into a labyrinth of literary and historical echoes; and beginning with Jeremy Collier, 1690s crusader against Restoration wit and indecency in the theatre, audiences and commentators have puzzled over King Arthur’s tone and politics.4 In his essay ‘How many political arguments can dance on the head of a pin?’, Steven Zwicker captured the history of this semi-opera as a problem in interpretation, a tease of ambiguities that never resolve themselves into a coherent political design or into the whimsy we might expect when Dryden refers in his preface to practising ‘that Fairy kind of writing’.5 Scholars have struggled particularly to trace the political allegory  the work tantalisingly hints at: ‘Most simply’, Zwicker asks, ‘does Arthur represent James II and Oswald the invading William, Prince of Orange, or does the defeated Oswald suggest a parallel for James and the triumphant Arthur hint at William III?’6 Does blind Emmeline, over whom Arthur and Oswald fight, figure Britain? Is Dryden the renegade Philidel? After exhaustively listing King Arthur’s puzzles and inconsistencies, Zwicker suggests that Dryden, once cast out of political service, is freed ‘from the burden of argument’ and owes homage not ‘to party or person, not to religion or regime, but to pleasure and wit’ – to the freedom of imagination that celebrates ‘a kind of uninterpretable multiplicity’.7 After a career developing an ironic vision speaking for imperfect monarchs, in his final decade Dryden has nothing left to defend or advance but his art. Indeed, art is on display in King Arthur’s masques, but to advance more than spectacle. My approach through the stunning Frost Scene derives from perspectives of ecocriticism and current interest in climate science, which first prompted my attention to early modern England’s experiences during the Little Ice Age with cold at home and through northern exploration. Those experiences were coloured by religious, political, humoral, and other cultural associations with freezing bodies and latitudes.8 Homer’s Iliad, for example, links winter and warfare in an extended simile comparing the Trojans’ stoning of the Greek camp to falling snow that obliterates the humanly familiar – in ‘one bright Waste hides all the Works of Men’, in Pope’s translation, civilisation gone.9 While ancient Greeks initiated reports of a northern, nomadic, 150

cotterill: ‘armed winter, and inverted day’ equestrian race of Scythians noted for cannibalism but also frugality and virtue, the Scythian image as brawny, barbaric outsider, intemperate and warlike according to Galenic theories of climate and temperament, gradually solidified; by the sixteenth century, Camden and others were substituting northern Scythians for Mediterranean descendants of Troy as the first Britons.10 Christian Europe added the dimension of satanic powers to the cold north’s reputation as monstrous and uncivilised. Historian Geoffrey Parker has explored the conjunction of a cooling world climate with the seventeenth century’s ‘unparalleled spate of revolutions and state breakdowns around the world’, Europe’s almost continuous warfare; he documented how complex interconnections among human and natural disasters resulted in heightened superstition and social-political violence.11 At the end of this ‘century of the soldiers’, Dryden uses cold in King Arthur, I argue, to characterise obliquely the national climate of war, begun with William III’s assumption of the English throne, as an unnatural inversion of what Dryden had earlier celebrated as his former patron Charles II’s warmly temperate, civilising rule as a ‘Royal Husbandman’ reaping a ‘double Harvest’ of cultural and commercial wealth (Threnodia Augustalis, lines 356, 360).12 As John M. Stapleton, Jr notes, ‘The revolution of 1688 … brought England directly into continental war on a scale not experienced since the Hundred Years War.’13 William’s early adult life had been shaped by training and leading the Dutch ‘Republic’s forces against Louis XIV and his allies’, so that George Savile, first Marquess of Halifax, the dedicatee of King Arthur, had observed, ‘William “hath such a mind to France, that it would incline one to think, hee tooke England onely in his way.”’14 Behind its historically disorienting script pointing us simultaneously to past and present, King Arthur remains what Dryden claims in his dedicatory epistle it began as, his ‘last Piece of Service’ for Charles II. With a cold–warmth dialectic Dryden steadily undercuts the martial heroics he apparently applauds. The dialectic of cold–warmth and winter–spring subtly showcases here the moral vision of disillusion – of those who have felt evil’s chill and seen through false warmth – paradoxically in a work whose script of magicians and masques seems committed to the distracting pleasures of illusion. The plot device of Emmeline’s blindness and reversal to sight signals yet distracts from a deeper theme of eyes disillusioned. Arthur’s magician  Merlin sees farthest; but the poet and composer have given moral weight to the most poignant voices of pain and fear: not to Merlin or King Arthur or to the rival Saxon leader Oswald or to Emmeline, none of whom sing, but to two subordinate spirits who do – to Philidel, ‘The last seduc’d and least deform’d of Hell’ (2.1.14), and to a Cold Genius 151

part ii: rethinking context who comes ‘from below’ in a work whose only other ‘below’ is ‘the yawning gulph of Hell’ (1.2.30). The cold genius Dryden’s King Arthur is locked in a war with pagan Saxon Oswald, King of Kent, who aspires to enlarge Saxon power in England and win for himself Arthur’s beloved Emmeline, heiress of Cornwall. In 3.2, however, the evil Saxon wizard, Osmond, thrusts his master, Oswald, into a snake-and-toad-filled dungeon, seizes Emmeline whom Oswald had just kidnapped, and attempts to seduce his prize by transforming ‘the mildness of sweet Britain’s Clime’ to ‘Yzeland, and the farthest Thule’s Frost’ – in the bleak landscape mirroring her iciness towards him, which he hopes to melt. ‘Now know you are my Slave’, cries Osmond, and Emmeline is frozen in place (3.2.263). The wizard then stages his show to entice her: he summons a figure of Cupid from above, who summons a Genius of Cold from below; and a shivering, dancing Chorus, with what one scholar calls ‘an atmosphere of the marionette show’, sings through chattering teeth of the warming power of love ‘In spight of Cold Weather’ (3.2.311).15 The Frost Scene has enjoyed fame apart from King Arthur.16 Better known than its trembling Chorus is the seven-line aria in C minor by the Genius of Cold, a haunting cry of physical pain from being wakened to the hell of freezing. Scholars have noted how Dryden’s description of Cupid’s arrival signals his demonic nature: ‘the Proud God, disdaining Winters Bounds, / O’er-leaps the Fences of Eternal Snow’ (3.2.274–5) recalls Satan’s entry into Milton’s Garden of Eden when, contemptuous of the proper entrance, he ‘At one slight bound high overleaped all bound / Of hill or highest wall’ (4.181–2).17 When Cupid summons the Genius of Cold, he asks mockingly whether he is asleep under ‘Hills of Snow’, but that image becomes the graver, lonelier ‘Beds of Everlasting Snow’ in the Genius’s aria as he reluctantly emerges from below stage. He rises into view singing shaking notes whose electrifying chromatic harmonies slowly ascend, half-step by laborious half-step, in ‘chromatic writhing’, enacting musically his painful appearance, until the harmonies peak and turn to descend as he begs to return to his beds of snow and disappear into numbness – to ‘Freeze again to Death’.18 Described as ‘the most memorable music of the opera’,19 the aria leapt briefly into online prominence with the YouTube posting of a live performance with full orchestra by German countertenor and pop-cult figure Klaus Nomi in Munich in 1983, shortly before he died of AIDS. Only 39, thin and ill, singing in whiteface with darkened lips above a stiff white ruff, 152

cotterill: ‘armed winter, and inverted day’ Nomi embodied for many the sharp pain and distress in the shaking words of the ‘wondrous old’ Genius, ‘Far unfit to bear the bitter Cold’: What Power art thou, who from below, Hast made me Rise, unwillingly, and slow, From Beds of Everlasting Snow? See’st thou not how stiff, and wondrous old, Far unfit to bear the bitter Cold, I can scarcely move, or draw my Breath; Let me, let me, Freeze again to Death.   (3.2.281–7)

Why a Genius of Cold that cannot bear cold? Why do Dryden and Purcell load such emotional ardour into this aria? Why such painful consciousness of cold and desire for oblivion in ‘Everlasting Snow’ at the centre of an opera apparently celebrating King Arthur, which opens on St George’s Day in April and ends in a triumphant celebration of spring, St George, and the Order of the Garter? Students of King Arthur have noted the text’s crucial debts to Milton; but this Roman Catholic playwright living in internal exile, a lifelong student of Virgil, was at least passingly acquainted with the work of another student of Virgil, another poet of exile, Hell, and disillusion important to Milton – Dante, to whose polished Italian Dryden had alluded as early as the 1680 ‘Epistle to the Earl of Roscommon’. In Dryden’s dedication to the Aeneis (1697), he describes the Roman republic’s fall and refers to the horrific sight in the Inferno’s Ninth Circle of a three-faced, ice-glazed Satan munching on Judas, Brutus, and Cassius.20 In the frozen lake Cocytus, the pit of Dante’s Hell, ice-bound traitors are forever painfully awake to the cold they had embodied as humans but not felt while alive. Shuddering, there and in King Arthur, becomes horror’s chilling physical register of evil as a complete absence of human and heavenly warmth: ‘He strikes a Horrour through my Blood’, shivers captive Matilda whose blood runs cold at Osmond’s threats (3.2.264).21 The Genius’s pain at being awakened to cold is undercut immediately by saucy Cupid, who shames him into retracting his complaint; and that correction and the Genius’s acknowledgment of who has the power (‘Great Love, I know thee now’, ‘Every where thou art obey’d’ (3.2.296,  301)) places at the heart of King Arthur not only the threat of rape but also a brief exchange not unlike censorship and forced acquiescence to political necessity. At the opening of King Arthur’s most spectacular masque of deceit and illusion, a voice speaks uncensored of the reality of cold as death, death as cold.22 The Genius’s cry against feeling the cold, followed by his apology and self-correction to cheerfulness, bring to mind the poet’s own compromised circumstances since the Glorious Revolution, alluded to in his preface and well-known to his audience, which required him to correct 153

part ii: rethinking context his tone from satire and complaint to grateful submission to the Whig government. Dryden’s nostalgia for a lost warmer political and cultural climate hovers behind the attention to season in King Arthur. The fall into cold Both the classical and Judeo-Christian Fall from eternal spring and peace brought extremes of weather and war. In Dryden’s translation of the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ‘A Warlike Offspring prompt to Bloody Rage’ (line 161) characterises the brazen age following the silver age of extreme weather, before the final arrival of iron men who are killers – ‘stubborn as the Mettal’ (line 164) in Dryden’s addition to Ovid.23 In Book 10 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, at the moment of ‘that tasted fruit’ (10.687), winter winds from the north ‘Bursting their brazen dungeon, armed with ice / And snow and hail and stormy gust and flaw’ (10.696–8), when challenged by other winds, explode chaotically, like Adam’s rage. Milton’s winds are ‘armed’; ice is a weapon, associated with the satanic chill of warfare, and in King Arthur winter is also ‘Armed’ (3.1.18), cold associated with war and death. When Emmeline’s eyes are opened, she like Milton’s Eve delights in her reflection; but kissing a mirror she discovers ‘Alas, I’ve kiss’d it Dead; the fine Thing’s gone; / Indeed it Kiss’d so Cold, as if ‘twere Dying’ (3.2.132–3). Seeing Arthur for the first time, she asks if the war is over and hears ‘The sum of War is undecided yet, / And many a breathing Body must be Cold, / Ere you are free’ (3.2.155–8). Like the Saxons’ pagan sacrifice of six young men in order to beg Woden’s protection in battle (1.2), war in King Arthur leads young men to be killed. Heat and cold, whose precise balance human life requires, were central to the classical humoral physiology inherited by early modern Europe, which included theories relating climate and national character. Unflattering implications of the effect on humans of cold northern latitudes, such as references to Northerners’ dull wits and barbarism, were an early modern commonplace. Mary Floyd-Wilson, Daryl Palmer, Gail Kern Paster, and Alvin Snider, among others, have documented the influence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe of such classics of humoral theory as Hippocrates’ On Airs, Waters, and Places and passages in Aristotle’s Problems and Politics, which painted a distressing picture of inhabitants of Scythia, the world’s northern region – ‘the barbarous Scythian’ Lear claims to prefer to his daughter’s apparent cruelty, the nomadic ‘warlike Scythians’ in Lovelace’s ‘The Snail’ (43).24 Snider notes, ‘We sometimes forget, although … Dryden could not, that early modern Europeans tended to view Londoners as near neighbours to Muscovites and Laplanders.’25 154

cotterill: ‘armed winter, and inverted day’ Charles II’s Restoration in April 1660 and coronation on 23 April, St George’s Day, 1661 were timed to signify all the virtues of a new golden age of eternal spring and peace. The spring season and associated tender feelings of love, mercy, and forgiveness shaped the language of Dryden’s iconography of Charles II as England’s indulgent lover and father who inspired a Restoration of ‘gaudy Spring’ (‘To His Sacred Majesty’, line 29), fertility, rebirth, and warmth aligned with the ‘faithful Love, and kind Possessing’ recalled in Mr Howe’s song in King Arthur’s last scene (5.2.196), in contrast to war’s threats of forced ‘Possessing’ of girl and country. The Stuarts had emphasised their British descent, but the Scottish–Danish blood of Dryden’s patrons had been warmed by their French Catholic mother and mid-century exile in France’s court ruled by Charles II’s first cousin, Louis XIV – William’s lifelong enemy. King Arthur’s dedicatory epistle fails to mention William III but opens with Dryden fondly remembering the rule of love and merciful indulgence of Charles, whose ‘vigorous warmth’ the laureate had celebrated two decades earlier in Absalom and Achitophel. In his funeral elegy for Charles, Threnodia Augustalis, the poet used the double meaning of ‘spring’ as a source of life-giving water and as the season of new life in order to praise Charles, the ‘great Encourager of Arts’ and ‘That all forgiving King, / … That inexhausted spring / Of Clemency and Love’ (lines 257–60). King Arthur’s preface again recalls Charles’s ‘Clemency and Moderation’, which Dryden asks ‘be remembred with a Grateful Veneration by Three Kingdoms, through which He spread the Blessings of them’. King Arthur, Dryden’s Christian hero and a successful military general, is said to be ‘All that’s excellent in Oswald’, his ‘free and open Hearted’ (1.1.36) pagan rival, but also ‘As Merciful and Kind, to vanquisht Foes, / As a forgiving God’ (1.1.62–4), in contrast to Oswald’s ‘revengeful’ nature (1.1.38). From the first scene, the distinguishing heroic characteristic of a great British king is not military skill or physical bravery, which would reflect patriotically on William III, but mercy, a forgiving nature, which in the semi-opera is aligned with the mildness of spring and success in love – qualities Dryden had developed a career celebrating in Charles II. Dryden had always acknowledged England’s northern latitude as a measure of Charles II’s brilliant triumph as a ruler whose arts of peace turned London into an ‘Empress of the Northern Clime’, a brilliant ‘Northern Star’ (Annus Mirabilis, lines 845, 1199). ‘Virtues unknown to these rough northern climes / From milder heavens you bring, without their crimes’, gushes Dryden to Charles II in 1661 (‘To his Sacred Majesty’, lines 89–90). He pictured England under Charles as an ‘Eden’ with the sea ‘our fence, / While we preserve our state of innocence’ (Prologue to The Unhappy Favourite, lines 27–8) free from civic broils and wars, England 155

part ii: rethinking context as a lush garden of arts and sciences. 26 After the Glorious Revolution, however, and not long before completing King Arthur, in the dedicatory epistle to The Vocal and Instrumental Musick of The Prophetess (1690–91), Dryden returns to the ancient connection between latitude, national character, and distance from the temperate centres of civilisation to express a more pessimistic view of his northern country: ‘Thus being farther from the Sun, we are of later growth, than our Neighbour Countryes; and must be content to shake off our barbarity by degrees’.27 Images of seasonal inversion – such as spring turned abnormally to winter – had long been commonplace in poetry of exile from Ovid’s Tristia (8–12 x ) to Lovelace’s ‘The Grasshopper’ (1649), reflecting political through climatic instability. Dryden had employed the trope throughout his career. In ‘Astraea Redux’ (1660), Charles II and the Stuart Restoration signal the return of spring warmth and fertility after the frost and cold of the Commonwealth years (135–6). In his ‘Prologue to His Royal Highness’ (1682) on the Duke of York’s return from exile in Scotland to London with ‘forgiveness in his hand’ (line 37) at the end of the Exclusion Crisis, Dryden compares the earlier persecuting impulses of the mindless public to ‘storms of Hail-stones’ that now ‘soften to a silent showre’ (lines 34–5). His ‘Prologue to the Dutchess, on Her Return from Scotland’ (1682) imagines Mary of Modena’s exile with her husband as turning England’s ‘fruitfull Plains to Wilds and Desarts’, as when ‘Edens Face’ (lines 5–6) mourned humankind’s exile, while Love ‘wander’d Northward to the verge of day, / As if the Sun and He had lost their way’ (lines 10–11). Their exile was a political and climatic inversion; ‘Nature’ had ‘delay’d the Spring’ (line 29).28 In The Hind and the Panther (1687), fearful that James’s attempts to expand religious toleration would backfire, Dryden has the Protestant Panther tell a warning tale to the Catholic Hind about approaching dangers of ‘persecuting cold’ (3.430) for complacent swallows. Ignoring the signs of political change when ‘time turn’d up the wrong side of the year’ (3.438), the swallows are beaten from the sky by Boreas’s volley of hail mixed with snow, to die frozen (3.620–4).29 About four years later, stripped of his laureateship, disenfranchised, and constantly threatened with censorship, Dryden conjures unnatural hail, freezing cold, and ice as a persecuting, unnatural landscape of warfare, deception, and demonic lust. Cold war and heroic pity The androgynous spirit Philidel, whose tenderness of conscience Dryden aligns with the softness of spring, ‘The Tender Year’ (5.2.101), represents the life-affirming values of one that has seen Hell’s cold and mourns the 156

cotterill: ‘armed winter, and inverted day’ human waste of war: ‘Ah! for so many Souls, as but this Morn’ / Were cloath’d with Flesh, and warm’d with Vital Blood, / But naked now, or shirted but with Air’ (2.1.4–6). The drama’s contrast between Philidel’s and the victorious Britons’ responses to the aftermath of battle is one of the clearest of King Arthur’s indirect reflections on war’s chilling effect on human warmth. In 1.3, the Britons and Saxons battle offstage after which Arthur’s soldiers appear exulting as victors. Their song, however, highlights the similarity between mercenaries in war – ‘The Gods from above the Mad Labour behold, / And pity Mankind that will perish for Gold’ and the victorious ‘bold Britons’ charging off to plunder – ‘To the Plunder we run: / We return to our Lasses like Fortunate Traders, / Triumphant with Spoils of the Vanquish’d Invaders’ (1.3.7–8, 14–16). Immediately after, in 2.1, we hear Philidel’s horror at the loss of life, where like his literary ancestor, Shakespeare’s Ariel, he feels more than humans do for their fellows in pain. Within the first twenty lines, Philidel speaks the word ‘pity’ or ‘piteous’ three times and describes himself as ‘the tender’st of my kind’. The word ‘tender’ would carry resonance not only of sensitivity, delicacy of feeling, and kindness but also, for Dryden as Roman Catholic convert and for his audience, of those ‘tender consciences’ outside the Church of England to whom James II attempted to offer religious liberty in exchange for political support in his Declaration of Indulgence. Dryden’s sources for King Arthur, beginning with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s early twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain, the first account to make Arthur central in British history, highlight his achievements as a great soldier-conqueror, both in Europe and lands far north. But Dryden’s Arthur is not this imperial conqueror, although by 1691 imperial conquest and war, and their heavy financial and human costs, had become a national preoccupation. During 1689–90, William had engaged English forces with Protestant Dutch, Danish, German, and Huguenot troops not only on the continent but in Ireland to subdue Irish Jacobites; he joined the Irish fight in June 1690 to rout James II’s army at the Battle of the Boyne on 1 July, although, on the day before, English naval forces had suffered a humiliating defeat by the French at the Battle of Beachy Head on England’s southern coast, which put France temporarily in command of the Channel. Later in July, the French ‘had landed at Teignmouth in Devon and burned it down’.30 William’s victory of the Boyne in Ireland thus ‘failed to relieve the national disquiet’,31 according to diarist John Evelyn, who noted on 13 July 1690, ‘the French fleete … ride at present in our Chanell, threatning to Land, which causes an extraordinary alarm.’32 William departed England for the Netherlands in January 1691, but in subsequent battles that year, William’s forces continued levelling Irish 157

part ii: rethinking context Catholics. Evelyn’s diary for 8 July 1691, the summer when King Arthur was probably first staged, comments, ‘The Government here, very loose & as it were on floates’, and on 19 July, Evelyn registers the ‘greate Victory of K: Williams Army in Ireland’ at Aughrim but observes cost in lost lives: it was not ‘cheape to us, neere 1000 kild, but of them 4 or 5000’.33 Given this atmosphere of ‘national disquiet’, it is hard not to hear Dryden’s irony when, in offering King Arthur to Halifax, he marvels how ‘the Nation is secur’d from Foreign Attempts, by so powerful a Fleet, and we enjoy not only the Happiness, but even the Ornaments of Peace.’34 In Annus Mirabilis and Threnodia Augustalis, Dryden had celebrated Charles II for understanding that England’s future glory and wealth lay in trade, which required peace – ‘That Peace which made thy Prosperous Reign to shine’ (Threnodia Augustalis, line 289). On 20 July 1691, Evelyn worries about the disruption to English trade caused by conflict with France: ‘we lose Merchant ships by the Privateeres getting out of Dunkirk,  … greate apprehension of the Fleet laden with provision for the West Indies: our Merchants of Russias ships being taken.’35 On 16 August: ‘We lost our Barbados Fleete by the French.’36 Dryden’s Arthur is not Geoffrey of Monmouth’s legendary world conqueror, who would be a pleasing heroic reflection for England’s present king, but a lover, distinguished less by bravery than by mercy and the affection of his men and his Emmeline. Further, the plot opposing Christian Briton and pagan Saxon turns less on fighting than on a contest between the magic arts and values of the wizard behind each general. Arthur’s Merlin, who commands the heat of life and love, is pitted against Oswald’s Osmond – more violent, revengeful, thieving, and proud than his master – and Osmond’s demon Grimbald, who needs blood to prophesy (1.2.24), who together command the chill of horror and death and foresee their end in Hell. Arthur’s triumph is aided significantly by the defection to the Christian Britons of the spirit Philidel, and by Osmond’s betrayal of his own master, proving himself a ‘Monster of Ingratitude’ (5.2.69). His hideous sin and exposure may reflect obliquely on those Englishmen who had betrayed their king, inviting to England and swearing allegiance to William. In contrast to Osmond’s betrayal, Philidel’s tenderness of conscience and fear of Hell, compassion for humanity, and above all deep pity that mourns the tragedy of war where the soldiers do not, force him to leave the devilish service of Osmond, who enjoys human misery, and to join Merlin. Only the combined aid of Merlin and Philidel insures Arthur regains his love and wins the hand-to-hand combat with Oswald. Referred to as both ‘he’ and ‘she’, Philidel recalls Shakespeare’s Ariel and, in one aspect, Puck (Philidel opens Emmeline’s blind eyes with 158

cotterill: ‘armed winter, and inverted day’ Merlin’s ‘Soveraign Dews’ (3.2.80)) as well as Abdiel of Paradise Lost, the angel who, while still in Heaven, defects horrified by Satan’s plot of revolt against God. To the fierce demon Grimbald, Philidel is a renegade, a ‘trim Apostate’ (3.2.16), and he or she has been read as a ‘Trimmer’, the term coined during the Exclusion Crisis by the Marquess of Halifax for those who for self-interest change allegiance between two opposing sides. Scholars have seen Philidel as a possible figure of the playwright himself, a much-taunted Trimmer after he converted to Rome while serving James’s Catholic court.37 But Philidel is above all the moral voice whose gender-bending tenderness echoes the poet’s concern for war’s human toll expressed in the preface where Dryden praises his original patron for his ‘Peaceful Reign’ and Halifax for preventing the Exclusion Crisis from exploding into another bloody civil war: So many Wives, who have yet their Husbands in their Arms; so many Parents, who have not the Number of their Children lessen’d; so many Villages, Towns and Cities, whose Inhabitants are not decreas’d, their Property violated, or their Wealth diminish’d, are yet owing to the sober Conduct, and happy Results of your Advice.38

Among ‘Property violated’ in war are women. Oswald and Guillamar stumble upon the British camp and seize Emmeline and her servant Matilda, while the women cry ‘a Rape, a Rape!’ (2.2.85). In the following scene, the drama’s briefest – only three lines – a call to arms sounds offstage, presumably reflecting Arthur’s discovery of the women’s abduction, and Arthur’s Captain of the Guards, Albanact, enters with troops. The terse dialogue between Albanact and one of his soldiers reflects the Captain’s disgust at the degenerate behaviour of the British soldiers so soon after battle – ‘Pox o’ this Victory; the whole Camp’s debauch’d: / All Drunk or Whoring’ (2.3.2–3). The scenes beg the question who is more honourable, the ‘Drunk or Whoring’ British soldier or Oswald, called a ‘Cold’ lover (2.2.41) for his ‘Rape’ of Emmeline. Geoffrey Parker emphasises the reality of rape during, for example, the Thirty Years War and the English Civil Wars.39 The widespread violence against women by marauding soldiers in early modern warfare was a fact of life, alluded to, for example, in the cool, threatening speech of Shakespeare’s Henry V (3.3.1–43) to the Governor of Harfleur, demanding surrender before Henry lets his soldiers loose on the city, where he repeatedly imagines rape. And though not as explicit a danger to the Britons as was Henry V to Harfleur – instead kept fantastic with magic – Osmond’s Frost Scene brings to a head the accumulating threat in King Arthur of human coldness, winter, and warfare as an unnatural inversion of spring’s warmth and heroic human tenderness and pity. 159

part ii: rethinking context ‘The Pages of our Wo’ Causing destructive, extraordinary weather, particularly hailstorms and unusual frosts that could lead to agricultural disaster and starvation, were ‘the most important’ charges brought against witches in early modern Europe.40 For Dryden’s audience, Osmond’s reversals of weather when he turns day to night sending ‘Globes of Hail’ to stop Arthur’s pursuit (‘An Armed Winter, and Inverted Day’ (3.1.17–18)) and when he creates the Frost Scene might recall actual accounts of alleged witchery. Dryden’s lifetime saw some of the worst seasonal upheavals on record in England and Europe.41 Notable hard winters left their mark in English pamphlets, broadsides, and sermons, which portray cold as terrifying divine punishment. Their popular pun of ‘Freezland’, connecting an unusually frigid England with the north-western Dutch province of Friesland on the North Sea, may be evoked when Dryden has the third sacrificial animal in the Saxons’ supplication to their gods for victory be ‘of Friezeland breed’ (1.2.56), as the pun lightly ties the pagan invaders and freezing cold with England’s Dutch monarch. The winter of 1683–84 was the ‘coldest for which we have instrumental readings’; and among other disasters, the Thames froze solid for two months between December 1683 and February 1684, halting commercial shipping and causing scarcities of food and fuel.42 Groups of unemployed watermen, however, erected on the ice a profusion of booths and stalls with rowing skulls as beams supporting canvas and blanket shelters, so that by the new year the ice supported thousands of new entrepreneurs and customers.43 James Winn has speculated that the celebrated 1684 Frost Fair on the Thames was a possible inspiration for King Arthur’s Frost Scene, but the Fair’s iconographic and literary representation in broadside, pamphlet, and memoir suggests a stronger relation than hitherto realised between the confusing wonder of London’s merchants turning a natural disaster into profit on the ice and the slippery illusory world of King Arthur.44 Known variously as Blanket Fair, Freezland, and Frost Fair, this magic city, captured in woodcut and copperplate engravings as well as in at least one oil painting by Abraham Hondius, consisted of a central line of booths running from Southwark bank near the Bear Garden to Temple Stairs, surrounded by other activities numbered and identified on illustrated broadsides whose breathless recital of wonders conveyed the head-spinning profusion of entertainment. The imprisoned river imagined as female had become not only a market but a theatre, a ‘Raree-Show’45: ‘Behold the Wonder of this present Age, / A famous River now become a stage’,46 one broadside cries, and as with any theatre district there were, Evelyn noted, ‘lewder places; so it seem’d to be a bacchanalia … or a Carnoval on 160

cotterill: ‘armed winter, and inverted day’ the water’.47 Broadsides warned both sexes about ‘slipping’, being turned upside down, head or backside where heels should be, and losing their virtue and money.48 Both the Frost Fair as described in contemporary documents and the demonic Frost Scene in King Arthur represent a spectacular but morally dangerous temptation to dissipation in a transformed space outside the normal boundaries of time and place. Both also proved transient. The broadsides repeatedly emphasise the Fair’s marvellous theatre sprung out of nowhere onto its ‘Glass-glib-face’ and that it disappeared as fast ‘As the castles enchanted be’.49 It was fantastic and unnatural ‘Like Babel’.50 The Great Frost of 1684 was also portrayed as divine punishment for national sins, prompting calls to repentance; and those blamed in the popular literature for this catastrophe were the Whigs, as in the broadside ballad, ‘The Whigs hard Hearts. The Cause of this hard Frost’.51 Whether or not the 1684 Frost Fair influenced Dryden’s thinking about a wintry masque for King Arthur, we know that because of it the poet did not have far to look for associations of cold with icy-hearted Whigs. The final tableaux and music of King Arthur celebrating England and St George’s Day hint at the work’s juxtaposition of two national visions, one centred on love’s warmth, the other on war. The nation in Venus’s lyric solo is her favourite ‘Fairest Isle’, ‘Seat of Pleasures, and of Loves’, a ‘boudoir, not an empire’, as one recent critic observed.52 Yet finally England is called to attention by a brassier ‘Warlike Consort’ (Emmeline earlier declares the trumpet sounds like ‘an angry fighting face’ (1.1.145)), whose spokesman is ‘Honour’, not Venus, as appropriate for an isle now promoting military heroes and ‘this Martiall Prize’ of the Order of the Garter. Arthur observes to Merlin that this masque leaves much about the future still ‘conceal’d’ – in fact, ‘the Pages of our Wo’ (5.2.218). Arthur’s ‘our Wo’ might recall not only Philidel’s sensitivity to ‘Humane Woes’ (2.1.3) but also ‘all our woe’ in the third line of Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as the gathering resonance of ‘woe’ in Milton’s epic of the power of illusion and pain of disillusion in humanity’s long history of error. The most excruciating moment of disillusion occurs after Eve returns from eating the forbidden fruit, flushed and confused with new knowledge, and Adam, stunned, sees instantly not only her transgression but that he will join her in guilt inevitably, as ‘to lose thee were to lose myself’ (9.960).53 His whole body responds, with cold, to the terrifying enormity of this moment, as he Astonied stood and blank, while horror chill Ran through his veins, and all his joints relaxed; From his slack hand the garland wreathed for Eve Down dropped, and all the faded roses shed. (9.890–3)

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part ii: rethinking context The paralysing ‘chill’ at what Eve has done, the enervation of the body as a sign of loss of control and life force, and the faded, dropping roses all point to humanity’s fall out of an eternal spring and warmth. Adam’s fatal enervation is recalled explicitly in King Arthur when, in the thick of Osmond’s enchanted wood, Arthur is tempted by a demonic Emmeline look-alike, and invoking ‘Adam’s Fault’ (4.2.130) as his own, he drops not a garland of roses but his ‘Reason’, his tense guard physically in the form of his protective gauntlet, in order to embrace the dissembling Grimbald. Grimbald is exposed just in time by Philidel with a touch of Merlin’s wand, as Satan in Paradise Lost had been discovered ‘squat like a toad’ (4.800) at Eve’s ear with a touch of Ithuriel’s spear. ‘Poor deluded Mortal, hold thy Hand’, cries Philidel to Arthur, ‘Th’ Infernal Paint shall vanish from her Face, / And Hell shall stand Reveal’d’ (4.2.135–6). At the sight of Grimbald, Arthur, like Adam, freezes (‘Horrour seizes me’ (4.2.139–40)), as shackles drop from his eyes. Turning cold as a physical response to evil is the moral touchstone Dryden evokes connecting winter cold, William III’s wars, and England’s fallen world, a lost spring. Hence, the integrity of this semi-opera lies in the Genius of Cold, who provides its musically dramatic high-point and who, like Dryden’s original conception of this work, has been made to mock itself, and in Philidel, the tender spirit who has seen Hell gape and is not fooled by its illusions of warmth. What in 1684 was planned as a celebration of Charles’s fertile warmth and indulgent clemency triumphing over cold weather, wars, and plots has become, in a chillier political clime, an exposure of the illusory warmth of love in the name of war. Notes Citations from Dryden’s King Arthur: Or, The British Worthy are to Vincent Dearing’s text in The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956–2000), vol. 16. References within the semi-opera are to act, scene, and line numbers, or to page and line numbers in the dedicatory epistle, or to page numbers in the Commentary, pp. 281–343. The quoted phrase in the title comes from 3.1.18. 1 H. H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World (London and New York: Routledge, 2nd edn, 1995), p. 213. From the latter half of the sixteenth through the seventeenth century, England and continental Europe experienced exceptional cold within a larger pattern of cooling weather, the so-called Little Ice Age. See B. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 2 English critic and dramatist Charles Gildon referred to Osmond’s masque as ‘the Frost Scene’ in his Life of Mr Thomas Betterton, The late Eminent Tragedian (London, 1710), p. 167, the first known such reference.

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cotterill: ‘armed winter, and inverted day’  3 The far north and intense cold had been demonised for Christian Europe ever since early patristic writers cited such passages as Isaiah 14:12–14, Jeremiah 1:14, 4:6, 6:22–3, 10:22, 25:9, Ezekiel 26:7, and the apocryphal book of Enoch, 10:1–3, to situate the throne of Lucifer in the north. Light, heat, and the east became associated with the warmth of heavenly charity; darkness, cold, north, and the west (where the morning star sets) with Satanic hard-heartedness and pride.  4 Collier suspected irreverence and subterfuge in King Arthur’s disturbing echo chamber of ‘Genii and Angels, Cupids, Syrens, and Devils; Venus and St. George, Pan and the Parson’, a ‘strange jumble and Hotch potch of Matters’. J. Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (London, 1698), p. 188.  5 S. N. Zwicker, ‘How many political arguments can dance on the head of a pin?’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, 34:1–2 (2010), pp. 103–16. Studies of this semi-opera not cited elsewhere in these notes include J. A. Winn, ‘“Confronting Art with Art”: The Dryden-Purcell collaboration in King Arthur’, Restoration, 34:1–2 (2010), pp. 33–53, along with his discussion of King Arthur in John Dryden and His World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 588–91; A. Pinnock, ‘A double vision of Albion: allegorical re-alignments in the Dryden-Purcell semi-opera King Arthur’, Restoration, 34:1–2 (2010), pp. 55–81, and Pinnock, ‘King Arthur expos’d: a lesson in anatomy’, in C. Price (ed.), Purcell Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 243–56; and J. M. Armistead, ‘Dryden’s King Arthur and the literary tradition: a way of seeing’, SP, 85:1 (1988), pp. 53–72.  6 Zwicker, ‘How many political arguments’, p. 105. See David Bywaters’s interesting Jacobite reading of King Arthur in his Dryden in Revolutionary England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 75–93. C. Price, however, reads Arthur as William III and Oswald as James II, their final battle enacting the Battle of the Boyne (Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 293–4).  7 Zwicker, ‘How many political arguments’, pp. 112–14. Zwicker argues that Dryden frustrates the exact ‘subordination of art to politics’ that he practiced in his days of service to the Stuarts.  8 For ecocritical scholarship important for this essay, see note 25, also the essays in L. Bruckner and D. Brayton (eds), Ecocritical Shakespeare (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), and in T. Hallock et al. (eds), Early Modern Ecosystems from the Florentine Codes to Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 131–42; and A. Harris, Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (London: Thames and Hudson, 2015).  9 M. A. Favret examines this Homeric simile in Pope’s translation of the Iliad, 12: 329–44, in War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 98–100. 10 On the history of references to Scythia and Scythians, see J. W. Johnson, ‘The Scythian: his rise and fall’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20:2 (1959), pp. 250–7; R.  Cogley, ‘“The Most Vile and Barbarous Nation of all the World”: Giles Fletcher the Elder’s The Tartars Or, Ten Tribes’, RQ, 58 (2005), pp. 781–814; A. Hirota, ‘On the margins of a civilization: the representation of the Scythians in Elizabethan texts’, in Y. Takahashi (ed.), Hot Questrists After the English Renaissance: Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (New York: AMS Press, 2000), pp. 237–53.

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part ii: rethinking context 11 G. Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. xvii. 12 Ibid. p. 26, quotes the phrase ‘the century of the soldiers’ from a 1641 letter by Italian poet and diplomat, Fulvio Testi. 13 J. M. Stapleton, Jr, ‘The dual monarchy in practice: Anglo-Dutch alliance and war in the Spanish Netherlands 1689–1697’, in E. Mijers and D. Onnekink (eds), Redefining William III: The Impact of the King-Stadholder in International Context (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 69–90, at 69. 14 Ibid. pp. 69–70. 15 R. Savage, ‘Calling up genius: Purcell, Roger North, and Charlotte Butler’, in M. Burden (ed.), Performing the Music of Henry Purcell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 212–31, at 229. 16 Price (Henry Purcell and the London Stage, p. 318) and M. Burden (Purcell Remembered (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1995), pp. 98–9) note T. Gray’s description in a letter of 3 January 1736 to Horace Walpole about the 1735–36 revival of King Arthur, where Gray notes the Frost Scene as ‘excessive fine’ and describes it in vivid detail. A Frost Scene ‘between Cupid and the Genius of the Frozen Clime’, along with other ‘analogous passages’ from King Arthur, was added to a version of Milton’s Comus performed at Covent Garden in March 1842. See A. Thaler, ‘Milton in the theatre’, SP, 17:3 (1920), pp. 269–308, at 300. M. W. Alssid, ‘The impossible form of art: Dryden, Purcell and King Arthur’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 10:1 (1977), pp. 125–44, writes that the Frost Scene, ‘after its original performances, was played as a separate entertainment’ (p. 138). 17 See, for example, Savage, ‘Calling up genius’, p. 231. Winn has also noted the echoes from The State of Innocence, Dryden’s dramatisation of Paradise Lost, when Lucifer assures his devils they are ‘Fit to tempt Fate … / T’o’erleap th’ Etherial Fence’ (1.1.56–7). See J. A. Winn, ‘When Beauty Fires the Blood’: Love and the Arts in the Age of Dryden (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 296. All citations from Paradise Lost are to book and line numbers in the edition by S. Elledge (New York: Norton, 1993). 18 Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage, p. 307. 19 See the discussion of the Cold Genius’s song in Appendix A on Purcell’s music in Dryden, Works, vol. 16, especially on pp. 493–5; see also Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage, p. 303. 20 On Dryden and Dante, see K. C. M. Sills, ‘References to Dante in seventeenth-century English literature’, MP, 3:1 (1905), pp. 99–116, at 114–15. 21 See definitions 2a and 3a in the OED’s entry for ‘horror’, for the link between physical shuddering, as if chilled, and emotions of horror. 22 Faced with Cupid’s confident claim in C major to wield the sun-like power to banish cold, the Genius’s next lines, in Price’s words, are musically both ‘vacuous’ and ‘almost simpering’; he apologises for being so extravagant about his pain. Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage, p. 305. 23 Dryden’s translation of the first book of the Metamorphoses appeared in 1693 in Examen Poeticum. See Dryden, Works, 4:376–408. 24 Palmer, Paster, and Floyd-Wilson have explored the early modern humoral and geo-humoral connotations of cold as they correspond with notions of gender (the feminine and effeminacy), mood (instability of temper and melancholy), i­ntellectual

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cotterill: ‘armed winter, and inverted day’ capacity and sanity (a weak rational faculty), and especially national character (dullwitted and barbaric), as reflected in early seventeenth-century texts. See D. W. Palmer, Writing Russia in the Age of Shakespeare (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), ‘Hamlet’s northern lineage: masculinity, climate, and the mechanician in early modern Britain’, Renaissance Drama, 35 (2006), pp. 3–25, and ‘Jacobean Muscovites: winter, tyranny, and knowledge in The Winter’s Tale’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 46:3 (1995), pp. 323–39; G. K. Paster, ‘The unbearable coldness of female being: women’s imperfection and the humoral  economy’,  ELR, 28:3 (1998), pp. 416–40; M. Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity  and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 25 A. Snider, ‘Hard frost, 1684’, JEMCS, 8:2 (2008), pp. 8–32, at 12. 26 In his essay ‘Upon the gardens of Epicurus; or of gardening in the year 1685’, Sir William Temple defends Charles II’s representation of England’s mildness: ‘He said, he thought that was the best Climat, where he could be abrord in the Air with pleasure, or at least without Trouble and Inconvenience, the most days of the Year, and the most hours of the Day; and this he thought he could be in England, more than in any Country he knew of in Europe.’ Sir William Temple, Miscellanea. The Second Part. In Four Essays. (London, 4th edn, 1696), pp. 112–13. 27 Dryden, Works, 17:325. 28 In Dryden’s ‘The lady’s song’, unpublished in his lifetime, the flight of Arcadian Pan and Syrinx ‘from our shore’, understood as James II and Mary d’Este, leaves Spring and Venus in mourning, without the Graces and Love. See E. Miner (ed.) in Dryden, Works, 3:223. 29 Dryden returns to the image of winter as an unnatural inversion or usurpation of spring in the first stanza of ‘A song to a fair young lady going out of town in spring’, published in Examen Poeticum; Dryden, Works, 4:421–2. 30 Dryden, Works, 16:307. 31 D. Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 355. 32 J. Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 5:29. 33 Ibid. 5:66. 34 Dryden, Works, 16:6. 35 Evelyn, Diary, 5:67. 36 Ibid. 5:68. 37 See, for example, Winn, John Dryden and his World, p. 450, and ‘When Beauty Fires the Blood’, pp. 284, 294–5. Zwicker, ‘How many political arguments’, notes the parallel between Philidel and Dryden as figures who live by their wit and are capable of deceptively flattering unfriendly powers to help advance their friends, pp. 108–9. 38 Dryden, Works, 16:4. 39 Parker, Global Crisis, pp. 30–1 (and its illustration, Plate 2, of a 1640s sculpture, ‘Scene from the Thirty Years War’, by German baroque sculptor L. Kern, depicting a soldier abducting a naked woman, her hands tied behind her and his sword pressed into her back); also p. 387. 40 See W. Behringer, ‘Climatic change and witch-hunting: the impact of the Little Ice Age on mentalities’, Climatic Change, 43 (1999), pp. 335–51, at 339; and Behringer, ‘Weather, hunger and fear: origins of the European witch-hunts in climate, society

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part ii: rethinking context and mentality’, in D. Oldridge (ed.), The Witchcraft Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 69–86. 41 The chilling during the seventeenth century was intensified by effects of the Maunder Minimum (named after nineteenth-century solar astronomers Anne and Edward Walter Maunder), a virtual absence of sunspot activity between 1645 and 1715 producing a further decrease of light and heat. See Parker, Global Crisis, pp. 12–13, and J. A. Eddy, ‘Climate and the role of the sun’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 10:4 (1980), pp. 725–47. 42 G. Manley, ‘Central England temperatures: monthly means 1659 to 1973’, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 100 (1974), pp. 389–405, at 400. In Oxford, ‘even that indefatigable scribbler, Anthony Wood, found his over-hasty pen stayed by the weather; his bottle of ink … “froze at the fier side”’. R. Beddard, ‘The London Frost Fair of 1673–84’, The Guildhall Miscellany, 4:2 (1972), pp. 63–87, at 64. 43 The first recorded Frost Fair held on the Thames occurred in the winter of 1608, according to W. Andrews, Famous Frosts and Frost Fairs in Great Britain. Chronicled from the Earliest to the Present Time (London: George Redway, 1887), p. 10. For a full account of the printed visual images from the 1683–84 Frost Fair, see J. Monteyne, The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 215–57. See Evelyn’s diary entries for 23 and 27 December 1683, and for 1, 6, and 9 January, and especially the description of the Fair in the entry for 24 January 1684. 44 Winn, John Dryden and His World, p. 393, and ‘Confronting Art with Art’, p. 34. The editors of the California Dryden note the possibility that Dryden had read ‘Of fairs upon the ice’, ch. 6 in vol. 4 of Swede Olaus Magnus’s A Compendious History of the Goths, Svvedes, & Vandals, and Other Northern Nations (London, 1658). 45 ‘A winter-wonder: or, the Thames frozen over, with remarks on the resort there’ (London, 1684). ‘News from the Thames; or, the frozen Thames in tears’ (London, 1684) ventriloquises the ‘imprison’d’ female river. 46 ‘Great Britains wonder: or, London’s admiration’ (London, 1684), lines 1–2. 47 24 January 1684, in Evelyn, Diary, 4:361–3. 48 ‘Blanket-Fair, or the history of Temple Street’ (London, 1684). 49 ‘The Thames uncased, or the waterman’s song upon the thaw’ (London, 1684). 50 ‘Freezland-Fair, or the Icey Bear-Garden’ (London, 1684). The Fair’s fabulous transiency made it for many, like Bishop Fell of Oxford, ‘a lively emblem of the designes and business of this world, where the foundation is water and the first thaw drowns the whole fabric.’ See Beddard, ‘The London Frost Fair of 1683–84’, p. 84. 51 ‘The Whigs hard hearts. The cause of this hard frost. An excellent new ballad, to the tune of, Oh London! Th’adst better have built new bordello’s’ (London, 1684). 52 See T. Ashley’s review of a production of King Arthur at London’s Barbican, 8 May 2009, www.theguardian.com/music/2009/may/09/opera-review-king-arthur. 53 My reading of this passage is indebted to G. Bolens, The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), pp. 33–4.

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Part III: Rethinking literary histories

Smith: The European Marvell

9

The European Marvell Nigel Smith

We have long known that Marvell stood out among his contemporaries both for his familiarity with European literature, not least poetry, in Latin and in the vernaculars, and his familiarity with many of the states, cities, and countryside of continental Europe because he travelled there. A map of his possible or actual literary encounters in his travels, and the possibility that he had an impact as a man of letters in those places, are research areas under investigation. To those agendas we can add the following argument, which is that the measure of Marvell as man of letters can only be fully compassed by placing his enterprises as poet, prose writer, and political agent, in the context of the literary power relationships and political role of literature that pertained on the European continent. Three areas of investigation follow: the patronage and veneration of European poets and its significance; the cross-lingual arenas of poetic contest in times of international conflict; the broader significance of the appeal to Marvell of European poetry, beyond mere textual echoes, explored in the case of the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora y Argote.1 Poets and patrons Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor (1640–1705), did not wish to be outshone. And thus, when the Siege of Vienna was raised and the Ottoman armies were pushed back, Leopold made sure he was at the front of the printed and engraved visual publications. He was not at the battle himself, was not by training a soldier, and the crucial fighting was done by the Polish cavalry under the command of Jan Sobieski, Poland’s elected monarch. Leopold’s personal poet was Ghibbesius, who had sent poems and gifts to the Bodleian Library in 1670 on expectation of a diploma from Oxford that was not at first forthcoming.2 He remonstrated in English. That’s because he was English, if probably born in France. Ghibbesius was James 169

part iii: rethinking literary histories Alban Gibbes (1611–77), an English Roman Catholic.3 He was the son of William Gibbes, who was physician to Henrietta Maria, and Mary Stoner, whose family owned a large estate extending from Watlington, Oxon, to Reading. He lived in Rome from 1644, after studying in St Omer and Padua, and travelling in the Low Countries, Spain, Germany, and Italy. He was physician to the Bishop of Frescati, and canon of St Celsus. He is noted for his learning and in 1647 was made professor of rhetoric at the Sapienza in Rome by Pope Alexander VII, in 1667 was named Poet Laureate by Leopold I. In 1668, eight volumes of poetry, mostly in Latin, were published in Rome. He died in 1677 and was buried in the Pantheon. In a Marvellian paradigm we could imagine an epideictic or a satire: ‘Gibbes, an English Priest at Rome’. Ralph Bathurst, the President of Trinity College, Oxford, wrote verses on the reception by the Bodleian Library of Gibbes’s diploma, gold chain, and medal. These may be understood as pompous panegyric or ‘solemn irony’ as Warton put it. Gibbes’s vanity (he considered himself the equal of Horace) was famous all over Europe, and Bathurst joined in the mockery, which had already been engendered in the distichs by Athanasius Kircher that accompanied his image: Tot pro Ghibbesio certabunt regna, quot urbes Civem Maeonidem asseruere suum. (As many kingdoms fought over Gibbes as cities Claimed Homer as their citizen.)4

Gibbes wrote, according to Warton’s report, that he could not properly present his prefatory credentials to Leopold until he had been sent the diploma by Oxford, ‘and accompany it with my picture in a frame by the hand of the great master Peter de Cortona.’ Gibbes further lamented that he had written more than a thousand lines to honour the marriage of the Duke of York to the Duchess of Innsbruck, which marriage was aborted, so the effort went to waste; he hoped (alternative confessions notwithstanding) that an epigram on the Duke of Monmouth would be well received. Bathurst’s eulogy is described by Warton as ‘a piece of solemn irony’, where the poet ‘gratified his own private opinion, and indulged his peculiar impulse to jocularity, without any apparent violation of public decorum.’ He compared Gibbes to Camillo Querno, Alexander Pope’s ‘antichrist of wit’, a sixteenth-century Italian poet whose 20,000-verse epic Alexias was apparently so execrable its loss was generally celebrated. Yet, not only can we imagine Marvell in his continental touring mode writing a poem about Gibbes as he did about Richard Flecknoe, it is also the case that Marvell and Gibbes are effectively drawn together by the biographers of the time, for while John Aubrey regarded Marvell as an outstanding Latin poet, so John Evelyn, who met Gibbes in Padua 170

smith: the european marvell and Rome, and Anthony à Wood, revered him for the same ‘excellent’ poetic qualities. Both poets strove to imitate Horace.5 Both were tutors, and travelled with their charges in Europe: Gibbes had Philip Porter, son of the influential courtier and patron of art and literature Endymion in his charge in the late 1630s. Both poets sought the patronage of the great, and if Gibbes was often hired as a physician, so too his ready poetic talent for panegyrics made him an attractive protégé: he won patronage from Cardinal Spada, Prince Giustiniani and Pope Alexander VII. Marvell treated the Roman Catholic Earl of Castlemaine not unsympathetically in Last Instructions to a Painter, lines 405–8; Gibbes allegedly dedicated epigrams to him. In parts of Europe, poets were already protected with endowed positions, chairs in creative writing, we might say. While there were laureateships in England, and dramatists were hired by courts and town corporations, that is nothing on the chair of poetry enjoyed by Simon Dach (1605–59) at the University of Königsberg in the Duchy of Prussia. His father was a poorly paid court interpreter in Lithuania, but he was classically educated in the Domschule of Königsberg and in Latin schools at Wittenberg and Magdeburg, and he entered the University of Königsberg in 1626.6 He became professor of poetry in 1639, and while some of his duties involved writing celebratory or commemorative verse in Greek or Latin for university occasions, he also wrote in German for the Prussian and Brandenburg elite, and through a writing circle produced many hymns and occasional poems that enjoyed wide circulation in the German-speaking world. Once made a Poet Laureate, he never appeared in public without his laureate’s crown and regalia. The man Milton wanted Marvell to replace as his assistant in 1653 was the secretary-poet Georg Rudolf Weckherlin, a native of Stuttgart, who had married an Englishwoman and been the Latin secretary to several of Charles I’s aristocratic favourites, and had managed to switch into service with the Long Parliament and eventually the Republic. Weckherlin was impressed by England because it was an integrated Protestant kingdom capable of standing up to apparently greater Catholic powers. He admired English literary culture and was using Spenser’s verse to refound the imaginative potential of German verse. In this respect, he is rightly compared to Martin Opitz, who used his connection with his Dutch teacher, Daniel Heinsius, to place German verse on a new neoclassical footing.7 Weckherlin managed to remain a prominent and influential German-language poet (he also wrote verse in Italian and English), and to fold himself into the rising English gentry. He married the daughter of the town clerk of Dover but was granted an English coat of arms on account of his Stuttgart family’s armigerous status, and was a naturalised Englishman by 1630. His 171

part iii: rethinking literary histories daughter Elizabeth married William Trumbull of Easthampstead Park, Berkshire, and his grandson of that union, William, whom he taught French and Latin, would be a future secretary of state.8 Poetry, polities and ideology As Arthur Weststeijn has shown us, the English Republican James Harrington and the Dutch Republican theorist Pieter de la Court were in close correspondence in early 1672 about the differences between the two states: de la Court was at pains to point up the superiority of the commercial nature of the Dutch Republic; from a Dutch viewpoint the English monarchy was limited by kings that ‘deliberately wage [wars] against neighbours, therefore it is apparent that during those times trade and navigation could not be maintained there at all.’9 His letter was not the only attempt by Dutch agents to prevent a war with England breaking out that year, but they all failed. Republics are better places, since ‘with small means, … greater frugality, wisdom and resolution – which are generally to be found in republics – endured and humiliated the remarkably larger resources and power of the king of England.’10 What de la Court thought of the English Commonwealth we are not told, and that Harrington understood to have a preponderantly agrarian as opposed to commercial balance. The Dutch Republican position, however, is clear: in a dialogue tract of 1672, which was censored, Joachim Oudaen suggested that Willem the Stadholder accepted war with England purely for reasons of his own gain, reflecting the split between Republicans and Orangists within the Dutch polity.11 In 1667, during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the outcome of which gave de la Court his confidence, many English Republicans in the English navy took a similar viewpoint about princes, driven especially by Charles II’s failure to pay them, defected, and supplied the expert naval advice that enabled the Dutch to mount successfully the Chatham raid. Thomas Dolman is only one name that survives from a longer list of defectors. Most of the poetry written by Marvell about the sea is his poetry about the Anglo-Dutch Wars, the three somewhat religious but mostly political and mercantile conflicts of 1651–54, 1664–67, and 1672–74. While the English dimensions of the poetry have been well explored for a long time now – effectively, since the late 1950s – in this section I want to expand a paragraph I wrote in a headnote to the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Marvell: The Medway raid [of June 1667, which enabled the Dutch to settle the war on terms favourable to them] was celebrated in Holland by a large and various body of publications, including printed maps and charts, detailed

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smith: the european marvell scenic engravings, letters from naval commanders in ships anchored in the Thames and Medway, and verse. M[arvell]’s later confession that Dutch satirical iconography of the English rendered a more truthful picture of the English than any native assessment (see AGP, 31, 36) presupposes a knowledge of Dutch anti-English literature. It is highly likely that M[arvell] saw some of this material, and used it, or at least was helped by its perceptions, to fashion his critique of the government’s mismanagement of the war (see below, 381–2).12

Indeed, some of the triumphalism in Dutch satire addressing the Chatham Raid was cited as a cause of the next war by the bellicose and easily affronted Charles II (when he wanted to appear offended), such as the apotheosis of the Dutch naval administrator Cornelis de Witt. As ever, our interest as far as the poetry goes must come again to the extraordinary description in the Last Instructions to a Painter (1667) of de Ruyter the Dutch admiral sailing with his squadron up the Thames. Earlier in the poem, a panicky and cowardly Charles and a bewildered chief minister Clarendon beseech Louis XIV to ask the Dutch to lay off: ‘the Hollanders do make a noise, / Threaten to beat us, and are naughty boys / … Pray him to make De Witt and Ruyter cease, / And whip the Dutch unless they’ll hold their peace’ (lines 429–30, 437–8). But at line 523 the reader meets this:   Ruyter the while, that had our ocean curbed, Sailed now among our rivers undisturbed, Surveyed their crystal streams and banks so green And beauties ere this never naked seen. Through the vain sedge, the bashful nymphs he eyed: Bosoms, and all which from themselves they hide. The sun much brighter, and the skies more clear, He finds the air and all things sweeter here. The sudden change, and such a tempting sight Swells his old veins with fresh blood, fresh delight. Like am’rous victors he begins to shave, And his new face looks in the English wave.

Few could fail to be impressed by the remarkable generic moves Marvell makes here. It is neither menacing nor martial, but a fusion of epyllion, pastoral, and (libertine) romance; neither epic nor mock epic. Making the waves his shaving mirror, as he fancies his chances with the Kentish sea nymphs, makes de Ruyter a Polyphemus, in line with Marvell’s portrayal of Damon the Mower. The naked nymphs in this mythopoeia represent the vulnerability of the English and their natural fecundity, who should be protected by the men folk but are not. This is not a sea raid but a date. The obvious point to be drawn from the passage is that the generic irregularity is a consequence of the failed administration. De Ruyter should be finding it hard, but Marvell shows him tacking down the Medway unresisted as if in a pleasure boat. 173

part iii: rethinking literary histories The context in which I would place this passage is one that is now commonly accepted among early modern historians. The Dutch and the English are neighbours and friends as much as enemies. This worked with a specific dynamic driven by the divisions in each country’s politics. The House of Stuart was intermarried with the House of Orange, and English Royalists and supporters of the restored monarchy tended to ally themselves with the Prince of Orange, who since 1578 had been Stadholder of most of the United Provinces. Some Parliamentarians and out and out Republicans in England could see a common cause with the Dutch Republicans, prominent in the States of Holland that met in The Hague. While Marvell’s satirical poetry subscribes to a patriotic critique of the Clarendon regime, to what extent might Marvell’s painter poems be seen as specifically indebted to particular Dutch poems? On the face of it, the answer is not promising: of the several Dutch printed poems on the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and the raid on the Medway in particular, none depart from asserting a spectacular and very bloody heroism. Take, for instance, the great playwright Joost van den Vondel’s ‘Zeegevier der vrye Nederlanden op den Teems’ (‘Triumph of the Free Netherlands on the Thames’, 1667).13 Amsterdam’s Rome to England’s Carthage (the associations are the other way around in Marvell’s ‘The Character of Holland’, first composed in 1653 but published first in print in altered form in 1665 and decidedly pro-English) is a governing framework in which English primary aggression, represented by James, Duke of York as a recast Neptune, is properly met by intrepid Dutch sea courage. The English sea commanders, York and Monk, are rogues, and despite defensive preparations, decidedly more effective than in Marvell’s poem, although finally they are no match for the skilful de Ruyter. Vondel’s poem is, in fact, one  of intelligent military and economic strategy: in destroying so much of the Royal Navy, the Dutch have removed the threat in every sense from the English. This is symbolised poetically by focus on the burning ships in the estuarial waters, an echo, as countless Dutch publications saw it, of the providential punishment wrought by the Great Fire of London in the previous year.14 In one version, Vondel’s poem was accompanied by another one by Johannes Laurentius, himself an expert on naval matters: ‘Naa-Klachte van den Britsen Konning’ (‘Complaint of the English King’).15 Charles II is made to speak bitterly about how his pride is humiliated by the Chatham Raid. Perhaps this is more promising satire to be compared with Marvell. His voice verges on a mockery induced by dramatic irony: ‘Nu Hollandts donder-busch ook op den Theems gehoort is, / En buldert in het oor van mijn verbrande Stadt’, lines 9–10 (Now Dutch canon also on the Thames is heard / And roars in the ear of my burnt city). The economic message is 174

smith: the european marvell clear here as in the Vondel pamphlet, that with the peace there should be sufficient prosperity and that the extent of the world’s trade can be shared between the English and the Dutch. This says the poem is part of God’s grace (‘Godts uytgestorten’, line 37) and will amount to a liberation of England (‘Vervullen Engelant, en vryen van den druck’, line 38). Thanks to the ‘salty high seas’ (‘silte baaran’), the domain of the sea deity Tethys, which is now safe from robbery by their enemy, merchants will gain profit and riches (‘voordeel, en gewin / … / En brengen winst’, lines 42, 44) literally across the globe, facilitated by fully laden ships. Britons and Dutch will celebrate peace, placing the ‘peace-banner’ on the top of church, capitol and towers (‘Dan sal de Vrede-Vaan, by Brit, en Batavieren / Op Kerck, op Capitool, op toorens staan geplant’, lines 45–6). Another kind of voice enters with Joachim Oudaen’s Op de Brittannische Vernedering door de Zee-macht van hare Hoogmogentheden, Onder het hooge Staats-gezagh van den Heldhaftigen Heere Mr. Kornelis de Witt (1667) (On the Humiliation of the British by the States’ Navy, under the High Authority of the State hero My Lord Cornelis de Witt). In the sphere of drama, Oudaen regarded himself as Vondel’s pupil, but here he goes beyond Vondel in offering a distinctly political and economic reading of the situation, one consistent with the strong Dutch Republican that we know Oudaen to be.16 The contrast with a pro-English economic vision as in Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis (1667) could not be greater. Charles II is regarded by Oudaen as a personal tyrant, dangerous to the liberty of the United Provinces because he insists on the English monarch’s claim to own the right to navigate the North Sea approaches to the Netherlands. Cornelis de Witt’s bravery is stirred by this patriotism in the cause of liberty (Oudaen is conveying more or less directly the ideology of the Regent class so identified with the de Witt brothers), and so, like Agricola leaving his estate to fight a war, Cornelis de Witt takes to the high seas: ‘Of citizen qualities / Extended to Roman dimensions.’ In keeping with the violence that is characteristic of the Dutch stage at this point in time, to which Oudaen was fully committed, tyranny will naturally produce a violent reaction: Dus ziet hier die dwingeland, In zyn havens op zyn strand, Afgebrande Scheepsgebouwen, Doorgekapte kabeltouwen Magazynen opgesprongen   (lines 47–51)17 (Thus, see here the tyrant, In his ports on his shores, Burned ship-buildings, Severed cable ropes, Warehouses blown up)

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part iii: rethinking literary histories This is a response to what was seen as the preposterous boast in Charles’s coronation triumph, celebrating him as the British Neptune, in addition to naming him king of the four kingdoms and parts of France, together with the war-causing claim ‘at whose discretion the sea be open or closed’. Charles is reminded that once the leading English warship Royal Charles, which the Dutch captured at Chatham and sailed back to Holland, was called the Naseby after the Parliamentarian victory in the Civil War: the king is shown his father’s and the English monarchy’s nemesis, although in 1649 Oudaen himself, like most Dutchmen, reviled the regicide. Oudaen likens de Witt to Popillius, another citizen solder, who drew a line in the sand around Antiochus and forbade him to cross it until he promised not to attack the Romans’ allies. The Chatham raid, as it were, provides a sea mark or buoy beyond which Charles II must not go. The irony will be evident to any Marvellian, since Marvell’s 1651 Latin poem addressed the English Republic’s ambassador Oliver St John as Popillius going to draw a line in the sand around the States General in the diplomacy that preceded the First Anglo-Dutch War of 1651–54.18 Not only is Marvell to be considered as a kind of poet in an international context, also his public poetry is part of an international and sometimes highly contested literary arena. The third and final section of this essay makes a similar case for lyric poetry and the identity of the lyric poet. Suspension is belief We know that Marvell visited Spain between 1642 and 1646, and towards the end of ‘Upon Appleton House’, explicit mention is made of two Spanish royal residences. Nun Appleton makes ‘Aranjuèz, as less, disdained; / The Bel-Retiro as constrained’ (lines 755–6). Aranjuez and ‘Bel-Retiro’ were royal residences near Madrid in Spain with impressive gardens, hermitages, and frequent masque performances. ‘Bel-Retiro’ is properly Buen Retiro, so Marvell makes a Protestant and anti-Catholic joke (‘Bel’ is from ‘Bell and the Dragon’ in the Apocrypha). We presume then that the poet was in Madrid during his visit. Marvell makes much of his fencing lessons during his sojourn in Spain: ‘My Fencing-master in Spain, after he had instructed me all he could, told me, I remember, there was yet one Secret, against which there was no Defence, and that was, to give the first Blow.’ Whatever that tells us, these Spanish palaces with gardens are significant. Statuary in the garden was dense and very largely Italianate from the beginning. Aranjuez is forty-eight kilometres from Madrid, whereas Buen Retiro is right in the heart of the capital city. It was originally the royal retreat for Christmas and Easter; Philip IV began to build extensive gardens 176

smith: the european marvell in 1632. During Marvell’s visit to Spain in the mid-1640s they would have been new, and many of the walks and plazas bear the names of Spanish-speaking countries of the new world. Here the poetry societies that characterise seventeenth-century Madrid met.19 Perhaps it was here that he first encountered in poetry the plant that carried his name. The great and controversial lyricist Luis de Góngora refers to the Caribbean and Central/South American plant called the ‘Marvel of Peru’ (mirabilis jalapa) and its quickly fading flower: Vuelean los ligeros años y con presurosas alas non roban, como harpías, nuestras sabrosas vïandas, La flor de la maravilla esta verdad nos declara porque le hurta la tarde lo que le dio la mañana. (Lightly the years fly by and in their hurried flight like harpies snatch away our most enticing sweets. The tiger flower, the marvel of Peru reveals this truth, because afternoon steals from it the bloom that morning gave.) (trans. John Dent-Young)20

Marvell would later deploy the image in a very different way in the ‘The Mower against Gardens’: The tulip, white did for complexion seek; And learned to interline its cheek: Its onion root they then so high did hold, That one was for a meadow sold. Another world was searched, through oceans new, To find the Marvel of Peru.

The lines in Góngora come in his Romance of 1582, ‘Que se nos va la pascua, mozas, / que se nos va la pascua!’, translated by John Dent-Young as ‘The party’s ending, girls, / the party’s over.’ In this genre, the refrain repeats at the end of every verse. The focus arrives in the second stanza, where the plant becomes a symbol of fleeting beauty. This is no standard carpe diem since the invitation to the moment of consummation is offered on such negative terms. The party is already over as demonstrated by the Marvel of Peru, the plant that blooms and dies in a day. Perhaps, however, one should be more struck by the strength of the figure of years as passing clouds of birds, and, in the second move of figuration, ‘like harpies snatch away / our most enticing sweets.’ There is no point in enjoying youthful pleasure because death will inevitably be the lot of all. The poem seems to 177

part iii: rethinking literary histories work by making poetic likenesses from apparently distinct, even opposite phenomena. The wildness of the girls as they dance and cavort is matched by the hurry for the harpy-like years; the tolling bell of life is in fact the curfew. The colour of life suggested by the ‘tiger flower’ is matched by the draining of colour that will come with age, as a fair face with blue eyes becomes blackened, and more pleated and wrinkled than a bishop’s rochet (another image to be found in Marvell).21 The metaphors take revenge on the reader (implied by the poet to be a naïve girl) with increasing intensity: a single tooth is left in the grave of a bowl of custard, and its owner remembered when it was a pearl. Hair, so associated with sexual allure, is gold; it will go grey, and then, like the emblem of Opportunity, who has hair at the front but is bald behind, it will disappear – and here we move from the world of conventional symbols in the emblem book to the literal ravishment of age. The energy of the male speaker enhances the startling effect of the succession of tropes. The poem is a tremendous piece of virtuoso poetry. Did Góngora have a special meaning for Marvell? One eminent poet whose work was well known to Marvell, Sir Richard Fanshawe, Charles I’s ambassador to the royal court in Spain, certainly translated some Góngora.22 After his return to Spain in 1636, Fanshawe translated a group of nine sonnets that would remain in manuscript, of which four are by Góngora, one by Bartolomé L. de Argensola, one loose adaptation of another poem, and one further sonnet by Lupercio de Argensola. Then, along with his well-known translation of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido (1648), came ten sonnets, of which seven are by Góngora, and two by Bartolomé L. de Argensola, and one of these, ‘En la meurte de D. Roderigo Calderon’, was adapted as ‘The Fall’ to address the execution of Fanshawe’s’s friend, the Earl of Strafford. These are lively, well-executed, and, as Fanshawe’s editor Peter Davidson says, ‘no less luxuriant than the originals’; hence, truly Spanish baroque in English. Davidson argues that Fanshawe made the ‘diffuse and thin’ Argensola sonnets more like ‘Góngorist baroque’ in an ‘extraordinarily convincing’ way.23 Some have seen continuities between Marvell’s verse, especially in ‘Upon Appleton House’ and the Mower poems and Góngora’s, focused on their respective ability to blend different media, to make the reader forget the difference between what is being represented and what does the representing.24 Yet, nothing prepares us for the extraordinary unorthodoxy of Góngora’s Soledades, written in 1613. The flexibility afforded by the long stanzas with unpredictable and remote rhyme schemes opens up into a poetic universe where it is sometimes impossible to tell the different parts of speech, who is speaking, what is the subject, what is the object, and is this a real sentence we are in? It all comes down to a splendid poetic 178

smith: the european marvell process, or should I say, a verbal sculpture that manages to suggest that it is quite separate from the materials that constitute it: Era del año la estación florida en que el mentido robador de Europa – media luna las armas de su frente, y el Sol todos los rayos de su pelo –, luciente honor del cielo, en campos de zafiro pace estrellas, cuando el que ministrar podía la copa a Júpiter mejor que el garzón de Ida, – náufrago y desdeñado, sobre ausente –, lagrimosas de amor dulces querellas da al mar; que condolido, fué a las ondas, fué al viento el mísero gemido, segundo de Arión dulce instrumento. (It was the flowering season of the year when Europa’s false-hearted abductor – a half moon the weapons on his brow, the Sun’s rays all the strands of his hair – oh bright glory of heaven, grazes on stars in fields of sapphire blue; when one who could pour the wine for Jupiter better than the comely lad of Ida, – a shipwrecked youth, one scorned and desolate – weeps sweet complaints of love to the sea; taking pity, for the waves and for the wind it made of his abject tears a second sweet instrument of Arion.)25

The subject, the shipwrecked youth, is only discovered in mid-stanza. Until then, the imagery is in control – the language of the spring, cascading into myth, and the mythic figure who is part of nature, or indeed the cosmos – we are given the celestial figure of Jupiter as Taurus, the bull that brings spring. We move from the utterly cosmic to the microcosm of the youth, his tears likened to the dolphin-enchanting music of Arion’s voice. The extraordinary stanza leaves the reader stranded (it is perhaps rather a ‘stranza’), focusing mostly on the very creation that is the stanza itself. The shipwrecked youth makes it ashore, but before he finds the beach, he has to be given up by the sea, and this for Góngora is no simple delivery but a thorough piece of marine emetic: Del Océano pues antes sorbido, y luego vomitado no lejos de un escollo coronado de secos juncos. (By ocean first gulped down, by Ocean swallowed and then vomited, spat out not far from a reef rising from the sea, crowned with dry reeds and rushes.)

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part iii: rethinking literary histories The consciousness of changing landscapes and mediums, from sea to dry land, that to the youth the uneven sea and the mountainous island look the same, is what interests Góngora: No bien pues de su luz los horizontes – que hacían desigual, confusamente, montes de agua y piélagos de montes – desdorados los siente. (Then as soon as he perceives horizons – that changeably, confusedly became mountains of water, open seas of mountains losing their golden hue.)

The idea is to make the poetry follow the sense perceptions of the youth as he scales the cliffs: Vencida al fin la cumbre – del mar siempre sonante, de la muda campaña arbitro igual e inexpugnable muro. (Vanquishing at last the peak – to the always sounding sea and countryside ever mute the neutral judge and wall impregnable.)

The longer stanzas seem to fit perfectly the sense of the youth moving rapidly towards the light of the cottage, fearful of dangerous trees in his way, and strong winds: the long stanza accommodates the youth’s swift walk. Entering a rustic community, the youth devotes himself to praising its simple virtues in terms that sound elaborately courtly even as he damns courtliness. One could turn to the lines using the Daedalus and Icarus myth to explain vanity, but better is the stanza describing how the shepherds help him: Limpio sayal, en vez de blanco lino cubrió el cuadrado pino; y en boj, aunque rebelde, a quien el torno forma elegante dió sin culto adorno, leche que exprimir vio la Alba aquel día – mientras perdían con ella los blancos lilios de su frente bella –, gruesa le dan y fría, impenetrable casi a la cuchara, del viejo Alcimedón invención rara. (A length of clean course wool, and not white linen, covered the square pine plank; and in boxwood, though unyielding, to which a lathe had given elegant form with no refined adornment, milk the Dawn that day saw drawn – to which white lilies worn round her beautiful brow could not compare –, they give to him, thick and cold,

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smith: the european marvell almost impenetrable to the spoon, that rare device of ancient Alcimedon.)

When the shepherd people have been described in all their specialness, Góngora fixes on the way in which action appears to make a pathway between objects: once again they become one: Otra con ella montaraz zagala juntaba el cristal líquido al humano por el arcaduz bello de una mano que al uno menosprecia, al otro iguala. (With her another lass of the countryside joined liquid crystal to the human kind by the beautiful conduit of a hand that scorns the one, is equal to the other.)

This kind of mythopoeia easily lends itself to allegory, so that the description of the sea, for instance, permits an account of the Spanish conquest of the Americas and its consequences: Segundos leños dio a segundo polo En nuevo mar, que le rindió no sólo las blancas hijas de sus conchas bellas, mas los que lograr bien no supo Mídas metales homicidas. (Greed sent second barks to a second pole in a new sea that offered him not only the beautiful white daughters of its shells, but murderous metals Midas never learned to possess successfully.)

Such inventiveness puts Góngora into a league of his own, and far beyond or different to the conceited ingenuity of a John Donne: ‘Góngora’s preternatural mobility and overwhelming spatial modelling, his telegraphic metaphors and cross-referential images, and his juxtaposition of mythological and secular figures raise lo conceptuoso to a fever pitch. The Góngorine conceit simultaneously intoxicates and shipwrecks Góngora’s reader.’26 It is no surprise that anyone attempting to translate the poem into any language, especially in the seventeenth century, would encounter more difficulties than a Spanish speaker merely trying to understand the poem. Even the talented Thomas Stanley, a poetic associate of Marvell’s, who managed 130 lines of the first Soledad, would resort to three Latin words at the end that say it all: ‘– difficile valete nugae’ (‘farewell difficult trifle’). But he did make those 130 lines as opposed to the forty that was all he translated of Góngora’s Polyphemus and Galatea. Stanley’s solution is to make the first Soledad clearer than the original Spanish, something that the most recent translations resist: ‘Twas now the blooming season of the year, And in disguise Europa’s Ravisher

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part iii: rethinking literary histories (His brow arm’d with a Crescent, with such beams Encompast, as the Sun unclowded streams The sparkling glory of the Zodiack! Led His numerous Herd, along the azure mead.

But even Stanley cannot avoid the burying of the identity of the shipwrecked youth, overshadowed by Ganymede and Arion, until the text more evidently resembles Sidney’s description of the shipwreck survivor in Arcadia. Then, Stanley finds a way of rendering somewhat faithfully Góngora’s extended syntax, while using rhyme, repetition, and a crisp  iambic foot to make the poem move with some speed. Both Stanley  and Marvell would have been helped by the extensive commentary by Garcia de Salcedo Coronel, far more elaborate than anything that was attached to an English poem at this time, part of the most likely edition of the Soledades that they would have used, published in Madrid in 1636.27 It looks like Marvell has seen Stanley’s translation: No moderno artificio borró designios, bosquejó modelos, al cóncavo ajustando de los cielos el sublime edificio; retamas sobre robre tu fábrica son pobre, (No modern artifice corrected your designs, sketched out your models, adapting to concavities of sky your edifice sublime; branches of broom on oak are your entire construction.) (Góngora, trans. Grossman) Thy builder knew no quaint Designe enchac’t With curious Works, rear’d to a height so vast, As if Heavens Arch were but thy Cupula; Rafters of Oak, thatch’d with a little straw, Make thy poor Fabrick up; (Stanley) But all things are composèd here Like Nature, orderly and near: In which we the dimensions find Of that more sober age and mind, When larger-sizèd men did stoop To enter at a narrow loop; As practising, in doors so strait, To strain themselves through heaven’s gate. (Marvell) ‘Upon Appleton House’, lines 25-32.

What might Marvell and other English poets have known about Góngora? Góngora’s opponent, the great court poet Francisco de Quevedo, whose 182

smith: the european marvell works we know were in John Donne’s library, purchased the house in which Góngora was living in order to make him homeless.28 Was Quevedo perhaps a little jealous? Quevedo’s poetry against Góngora does not stint in its own wordplay in order to insult and ridicule Góngora. As Christopher Johnson notes in his fine and engaging translation, Quevedo derives his insults from the terms reserved for Jews and homosexuals, assuming that Italians were prone to sodomy. Indeed, if there was a sodometrical poem, this is it, where Góngora is the Cyclops, but with his single eye in his anus: ‘del microcosmo sí, orbe postrero’ (a microcosmic, posterior orb).29 This arse-eye does not see but must shit poetry – the murky stuff that Góngora puts out – but that is nothing, just as the anus is but an ‘O’, an aperture. The Góngora fart is the beginning of his cult and of cultismo: ‘este es el culo, en Góngora y en culto’ / que un bujarrón le conociera apenas (this is the crack of Góngora’s cult / where even bungholers blanch).30 Language that enacts the catachresis itself, rather than simply naming it, is more present in the associated poem: ‘Contra Góngora’ (Against Góngora): ‘Qué captas, nocturnal, en tus conciones, / Góngora bobo, con crepusculallas’ (Benighted, silly Góngora what’ do you / insinuate with your songs’ crepuscularities).31 Góngora might attempt to be the great and innovative sixteenth-century poet Garcilaso de la Vega, but the more he does so the more we realise his abilities fall far short. The second stanza suggests that Góngora is so precious he wants his poetry to be interpreted as if it were as obscure as an ancient medal, stigma, or fossil. Ultimately, however, he is nothing but a big shitter. The poetic climax of this is that the words compound to become stringy turds, or indeed ascending to the greatest state of a dreckwert, which is to be undecipherable: ‘farmacofolorando como numia’ (laxocacofixating like nobiz).32 The stanza makes clear that Góngora’s metaphorising is a shitting, an excremental creation: ‘si estomacabundancia das tan nimia, / metamorfoseando el arcadumia’ (your bellybundance spews so bountily, / metamorphiposing the acadiz). The Spanish adds the rhymes and the wordplay that the translation is unable to supply: farmacofolorando como numia, si estomacabundancia das tan nimia metamorfoseando el arcadumia.

Quevedo thought of himself as guarding a tradition of excellence in Spanish verse that reached back at least into the previous century, and that was intrinsically connected to the excellence of the Spanish monarchy: the rise of Castile, its union with Aragon, and its extension of power across the Atlantic.33 One of his heroes was the soldier-sonneteer Francisco de Aldana (1537/40–78), and others, whom he edited, including Fray Luis 183

part iii: rethinking literary histories de León (1527–91). Hence there is the negative comparison of Góngora with Garcilaso.34 Thus, in his own time, with the monarchy in far harder straits than under Felipe II, his sense was of a national failure, of which Góngoran cultismo was only one manifestation. There is something inherently transgressive then about Góngora himself, and this was attractive to Marvell. Well educated, but leaving university in Salamanca without a degree, a clergyman but with a damaged reputation on account of his alleged associations with actors and bullfight crowds, and for writing irreverent satire. His voicing of common speakers is matched by the highly sophisticated techniques he used, and which garnered the reputation of cultismo or gongorismo. Góngora was recognised for his creativity but this came at the price – so his contemporaries claimed – of obscurity, which earned him the title ‘Prince of Darkness’, poet of ‘black verse’.35 A courtly English poet like Fanshawe might admire Góngora’s ingenuity, and more obviously Protestant poets like Stanley and Marvell might see this difficult poetry, pitted against much of the grain of Spanish culture, as peculiarly attractive. It is literary modernity that has proclaimed Góngora’s reputation: in addition to his literary enemies, his patrons at the court of Felipe III, where he served as a royal chaplain from 1617, did not serve him well. He died in 1627 disillusioned, destitute, and without a serious literary reputation. The resonances with Marvell’s relative disappointments and his portrayal by his Restoration enemies as a homosexual or as in some way unmanned or neutered are very clear. Góngora is extremely difficult to edit since he did not keep originals, and those works that circulated in manuscript greatly changed by being copied many times over. Góngora’s verse may be regarded as an utterly negative critique of that which was around it; perhaps the most complete critique of the court, and one reason why so many have regarded his verse as distinct from the kind of acceptable mannerism of Quevedo: conceptismo.36 You do not see these qualities in the poetry that registers the deaths by execution, murder, and old age of three of his patrons. This poetry seems as austere, integral and dignified as any Renaissance elegy, although apparently witnessing the execution seems to make the poet a victim as much as his dead patron: Al tronco descansaba de una encina Que invidia de los bosques fue lozana, Cuando segur legal una mañana Alto horror me dejó con su rüina. (I was resting against the trunk of a luxuriant oak tree That was the envy of the forests, When, one morning, the legal ax With its destructive blow left me to suffer an atrocious act.)37

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smith: the european marvell We should admire the cool rendering of violence, locked serenely into the art of the poem: Laurel, que de sus ramas hizo dina Mi lira (ruda sí, mas castellana) Hierro luego fatal su pompa vana (Culpa tuya, Cali’ope) fulmina. (Laurel, that shaped from its branches My worthy lyre (unpolished indeed, but Castilian), A fatal iron blade then strikes down in a flash Its vain pomp (you are to blame, Calliope)).38

The final stanza expressing dismay and disillusionment is a decidedly deflated way to end the poem after these amazing jewels of stanzas, in which so much energy is contained in so compact and well-ordered a space. Conclusion One way forward with English literature in this period is to understand its relationship with the other vernacular literatures of western and central Europe and the colonies of those polities. Many English poets were aware of the politics and sociology of the continental poets, the contexts in which they wrote. That this also involved a kind of poetic warfare that paralleled and was indeed part of real war in the first age of empire should not surprise us, for the task of the poet politician was, if necessary, to issue paper bullets and to engage in the intriguing game of matching odes to ideology. To dignify vernacular English by imitating the best examples in antiquity and in Renaissance Italy was no longer the preoccupation for Marvell’s generation, or a poet like Marvell, however much it remained a potent force. Marvell’s poetry has its precise greatness through its international dialogue with poets who were particularly attractive to him, poets known not through bookish imitation but through travel, careful study, and conflict: circumstances that were outside the boundaries of neoclassical imitation. It was an acknowledgement of the different cultures of early modern Europe but also a way of sustaining and developing poetic art by letting the ‘foreign’ other sit in one’s verse and one’s prose. In this way, I hope we can begin to rewrite the history of the vernacular European literatures as they interacted with one another. Notes  1 Parts of this essay were originally delivered under this title as the C. A. Patrides Lecture, University of York, 4 June 2013. This essay situates Marvell’s writings and career in relation to four different continental poets or poetic contexts; it should be

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part iii: rethinking literary histories read ­alongside my ‘Transvernacular poetry and government: Andrew Marvell in early modern Europe’, in J.-J. Chardin and L. Curelly (eds), Andrew Marvell and Europe, special issue of Marvell Studies, 2:1 (2017), which places Marvell the diplomatic traveller in the context of contemporary literary activity in the places he visited.  2 It was eventually awarded in February 1671, the first MD to be granted to an English Roman Catholic.  3 See ODNB entry by D. K. Money, and his The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the Tradition of British Latin Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1998).  4 T. Warton, The Life and Literary Remains of Ralph Bathurst, M. D. (London, 2nd ser., 1761), pp. 226–8; [ii] 277–80; Bathurst’s poem is entitled ‘Carmen. In honorem Viri Celeberrimi et Principis Poetarum Domini Doctoris Gibbesii, cum Diploma. (1676)’. The lines attributed to Kircher refer to Cicero, Pro Archia, 19. Thanks to Leon Grek for an illuminating discussion and for the translation.  5 See J. Gibbes, Carminum Jacobi Albani Ghibbesii, poetae laureati caesarii, pars lyrica: ad exemplum Q. Horati Flacci quamproxime concinnata (1665, 2nd edn, 1668; the title translated by Money: ‘the lyrical part of the poems of James Alban Gibbes, imperial poet laureate: as near as possible to the model of Horace’).  6 See J. L. Flood, Poets Laureate in the Holy Roman Empire: A Bio-bibliographical Handbook, 4 vols (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2006), 2:413–15. See also D. Heyde, Subjektkonstitution in der Lyrik Simon Dachs (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010).  7 See A. Schaffer, Georg Rudolf Weckherlin; The Embodiment of a Transitional Stage in German Metrics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1918), and more recently, T. Borgstedt, ‘Georg Rodolf Weckherlins “Buhlereyen”-Zyklus und sein Vorbild bei Edmund Spenser’, Arcadia, 29:3 (1994), p. 240. For Weckherlin’s activities in pre1640 England, see B. Ravelhofer, ‘Censorship and poetry at the court of Charles I: the case of Georg Rodolf Weckherlin’, ELR, 43 (2013), pp. 268–307.  8 ODNB life by S. Baron.  9 See A. Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age: The Political Thought of Johan and Pieter de la Court (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), pp. 1–2. 10 KB, MS 75 C 37, fols 273–82; Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism, pp. 1–2. The translation is by Weststeijn from ‘met kleine geldmiddelen, door grotere spaarsaam-, wijs- en standvastigheid – die gemeenelik is alle republiken gevonden wereden – die merkelik meerdere subsidiën ne magt des konigs van Engeland verduurd ende te schande gemaakt hebben.’ 11 J. Oudaen, Hollantse venezoen, in Engelant gebacken, en geopent voor de liefhebbers van ‘t vaderlant, en sijn hoogheid (1672). 12 See A. Marvell, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (Harlow: Longman, rev. edn, 2007), p. 367. 13 I am very grateful to Esther van Raamsdonk for help with early modern Dutch etymology and translation. 14 See W. van Nispen, De Teems in brant: een verzameling teksten en afbeeldingen rond de Tweede Engelse Zeeoorlog (1665–1667) (Hilversum: Verloren, 1991). 15 See P. Peck, V. Cl. Petri Peckii in titt. Dig. & Cod. ad rem nauticam pertinentes commentarii: quibus nunc accedunt notae cum ampla dote variarum circa rem navalem observationum, ed. Johannes Laurentius (Amsterdam, 1668).

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smith: the european marvell 16 See N. Smith, ‘The politics of tragedy in the Dutch Republic: Joachim Oudaen’s martyr drama in context’, in K. Gvozdeva, T. Korneeva, and K. Ospovat (eds), Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Public Sphere(s) in Early Modern Europe and Beyond (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), pp. 220–49. 17 In Oudaen, Joachim Oudaans Poëzy, Verdeeld in Drie Deelen (Amsterdam, 1712), 1:193–4. 18 See Marvell, In Legationem Domini Oliveri St John ad Provincias Foederatas, in Marvell, Poems, pp. 257–8. 19 See J. Robbins, Love Poetry of the Literary Academies in the Reigns of Philip IV and Charles II (London: Tamesis, 1997). 20 L. de Góngora, Selected Poems, ed. and trans. J. Dent-Young (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 26–7. For assessments of Góngora, not least in the context of European letters, see F. J. Warnke, European Metaphysical Poetry (New Haven: Published for the Elizabethan Club by Yale University Press, 1961). 21 See Marvell, The Loyal Scot, line 187. 22 Sir R. Fanshawe, The Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe, ed. P. Davidson, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, 1999), 2:44–9, 98–103, 351–3, 363–5. 23 Fanshawe, Poems and Translations, pp. 351–2. 24 See, e.g., K. H. Dolan, ‘Figures of disclosure: pictorial space in Marvell and Góngora’, Comparative Literature, 40 (1988), p. 245; see also R. K. Crispin, ‘Originality, hidden meanings and the canon: reading Donne, Góngora and the critics in their days and ours’, Neohelicon, 21 (1994), pp. 87–108. 25 All English translation of the Soledades by E. Grossman (Luis de Góngora, The Solitudes:  A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text (London and New York: Penguin, 2011). 26 J. Terekhov, ‘Obscurity, the conceit, and a transnational tradition of seventeenthcentury poetry’, Princeton term paper for ENG 532 Fall 2016: ‘Polyglot poetics: transnationalism, gender and literature’, p. 8. 27 Góngora, Obras de Don Luis de Gongora, 3 vols (Madrid, 1636). 28 See L. E. Hoover, John Donne and Francisco de Quevedo: Poets of Love and Death (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); C. M.-J. Wheatley, ‘John Donne and Spanish literature’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1985). 29 Quevedo, ‘Contra D. Luis de Góngora y su poesia’, line 2 in F. de Quevedo, Selected Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. C. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 186–7. 30 Ibid. pp. 186–7, line 13. 31 Ibid. pp. 188–9, lines 1–2. 32 Ibid. pp. 188–9, line 12–13. 33 See V. R. Lopéz, Historia y política en la obra de Quevedo (Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1991); A. Garcia-Bryce, Transcending Textuality: Quevedo and Political Authority in the Age of Print (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011). 34 See also R. Helgerson, A Sonnet from Carthage: Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth-Century Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 35 F. Cascales, Cartas filológicas (Murcia, 1634); J. de Jáuregui, Discurso poético, VI (Madrid, 1624). For Góngora’s defenders, see L. de Góngora, Obras, ed. J. López de Vicuña (1627), sig. [¶4r-6v].

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part iii: rethinking literary histories 36 See A. M.  Collard, Nueva Poesía: Conceptismo, Culteranismo en la Crítica Española (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1967); B. Gracián y Morales, Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio, ed. G. P. Galán (México, D. F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996). 37 ‘De las muertas de don Rodrigo Calderón, del conde de Villamediana y conde de Lemos’, lines 1–4, in Góngora, Góngora’s Shorter Poetic Masterpieces in Translation, ed. and trans. D. Chaffee-Sorace (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010), pp. 314–15; also translated by Dent-Young in Góngora, Selected Poems, 98–101. 38 ‘De las muertas de don Rodrigo Calderón’, lines 5–8, in Góngora, Góngora’s Shorter Poetic Masterpieces in Translation, pp. 314–15.

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Raylor: Waller, Tasso, and Marvell

10

Waller, Tasso, and Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter Timothy Raylor

In their psycho-biographical study, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane, Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker remark, as many previous readers have done, on the strange interlude at the heart of Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter: a scene in which the poet turns from satiric catalogue to pastoral celebration of the beauty of the English river scene; to indulgently comedic celebration of the Dutch admiral, de Ruyter, as a rosy-faced roué, shaving before, as it were, a night on the town; and to a bizarre, baroque presentation of the death of the ‘loyal Scot’, Archibald Douglas, consumed by flames in the firing of his ship. The interlude, they observe, is remarkable primarily for its ‘adventitiousness, its disproportion’: ‘the pastoral interlude … takes up nearly two hundred lines, one-fifth of the poem’. ‘Such dilation’, they continue, ‘can be accounted for neither by historical nor topical pressures’; rather, it opens ‘a space’ for Marvell to explore ‘his enduring preoccupations’: innocent youth under threat; voyeurism, self-involvement, and narcissism; death by water; immolation by fire.1 While no serious student of the poem would deny that there is something quintessentially Marvellian about the scene, I am not convinced that we should regard it as inadequately motivated. And to bring into focus the sources of that motivation is my purpose in this chapter. That the Douglas passage occupies a crucial place in the poem’s structure was established by Steven Zwicker in a seminal essay of 1990, in which he clarified the relationship of sexual to political misconduct in the poem, linking England’s naval humiliation to the political and sexual corruption of the courtiers lined up for our scrutiny.2 In this project, the figure of Douglas is crucial. To Marvell’s satiric catalogue of noisy, corrupt, and sexually depraved monstrosities, the beautiful, chaste, androgynous Douglas provides a quiet and virtuous foil, functioning as moral anchor, both isolated hero and sacrificial victim.3 Zwicker’s reading of Douglas 189

part iii: rethinking literary histories is fortified by Martin Dzelzainis’s more recent suggestion that Douglas’s virtue is defined by its emphatic non-Englishness: Douglas is a Scot (‘the Loyal Scot’), is quite probably a Roman Catholic, and is so resolutely isolated that he even refuses to pollute his body with English water by diving into the Medway to save himself.4 That Douglas is a keystone in the moral and political fabric of the poem is clear. But is he opportunistically over-elaborated? Here I depart from Hirst and Zwicker’s suggestion that the passage is a mere voluntary on a favourite theme, unprompted by historical or topical imperatives. And I do so by arguing for the continued pertinence of Zwicker’s politico-sexual diagnosis of 1990, placing that analysis in a wider literary historical and political frame. For while the Douglas passage might, considered in isolation, appear to be unnecessarily, arbitrarily dilated, study of its textual underpinnings suggests that it was prompted and shaped by some clear literary and political occasions – occasions prompted by and coalescing around the poetry and politics of Edmund Waller. The passage illuminates the connection between literary and political antagonisms in the Restoration, making clear not only the degree to which arguments about policy were conducted through literary texts, but also the extent to which poetic genre could itself be constitutive of court ideology and, therefore, even national policy. It is well known that the Last Instructions are modelled after, and parodically answer, Waller’s Instructions to a Painter (1665, 1666), inverting Waller’s claims for the heroic grandeur of the Battle of Lowestoft and the charms of the late Stuart court. But there is in the Last Instructions a wider engagement with Waller’s work than this. Marvell brings into play others of Waller’s Restoration and Protectoral panegyrics, and in so doing, I suggest, he advances an attack that ranges more broadly than the immediate moral and political shortcomings of the late Caroline court. Marvell’s attack argues, I think, for a debilitating interdependence between the predominantly romance mode of Wallerian panegyric and the failures of English maritime power and court ideology. In thinking of Restoration panegyric as primarily romance in mode, I draw on Epic Romance, an important and wide-ranging study in which Colin Burrow argues for reading epic and romance not as distinct genres but as antagonistic impulses at work within a single tradition: a tradition that can be traced back to the two Homeric poems.5 In Burrow’s reading, the pagan, epic emotions of wrath and disdain are at war with – and, over time, displaced by – the Christianised romance emotions of pity and love; although (as Burrow demonstrates) even in moments of apparent romance triumph we can often discern the ghosts of pagan heroes fighting back.6 In this context, the romance world of Wallerian panegyric is presented by 190

raylor: waller, tasso, and marvell Marvell as both the symptom and – given Waller’s role as ‘trumpet general’ to more than one English regime – the enabling cause of a national malaise. Ovid, Tasso, and Wallerian romance The first point to note about the Douglas passage is that, thanks to the editorial work of Nigel Smith, we know that Marvell’s treatment of the young man’s conflagration represents a reworking of a passage by Waller: a passage taken not from the Instructions, but from his earlier, Cromwellian propaganda poem, a poem that celebrated a minor English naval victory over a Spanish plate fleet off Cadiz in September 1656.7 Waller’s Of a War with Spain, and a Fight at Sea (as it is most commonly known) is a victory poem serving – in its earliest versions – the cause of Protectoral propaganda.8 It opens with a robust, Machiavellian celebration of England’s imperial ambitions, as it (or, in the earliest versions, the Protector) looks with ‘disdain’ (a characteristically epic motive) upon the ‘gilded majesty’ of Spain: an empire supported by mere bullion (‘whose sinews are of coin’) as opposed to the ‘solid virtue’ which allegedly supports England’s.9 It closes, in its pre-Restoration versions, with a plea that the Protector be offered the crown. But despite its imperial thrust, Waller’s poem does not run in an exclusively epic vein; it is generically diverse to the point of confusion, incorporating strong, countervailing movements of romance. These appear most strikingly towards its end, in a passage that relates a miniature family tragedy. Among the Spanish fleet, on board the Vice-Admiral’s ship, was Don Francisco López de Zúñiga, marqués de Baides, sometime royal governor of Chile, then returning from his retirement at Lima to Spain and carrying with him his family and his fortune.10 After holding out for six hours against English attack, the Spanish fired the Vice-Admiral’s ship and it sank, taking with it most of the crew, the marqués, his wife, his eldest daughter, and all their treasure; two sons, including the eldest, and two younger daughters were rescued by English mariners. According to early accounts of the engagement, the marqués might have saved himself, but when his wife and daughter, ‘whom he loved exceedingly’, fainted and were burned, he ‘said he would die where they died, and embracinge his lady, was burned also with them’.11 The fate of the marqués and his family, and the plight of his surviving elder son, were much remarked and lamented by his English captors: in his report on the encounter, Edward Montagu, for instance, wrote to Secretary Thurloe of the ‘ingenious learned youth’, ‘left without father, mother, or meanes’, ‘whose story is the saddest, that ever I heard or read off to my remembrance’.12 John Evelyn, who visited 191

part iii: rethinking literary histories the young man in London, noted his fair complexion, his good breeding, and his excellent spoken Latin.13 Years later, Samuel Butler would remark on the providential judgement implied in Montagu’s death at the Battle of Solebay (1672): ‘burnt and Drownd himself for using the Spanish Duke with his wife and Daughter in the same Manner’.14 Such attitudes are almost paradigmatic instances of what Burrow considers the characteristic romance attitude: pity for the fate of a defeated enemy. Such accounts and attitudes furnished Waller with the mood and material for what he terms his ‘tragic play’ (line 43). Tragic it may be; Waller, though, casts it in a romance frame, celebrating the marqués and his wife as love suicides, in an extraordinary, emblematising baroque passage of sensual and emotional extremity:15 And now, into her [i.e. Venus’s] lap the richest prize Fell, with the noblest of our enemies; The Marquis (glad to see the fire destroy Wealth that prevailing foes were to enjoy) Out from his flaming ship his children sent, To perish in a milder element; Then laid him by his burning lady’s side, And, since he could not save her, with her died. Spices and gums about them melting fry, And, phoenix-like, in that rich nest they die; [Death bitter is for what we leave behind, But taking with us all we have is kind. What could he more than hold for term of life, His Indian treasures and more precious wife?] Alive, in flames of equal love they burned, And now together are to ashes turned; Ashes! more worth than all their funeral cost, Than the huge treasure which was with them lost. [Fair Venus wept, her tender hands she wrung, That love should perish whence herself was sprung. Her son endeavouring their lives to save, Drenched all his feathered arrows in the wave: Since when so slow, and so unsure they move, That never more we may expect such love.]    (lines 75–88)16

The ultimate source for this treatment is, of course, Ovid’s Pythagorean account of the Phoenix, dying in its nest of spices (nard, cassia bark, cinnamon, and myrrh).17 The image of true lovers as a phoenix was part of the universal language of Renaissance iconography.18 So also were sacred associations, in which the phoenix represented the unique, self-sacrificial love of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary.19 And such language was universal in scope. Not long after Baides left Peru, the silversmiths at Lima celebrated the feast of the Immaculate Conception with a procession of floats, one of which represented the Virgin in the form of a phoenix.20 Waller’s extraordinary scene, with its burning lovers and, in its earliest ­version, 192

raylor: waller, tasso, and marvell its weeping Venus, its Cupid soaking his arrows in the waves, draws, in a manner that to Anglo-American eyes appears somewhat embarrassing, on this international language of baroque.21 It is a tribute to a Spanish nobleman and his lady by a poet who is, like the English sailors within his canvas, moved by compassion for the enemy. The phoenix is clearly Ovidian, but for his framing of it Waller draws on another source: on Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, the poem that defined modern heroic romance. To be more precise, Waller draws from Edward Fairfax’s translation of the Gerusalemme liberata, Godfrey of Bulloigne (1600), a work that was his self-professed stylistic model.22 His particular source here is the death, in the final battle for Jerusalem, of the lovers Gildippe and Oduardo. It is an episode derived ultimately from that of Nisus and Euryalus in Aeneid, IX, though it is here rendered not in a homosocial, epic manner but in a heterosexual, romance vein. Gildippe, a gallant and beautiful lady knight, having been cut down by the enemy leader, Solimano, is supported by her lover Oduardo in his left hand while he attempts to fight with his right. Pulled between pity for the plight of his beloved and anger at her killer, self-divided in will and power, he is no match for the ferocious sultan, who hacks off his left arm, causing his lady to fall to the ground (20.96–8), where he joins her, pressing his limbs against hers (‘ed egli presse / le membra a lei con le sue membra stesse’).23 It is a high-point of the poem: a passage Tasso himself (following Virgil) singles out for future notice (20.94). But where Tasso approaches the joint deaths of the lovers obliquely, sidling up to it by way of an epic simile (that of the vine falling with its supporting elm (20.99–100)), Fairfax is direct, frontloading the announcement of Oduardo’s death and furnishing it with a motive that is no more than implicit in his source: ‘He let her fall, himselfe fell by her side / And for he could not saue her, with her dide’ (10.98).24 Fairfax’s Oduardo makes the suicidal sacrifice of a fully-fledged romantic hero, choosing death with his love over continued struggle against his enemy. Fairfax’s addition, with its corresponding shift of emphasis, gives Waller the hint. In the deaths of the marqués and marquesa, he offers a  maritime reworking of the battlefield death scene. He clothes the marqués  in Oduardo’s garb, applying to him – by changing a single conjunction – Fairfax’s generalising attribution of motive: Fairfax’s ‘And for he could not saue her, with her dide’ becomes Waller’s ‘And, since he could not save her, with her died’ (line 82). The borrowing is audacious, but it is apt; unlike the unfortunate Oduardo, the marqués might well have saved himself – by abandoning his ship. The poet thereby dignifies  the sacrifice, generously transforming England’s enemy into a romance hero. 193

part iii: rethinking literary histories But Waller also makes a significant change. The self-division between romance pity and epic ire which divides Oduardo and leads to his fall is displaced by Waller from the victim onto the assailant: from the marqués to the English sailors. The sight of the marqués’s romantic gesture so affects his enemies that ‘noble pity’ (line 92) allays their ‘wrath and fury’ (line 96), leading them to abandon the fight: These dying lovers, and their floating sons, Suspend the fight, and silence all our guns; Beauty and youth about to perish, finds Such noble pity in brave English minds, That (the rich spoil forgot, their valour’s prize) All labour now to save their enemies. How frail our passions! how soon changed are Our wrath and fury to a friendly care! They that but now for honour, and for plate, Made the sea blush with blood, resign their hate; And, their young foes endeavouring to retrieve, With greater hazard than they fought, they dive.   (lines 89–100)

The sudden change of tack merits official narratorial approbation. Waller replaces the pagan thirst for blood and booty that drove Euryalus to the slaughter of the sleeping Rutulians and led to his own death, with the more generous-spirited emotions of romance: ‘noble pity’ trumps desire  for ‘glory and gain’ – or, as Waller puts it, ‘for honour, and for plate’. And yet, moral approval of the move from anger to pity is not consistently maintained. The poet’s endorsement of the change from wrath to pity is undermined by its motivation in outward appearance – ‘Beauty and youth’: the distractions of romance; and by the apostrophe, which presents it as an uncontrolled and externally provoked slippage from one passionate extremity to another: ‘How frail our passions! how soon changed are / Our wrath and fury to a friendly care!’ Nor is the new attitude consistently maintained. Despite endorsing the sailors’ shift from martial ire to compassionate rescue, the narrator lingers slightly too long, in his dismissive parenthesis, on the value and legitimacy of the abandoned booty – ‘(the rich spoil forgot, their valour’s prize)’ (line 93). Such fascination permeates the entire passage: ‘the richest prize’ (line 75), ‘Wealth that prevailing foes were to enjoy’ (line 78), ‘the huge treasure which was with them lost’ (line 88). Even the ostensibly qualitative account of the loving couple’s death is infected by the language of quantitative measurement: ‘Spices and gums about them melting fry, / And, phoenix-like, in that rich nest they die’ (lines 83–4); ‘Ashes! more worth than all their funeral cost, / Than the huge treasure which was with them lost’ (lines 87–8; my emphases). 194

raylor: waller, tasso, and marvell Such inconsistency of attitude toward Spanish treasure permeates the entire poem. It opens with a dismissal of Spain’s new-world wealth as inherently corrupt and corrupting: Now, for some ages, had the pride of Spain Made the sun shine on half the world in vain; While she bid war to all that durst supply The place of those her cruelty made die. Of nature’s bounty men forebore to taste, And the best portion of the earth lay waste, From the new world her silver and her gold Came, like a tempest, to confound the old; Feeding with these the bribed Elector’s hopes [She made at pleasure, Emperors and Popes. With these advancing her unjust designs,] Europe was shaken with her Indian mines.   (lines 1–12)25

In the ensuing verse paragraph, England is, as we have seen, praised in Machiavellian terms for its robustness in relying on ‘solid’ national ‘virtue’ rather than sinews of coin, which produce a superficially impressive but inwardly infirm state, a ‘gilded majesty’ (lines 13–18). Strange, then, that the motivating force for the English attack is to seize Spanish bullion. Strange, too, that in the conclusion to its pre-Restoration versions the poem veers abruptly from the romance celebration of the English sailors’ ‘friendly care’ in rescuing the marqués’s children to a sternly imperialist coda arguing for the elevation of the Lord Protector to kingship by means of a crown fashioned from Spanish gold: Let the rich ore forthwith be melted down And the state fixed by making him a crown; With ermine clad, and purple, let him hold A royal scepter, made of Spanish gold. (lines 107–10)

Cromwell’s crown is to be fashioned from a portion of that very gold the English sailors have recently allowed, with the poet’s approval, to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.26 The poem’s ambivalence over the status of Spanish bullion is symptomatic of fundamental generic tensions or confusions in the poem. Its most careful modern student describes it as ‘a curious literary amalgam: one part political framework, one part an account of the naval engagement embellished with moral reflections, one part an elegiac love poem’.27 In its effort to weave together elements of romantic pathos with a narrative of national heroism, the poem is typical of Waller’s panegyric mode.28 He had deployed the same technique in his celebrations of the court and courtiers of Charles I, addressing the tensions between private passion and public duty.29 In his poem on Prince Charles’s escape from 195

part iii: rethinking literary histories rough seas of Santander, for example, Waller, with specious gallantry, justifies the prince’s failure to win the Infanta by insisting that he had, before arriving in Spain, fallen in love with Henrietta Maria, glimpsed on his journey through Paris. Suggestions of inconstancy are smoothed by mythological and historical framing: Arion accompanies the prince’s boat, singing of Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville in spite of his betrothal to Lady Bona of Savoy; he thus prophesies Charles’s marriage to Henrietta Maria as a redemption of Edward’s earlier failure of fealty: Ah! spare your swords, where beauty is to blame; Love gave the affront, and must repair the same; When France shall boast of her, whose conquering eyes Have made the best of English hearts their prize; Have power to alter the decrees of Fate, And change again the counsels of our state.30 (lines 25–30)

The poem is a gallant compliment to the queen and an endorsement of the motivations of romance: beauty and love will triumph over diplomatic obligation and public duty. Politics and romance at the court of Charles II Waller’s weaving together of private passion with affairs of state may not have raised many eyebrows at the austere and high-minded court of Charles and Henrietta Maria – a court that prided itself on its seamless merging of politics and love. But at the scandalous and dissolute court of Charles II, such blending was impossible to maintain. This did not dissuade Waller from trying. In his poem on St James’s Park (1661), for example, Waller celebrates Charles’s ‘improvement’ of the park as a sophisticated, courtly pleasure garden: Methinks I see the love that shall be made, The lovers walking in that amorous shade; The gallants dancing by the river’s side; They bathe in summer, and in winter slide. Methinks I hear the music in the boats, And the loud echo which returns the notes; While overhead a flock of new-sprung fowl Hangs in the air, and does the sun control, Darkening the sky; they hover o’er, and shroud The wanton sailors with a feathered cloud. Beneath, a shoal of silver fishes glides, And plays about the gilded barges’ sides; The ladies, angling in the crystal lake, Feast on the waters with the prey they take; At once victorious with their lines, and eyes, They make the fishes, and the men, their prize.

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raylor: waller, tasso, and marvell A thousand Cupids on the billows ride, And sea-nymphs enter with the swelling tide; From Thetis sent as spies, to make report, And tell the wonders of her sovereign’s court. (lines 21–40)31

There are clear dangers in this presentation, which assembles features from the classical locus amoenus and does not shy away from those which had, in the hands of Christian romance poets like Tasso and Spenser, acquired an aura of sexual excess and corruption: an inviting maritime approach leading visitors to a gorgeously situated pleasure park; wanton youths and nymphs frolicking in the water; beautiful ladies preying on men. Waller steers perilously close to relocating Armida’s palace in the heart of Westminster. He seeks to avoid the danger by a strategy of legitimisation: the king’s redevelopment of the park is grounded on his imperial power, enabled by the flux and reflux of the sea, which both carries English trade abroad, and (through the new canal linking the park to the Thames) allows foreign elements (Thetis’s spies) into the very seat of royal government. Hard work and recreation take their turns. But balance is also antithesis, and there remains the danger that the empire and pleasure may appear to be opposed, rather than complementary.32 Waller’s response is to assert the king’s subordination of private passion to public interest: No private passion does indulgence find; The pleasures of his youth suspended are And made a sacrifice to public care.    (lines 112–14)33

Such a claim is logically valid, but in practice it could not long survive the even most casual scrutiny. And since the primary emphasis of the poem is not imperial expansion but the pursuit of amorous delight, Waller’s park, with its flock of new-sprung fowl, was a sitting duck for court satirists like John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who parodied the poem in the most obscene manner imaginable in ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’. Despite deficiencies that are, in hindsight, so glaring, the Neoplatonic romance mode of Waller’s complimentary poems for Charles and Henrietta Maria was to become, through his influence, the dominant mode of early Restoration panegyric. It was the mode to which Dryden would make recourse, for instance, in his poem on the Battle of Lowestoft, addressed (with Wallerian gallantry) not to the Duke but to the Duchess of York (‘Verses to Her Highness the Dutchess, on the Memorable Victory Gain’d by the Duke against the Hollanders, June the 3. 1665. and on Her Journey Afterwards into the North’), and on which he would draw in the more extensive Annus Mirabilis, the opening lines of which 197

part iii: rethinking literary histories Dr Johnson criticised for having ‘rather too much resemblance’ to the opening of Waller’s Of a War with Spain.34 De Ruyter and the corruptions of romance A blurring of the opposition between public duty on the one hand and amorous gallantry on the other, and a privileging of the romance motivations of youth and beauty over those of epic austerity: this is the dominant mode of early Restoration panegyric. To a poet of high principle, these procedures created a toxic compound of generic confusion, moral flaccidity, and political corruption. And this, I suggest, is what Marvell is gesturing towards in his account of de Ruyter’s cruise up the Medway: Ruyter the while, that had our ocean curbed, Sailed now among our rivers undisturbed, Surveyed their crystal streams and banks so green And beauties ere this never naked seen, Through the vain sedge, the bashful nymphs he eyed Bosoms, and all which from themselves they hide. The sun much brighter, and the skies more clear, He finds the air and all things sweeter here. The sudden change, and such a tempting sight Swells his old veins with fresh blood, fresh delight. Like am’rous victors he begins to shave, And his new face looks in the English wave. His sporting navy all about him swim And witness their complacence in their trim. […] Among the shrouds the seamen sit and sing, And wanton boys on every rope do cling. Old Neptune springs the tides and water lent (The gods themselves do help the provident). And where the deep keel on the shallow cleaves, With trident’s lever, and great shoulder heaves. Aeolus their sails inspires with eastern wind, Puffs them along, and breathes upon them kind. With pearly shell the Tritons all the while Sound the sea-march, and guide to Sheppey Isle.     (lines 523–36, 541–50)

The passage has usually been treated as a pastoral interlude within the mock-epic frame. But this is to misread the generic signals, which connect it not to Virgilian pastoral but to modern romance and, more pointedly, to the morally austere, Christian romances of Tasso and Spenser. Far from being an innocent scene in which Marvell indulges his penchant for celebrating ‘nature in moments of beauty’, the Dutch cruise is consistently and pervasively ‘wrong’.35 A. B. Chambers was, I think, the first to gesture towards a specifically romance context for the problems: the blue skies and gentle gales that facilitate de Ruyter’s undisturbed passage up the Thames 198

raylor: waller, tasso, and marvell and Medway; his sighting of naked English maidens, half-hidden in the water; his ‘wanton boys’ clinging to the rigging; the supernatural forces piloting his ship inland – Chambers is right to sense a connection with the approach to the Bowre of Blisse, and to the palace of Armida.36 And such parallels raise troubling moral and political issues. For the settings in question are nests of corruption, their beautiful inhabitants sirens and sorceresses, intent on luring Christian knights to their destruction. It is true that the Kentish nymphs are ‘bashful’ rather than alluring, but they are placed to furnish ‘a tempting sight’ (line 531) for the Dutch Admiral. Were they ‘never naked seen’ before today because English shepherds were too dim-witted to spot them? Or because they had never previously indulged in such tantalising behaviour? If the latter, why do they choose first to reveal their charms on the day of a foreign invasion? These are troubling questions which raise serious doubts about the probity of England’s inhabitants. Such questions are further complicated by the hall of mirrors within which each parallel is sited. Thus, for instance, de Ruyter is no Sir Guyon: no virtuous youth, staunchly rejecting the pleasures of the flesh; he is an ageing roué whose exhausted body is stirred and revivified (‘fresh blood, fresh delight’) by the temptations in which he appears to have every intention of indulging, as he shaves ‘Like am’rous victors’, observing his own reflection in the mirror-smooth waters. The virginal Archibald Douglas might make a more colourable Guyon, swimming virtuously, as in his early youth he did, away from the French and Scottish nymphs who attempted to accost him (lines 655–60). But with his ‘yellow locks’ and soft, white limbs, he is, in the water, difficult to distinguish from one of the alluring, golden-haired nymphs of Spenser or Tasso.37 The inversion of generic expectations and the misapplication of parallels in the Medway passage registers a monstrous perversion of moral and political standards. Marvell’s treatment of de Ruyter’s incursion points back to Waller. It does so not just by virtue of its romance mode but, more directly, by alluding to Waller’s celebration in On St James’s Park of the tidal Thames, now bringing the sea into the heart of Westminster for the royal pleasure: ‘The sea, which always served his empire, now / Pays tribute to our Prince’s pleasure too’.38 Waller’s emphasis on the river allowing ingress for royal pleasure was predicated on the counterweight of imperial expansion via England’s maritime power. Marvell notes the erasure of Waller’s warrant. No fleet: no empire. With tidal rivers allowing vessels from the wider world to penetrate its secret recesses, and with no means of expansion or even self-defence, England remains the pleasure garden depicted by Waller; but it is now nothing more than that: alluring, defenceless, open to all. In such a world it is de Ruyter and his sailors, not Charles and his 199

part iii: rethinking literary histories courtiers, who have their pick of England’s pleasures. Only on the face of the farthing – that most worthless of coins – can the Stuarts claim to rule the seas: ‘The court in farthing yet itself does please / And female Stuart there rules the four seas’ (lines 761–2) – ‘there’, but only there. And even there it is not the king, but Frances Stuart, the current object of his amorous attentions, who does so: a ‘female Stuart’ and not, as it should be, a male. And the claim itself is nothing more than solipsistic self-pleasuring: ‘The court … itself does please’. Not only does Marvell point up the absence of the naval strength that might warrant the pursuit of pleasure, he also implies the equation of romance motive, sexual depravity at court, and national political and military malaise. In Instructions to a Painter, Waller permitted the Duke of York an amorous interlude (of some thirteen lines) at Harwich, which allowed him and the reader to ‘meet the beauties of the British court’ (line 80). It is a romance digression from the heroic main plot: a respite from the celebration of England’s naval glory.39 In the Last Instructions, in the absence of any naval victory to celebrate, the amorous interlude swells to a monstrously bloated catalogue of depravity and corruption, featuring courtiers like the vast-buttocked, murderous Duchess of York, the mulishly-endowed Henry Jermyn, intimate of queens; and the Countess of Castlemaine, abasing herself out of lust for her bestial groom. In a grotesque instance of generic inversion, the digression eats the poem. Marvell establishes a pervasive interconnectedness between moral depravity, political disorder, and generic confusion. And he makes clear the centrality of generic confusion in the climactic scene of his poem, in which the king is visited in his bedchamber by the vision of a naked virgin, gagged, bound, and weeping (lines 891–8). The royal reaction is inevitable: the king attempts to molest her. What isn’t inevitable is Marvell’s framing of the event as an instance of moral depravity and political deviance grounded on generic confusion: ‘The object strange in him no terror moved / He wondered first, then pitied, then he loved’ (lines 899–900). Only after the vanishing of the vision does the king begin to understand its true significance: ‘he divined ’twas England or the Peace’ (line 906). There may be grounds for optimism here: perhaps, as Zwicker suggests, the king is schooled in poetics.40 I am not so sure: the king fails to acknowledge tragedy when he sees it (the terror that ought to be elicited by his witnessing his nation in distress), or to recognise epic when he hears it (the rumbling sounds of war outside his door (lines 907–9)). Instead, he is only moved by the romance motives by which he misconstrues the scene: wonder, pity, and love. Such understanding as comes is questionable in procedure – being achieved not through careful reading but divination (at best, intuition; at worst, guesswork) – and yields contradictory results: the 200

raylor: waller, tasso, and marvell king is unable to determine which of two contradictory possibilities the vision represents. There is small cause for hope in the work of this royal semiotician. And the climax demonstrates not only the extent to which the royal will is the ultimate cause of the displacement, in the interest of amorous intrigue, of a navy, and a foreign policy; it also indicts the role of panegyrists like Waller, who, with their romance treatment of state affairs, legitimise and mythologise the subversion of moral and political standards. Marvell’s response, in his presentation of the death of Archibald Douglas, is to reject the romance mode of Restoration panegyric and attempt a reformed and purified version of epic. Douglas and the rejection of romance Marvell’s erotic presentation of Douglas’s death by burning is clearly drawn from the conflagration of Waller’s lovers in Of a War with Spain – though with striking differences. In Douglas’s case the fire is figured not as destroyer of lovers but as the lover: ‘Like a glad lover, the fierce flames he meets / And tries his first embraces in their sheets’ (lines 677–8). And although the action of lying down to die alongside a beloved companion is almost identical to that in Waller, even down to the verbs and rhymes (‘laid’, ‘died’, ‘side’); where the marqués lies down with his wife (‘Then laid him by his burning lady’s side / And, since he could not save her, with her died’; lines 81–2), Douglas lies down with his sword: ‘Down on the deck he laid himself and died, / With his dear sword reposing by his side’ (lines 687–8). The significance of such revisions becomes clearer when we recognise that in revising Waller, Marvell was pulling at the roots of the very tradition within which he and his predecessor were working. In taking over Waller’s nautical death scene, Marvell recasts it in defiantly anti-romance terms, as a moment of stridently epic heroism. He presents Douglas’s conflagration within the frame provided by Waller; but he strips out Waller’s Tassonian heterosexual romance love plot, presenting the married, thirty-something Douglas as a virginal youth: . . . brave Douglas, on whose lovely chin The early down but newly did begin, And modest Beauty yet his sex did veil, While envious virgins hope he is a male.    (lines 649–52)

But Marvell also reaches back beyond Waller, beyond Tasso, to Virgil, portraying Douglas as a Euryalus (‘a boy who showed on his unshaven cheek the first bloom of youth’ – ‘ora puer prima signans intonsa iuventa’ (9.181)).41 This is not simply a case of shifting from Waller’s heterosexual to Virgil’s homoerotic mode. The homoerotic is present, of course, both in 201

part iii: rethinking literary histories the poet’s presentation of Douglas, and in the visual relationship he establishes between Douglas and the senior figure of Admiral George Monck, watching while Douglas burns. But Monck is no Nisus: he does not die with Douglas; rather, he watches him from a distant deck, and the poet’s focus is not on his emotional response to Douglas’s death but on Douglas’s self-congratulatory delight in watching Monck watch him die (‘And secret joy in his calm soul does rise / That Monck looks on to see how Douglas dies’ (lines 675–6)). The image of Douglas gazing with ‘secret joy’ at Monck gazing at his death represents a further romance allusion, echoing and revising the extraordinary scene from Gerusalemme liberata in which Rinaldo holds up a crystal mirror to the enchantress Armida and begs her to turn her eyes on him to watch him burn in the flames of love (20.20–2). In Marvell’s revision, the young hero burns in real flames and, unlike the unfortunate Rinaldo, is watched in turn by the (male) object of his gaze. Though its structure draws on romance, this is no romance ending: Monck is not moved by love or by pity. He is not allowed to register any emotion. The scene is ultimately less homoerotic than it is autoerotic. Marvell’s emphasis is on the self-enclosure of the young victim, who dies alone. Douglas’s Virgilian sword-waving – which alludes to Nisus ‘whirling his lightning blade’ (‘rotat ensem fulmineum’ (9.441–2)) at the surrounding foe – serves not to attack the enemy, but to draw a protective circle around himself: ‘Or waves his sword, and could he them conjure / Within its circle, knows himself secure’ (lines 666–7). Even his hair is selfinvolved: ‘His yellow locks curl back themselves to seek’ (line 653). But he does not die absolutely alone. In a striking revision of Waller, Tasso, and Virgil, of both romance and epic tradition, Douglas lies down not with his wife, or with his friend, but with his weapon: Fairfax’s ‘deare ladie’ (20.97) becomes Douglas’s ‘dear sword’.42 In treating Douglas’s death, Marvell reaches back beyond Waller and Tasso and attempts to purge even from the ultimate Virgilian source of the topos the romance passions of love and pity. Rather than being prompted by such emotions, the death of Douglas is motivated by the epic warrior’s passion of disdain – disdain here directed not so much at the other, the enemy, as at the self: That precious life he yet disdains to save, Or with known art to try the gentle wave. Much him the honours of his ancient race Inspire, nor would he his own deeds deface; (lines 671–4)

The emphasis on Douglas’s ‘ancient race’ underscores the recidivist impulse of the scene, which celebrates the purity and simplicity of a heroic code that is both historically and racially distant from the corrupt and decadent civility of modern England. Marvell’s hero is self-contained, 202

raylor: waller, tasso, and marvell pitiless, inviolable. Making matters still more complex is the suspicion that Douglas’s self-righteousness slides into self-congratulation and the baroque extravagance of the scene into parodic excess. Just how seriously are we to take the scene?43 Marvell’s revision of romance in his presentation of the broiled Scot criticises Waller’s poetic practices and the generic and political assumptions embedded in them. Waller had deployed romance to idealise the courts of Charles I and Charles II – or, perhaps more accurately, those of their queens. It was for Henrietta Maria that Waller penned his earliest royal panegyrics.44 For Queen Catherine of Braganza, Waller inscribed an elegant autograph poem on her copy of Tasso.45 In such works, Waller invariably allows amorous motive to trump national obligation and imperial ambition, romance to triumph over epic. It is the political manifestation of this triumph, as the abandonment of civic duty in the face of unregulated sexual desire, that Marvell’s Last Instructions diagnoses in its treatment of the Stuart court. In the counter-example of Douglas, Marvell does away not only with romantic love – presenting a married man as an innocent virgin – he also rejects, in his quest for inviolable innocence, even the heroic friendship which had furnished the basis of the Virgilian original. Marvell rejects Wallerian (and Tassonian) heterosexuality, turns his back on Virgilian homoeroticism, and embraces autoeroticism as the only viable focus for epic action. The Douglas passage is not, in sum, an unprompted exploration of private preoccupations; it is, rather, one of those frequent moments in Marvell’s verse at which public necessity and private impulse align to indict the confusion of generic indecorum, moral culpability, and political frailty he finds in the poetry of Edmund Waller and the court for which he wrote. Notes 1 D. Hirst and S. N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 116. 2 S. N. Zwicker, ‘Virgins and whores: the politics of sexual misconduct in the 1660s’, in C. Condren and A. D. Cousins (eds), The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), pp. 85–110. Portions of this essay appear in revised form in Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 107–19. 3 Zwicker, ‘Virgins and whores’, pp. 100–1; Zwicker, Lines of Authority, pp. 114–15. See also, M. Gearin-Tosh, ‘The structure of Marvell’s “Last Instructions to a Painter”’, Essays in Criticism, 22:1 (1972), pp. 48–57, esp. 52, 54. 4 M. Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Earl of Castlemaine’, in W. Chernaik and M. Dzelzainis (eds), Marvell and Liberty (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 290–312, at 298. 5 C. Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 274.

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part iii: rethinking literary histories  6 Burrow, Epic Romance, pp. 4–5.  7 A. Marvell, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (Harlow: Longman, rev. edn, 2007), p. 366. (All subsequent quotations from the poem are taken from this edition, cited by line number in the text.)  8 E. Waller, The Poems of Edmund Waller, ed. George Thorn Drury, 2 vols (London: Bullen; New York: Scribner’s, 1901), 2:23–7. (All subsequent quotations from the poem are taken from this edition, cited by line number in the text.) It was printed in a broadside version in 1658 (A Lamentable Narration of the sad Disaster of a great part of the Spanish Plate-Fleete that perished near St. Lucas (London, 1658)); in a revised version in a biography of Cromwell in 1659 (S. Carrington, The History of the Life and Death of His most Serene Highness, Oliver, Late Lord Protector (London, 1659), pp. 195–9); and in a further revised and truncated version (removing references to the Protector) in 1661. This last version was reprinted in Waller’s collected Poems (1664, 1668, 1682, etc.). The early development of the text is established by P. R. Wikelund in ‘Edmund Waller’s Fitt of Versifying: deductions from a holograph fragment, Folger MS. X.d.309’, Philological Quarterly, 49:1 (1970), pp. 68–91.  9 Waller, Poems, 2:23, 27. On the Machiavellianism of the opening lines, see T. Raylor, ‘Waller’s Machiavellian Cromwell: the imperial argument of A Panegyrick to my Lord Protector’, RES, 56:225 (2005), pp. 386–411 (at 398–9). 10 On the marqués and his death, see J. T. Medina, Diccionario Biográfico Colonial de Chile (Santiago de Chile: Elzeveriana, 1906), pp. 477–8; M. de Mendiburu, Diccionario Histórico-Biográfico del Perú, vol. 5 (Lima: Imprenta Bolognesi, 1885), pp.  83–4. English accounts have erred in assuming that the marqués was governor of Peru. 11 E. Montagu to Thurloe, 19 September 1656; J. Thurloe, A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, ed. T. Birch, 7 vols (London, 1742), 5:433; see also the official publication, printed by parliamentary order, A True Narrative of the Late Success (London, 1657), pp. 11–14; C. H. Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate, 1656–1658, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), 1:231–2. 12 Thurloe, State Papers, 5:433. 13 J. Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. de Beer, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 3:188. 14 Samuel Butler, Prose Observations, ed. H. de Quehen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 217. 15 For a persuasive sketch of the characteristics of baroque, see P. Davidson, The Universal Baroque (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 12–21. 16 The two bracketed passages are taken from pre-Restoration versions of the poem; Waller, Poems, 2:6–7; the second was removed from the revised version of 1659; both were removed from post-1660 versions on which G. Thorn Drury based his text; they are therefore omitted from his line count. 17 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 15.391–407. 18 See, for example, John Donne, ‘The Canonization’, lines 23–4. 19 See, for example, H. Hawkins, Parthenia Sacra ((Paris), 1633), pp. 262–6. 20 Baides set sail from Peru for Panama in October 1654; the silversmiths’ parade took place on 9 December 1656; Chronicle of Colonial Lima: The Diary of Joseph and Francisco Mugaburu, 1640–1697, ed. and trans. R. R. Miller (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), pp. 33, 42.

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raylor: waller, tasso, and marvell 21 On embarrassment in the baroque, see Davidson, Universal Baroque, pp. 15–17. 22 For Waller’s interest in Tasso, see J. Dryden, ‘Preface’ to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700); J. Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg, Jr, et al., 20 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953–2000), 7:25; Raylor, ‘Waller’s Machiavellian Cromwell’, pp. 408–9. 23 T. Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, ed. L. Caretti (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), p. 649. See, for the self-division in the episode, Burrow, Epic Romance, pp. 87–9. 24 E. Fairfax, Godfrey of Bulloigne, ed. K. M. Lea and T. M. Gang (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 577. 25 In the bracketed passages, I follow the pre-Restoration versions of the text. 26 The ambivalence of the poem’s economics is carefully analysed in E. Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 126–35. 27 Wikelund, ‘Waller’s Fitt of Versifying’, 85. 28 Ibid. 89. 29 See, for instance, ‘On His Majesty’s Receiving the news of the Duke of Buckingham’s Death’ and ‘To my Lord Northumberland on the Death of His Lady’. 30 Waller, Poems, 1:2 (lines 25–30). 31 Ibid. 2:40–1 (lines 21–40). 32 See Chambers, Andrew Marvell and Edmund Waller: Seventeenth-Century Praise and Restoration Satire (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), pp. 60–1. 33 Waller, Poems, 2:44 (lines 112–14). 34 Dryden, Works, 1:57–8, 277. 35 Gearin-Tosh, ‘Marvell’s “Last Instructions”’, p. 54. 36 Chambers, Marvell and Waller, pp. 164–5. See, for instance, Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, 15.9 (clear skies and water), 33, 59–66; Spenser, Faerie Queene, 2.12.37, 42–87. 37 Spenser, Faerie Queene, 2.12.65; Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, 15.60–61. 38 Waller, Poems, 2:40 (lines 7–8). 39 A point made by J. Messina in ‘The heroic image in The Last Instructions to a Painter’, in K. Friedenreich (ed.), Tercentenary Essay in Honor of Andrew Marvell (Hamden: Shoestring Press, 1977), pp. 297–310, esp. 301. 40 Zwicker, Lines of Authority, p. 118; Zwicker, ‘Virgins and whores’, p. 104. 41 Virgil, ed. and tr. H. R. Fairclough, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, rev. ed., 1934), 2:124. 42 His knowledge of Tasso is clear from his allusion to the Tassonian ‘membra’ (‘limbs’). 43 As noted by E. E. Duncan-Jones, ‘Marvell: a great master of words’, PBA, 61 (1975 [1976]), pp. 267–90 (278–79); also, Gearin-Tosh, ‘Marvell’s “Last Instructions”‘, p. 54. 44 T. Raylor, ‘The early poetic career of Edmund Waller’, HLQ, 69:2 (2006), pp. 239–65. 45 Waller, Poems, 2:88.

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Garganigo: Marvell’s personal elegy?

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Marvell’s personal elegy? Rewriting Shakespeare in A Poem upon the Death of O. C. Alex Garganigo

‘I saw him dead’ is probably the best-known line in Marvell’s Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector (late 1658–early 1659), and most readings advance it as proof of the elegy’s personal nature – ‘personal’ connoting simplicity and directness, truth and accuracy, love and admiration for the deceased. Marvell, so the story goes, actually saw the corpse of the Lord Protector in September 1658,1 and the verse paragraph introduced by this blunt, monosyllabic statement constitutes the poem’s climax, offering his immediate, unvarnished, heartfelt response to Cromwell’s death: I saw him dead. A leaden slumber lies And mortal sleep over those wakeful eyes: Those gentle rays under the lids were fled, Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed; That port which so majestic was and strong, Loose and deprived of vigour, stretched along: All withered, all discoloured, pale and wan, How much another thing, no more that man? Oh human glory vain, Oh death, Oh wings, Oh worthless world, Oh transitory things!    (lines 247–56)2

Pierre Legouis set the tone for later criticism when he described the poem’s emotional, ‘personal note’, that of ‘a friend mourning for a friend’, to which ‘love adds its intimate note’.3 For Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘I saw him dead’ ‘conveys starkly the personal moment’ in which ‘emotion spills out’ and ‘reverberates throughout the poem’, contributing to the picture of Cromwell as private, domestic, and ‘fully human’ – ‘in sharp contrast to the funeral pomp’ that featured the Protector’s wax effigy rather than his physical body.4 Like Knoppers, Ashley Marshall places ‘I saw him dead’ in the title of her essay on the poem and sees the phrase as ‘intensely personal’, the ‘most powerful moment’ in the poem and the sign of a personal 206

garganigo: marvell’s personal elegy? relationship with the Protector, although it simultaneously has political resonances.5 Edward Holberton remarks upon its ‘startling breach of decorum’, which offers the ‘personalized voice’ of someone ‘with insider knowledge’ who ‘stresses’ the ‘near-paradoxical greatness’ of Cromwell, a greatness ‘that impresses through its humanity’.6 Nigel Smith calls the poem ‘a small, highly intelligent, engagingly personal masterpiece’.7 Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker argue that this ‘overwrought poem’ ‘presents a drama that is domestic, familial, and deeply personal’, full of ‘pathos and sensibility’, occasionally descending into bathos. They wonder, though, whether Marvell actually enjoyed an intimacy with the Cromwell family and saw Oliver’s corpse – as opposed to the effigy displayed at a public lying-in-state in Somerset House and remarked upon by the likes of Samuel Slater.8 Virtually all critics see Marvell projecting the persona of an emoting, grief-stricken mourner. And understandably so: the poem itself emphasises the ‘gentle passions’ of love and grief in what it calls ‘our course of mourning’ – emotional ‘notes’ both ‘sad’ and ‘true’ (lines 26, 21, 165, 60). Yet there is something else going on here as well. I argue that Marvell’s apparent claim to have seen the body is more mediated and less personal than we have thought. Recognising the intertextuality and the irony of ‘I saw him dead’ can help us re-evaluate Marvell’s relationship to Cromwell, which involved more hostility and resentment than we have supposed. At the very least, we need a finer sense of what ‘personal’ means. If it refers to an individual’s unfiltered, relatively uncomplicated set of strongly positive emotions for and experience of a friend, then the word seems wanting. If it denotes complicated, conflicted emotional engagement presented to the reader via various forms of mediation, then the term becomes more useful. The main reason for doubting the personal authenticity of the line is that it isn’t Marvell’s. Critics such as H. M. Margoliouth, Legouis, Donald Friedman, and Nigel Smith have caught allusions to Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and Henry V in other parts of the poem.9 But no one seems to have noticed that ‘I saw him dead’ is a direct quotation of Hal’s startled response to Falstaff’s rising from the dead in Henry IV, Part 1. Shortly after Douglas appears to have slain Falstaff in Act 5, Prince John sees Falstaff alive and asks Hal, ‘Did you not tell me this fat man was dead?’ Hal insists, ‘I did, I saw him dead, / Breathless and bleeding on the ground’ (5.4.129–31).10 I submit that not only does Marvell’s echo of ‘I saw him dead’ rehearse someone else’s experience (Hal’s stunned mixture of grief, relief, and exasperation at Falstaff’s revival); it also drags along the whole tangle of Hal’s relationships to Falstaff and his father, as both second selves and others. Among the grief and admiration for Cromwell in Marvell’s elegy, 207

part iii: rethinking literary histories there lurks a resentment of being in his shadow, at being always a servant and client to some great man, even in death. The poem thus dares to voice dissatisfaction with Cromwell, as Dryden, Wither, and Waller had done in their elegies – not to mention the unmitigatedly hostile responses to his death11 – but even more so. Marvell proves ‘subversive’ in Zwicker and Hirst’s terms not just by displaying his own emotions and identifying Cromwell’s all-too-human frailty, but by chafing at his own ‘dependency and its incapacities’.12 Source or analogue? Allusion or resemblance? At this point, the argument would normally turn to the consequences of an alleged allusion, leveraging it as evidence for a revised understanding of the poem’s date, circulation, or genre; the poet’s affiliations, languages, or ideology – regarding it all the while as neither a commonplace nor an analogue.13 But before arguing something quite different – that this meaningful echo places Marvell outside rather than inside various communities – I must first ask how we know that ‘I saw him dead’ is a quotation of Shakespeare. Couldn’t it be a lexical coincidence? After all, it combines four ordinary words in a straightforward way, albeit with something omitted: ‘I saw him lying there dead’, or something of the sort.  Couldn’t anyone have said this? Surely many people had blurted it out independently of each other long before Marvell, and would continue to do so afterward. That Marvell’s words were hardly unique we learn not just from Shakespeare’s play but from the nine other precursors that pop up in a search of full texts in Early English Books Online (EEBO), five of which match Marvell and Shakespeare precisely (‘I saw him dead’) (marked with asterisks below), the other four offering variants like ‘I saw him lying dead’, ‘I saw him quite dead’, or, somewhat further afield, ‘I saw him fall dead’. I exclude duplicates of the line in later editions of 1 Henry IV, including the Folios of 1623 and 1632, as well as any hits after 1658: *John Nicholls, Lives of the Proude Popes, Ambitious Cardinals, Lecherous Bishops (1581) There was one honored in that colledge as a saint for his beauties sake, but lo, now he is a carkase: I saw him dead. Boccaccio, Amorous Fiammetta (1587) And sometimes these fantasies of horror perced so farre into my minde, that (me thought) I sawe him lie dead before me. *Shakespeare, The History of Henrie the Fourth (1598) (Q1; unchanged in F1 and F2) I did, I saw him dead, Breathlesse and bleeding on the ground. *Thomas Heywood, King Edward the Fourth (1600) [Apropos the Duke of Clarence]

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garganigo: marvell’s personal elegy? dr. shaw I hope my Lord he is not dead alreadie? lord lovell But I hope sir he is, I am sure I saw him dead, Of a Flies death, drownd in a butte of Malmesey. *Pierre Matthieu, The Heroyk Life … of … Henry the Fourth (1612) [After the French King Henri IV’s murder] It seemed vnto me that it was an illusion, mine imagination contradicting mine eyes, beeing not able to figure vnto me that I saw him dead. Lope de Vega, The Pilgrim of Casteele (1621) I had not as yet seene Mireno, and searching him with mine eyes all about the roome, I sawe him lying Dead. *Francis Quarles, Divine Fancies (1633) [Apropos an unidentified person] I Saw him dead; I saw his Body fall Before Deaths Dart. William Strode, The Floating Island: A Tragicomedy (1636; pub. 1655) queen fancy  Where’s Livebyhope? sir amorous The same I faine would know: Last when I saw him, he was laid for dead. Gilbert Saulnier Du Verdier, The Love and Armes of the Greeke Princes (1640) [Amadis de Gaul kills the Monster of the Mountain of Bears and faints; a shepherd rides to the court to report to the Emperor of Martaria] Sir … I saw him quite dead, and will conduct you, if you please, wher that brave Knight [Amadis] lyes. *Madeleine de Scudéry, Artamenes, or, The Grand Cyrus (1648–53; trans. 1653) [Apropos Otanus] I cannot tell how the misfortune happened, but I saw him dead with these eyes.14

Thus, since the line is hardly unique even in the printed record, we might assume that it also appeared in manuscript and in unrecorded oral practice before 1658. How, then, do we know that among those ten printed texts before 1658 (including Shakespeare) one stands out as a source for Marvell? It is, of course, possible that none of them is; and the standard reading of the poem presupposes this: that any other text containing this exact phrase, written or oral, is an analogue since Marvell describes his own experience of Cromwell’s corpse in his own words. But this seems unlikely for the following reasons. Access, similarity, relevance, and memorability: a previous text can be a writer’s source if it is available to him; if it is similar in word, idea, or context; if it is in some broader way relevant to his rhetorical occasion; and if it is memorable. As the most famous English-language author on the list, Shakespeare would obviously have been available to Marvell; and a glance at Smith’s annotations of Marvell’s poetry reveals numerous allusions to Shakespeare. On grounds of similarity, four texts seem more suspect since they interpose one or more words between ‘him’ and ‘dead’: ‘I saw him lie dead’ (Boccaccio); ‘I saw him lying dead’ (Lope); ‘when I saw him, he was laid for dead’ (Strode); ‘I saw him quite dead’ (Du Verdier). They thus lack 209

part iii: rethinking literary histories the startling spareness, precision, and near ungrammatical awkwardness of Marvell’s line.15 The others (Nicholls, Shakespeare, Heywood, Matthieu, Quarles, and Scudéry) match the phrase exactly, but most of them embed it in the middle of a sentence or clause. The ones that don’t are Nicholls and Quarles, with the latter being the closest match in that ‘I saw him dead’ begins a sixteen-line poem just as Marvell’s begins a new verse paragraph. In terms of similarity of idea and content and thus of relevance, few of them match Marvell’s rhetorical situation (that of elegising a country’s leader and positioning him in relation to his son and to the poet himself): Shakespeare, Heywood, and Matthieu. Shakespeare beats out the other two because the father/son dynamic is so central to 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV – with Falstaff serving at times as a surrogate father for Hal and with Henry IV dying so memorably in the latter play. The translation of Matthieu describes the French King Henri IV’s murder by Ravaillac, without a son of the same name succeeding him; and Heywood creates a pastiche of Shakespeare’s Richard III and 1 Henry IV in having one character, Lord Lovell, describe the murdered Duke of Clarence (Edward IV’s brother) ‘drownd in a butte of Malmesey’ with another phrase that Shakespeare’s Hal applies to the falsely dead Falstaff (‘I saw him dead’). Such a feeble pastiche of Shakespeare also bears upon the issue of memorability. Surely the original is more memorable than Heywood’s clumsy and much less performed imitation of Shakespeare? Likewise, more famous authors and texts are likely to be more memorable. Nicholls, Heywood, Matthieu, Strode, and Du Verdier were much less known than the other writers on the list; and of the remaining five, Quarles and Shakespeare would have stood out as Englishmen, and Shakespeare as the better known of the two. All things considered, Shakespeare’s ‘I saw him dead’ is more accessible, similar, relevant, and memorable than the others. Since many of them are relatively obscure, probably unknown to Marvell, translated from other languages, and contain subject matter unrelated to the situation of the Cromwells and Marvell in 1658–59, they are probably analogues and Shakespeare the source. So much for alternative explanations. Further evidence for Shakespeare as source Two other factors would suggest that the Henries and the Henriad would have been on Marvell’s mind in late 1658. First, another elegy had already compared the Cromwells to the Henries. John Rowland’s Upon the Much Lamented Departure of the High and Mighty Prince, Oliver … A Funeral Elegie was printed before Marvell’s was advertised in January – Thomason’s 210

garganigo: marvell’s personal elegy? copy is dated 2 October 1658 – likening Richard to Hal and Oliver to Henry IV: Scepters and Crowns are oftentimes begirt With thorny cares that lying in the dirt, Few men would take them up, did they but know The thoughts of heart they bring with grief and woe. So Henry Bullingbrook on his deaths-bed Henry the Fifth his Son admonished.    (lines 16–21)16

Rowland seems to be thinking of Shakespeare since he conjures up a deathbed scene not in the Bard’s sources – Holinshed, Hall, Stowe, Daniel, and The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth – nor in contemporary histories. In those places Henry IV admits guilt about usurping Richard II’s crown but does not admonish Hal about the cares of state.17 That admonition only appears in 2 Henry IV.18 So Marvell could easily have seen Rowland’s simile and decided to one-up it by actually quoting Shakespeare rather than merely alluding to him, as Rowland seems to have done. Second, Marvell has frequent recourse to Falstaff and Hal in his later satire on religious bigotry, The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–73), which invokes Shakespeare repeatedly, and 1 Henry IV more than any other play: four times, as compared to The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest (each of them once).19 In showing a preference for 1 Henry IV ’s comic, as opposed to its historic or tragic, materials, Marvell links his opponent, Samuel Parker, to Falstaff by putting the latter’s words in his mouth (pp. 71, 80): the lines from Act 2, Scene 5, about reasons growing as plentifully as blackberries and about Falstaff’s not being an ‘Hebrew Jew’ (1H4, 2.5.220–2, 164–5). Marvell’s editors have quite reasonably attributed the latter phrase to Shylock since it appears in a sentence that mentions ‘pounds of flesh’: ‘as for Extortion, who but such an Hebrew Jew as you [Samuel Parker], would after an honest man had made so full and voluntary Restitution, not yet have been satisfied without so many pounds of his flesh over into the bargain’ (p. 80). But Shylock never utters so obvious a redundancy as ‘Hebrew Jew’. Alone among Shakespeare’s characters, Falstaff does when trying to browbeat Peto into confirming his story about robbing and tying up people near Gad’s Hill. ‘You rogue’, he exclaims, ‘they were bound, every man of them, or I am a Jew else, an Hebrew Jew’ (2.5.164–5). Since Falstaff uses this near-oath to lie, he marks himself as outside the civilised pale to some extent, like an ‘Hebrew Jew’. So for Marvell to call Parker ‘an Hebrew Jew’ is to call him out as a barbarous liar like Falstaff, not just an extortionist like Shylock. 211

part iii: rethinking literary histories In The Rehearsal, Marvell also compares Parker’s one-line putdowns of other writers to Falstaff’s self-confessed ‘dexterity in sinking’ in Merry Wives, 3.5.10–11. Whereas Falstaff fears that he will literally sink when thrown into the Thames in a basket, Marvell twists the line to mean that Parker’s attempts at wit always end in bathos, the art of verbal sinking. ‘I cannot but observe’, says Marvell, ‘this admirable way (like fat Sir John Falstaffe’s singular dexterity in sinking) that you have of answering whole Books and Discourse, how pithy and knotty soever, in a line or two, nay sometimes with a word’ (p. 137). Parker should plead guilty to Falstaff’s brand of entertaining but insubstantial rhetoric. But Marvell focuses more on the Falstaff of the Henriad and casts himself as Hal to Parker’s Falstaff. If Parker has imitated Falstaff by vilifying and thus stealing other people’s reputations, Marvell will steal those reputations back by defending them, just as Hal steals the Gad’s Hill money back from Falstaff. The comparison depends on a reference to a notorious highwayman in Marvell’s time named Simons – a kind of latter-day Falstaff: no man needs Letters of Mart against [i.e., permission to take reprisals against or rob] one that is an open Pirate of other mens Credit: and I remember within our time one Simons, who rob[b]’d always upon the Bricolle [the rebound], that is to say, never interrupted the Passengers, but still set upon the Thieves themselves, after, like Sir John Falstaff, they were gorged with a booty; and by this way, so ingenious, that it was scarce criminal, he lived secure and unmolested all his days, with the reputation of a Judge rather than an High-way man. (p. 245)

Presumably, Marvell sets himself up as the ingenious and judicious counterpart both to Simons and to Hal, who, along with Poins, steals the money from Falstaff and his men. Marvell’s vindication of John Owen’s and other Nonconformists’ reputations in The Rehearsal represents a counter-theft, a restoration of cultural capital. In this connection we should also register that Marvell accuses Parker of resembling Hal’s father, Henry IV, who for protection puts body doubles of himself into the field at the Battle of Shrewsbury (5.3.1SD, 25; 5.4.27–35). Parker has likewise put counterfeit versions of himself into the field of polemical print, allegedly publishing his own work under other men’s names in the other replies to The Rehearsal Transpros’d. Parker ‘imitated the Wisdom of some other Princes, who have sometimes been perswaded by their Servants to disguise several others in the Regal garb, that the enemy might not know in the battle whom to single’ out (p. 252). Once again, Parker parallels not Hal but one of the two most important men in Hal’s life, his father, of whom the Prince himself could claim to be a copy, if not exactly a counterfeit coin. Thus, in The Rehearsal ’s 212

garganigo: marvell’s personal elegy? four ­allusions to 1 Henry IV and single allusion to Merry Wives Marvell consistently assumes the position of Hal in relation to both Falstaff and Henry IV, whom he associates with Parker. So if this interest in Hal and the Falstaff plays appears in 1672–73, why should it not in the Cromwell elegy fifteen years earlier – especially, if Marvell composed it after reading Rowland’s poem? If Marvell’s ‘I saw him dead’ consciously echoes one of Shakespeare’s best-known plays in 1658–59 (1 Henry IV had been reprinted at least nine times since 1598), what new things does it tell us about the elegy and Marvell’s relationship to Cromwell? The latter appears enormously conflicted, Marvell casting him as both other and self, admired and resented, patron and master, as well as friend. Mirroring Shakespeare: Cromwell as Henry IV and Falstaff, Marvell as Hal How, then, do the parallels with the Henriad work in the Cromwell elegy? To the poem’s melange of tones, styles, and subjects they add a hint of satire. We should note at the outset that Marvell figures Cromwell as a stage prince: The people, which what most they fear esteem, Death when more horrid, so more noble deem; And blame the last act, like spectators vain, Unless the prince whom they applaud be slain.    (lines 7–10)

The play would seem to be a tragedy, with the prince slain in battle or by a traitor. But overall, the comparison does not reflect well on the English people, who approach their recent history and politics like a fiction. If this is a history play with tragic notes, Cromwell’s death from natural causes resembles that of Henry IV in 2 Henry IV. More importantly, though, Marvell casts Cromwell as something like Falstaff and himself as something like Hal. ‘I saw him dead’ would seem to breathe finality – Cromwell is really dead; I saw it myself; and there’s no hope that he’s alive. Yet, the Shakespeare quotation awkwardly carnivalises the situation. In 1 Henry IV, Falstaff has inconveniently but fortunately risen from the dead in parody of Christ, and now his lie about killing Hotspur must be connived at. Hal must be relieved that Falstaff is alive, but he is also exasperated at still having to clean up the fat man’s messes. What is the counterpart of this situation in the Cromwell elegy? No longer someone ‘modest’, ‘domestic’, ‘fully human’, as Knoppers puts it,20 Cromwell becomes, if not a clown, at least someone unreliable, someone whose reappearance might not be desirable, forcing Marvell to lie like Hal. 213

part iii: rethinking literary histories Marvell sees himself as the dutiful servant of the Protector and his family who still has to do PR for it as Latin secretary and writer of a semi-official elegy that, as Holberton has argued, broadcasts to Puritan supporters Cromwell’s plainness and affectionate domesticity.21 Specifically, he has to prop up the less-than-stellar son, Richard, in a difficult and unstable situation, the elegy terminating, like many of its cohorts, in a paean to the new Protector. Richard is no Falstaffian rogue, but he may require the conniving exaggerations of Marvell’s panegyric. If epideictic poetry often entails some degree of exaggeration or even lying, then quoting 1 Henry IV may be a good way to acknowledge that problem surreptitiously.22 In the play, Hal follows up ‘I saw him dead’ by chiding Falstaff, ‘Thou art not what thou seemst’. The reply is ‘Lord, Lord, how the world is given to lying’; and Hal ends the exchange with ‘For my part, if a lie may do thee grace, / I’ll guild it with the happiest terms I have’ (5.4.133, 139–40, 150–1). If Marvell’s elegy had been published as originally intended, along with Dryden’s and Waller’s in a semi-official government volume, it would have had to shade the truth about the other counterparts of the revived Falstaff: not just Cromwell’s soul communing with the worthies in heaven, but his son and successor, Richard. There will be more to say about Marvell as Hal, but for the moment we should observe that one difficulty of writing about Oliver and Richard lay in their problematic status as Lord Protectors: not quite king, but not quite not king either. The usual language for describing kings and royal succession seemed not entirely appropriate here; but given Oliver’s regal funeral – some thought too regal23 – not entirely inappropriate either. After all, Richard became Protector because he was Oliver’s son and  because the Council of State named him successor, claiming that Oliver had done so before his death. As Marshall and Knoppers have demonstrated,24 the  royal idiom of the king’s two bodies plays a subtle but important role in the poem, Marvell insisting that he saw the Protector’s dead body natural, not the representation of his second, political body in the effigy seen by many at the lying-in-state and in the funeral procession, in which Marvell walked.25 As Ernst Kantorowicz showed, the doctrine of the king’s two bodies assumes that the next monarch is in crucial ways a copy, a survival, a double, a mirror of the previous one;26 and Shakespeare interrogates this idea throughout the Henriad, especially in Henry V, which displays the tensions between the two bodies, but most relevantly in 1 Henry IV, where Falstaff’s reply to Hal’s accusation ‘Thou art not what thou seemst’ is ‘No, that’s certain: I am not a double man’ (5.4.134). Falstaff is, of course, the size of two men; and he is double in the sense of being a two-faced liar. But Shakespeare hints at another kind of doubleness. Falstaff has functioned 214

garganigo: marvell’s personal elegy? as a double or foil to Hal; but as an older man and instructor in the ways of the tavern world, he has also acted as a surrogate father, and thus as a double of Hal’s father, the king. In his ‘resurrected’ state, Falstaff also parodies the royal body politic’s surviving the death of the previous king. In Falstaff ’s death and resurrection, Hal thus faces an anticipation of his own father’s death, as well as the body politic’s rebirth in himself – a thing devoutly to be wished and to be dreaded, as the parallel passage in 2 Henry IV makes clear. Before rejecting Falstaff at the end of that play (‘I know thee not, old man’ (5.5.45)), Hal unwittingly imitates Falstaff by stealing crowns, his father’s crown. Mistakenly assuming that Henry IV has stopped breathing, he takes up the crown lying on the sickbed, crowns himself, and leaves. Later, when called to account for it by a father who has not died but risen from the dead like Falstaff, Hal expresses bafflement in words with a force similar to that of ‘I saw him dead’: ‘I never thought to hear you speak again’ (4.3.219). Because Hal is the puzzled observer in both cases, this incident likens Henry IV to Falstaff – both of whom he sees rising from apparent death. Thus, when Marvell quotes Hal’s response to Falstaff’s parody of royal resurrection in 1 Henry IV (‘I saw him dead’, but he’s alive), he displays ambivalence towards Cromwell as the counterpart of both Falstaff and Henry IV. That ambivalence consists of love, grief, exasperation, and resentment at being deprived of things he deserves – power and ­recognition – feelings akin to Hal’s in the Henriad. Holberton rightly detects an ‘envy of Oliver’s position’,27 for Marvell is left out of any sort of succession, and might lose the government job it had taken so long to secure. In fact, Richard Cromwell represents the true counterpart of Hal in the poem in that he has actually succeeded his father: He, as his father, was kept from sight In private, to be viewed by better light: But opened once, what splendour does he throw? A Cromwell in an hour a prince will grow.   (lines 309–12)

These lines obviously recall the opening stanzas of the Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, with their characterisation of Oliver (and Marvell himself) as ‘The forward youth that would appear’ (line 1). But the emphasis on light and on the contrast between Richard’s former and future states also recalls the famous soliloquy in 1 Henry IV in which Hal reveals the larger purpose of his slumming in the tavern world: … herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That when he please again to be himself, Being wanted he may be far more wondered at

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part iii: rethinking literary histories By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapours that did seem to strangle him. (1.2.175–81)28

Marvell, by contrast, failed to become a clergyman like his father, Andrew Marvell Senior. Andrew Marvell Junior is only a servant, a smaller mirror or double of the great man than Richard is, and one whose brief as Latin Secretary and propagandist in The First Anniversary and in the elegy itself is to mirror his patron’s thoughts and feelings, to speak someone else’s words.29 Marvell thus displays and tries to work through his own frustrated desires for advancement: to become someone powerful and perhaps beneficial to the nation – at any rate, financially secure. Marvell’s disappointment may involve self-loathing as well, a self-loathing neither feigned nor the product of elegiac and epideictic abasement. To include himself in the group of people who in the wake of Cromwell’s  death are ‘Death’s  refuse, Nature’s dregs, confined / To loathsome life’ (lines 229–30) is to betray emotions that often accompany grief for a loved or powerful one, but also to tap into a lingering sense of existential inferiority, the kind that results from being little better than the crowd who ‘press about [Cromwell’s] chamber door’ at his levée (line 232). Mirroring others Mirrors are obviously an important motif in Shakespeare’s history plays – think of Richard II shattering his mirror – but the Cromwell elegy’s allusions to the Henriad suggest that Marvell is doing something different. In the end, his mirrors point to his own status as a mirror to Cromwell and his family, decidedly not a part of it. In the poem, mirrors often indicate interpersonal emotional transfer and intersubjectivity – the dissolution of boundaries between subject and object, self and other. But they also mark derivativeness and inferiority.30 Children or clients of a great man do not enjoy selves/identities wholly separate from him, which can become problematic. The elegy opens with a description of Providence as ‘the glass where all appears’ (line 3). Providence is both subject and object here, a spectator that is its own spectacle, looking into itself and seeing Cromwell’s death: That Providence which had so long the care Of Cromwell’s head, and numbered ev’ry hair, Now in itself (the glass where all appears) Had seen the period of his golden years: And thenceforth only did attend to trace What death might least so fair a life deface.    (lines 1–6)

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garganigo: marvell’s personal elegy? Providence only looks into itself to see whether death can ‘deface’ Cromwell’s life, which it can’t – it can only appear to. Providence can ‘trace’ that ‘defacing’: by (1) investigating it after the fact; (2) predicting it by tracing out an already existing plan in the same way that one traces a picture through transparent paper; or (3) touching the mirror itself and tracing on its surface a pattern of Cromwell’s physical appearance and death – perhaps even scratching the surface in the process, in effect defacing the mirror itself. While Cromwell is not the same thing as his image in Providence’s mirror, they look alike, and the boundary between Cromwell’s self and things outside it grows somewhat indistinct. If Providence acts as both mirror and spectator, Cromwell does the same in the poem’s other mirror passage, where the boundary between self and other becomes hazier and the mirror becomes even more vulnerable: Like polished mirrors, so his steely breast Had every figure of her [his daughter, Elizabeth’s] woes expressed; And with the damp of her last gasps obscured, Had drawn such stains as were not to be cured. Fate could not either reach with single stroke, But the dear image fled, the mirror broke.   (lines 73–8)

Cromwell himself becomes the mirror, or at least his breast does – or is it his shiny breastplate, a reminder of his soldiering days? Whatever the case, that ‘polished mirror’ reflects Eliza in various ways: her emotions or ‘woes’, as well as her death, her ‘last gasps’ (cf. lines 53–66). No distant reflective surface, untouched by what it portrays, Cromwell’s breast breaks in the end. He dies, either from catching her disease or from worrying about her and feeling her pain or both. And the mirror that is Cromwell’s breast can be affected in other physical ways: Eliza’s last gasps ‘obscure’ and ‘stain’ it. These lines conjure up two distinct but related images: of a mirror being held up to Eliza’s face to see if she still breathes and of Cromwell cradling her in his bosom. When ‘the dear image fled’ and Eliza dies, she is no longer reflected in his ‘steely breast’; and he is left alive, alone, and suffering – for the moment. Marvell’s phrase mirrors Milton’s elegy on his second wife, Katherine Woodcock (‘Methought I saw my late espoused saint’), a dream vision that ends with the line ‘I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night’.31 But mirroring is a metaphor not just for literary allusion but for family resemblance and relationships. Eliza mirrors her father. If mirrors repeat their originals, then mirror images are repetitions, visual echoes. Cromwell’s breast contains Eliza’s ‘dear image’ in itself (Poem upon Death of the Lord Protector, line 78), but she is also an image of him.32 Dying, she is racked by disease: ‘A silent fire now wastes those limbs of wax, / And 217

part iii: rethinking literary histories him within his tortured image racks’ (lines 53–4, my italics). Eliza is Cromwell’s image, but, again, not entirely separate from him. He feels her pain and sickness; he is upset about her; and he is somehow within her – or within the image of him that is her. For she is his ‘tortured image’ not just in being tortured by illness, as he is, but in being his child: a distorted, imperfect copy of her father. In any case, Eliza’s lesser status as an ‘image’ with ‘limbs of wax’ suggests her similarity to the aforementioned wax effigy of Cromwell that lay in state at Somerset House and was visited by mourners after his death.33 Her fashionably yet sickly pale skin resembles wax, but she is also a wax image in being a child and copy of her father. This raises the whole issue of the effigy’s function: to represent the king’s second body, his body politic.34 Nigel Llewellyn has shown that medieval and early modern English funeral monuments frequently used two statues to contrast the deceased’s two bodies: the physical body now reduced to bones v. the social position or role when alive.35 In France and England the king’s effigy served the same purpose, representing the survival of his second body: the kingship had not died, although the person occupying it had. This is, of course, one indicator of the steps the Lord Protector had taken towards arraying himself with some of the trappings of kingship; and it is connected to his regal funeral rites, in which the effigy played a part.36 Marvell’s poem thus participates in the uneasy discourse about Cromwell’s nature and position as Protector. But the wax image is also a mirror: of both Cromwell’s bodies, natural and politic. And Richard might be a lesser, distorted copy, a poor mirror image of his father – even lesser and poorer than Eliza. As we have seen, Marvell is yet another secondary, flawed mirror of Cromwell. But to insert himself into Richard’s place by adopting the subject position of Hal in ‘I saw him dead’ is not just to express resentment at a Falstaffian or a royal father-leader but also to express love and admiration. It’s complicated. But was that love reciprocated? To put it another way, Marvell knew that he was not the Hal in this situation and never would be. Richard came closest, even if he didn’t measure up. In elegising Cromwell and mirroring his personality and achievements as well as the apparently rich domestic life of the Cromwell family – or at least part of it – Marvell shows that he’s outside it. No one mirrors him back; it’s not mutual. Perhaps this and other aspects of the elegy, with its unsettled, oblique syntax, contributed to Marvell’s decision to withdraw it from publication in a semi-official volume at a time when Richard was still in power – not to mention his possible doubts about Richard’s staying there. Even then it was too risky, too focused on the poet and not on the Cromwells. 218

garganigo: marvell’s personal elegy? In excavating the troubled subtext of ‘I saw him dead’, I hope to have shown the poem’s supreme irony: that what appears to be its most individual, most personal moment turns out to be someone else’s – the words of a fictional prince who cannot be Marvell’s patron and whom Marvell cannot become. He does not wholly own this moment because he speaks someone else’s words. The apparent testimony of an eyewitness simultaneously channels Shakespeare, heavily mediating and qualifying Marvell’s grief. While it offers a glimpse into the conflicts in Marvell’s psyche and in his relationship to Cromwell and to patrons more generally, the line also suggests the benefits to be reaped from paying more attention to Marvell’s engagement with Shakespeare throughout his career. If the allusion places Marvell within any community at all, it is a community of poets, dead and alive. As Annabel Patterson and Nigel Smith have hinted, the Cromwell elegy in effect negotiates some of the same ‘voluptuously emotional’ territory as Milton’s Lycidas: how to deal with strong predecessors in the Bloomian sense – predecessors who, as advertised by the poem’s allusions, would include Homer, Virgil, Lucan, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton himself, still alive and in the process of composing his magnum opus.37 Yet, Marvell’s engagement with Shakespeare in his lyrics and satires was surely richer and less selfinvolved than that, more focused on deploying Shakespeare for purposes other than mere self-reflection or self-advancement – public purposes, as in The Rehearsal Transpros’d. Notes Thanks to Steven Zwicker for showing us how to do it. Thanks as well to Matthew Augustine and Christopher D’Addario for their help with the argument. 1 C. Larson, ‘Marvell’s Richard Cromwell: “He, Vertue Dead, Revives”’, Mosaic 19.2 (1986), p. 60. 2 A. Marvell, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (Harlow: Longman, rev. edn, 2007). All subsequent references to this and other Marvell poems are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text. 3 P. Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 112–15. 4 L. L. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 151–3. 5 A. Marshall, ‘“I Saw Him Dead”: Marvell’s elegy for Cromwell’, SP, 103:4 (2006), pp. 501, 506–7. 6 E. Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 187, 181. 7 N. Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 153.

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part iii: rethinking literary histories 8 D. Hirst and S. N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 63–4; Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, pp. 139–41; S.  Slater, A Rhetorical Rapture as Composed into a Funeral Oration at the Mournfull Moving of His Highnes Stately Effigies from Somerset-House ((London,) 1658), p. 1. See also H. D., The Pourtraiture of His Royal Highness, Oliver Late Lord Protector … As Also a Description of His Standing and Lying in State at Sommerset-house (London, 1659), pp. 60–4. For adverse comment on Cromwell’s effigy, see A. Wood, A New Conference between the Ghosts of King Charles and Oliver Cromwell (London, 1659), p. 7; G. Wither, Salt upon Salt (London, 1659), pp. 18, 32.  9 H. M. Margoliouth’s commentary in H. M. Margoliouth, P. Legouis, and E. E. Duncan-Jones (eds), The Poem and Letters of Andrew Marvell, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 3rd edn, 1965), 1.332–3; P. Legouis, André Marvell: Poète, Puritain, Patriote 1621–1678 (Paris: Henri Didier; London: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 206; Smith, Poems, 307n.; D. M. Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 287, 289 (the St Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V, 4.3.18–67, is echoed in Marvell’s ‘So shall his praise to after times increase, / When truth shall be allowed and faction cease’, Poem on the Death of the Lord Protector, lines 271–2). 10 W. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, 5.4.129–31, S. Greenblatt et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare (New York and London: Norton, 2nd edn, 2008), p. 1253 (my italics). All subsequent references to Shakespeare are to this edition and appear in parentheses. 11 Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate, pp. 166–7, 169–70, 199–200, 202–4; A Copie of Quaeries, or, A Comment upon the Life, and Actions of the Grand Tyrant and His Complices … Oliver the First and Last of that Name ((London, 1659)); A Dialogue betwixt the Ghosts of Charls the I … and Oliver the late Usurping Protector (London, 1659); Margery Good-Cow … or, A Short Discourse, Shewing that There Is Not A Farthing Due from this Nation to Old Oliver for All His Pretended Services (London, 1659); The World in a Maize, or, Olivers Ghost (London, 1659); R. Watson, The Storme Raised by Mr Waller in his Verses upon That Which Happened about Their Protectours Death … Allayed in a Double Answer ((London, 1659?)). See also note 8 above. 12 Hirst and Zwicker, Orphan of the Hurricane, pp. 63–4, 70, 73, 98, 114; cf. their remarks on patronage and on Marvell’s various anxieties, discomforts, and resistances in his patronage poetry, but not specifically in the Cromwell elegy: pp. 2–3, 6–8, 36–7, 45, 153–4. See also Smith, The Chameleon, pp. 339–40. 13 J. Loxley, ‘Echoes as evidence in the poems of Andrew Marvell’, SEL 52:1 (2012), pp. 166–71, esp. 166. For an excellent example of echoes as evidence for membership in a coterie, see N. McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 14 J. Nicholls, Iohn Niccols Pilgrimage Whrein Is Displaied the Lives of the Proude Popes, Ambitious Cardinals, Lecherous Bishops, Fat Bellied Monkes, and Hypocriticall Iesuites (London, 1581), Q5v; G. Boccaccio, Amorous Fiammetta, trans. B. Young (London, 1587), p. 37; W. Shakespeare, The History of Henrie the Fourth (London, 1598), K3v; T. Heywood, King Edward the Fourth, Part II ((London,)1600), I3r-v; P. Matthieu, The Heroyk Life and Deplorable Death of the Most Christian King Henry the Fourth … by P: Matthieu Counceller and Historiographer of France, trans. ed. Grimstone (London, 1612), p. 117; L. de Vega, The Pilgrim of Casteele, trans. W. Dutton (London, 1621),

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garganigo: marvell’s personal elegy? p. 31; W. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), p. 72; W. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1632), p. 72; F. Quarles, ‘On the Contingencie of Actions’, in Divine Fancies (London, 1633), p. 2; W. Strode, The Floating Island: A Tragicomedy, 4.13 (1636; London, 1655), E3r; Gilbert Saulnier Du Verdier, The Love and Armes of the Greeke Princes, trans. Philip, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, 3 vols (London, 1640), 3.9; M. de Scudéry, Artamenes, or, The Grand Cyrus, trans. F. G., 5 vols (1648–53; London, 1653), 2.283. 15 As well as its possible ambiguity: ‘I, already dead in some sense myself, saw him lying there dead’. 16 See the British Library’s copy (Thomason Tracts 669.f.21(11)) of J. Rowland, Upon the Much Lamented Departure of the High and Mighty Prince, Oliver Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland, &c. A Funeral Elegie ((London,) 1658), p. 1 (lines 16–21, italics in the original). On this poem, see Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate, pp. 165–6, who mentions the comparison with Henry IV. 17 For Henry IV’s death in Shakespeare’s sources, see R. Holinshed et al., The Third Volume of Chronicles ((London,) 1587), p. 541; E. Hall, The Vnion of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre [and] Yorke ((London,) 1548), p. xxxii; J. Stowe, A Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles ((London,) 1565), p. 137; S. Daniel, The Civile Wars (London, 1609), pp. 108–11 (3.83, 89, 93–5); and the history play The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (London, 1598), C4r-D1r. For Henry IV’s death in histories of England and English kings available in the 1650s, see S. Daniel, The Collection of the History of England, 2 vols (London, 4th edn, 1650), 2.91–2; T. Heywood, Merlins Prophesies and Predictions Interpreted … Being a Chronological History of All the Kings (London, 1651), p. 235; and Sir R. Baker, A Chronicle of the Kings of England (London, 2nd edn, 1653), p. 238. The closest any of these texts comes to the deathbed admonition in Shakespeare is the following words of Henry IV to Henry V in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth: ‘God … send thee a prosperous raigne. / For God knowes[,] my sonne, how hardly I came by it, / And how hardly I have maintained it’ (C4v, my italics). 18 See 2 Henry IV, 4.3.313–43: ‘How troublesome [this crown] sat upon my head’; ‘Yet though thou [Hal] stand’st more sure than I could do, / Thou art not firm enough, since griefs are green, / And all thy friends – which thou must make thy friends –, / Have but their stings and teeth newly ta’en out, / By whose fell working I was first advanced, / And by whose power I well might lodge a fear / To be again displaced’; ‘Therefore, my Harry, / Be it thy course to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels, that action hence borne out / May waste the memory of former days’. Shortly after the comparison between the Cromwells and the Henries, Rowland seems to imitate another passage on cares of state in the Henriad: Henry V’s soliloquy on the night before the Battle of Agincourt. Rowland asks, ‘This Wise PROTECTOR that is lately dead, / How was He toyl’d with thoughts that fill’d His head / For to preserve from dangers that appear’d / On every side most justly to be fear’d? / Would men lay this to heart[,] I dare profess, / They’d never envy Princes happiness. / They watch when subjects sleep, and counsel take / For publick good, and for the peoples sake’ (lines 26–33). Compare Henry V, 4.1.212–66, esp. 218–9, 242–3, 249–53, 263–5: ‘What infinite heartsease / Must kings neglect that men enjoy?’; ‘‘Tis not the balm, the sceptre, the ball, / The sword, the mace, the crown imperial … Not all these, laid in bed majestical, / Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave / Who with a body filled and vacant mind / Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread; / Never sees

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part iii: rethinking literary histories horrid night’; ‘That slave, a member of the country’s peace, / Enjoys it, but in gross brain little wots / What the King keeps to maintain the peace’. 19 A. Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros’d, in A Marvell, The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. A. Patterson, M. Dzelzainis, N. von Maltzahn, and N. H. Keeble, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:71 (‘upon that Bramble Reasons grew as plentiful as Blackberries’: 1 Henry IV, 2.5.220–2), 1:80 (‘such an Hebrew Jew as you’: 1H4, 2.5.164–5); 1:245 (‘set upon the Thieves themselves, like Sir John Falstaff’: 1H4, 2.3.10–11SD), 1:252 (‘I believe he imitated the Wisdom of some other Princes, who have sometimes been persuaded by their Servants to disguise several others in the Regal garb, that the enemy might not know in the battel whom to single’: 1H4, 5.3.1–28, esp. 25); 1:80 (‘pounds of flesh’: Merchant of Venice), 1:99 (‘thought is free’: Tempest, 3.2.118), 1:137 (‘dexterity in sinking’: Merry Wives of Windsor, 3.5.10–11), 1:224 (‘Had he Acted Pyramus, he would have been Moon-shine too, and the Hole in the Wall’: Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.2.16, 43, 58; 5.1.153, 230–5) – all except ‘Hebrew Jew’ correctly noted by the Yale editors. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses. Is Marvell’s ‘the rest was Bawdy’ (RT, 1:230) a parody of ‘The rest is silence’ (Hamlet, 5.2.300)? 20 Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, pp. 153, 133. 21 Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate, pp. 177–81. Cf. Smith, The Chameleon, p. 151. 22 Marshall, ‘“I Saw Him Dead”’, pp. 500, 515–17, 522, sees the elegy as ambivalent about Richard. 23 Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, pp. 133, 145–6. 24 Marshall, ‘“I Saw Him Dead”’, pp. 511–13; Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, pp. 151–3. Marshall thinks that Marvell rejects the monarchical idea of the king’s two bodies (pp. 511, 513). 25 R. Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell: King In All But Name, 1653–1658 (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1997), p. 156. 26 E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 27 Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate, p. 189. 28 Cf. 1 Henry IV, 1.2.182–95; 3.1.39–88. 29 Cf. N. Smith, ‘“Mirrored Doubles”: Andrew Marvell, the remaking of poetry and the poet’s career’, in P. R. Hardie and H. Moore (eds), Classical Literary Careers and their Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 226. 30 On mirrors in the poem, see D. Treviño Benet, ‘“The Loyal Scot” and the hidden Narcissus’, in C. J. Summers and T.-L. Pebworth (eds), On the Celebrated and Neglected Poems of Andrew Marvell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), p. 204; Smith’s commentary in Marvell, Poems, pp. 303–4; Smith, The Chameleon, pp. 151–2. I should state from the outset that I do not offer a Lacanian account of mirrors and the mirror stage that posits every person’s identity as originally and inevitably the product of others’ perceptions, desires, and ideologies. Instead, I maintain that Marvell resents this happening to him in many parts of his life as someone subject to more powerful people and circumstances – in effect, that Marvell resents being a client. 31 See J. Milton, ‘Methought I saw my late espoused saint’, line 14, in J. Carey (ed.). Complete Shorter Poems (Harlow: Longman, 2nd edn, 1997), p. 348. If Milton had already composed Paradise Lost, 4.456–75 by 1658 and shown it to Marvell, then the Cromwell elegy may echo the passage in which Eve looks at herself Narcissus-like in

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garganigo: marvell’s personal elegy? the pool of water. Eve flees from her own image at first, and so does the image itself in Milton’s self-echoing language: ‘I started back, / It started back’ (lines 462–3). She later tries to flee Adam, whose ‘image’ she is (lines 480–3, 472). See J. Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. A. Fowler. (London and New York: Longman, 2nd edn, 1998), pp. 247–9. Thus, if Marvell echoes Milton’s echo of Ovid’s tale of Echo and Narcissus, he also echoes his own self-identification as Echo in ‘To His Coy Mistress’, line 27 (‘My echoing song’). On some implications of this phrase, see P. Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 219–24, esp. 224. 32 Cf. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, p. 151; Smith, The Chameleon, p. 152: ‘Eliza is a wax model of her father within him’. 33 Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell, pp. 144–150, 158. 34 Ibid. p. 145. 35 N. Llewellyn, ‘The royal body: monuments of the dead, for the living’, in L. Gent and N. Llewellyn (eds), Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540–1660 (London: Reaktion, 1990), p. 218ff.; The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c. 1500 – c. 1800 (London: Reaktion, 1991), pp. 46–53, 101ff.; N. Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 36 Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell, pp. 1, 143, 147–8, 150–3, 155–6, 158, 161–4; Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, pp. 139–41, 143–4, 146. 37 A. Patterson, Marvell: The Writer in Public Life (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 46, 49 (‘voluptuously emotional’); Smith, Poems, p. 302. Marvell thus places Shakespeare in a list of his own precursors in an elegy that uses the issue of the Cromwell family’s genealogy as a platform for discussing his own literary genealogy, as Milton had done in Lycidas.

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Augustine: How John Dryden read his Milton

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How John Dryden read his Milton: The State of Innocence reconsidered Matthew C. Augustine

This essay begins with an unlikely scene, a pre-production panel sponsored by Legendary Pictures held at the 2011 San Diego International Comic Convention. Featured are director Alex Proyas, of The Crow and Dark City fame, and the actor Bradley Cooper, then making his turn from the B-list to perennial Oscar contender. At hand is the official announcement of a long-rumoured big-budget adaptation of John Milton’s biblical epic, Paradise Lost, to be headed by Proyas with Cooper attached to star as ‘Lucifer’ (Satan), and with conceptual art by Dane Hallett, best known for his subsequent work on Mad Max: Fury Road.1 The greenlighting of the script hinges on advances in motion capture technology, which will allow Proyas’s live-action cast to be inserted into the digitally rendered universes of Milton’s Heaven, Hell, and Garden of Eden. ‘[Trying] to create unique environments is a challenge,’ Proyas tells the audience. ‘This film couldn’t have been made a few years ago; we’re not sure we can make it now.’ Some six months later, however, amidst spiralling budget projections and qualms about the mass-marketability of the source material, as reported in various entertainment industry outlets, Legendary Pictures would pull the plug on the project, leaving the curious to sift over its traces. Not, of course, for the first time did a spectacular cross-media adaptation of Paradise Lost thus fail of being realised. In the winter of 1673–74, the Stuart poet laureate and historiographer royal, John Dryden, famously undertook to recast Milton’s blank-verse epic as a rhymed semi-opera, possibly meant for the reopening of Drury Lane Theatre in March of the new year, or alternatively, as an entertainment for the marriage of the Duke of York to the Princess Mary of Modena, its eventual dedicatee.2 The resulting script was never produced as theatre, and for reasons not unlike those which sank the film treatment: the scenery and machines needed to achieve Dryden’s effects were perhaps too costly for the struggling King’s Company to risk investment, and there may have been 224

augustine: how john dryden read his milton q­ uestions as well about the viability of a biblical stage play derived from the pen of a notorious regicide – Paradise Lost had after all been queried by the censor for ‘imaginary Treason’ – even if it now came under Dryden’s imprimatur.3 ‘An act of – well, I will let you name the crime’, in the coy phrase of E. N. Hooker, it is fair to say that this text has not fared well with critics or biographers.4 While work on The State of Innocence is not exactly wanting, it is most often played in a minor key, and with a touch of incredulity: just what was Dryden thinking, Anthony Welch asks, when he ‘set out in the early 1670s to write an opera based on Paradise Lost?’5 Stalking this scholarly paradigm is the oft-repeated anecdote of Dryden’s ‘memorable visit’ to Milton, seeking the blind poet’s leave to trick out his epic in rhyme: ‘Well, Mr Dryden, says Milton’, or so we are told by Edward Phillips, ‘it seems you have a mind to Tagg my Points, and you have my Leave to Tagg ’em, but some of ’em are so Awkward and Old Fashion’d that I think you had as good leave ’em as you found ’em.’6 Through the scrim of civility, commentators have readily discerned in this piece of theatre the jostling of rival programmes and interests, Dryden’s false modesty and ulteriority of motive, Milton’s disdainful superiority. If Dryden means to give Milton a lesson in literary fashion, and in so doing turn Milton’s spiritual politics on their head, the older poet gives his blessing fully expecting the laureate to discomfit himself in the process: ‘Well mightst thou scorn thy readers to allure’, sneers Milton’s friend Andrew Marvell, ‘With tinkling rhyme, of thine own sense secure; / While the town-Bayes writes all the while and spells, / And like a pack-horse tires without his bells’ (On Mr Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, lines 45–8). Since at least the 1980s, scholars have been steadily revising this picture, emphasising the sustained pressure of Dryden’s engagement with and rewriting of Milton, in works ranging from Absalom and Achitophel to The Hind and the Panther to Dryden’s Virgil.7 At the same time, the surprisingly durable assumption that Milton was not of his age has given way to increasing recognition that Milton’s major poems can only be understood in part as responses to Stuart political and literary spectacle, not least as putative answers to ‘Dryden’s astonishing career as the central protagonist of a new literary culture’.8 It is possible, of course, to see in the contest between Dryden and Milton a wider clash of poetic and political ideals, but what no longer seems possible is to imagine Milton’s major poetry as autonomous from its Restoration contexts or Dryden as ‘strangled’ by Milton’s poetic achievement. Dustin Griffin has highlighted the ‘wide range of literary possibilities’ Milton offered to the eighteenth century, but so too did Milton engage productively with Restoration forms and fashions, and not only with the literary culture of nonconformity.9 225

part iii: rethinking literary histories Moreover, as Harold Love’s work on the clandestine satire of this period has demonstrated, the interplay between cultural centre and oppositional margin could produce results which confound the neat antitheses such models generally presuppose.10 The Restoration court lampoon, for instance, first took shape in rivalries between the older and younger generation of courtiers but also between Charles’s and Queen Catherine’s courts. Thus, despite its frisson of voyeurism and abuse, the lampoon was fundamentally of the court, and assumed an identification with court values. As the court lampoon began to circulate beyond the contexts in which it was originally meant to perform, it took on a new life in the hands of Marvell and other writers who fashioned out of its gestures and idioms a programme of state satire and oppositional critique. The energies of these, chiefly scribal, ‘poems on affairs of state’ are in turn reabsorbed and re-inflected in Dryden’s great Tory satires, above all Absalom and Achitophel. To be sure, each stage in this evolutionary chain involved an attempt to transverse if not indeed to cancel or explode the authority of its interlocutory other, but critics of Marvellian satire have nevertheless remarked on its complicity with the transgressive pleasures of courtly lampoon, students of Dryden on the nonconformity of Absalom with the imperatives of Stuart apology. It is under the sign of such indeterminacy and dynamic exchange that I wish to reconsider Dryden’s adaptation of Paradise Lost, a text, or rather an ensemble of texts, that brings into focus not only Dryden’s ambivalence about Milton but also about the nature and direction of his own art by the middle of the 1670s. Thus, Dryden’s prefatory ‘Apology for Heroique Poetry and Poetique Licence’ – despite professing he ‘should be sorry … that any one should take the pains to compare them together’ (12:86) – insistently tethers Dryden’s opera to Milton’s original, presenting a united Parnassian front against those ‘Hypercritiques of English Poetry’, who privilege ‘correctness’ above ‘sublime Genius’ (12:87–8). The object of Dryden’s effort in revising Milton has of course been thought to savour more of the ridiculous than the transcendent. Yet we should be wary of construing this as haplessness; for as Dr Johnson remarked, Dryden ‘delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle; to approach the precipice of absurdity, and hover over the abyss of an unideal vacancy.’11 And indeed, suspended between the heroic and the mock-heroic, as I shall argue, Dryden’s opera detunes the antithesis between Milton’s ‘strenuous liberty’ and Restoration libertinage even as it accommodates Milton’s anti-Augustan poetics to Dryden’s Augustan vision. It is to this welter of negotiations in text and paratext that we now turn.

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augustine: how john dryden read his milton ‘An Age of Illiterate, Censorious, and Detracting people’ The most immediate context for Dryden’s ‘tagging’ of Milton’s verses is the controversy over rhyme which had arisen with the new heroic drama. Dryden’s central contribution to that debate, the Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667), had ventriloquised a digest of complaints against rhyme, only to demolish such arguments in a long speech by the poet’s alter ego Neander, and with a relish that would be resented and confuted by Dryden’s equally recognisable interlocutor, Sir Robert Howard – Dryden’s brother-in-law and ‘a great admirer of Milton to his dying day’.12 By 1672, however, when the two parts of The Conquest of Granada were published together, Dryden’s – and rhyme’s – ascendance appeared absolute: ‘Whether Heroique verse ought to be admitted into serious Playes’, the laureate playwright imperiously declared, ‘is not now to be disputed: ’tis already in possession of the Stage: and I dare confidently affirm, that very few Tragedies, in this Age, shall be receiv’d without it’ (11:8). For all that Paradise Lost, as Michael McKeon points out, has most often been seen ‘as the culminating production of the English Renaissance’, read ‘with and against the epic poems of the previous century’,13 the note on ‘The Verse’ is keyed precisely to the Dryden–Howard debate and reveals striking ‘verbal and thematic links’ with Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie, but also ‘with the prefaces to Dryden’s Rival Ladies (1664), Annus Mirabilis (1667), and The Indian Emperour (1668)’.14 Surely such familiarity – and indeed an emulous awareness of Dryden’s reception by the Town – provides the necessary gloss on the animadversive force of Milton’s pronouncement, ‘This neglect then of Rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem’d an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing’ (p. 352). And as Sharon Achinstein has shown, Marvell for one seems to have well understood the religious politics of Milton’s self-conscious ‘liberty’ in the choice of blank verse for his epic.15 Given this nexus of argument and contention, and the apparent violation of Dryden’s translating Milton’s rhymeless poem into heroic verse – the perennial bugbear of scholarship on The State of Innocence – we might  expect Dryden to confront the issue in the critical essay which precedes the published text. As it turns out, however, Dryden does not discuss rhyme here at all; at no point in his discourse does the word ‘rhyme’ even appear. Rather, Dryden’s prefatory essay diverts the critical conversation away from rhyme in favour of a broader concern with decorum, a move, as we shall see, that allows Dryden to defend his brand 227

part iii: rethinking literary histories of heroic tragedy on terms that are cognate with ‘Milton’s Paradice’ and indeed with the epics of Homer and Virgil (12:90). Whereas Milton’s headnote had blamed the bewildered first reception of his poem on ‘vulgar Readers’ enchanted with the Town-Bayes’s tinkling verse, Dryden sets both himself and Milton against ‘an Age of Illiterate, Censorious, and Detracting people, who thus qualified, set up for Critiques’ (12:87).16 Dryden thereby eschews arguments of pleasing the crowd (‘’tis already in possession of the Stage’), appealing instead to a Miltonic audience ‘fit though few’. In this way, the true apprehension of Miltonic sublimity becomes  a function  of  Dryden’s own critical authority, and Paradise Lost, that ‘monument of liberty and blank verse’, an analogue to that which Milton had anathematised – that is, to Dryden’s heroic poetry.17 Chief among the arguments against rhyme on the stage was an Aristotelean insistence on mimesis as the first rule of dramatic poesy. Thus, as Dryden’s Crites (Sir Robert Howard) maintains, since ‘a Play is the imitation of Nature; and since no man, without premeditation speaks in Rhyme, neither he ought to do it on the Stage; this hinders not but the Fancy may be there elevated to an higher pitch of thought then it is in ordinary discourse … but those thoughts are never fetter’d with the numbers or sound of Verse without study, and therefore it cannot be but unnatural to present the most free way of speaking, in that which is the most constrain’d’ (17:65–6). In advocating rhyme, Dryden had variously sought to exploit the concession we hear in Crites’s opinion, deploying on his own behalf Aristotle’s distinction that ‘Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life’ (1448a), and the prescription that tragic action should be represented ‘in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament’ (1449b).18 In the ‘Apology’, these debating points figure in an anatomy of the heroic mode conspicuously disjoined from rhyme and focused instead on matters of language and rhetoric, and specifically what Dryden terms ‘Catechreses and Hyperboles’ (12:91). ‘It requires Philosophy as well as Poetry, to sound the depth of all the Passions, what they are in themselves, and how they are to be provok’d: and in this Science the best Poets have excell’d.’ ‘Thus I grant you’, Dryden avers, ‘that the knowledge of Nature was the Original Rule; and that all Poets ought to study her’ (12:91). In order to square his own theory and practice with this règle prima, however, Dryden must fashion an exceptional account of mimetic poesis, one in which the collapsing of the natural and the artificial serves to authorise not only high-flown language, but indeed, by a kind of tacit metonymic extension, the whole sumptuous manifold of Dryden’s heroic entertainments. For from this original rule, 228

augustine: how john dryden read his milton that poets have ever been taught by Nature, ‘this also undeniably follows’, says the laureate, that those things which delight all Ages, must have been an imitation of Nature; which is all I contend. Therefore is Rhetorick made an Art: therefore the names of so many Tropes and Figures were invented: because it was observ’d they had such and such an effect upon the Audience. Therefore Catechreses and Hyperboles have found their place amongst them; not that they were to be avoided, but to be us’d judiciously, and plac’d in Poetry, as heightnings and shadows are in Painting, to make the Figure bolder, and cause it to stand off to sight. (12:91)

Dryden’s hectoring ‘therefores’ cannot quite efface the tendentiousness of this sequence of claims: (1) that all ages are delighted with mimesis; (2) rhetoric is mimetic; (3) catachresis and hyperbole are rhetorical; (4) ergo, catachresis and hyperbole are mimetic, and hence, delightful. That this conclusion does not follow from Dryden’s premises is of course witnessed by the essay’s attestation of malice and detraction, which hardly seems compatible with the universal delight Dryden here ‘proves’ in heroic poetry. But this brio rhetorical performance nonetheless reframes the bombast and cant of heroic plays as so much ‘judicious heightning’ (12:91), Nature raised to ‘the last perfection of Art’ (11:8). Having deracinated heroic poetry of the kind Dryden had written to date of its local and contingent aspects – namely, rhyme – in an effort to establish its identity with all true poetry, the essay is intent on showing how poetic loftiness invariably suffers in the estimate of mediocre wits (12:87). Citing a range of adverse opinion on writers from Homer, Virgil, and Tasso, to those giants of the past age, Shakespeare and Jonson, to Cowley and Milton, Dryden dispatches such criticism as ‘malicious and unmanly’ (12:87), chiding its authors for attacking ‘little Mistakes, or rather Negligences’ (12:88) while ignoring or failing to appreciate ‘sublime Genius’ (12:87). There is an obvious tactical upshot to this, as Dryden collocates derisive contemporary responses to the heroic drama with despite of Homer and Shakespeare, and at the same time insinuates himself into the empyrean of sublime poets, here sliding from the first-person singular into the first-person plural: ‘I cannot but take notice how dis-ingenuous our Adversaries appear’, he marvels. ‘All that is dull, insipid, languishing and without sinews in a Poem, they call an imitation of Nature: they onely offend our most equitable Judges, who think beyond them; and lively Images and Elocution, are never to be forgiven’ (12:93). ‘What Fustian, as they call it’, the laureate continues, ‘have I heard these gentlemen find out in Mr. Cowley’s Odes? I acknowledge myself unworthy to defend so excellent an Author; neither have I room to do it here; onely in general I will say, that nothing can appear more b­ eautiful 229

part iii: rethinking literary histories to me, than the strength of those images they condemn’ (12:93–4). Fustian and bombast were near terms, both suggestive of artificial pomp, an empty verbal pyrotechnics. That they touched a nerve for Dryden is well illustrated by the way he deploys these scoffing epithets against his theatrical rival Elkanah Settle: the Empress of Morocco is ‘A senseless tale, with flattering fustian fill’d’ (line 8); ‘Thy words big bulks of bombast bear’ (line 10); ‘By thee inspir’d, thy rumbling verses roll, / As if that rhyme and bombast lent a soul’ (lines 13–14); ‘With noise and laughing each thy fustian greets’ (line 23). Dryden’s rewriting of Cowley’s so-called ‘Fustian’ as ‘lively Images and Elocution’ transparently functions, then, as self-vindication, even as it razes distinctions between unlike forms, the Pindaric ode and Dryden’s heroic verse. Arguing by proxy in this way also permits Dryden to assume an air of critical disinterest, setting himself up as one of those ‘equitable Judges’ (12:93) who think beyond the common, respecting greatness even when it errs, not scrupling ‘to a hair of little differences’ (12:88). What, then, of Milton? How does he consort with the heroic or grand style outlined in Dryden’s essay, illuminated as such a style is by the lights of an uncomprehending age? There is precious little extant commentary on Paradise Lost (1667) dating to the reigns of Charles and James; indeed, the earliest entries for the poem’s critical reception in most sourcebooks are Marvell’s commendatory poem (1674) and Dryden’s praise in The State of Innocence (1677). It took Milton’s printer Samuel Simmons about two years to sell off the initial print run of 1,300 copies, and though Nicholas von Maltzahn characterises the first edition as selling ‘quite well’, Simmons waited until 1674 before issuing a second, revised edition.19 A third would appear in 1678, followed by Jacob Tonson’s lavish folio edition a decade hence, from which point reprintings increase markedly, as Paradise Lost assumes the status of an English ‘classic’. The idea that Milton ‘wrote no language’, as Dr Johnson would have it, or in a ‘Babylonish Dialect’ – ‘Fustian, as they call it’ – was thus not necessarily common currency in the Restoration.20 Though, as Helen Gardner observed in her Alexander Lectures of 1965, the ‘highly artificial’ style of Milton’s epic constitutes a ‘fundamental ground of complaint’ in the reception history of Paradise Lost.21 Edmund Waller, the great Stuart poet and courtier, supposedly found the poem ‘tedious’, jibing that ‘if its length be not considered a merit, it hath no other’;22 surely he was not the only seventeenth-century reader to have found the language of Milton’s epic challenging, not to say exhausting (Dr Johnson again: ‘None ever wished it longer than it is’).23 Whether or not Milton was yet being charged with un-English fustian, Dryden’s praise for Paradise Lost as ‘undoubtedly, one of the greatest, most 230

augustine: how john dryden read his milton noble, and most sublime POEMS, which either this Age or Nation has produc’d’ (12:86) as much as supposes its misapprehension and ill esteem by the race of ‘Hypercritiques’ lately grown up in England, who declare ‘all the flights of Heroique Poetry, to be concluded bombast, unnatural, and meer madness, because they are not affected with their Excellencies’ (12:90). Elsewhere in the essay, Dryden considers that Horace ‘tax’d not Homer, nor the Divine Virgil, for interessing their gods in the Wars of Troy and Italy; neither had he now liv’d, would he have tax’d Milton, as our false Critiques have presum’d to do, for his choice of a supernatural Argument’ (12:93). Thus, as he does with Cowley, Dryden here transposes onto Milton complaints against the indecorum of his own heroic plays, their stilted and unnatural language, their ‘Gods and Spirits, and … Enthusiastick parts’ (11:12), treating as fungible all the age’s false criticism and all its lofty or sublime poetry, ‘Mr. Cowley’s Odes’, ‘Milton’s Paradice’, and, of course, Dryden’s tragic drama. Far from seeking to neutralise Milton’s literary authority, Dryden’s ‘Apology’ in fact bestows it, directly challenging the contemporary rage for rules and method, order and grace – the very regime of Augustan sensibility with which Dryden is so powerfully identified, not least by Milton himself. As Milton’s great poems know, however, ‘every gift is a bond with the giver’,24 and Dryden’s approbation, like all his praise, is hardly given innocently: for if he here makes a show of appreciating Milton’s glories in an age without eyes to see or ears to hear, the opera is nonetheless a monument to public taste, and moreover to the cynicism of the 1670s. But it is not, or not wholly, thereby a demolition of Milton’s dissenting poetics; for it is also a record of Augustanism ‘unparadiz’d’ and of the complex dialogism that characterises Dryden’s great loyalist satires. ‘What more I shall desire, I know not yet’ If one of the purposes of this essay is to desediment The State of Innocence from the presuppositions of canonical literary history, it cannot be stressed enough that Dryden’s opera found a ready audience in both manuscript and print, and there is little evidence to suggest he felt embarrassment over it, however much ‘we may wonder why he attempted a project that must – in our eyes – have been doomed from the start.’25 The work was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 17 April 1674 as ‘a booke or copy entituled The Fall of Angells and man in innocence, An heroick opera Written to [sic] John Dreyden, servant to his Majestie’, but would not appear in print until early 1677. In the ‘Apology’, Dryden tells us that he was forced to publish the unacted opera in his ‘own defence’, ‘many hundred Copies of it being dispers’d abroad without my knowledge or consent: so that every 231

part iii: rethinking literary histories one gathering new faults, it became at length a Libel against me’ (12:86). Such coyness should not be taken at face value. In a career spanning more than four decades, there is not a single example of Dryden’s choosing ultimately to withhold from print a piece of writing already exposed to public consumption, whether through performance or manuscript circulation.26 Indeed, among the various and capacious body of writings collected in the standard California edition (20 vols), only a single effort, so far as I can discern – a late life of Lucian written for a new translation of his works by several hands – did not appear in print in Dryden’s lifetime, and then only because of delays and ‘reverses’ suffered by the bookseller sponsoring the project.27 No mere squib or lampoon – the text of The State of Innocence runs to some 1,400 lines – the scribal transmission of ‘many hundred Copies’ indicates a remarkable appetite for the work, and as von Maltzahn has shown, ‘despite Dryden’s dissociation of himself from the proliferating manuscript copies, and their corruptions, there is evidence that some authorial sanction may have lain behind such transmission.’28 The print audience for the play was likewise both wide and durable: between 1677 and 1703 it would go through nine individual quarto editions and could be found as well in the collection of Comedies, Tragedies, and Operas (1701) issued shortly after Dryden’s death. There is nothing revelatory about these observations, which begin with what Dryden himself tells us; yet in treating The State of Innocence as a curiosity, critics have elided a material history in which the circulation of Dryden’s play-poem likely exceeded that of Paradise Lost until the early eighteenth century, a circumstance that bears not only on how we read the opera historically, but also how we construe the cultural matrix in which it is read. There is an instructive parallel in the case of Nahum Tate’s notorious 1681 adaptation of King Lear, a text which has only infrequently found perspicacious comment, notwithstanding that Tate’s Lear ruled the London stage until the early nineteenth century, and so comprises a fascinating counter-history of aesthetic taste. With respect to the ruling aesthetics of The State of Innocence, for as much as Dryden’s preliminaries tout sublimity and greatness of thought, and their apotheosis in the poet of Paradise Lost, his apparent revisionary strategy, as has been widely observed, is to compress and to regularise, shaping and polishing Milton’s chaotic matter. As Nathaniel Lee wrote in commendatory verse, ‘To Mr. DRYDEN, on his POEM of PARADICE’, while ‘Milton did the Wealthy Mine disclose’, he did but ‘rudely cast what you cou’d well dispose’, ‘His was the golden Ore which you refin’d ’ (lines 12–13, 16). Here we have a positive articulation of the Augustan values derided by Marvell and Milton as so much superficial slickness (and 232

augustine: how john dryden read his milton indeed slackness), the assertion of a culturally dominant idiom of beauty and regularity over against Milton’s ‘old fashion’d ’ (line 14) and uncivil discourse. That there is a politics to such counterpointing has already been suggested by Milton’s headnote; and it may well be, as Achinstein argues, that Lee’s criticism self-consciously borrows the accents of Anglican opposition to religious dissent: ‘If Milton was the Old Testament creator, drawing “chaos” out of the “wealthy mine,” Dryden, like Jesus, brought form to this chaos, “new light” out of darkness. A new day was dawning after a mysterious night – as the grace of Christ followed and corrected the rough judgment of the Old Testament God, as the Restoration followed the Revolution (such tropes were widely used to greet the returning Charles in 1660).’29 Surely, though, few readers have seen the opera in quite this way; Dryden even says of Lee’s verses, ‘I hope they will rather be esteem’d the effect of his love to me, than of his deliberate and sober judgment’ (12:86), not perhaps out of self-deprecation as much as an awareness that his treatment of Paradise Lost strains credulity as an exercise in neoclassical decorum. It bears noting, in this regard, that Lee’s praise for The State of Innocence runs at somewhat cross purposes to Dryden’s critical preface, with its counter-intuitive defence of the irregular Longinian sublime and its disdain for ‘the midling or indifferent … which makes few faults, but seldome or never rises to any Excellence’, ‘This kind of Genius [who] writes, indeed correctly’, and ‘with wonderful care makes his business sure: that is, in plain English, neither to be blam’d, nor prais’d’ (12:87–8). The State of Innocence manifestly forgoes competing with Miltonic grandeur, but it does not have as its end a timid or polite correctness; its province is rather the anti-sublime and the mock-heroic, and in calling into question the politics of form, it interrogates Dryden’s heroic poetry as searchingly as it does Milton’s. This sceptical, un-idealising quality aligns The State of Innocence not with the Augustan fables of the 1660s – ‘A new day ­dawning … after a mysterious night’ – but with their collapse in the 1670s, anticipating the deepening crisis of sovereignty towards which that decade was heading. Thus, in a brilliant re-contextualisation of Dryden’s opera in light of its manuscript recensions, von Maltzahn has suggested that The State of Innocence ‘is perhaps best read not in comparison with Paradise Lost’ at all, but instead ‘as a precocious and outstanding contribution to English libertine literature’ of its moment (c. 1673–77), jostling with the likes of the Rochesterian Sodom for the attention of scribal coteries.30 Bearing in mind the traffic between and among the regimes of manuscript, print, and performance in the Restoration, we might also consider that the preprint life of Dryden’s script coincides with and was perhaps sustained by the 233

part iii: rethinking literary histories debuts of Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), Etherege’s Man of Mode (1676), and Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677), the signal texts of Restoration sex comedy. But it seems to me that it is precisely in its libertine aspect that The State of Innocence may be productively read, in the first instance, as strategically re-presenting the tragedy of the fall, and so troubling the basis of Milton’s theodicy. Critics have often been struck by the loucheness of Dryden’s Adam and Eve, and by the decidedly fallen idiom of their discourse and desires in prelapsarian Eden. On first seeing Eve, the felt prospect of ‘bliss’ instantly prompts in Adam a resignation of the immaterial will: ‘My better half, thou softer part of me, / To whom I yield my boasted Soveraignty, / I seek my self, and find not, wanting thee’ (2.3.5–7). This impulse is aggravated  by Eve’s contemplative self-regard, as she stoops to embrace  her  own image in the fountain: ‘Lost e’r ‘tis held; when nearest, far away. / Ah, fair, yet false; ah Being, form’d to cheat, / By seeming kindness, mixt with deep deceipt’ (2.3.25–7). Whereas Milton’s initial depiction of Adam and Eve emphasises their uprightness, their ‘native Honour’ and ‘naked Majestie’ as images of their Maker’s ‘Truth, wisdome, Sanctitude severe and pure / Severe but in true filial freedom plac’t’ (4.288–94), Dryden’s Edenic couple more resembles a courtesan and a willing slave. In treating of their consummation, Adam’s lines mingle Petrarchan self-abasement with the ambition to become an Aretino, instructing himself and Eve in love’s rich pageant: ‘Pity that love thy beauty does beget: / What more I shall desire, I know not yet. / First let us lock’d in close embraces be; / Thence I, perhaps, may teach my self, and thee’ (2.3.48–51), the couplet perhaps recalling the close of Donne’s erotic lyric ‘To His Mistris Going to Bed’, ‘To teach thee, I am naked first; why then / What needs thou have more covering than a man’ (lines 47–8). For her part, Eve seems to delay out of an instinctual coyness (2.3.53–6) and intuitively grasps the power politics of sex not only before the curse of sin but as yet in innocence of holy marriage: ‘I well fore-see, when e’r thy suit I grant, / That I my much-lov’d Soveraignty shall want’ (2.3.66–7). When the happy event does occur, lacking a narrator to limn the mysteries of wedded love, Dryden’s Adam and Eve are made to give speeches on their experience of the nuptial bower, Eve most provocatively, in terms that ventriloquise the ecstatic tropes of courtly verse: When your kind Eyes look’d languishing on mine, And wreathing Arms did soft embraces joyn, A doubtful trembling seiz’d me first all o’r; Then, wishes; and a warmth, unknown before: What follow’d, was all extasie and trance; Immortal pleasures round my swimming eyes did dance,

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augustine: how john dryden read his milton And speechless joys, in whose sweet tumult lost, I thought my Breath, and my new Being lost.    (3.1.39–46)

Adam is somewhat more modest, displacing his own subjectivity into Heaven’s and Nature’s sympathetic response – angelic choirs, trembling firmaments – but adding the oddly voyeuristic conceit of ‘furr’d and  feather’d kind’ seemingly crowding round the marriage bed, while  fish  did leap ‘above the streams, the passing Pomp to view’ (3.1.37–8). But it is not just the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and the creatures that move along the ground who look upon Adam and Eve so enwreathed; so, too, Lucifer, whose envy of God’s newly created race is expressed in the brutally appetitive language of the libertine anti-hero: ‘Why have not I like these, a body too’, he considers, ‘Form’d for the same delights which they pursue? / I could (so variously my passions move) / Enjoy and blast her, in the act of love’ (3.2.92–5). Thus, Dryden foreshadows the dramatic coordinates of the fall, which hinges alternately on the permissiveness and possessiveness borne of the will’s subjection to the expedients of desire. Soliloquising on his acquiescence to Eve’s proposal for maximising their labour by gardening separately, notwithstanding Eve’s disquieting dreams and the archangels’ report of Lucifer’s plot to delude mankind, Adam ruefully complains, ‘In love, what use of prudence can there be?’: More perfect I, and yet more pow’rful she. Blame me not, Heav’n if thou love’s pow’r had’st try’d, What could be so unjust to be deny’d? One look of hers my resolution breaks; Reason it self turns folly when she speaks: And aw’d by her whom it was made to sway, Flatters her pow’r, and does its own betray. (4.1.197–204)

Swayed by Lucifer’s blandishments – that by eating from the tree she should assume a godlike knowledge – Eve wavers as to whether she should share the fruit with Adam, meditating on the prospect of becoming lord over him; only when she contemplates the possibility of being usurped by ‘Some other Eve’ does she resolve, ‘No; he shall eat, and dye with me, or live: / Our equal crimes shall equal fortune give’ (5.1.9–16). The consequences of the fall becoming known, the bitter argument that ensues, with its repartee over the sorry lot of wives and the inconstancy of women, is pure Restoration comedy (5.4.1–77). Added to this that Dryden entirely omits Michael’s revelation to Adam of fallen history in Books XI and XII of Paradise Lost, and the consequent telescoping of human redemption within the play – ‘Death 235

part iii: rethinking literary histories you have seen: now see your race revive, / How happy they in deathless pleasures live’ (5.4.222–3) – a map of misreading would seem to emerge: in place of Milton’s epic theodicy of libertarian free will (‘Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’), Dryden presents a tragicomedy of libertinage (‘In love, what use of prudence can there be?’).31 Further support for this understanding comes in the protracted Act IV debate between Adam and the archangels over divine foreknowledge and human choice. The content of this debate, as Louis Bredvold was the first to note, appears to mirror the famous controversy between Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall, with Adam taking Hobbes’s part and Gabriel and Raphael  that  of Bramhall.32  The shaping influence of Hobbesian materialism on Restoration libertinism was of course widely assumed by contemporaries, making Hobbes’s name a byword for irreligion and sensual licence; hence Anthony Wood’s oft-quoted remark on the Earl of Rochester, that the court ‘not only debauched him but made him a perfect Hobbist’.33 But if Adam’s pessimistic conjectures about the scope of human agency, Can there be freedom, when what now seems free Was founded on some first necessity? For what ere cause can move the will t’ elect Must be sufficient to produce th’ effect: And what’s sufficient must effectual be; Then how is man, thus forc’d by causes free?    (4.1.79–84)

are coded by the play’s official discourse as ‘impious fancies’ (4.1.75) and Malmesbury cant, surely von Maltzahn is right to observe that Adam’s ‘questioning of liberty goes too little answered’.34 Not only are two archangels required to argue on behalf of Bramhall’s compatibilist view against Adam’s Hobbesian determinism, but Adam seemingly remains less than persuaded even after Raphael peremptorily breaks off their discourse with an injunction to ‘obey’ (4.1.111). ‘Hard state of life!’, Adam exclaims,  ‘’Twould show more grace my frailty to confine’, ‘Fore-knowing the success, to leave me free, / Excuses him, and yet supports not me’ (4.1.113–20). God’s foreknowledge may be strictly indifferent to the circumstance of human freedom, yet such indifference, Dryden suggests, hardly rates as good governance. But as much as this may seem a travesty of Milton’s purposes in Paradise Lost – and Dryden’s florid dedication of The State of Innocence to Princess Mary, ‘the most famous and the most feared Roman Catholic in England’, more than hints at this part of his agenda35 – arguably much of the opera’s success lies not in thwarting its source material but rather in how that material is activated vis-à-vis cultural circuits we can only call ‘Miltonic’. While 236

augustine: how john dryden read his milton critics have been quick to see a contrast between the carnality of Dryden’s Adam and Eve and the embodied innocence of Milton’s original pair, the question of prelapsarian sex was nonetheless a point of controversy, as Milton signifies in celebrating the ‘Rites / Mysterious of connubial Love’, Whatever Hypocrites austerely talk Of puritie and place and innocence, Defaming as impure what God declares Pure, and commands to som, leaves free to all.    (4.743–7)

Indeed, according to James Grantham Turner, Milton is ‘virtually unique in ascribing active eroticism, not only to the unfallen Adam and Eve, but to angels both fallen and unfallen’.36 Nor was Milton’s boldness in this regard unremarked by his contemporaries. While Patrick Hume, an early annotator of Paradise Lost, is of Milton’s opinion that ‘all the sensitive Appetites were in absolute obedience to Reason before Adam’s transgression’, his gloss on the passage above testifies to the authority of the contrary view, citing a range of ‘ancient fathers and great Doctors’ – from Gregory of Nyssa to St John Chrysostom to Augustine – who held ‘That if Adam had not sinned, Mankind had been multiplied in some more Angelical manner, and not by Carnal Copulation’.37 In the early eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe protested Milton’s rendering of Adam and Eve’s paradisal union on the grounds that ‘she must have Conceived, for Barrenness seem’d not to consist with the State of Perfection.’38 Alert as Dryden is to real or potential criticism of Paradise Lost, and in light of the emphasis he places on Edenic sex, Dryden’s attunement to the piquancy of the epic on this point seems a given. For those with longer memories, the name of John Milton also would have conjured, among other things, the notorious doctrine of divorce, for which Milton was denounced by William Prynne and the Westminster Assembly as an ‘egregious example of libertine heterodoxy’, in the words of Thomas Corns.39 Was not Independency, Prynne asked rhetorically, and with Milton evidently in his sights, ‘a very Seminar of Schismes, and dangerous divisions in Church, state? a floud-Gate to let in an inundation of all manner of Heresies, Errors, Sects, Religions, distructive opinions, Libertnisme and lawlesnesse among us, without any sufficient means of prevent or suppressing them when introduced?’40 In his Heresiography, or, A description of the hereticks and sectaries of these latter times, Ephraim Pagitt likewise repudiated so-called ‘Divorsers, that would be quit of their wives for slight occasions; and to maintaine this opinion, one hath published a Tractate of divorce, in which the bonds of marriage are let loose to inordinate lust, putting away wives for many other causes, besides that which our Saviour onely approveth’.41 237

part iii: rethinking literary histories The beginning of the end of the state of innocence Dryden’s script may thus be seen to mingle an appreciation for Milton’s radical theology of sex and marriage, and perhaps more broadly for Milton’s inspired poetic vision, with an oblique awareness of his residual identity as a ‘fanatick Saint’, and plays both upon the putative reception of Paradise Lost and on the charged penumbra of Milton’s revolutionary writings and reputation in making of Milton’s epic a titillating Restoration opera. In the diminution of heroic form, we may read something of that Augustan sense of belatedness given voice at times by Dryden and Pope, a concession of the divergence between epic ideals and Dryden’s contemporary milieu (the same milieu Milton’s headnote so vigorously upbraids). But if Dryden and his art are captive to the times, so too is Milton, his fiery Independent conscience, cut off from the radical forces of history, reduced to a form of libertinisme érudit, his prophetic verse – thanks to Dryden’s literary offices – now the source of a popular Stuart entertainment. Thus framed, The State of Innocence is both more and less triumphal a work than commentators have hitherto reckoned. Its success in domesticating Milton, symbolically but also with respect to the marketplace, can no longer be denied, yet entailed in that success is a perceptible deflating of the Augustanism of Dryden’s earlier heroic poetry. Here the political context bears noting. For as Richard Braverman has observed in connection with the increasing intensity of satirical literature depicting Charles as both a libertine and a cully, with the mid-1670s came a sense ‘that a threshold which marked a new phase in the reign had been crossed’.42 Among the witnesses he calls is Sir Edward Dering, who wrote in his diary that for twelve years after the Restoration, ‘we lived in peace, plenty and happiness above all nations of the world. But this blessing was too great to be continued long to those who deserved it so ill as we, and then the nation began to think the court inclined to favour Popery and France’, pointing to the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence and the commencement of the Third Dutch War.43 For the Marvell of An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government and the Whig historians Echard and Oldmixon, the year was 1674. So it was, Braverman posits, that ‘writers began to speculate about the future in ways that made it increasingly clear that the royalist vision of restoration was already anachronistic.’44 This would seem to leave little doubt of the opera’s topicality: Dryden’s universal monarch, but two minutes sentient, is already inquiring of Raphael about the possibility of a female lover with whom to propagate (2.1.34–40), and enjoys scant more than a dozen lines of dialogue with Eve before proposing they should ‘lock’d in close embraces be’ (2.3.50). 238

augustine: how john dryden read his milton A recalibration of the political and the politics of representation may account in some part as well for the opera’s curiously bathetic notion of poetic licence. That is, if we are right to read The State of Innocence as a contribution to libertine literature in the 1670s, then we should also be prepared to consider that the distance between Dryden’s licentious Adam and Bolloxinian, King of Sodom – the mock monarch of Rochester’s burlesque (if he wrote it) – is shorter than might seem, and so marks a transition in Dryden’s conception of the heroic. Indeed, the text to which The State of Innocence clearly points is the mock-heroic (and decidedly Miltonic) Mac Flecknoe, which was composed and began to circulate in manuscript (c. November 1676) even as Dryden’s opera continued to be read by scribal coteries, a poem described by Paul Davis as ‘a vent for the frustration and shame he felt at being in the – infrequent – pay of a monarch who fell far short of the famously high standards set by Augustus in patronage of the arts’.45 In the ambiguously ironised opening of Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden will of course praise the heavenly David for variously imparting his ‘vigorous warmth’, and, ‘wide as his command’, scattering ‘his Maker’s image through the land’ (lines 7–10). Part of the fabric of these satires, in other words, is not just the use of Miltonic language to mock-heroic effect, but an interpellation of Milton’s oppositional view of Stuart monarchy and its literary culture. Marvell’s humiliating image of Dryden drudging like a ‘pack-horse’ to tag Milton’s points – the very emblem of the opera in literary history – is thus not only interested but premature, for it is in The State of Innocence that Dryden plots the complex effects of some of his greatest Augustan poetry. Notes Throughout this chapter, Dryden’s works are cited from The Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg et al., 20 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956–2000). Milton’s texts are cited from The Riverside Milton, ed. R. Flannagan (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 1 E. Davis, ‘First look: Bradley Cooper as Lucifer in “Paradise Lost” (plus panel quotes and concept art from Comic-Con)’, Movies.com, 25 July 2011, accessed 29 August 2016, http://royale9.com/movie-news/paradise-lost-movie-images/3791. Proyas is quoted from Davis’s excerpted transcript of the panel. 2 See V. A. Dearing’s ‘Commentary’ in Dryden, Works, 12:320–1. 3 J. Toland, A Complete Collection of the Historical, Political, and Miscellaneous Works of John Milton (Amsterdam [London], 1698), pp. 40–1. 4 E. N. Hooker, ‘Dryden and the atoms of Epicurus’, HLQ, 24:3 (1957), p. 179. 5 A. Welch, ‘Losing paradise in Dryden’s State of Innocence’, in C. W. Durham and K. A. Pruitt (eds), Uncircumscribed Mind: Reading Milton Deeply (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna

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part iii: rethinking literary histories University Press, 2008), p. 22. Other discussions include M. Frank, ‘Staging criticism, staging Milton: John Dryden’s The State of Innocence’, The Eighteenth Century, 34:1 (1993), pp. 45–64; S. Achinstein, ‘Milton’s spectre in the Restoration: Marvell, Dryden, and literary enthusiasm’, HLQ, 59:1 (1996), pp. 1–29; L. Martz, ‘Dryden’s poem of paradise: The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man’, in C. Rawson and A. Santesso (eds), John Dryden (1631–1700): His Politics, His Plays, and His Poets (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 180–97; J. Airey, ‘Eve’s nature, Eve’s nurture in Dryden’s Edenic opera’, SEL, 50:3 (2010), pp. 529–44. Unfortunately, Tobias Gabel’s booklength study, Paradise Reframed: Milton, Dryden, and the Politics of Literary Adaptation, 1658–1679 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016), only came into my hands as this chapter was going into production.  6 The Early Lives of John Milton, ed. H. Darbishire (New York and London: Constable and Co., 1932), p. 335.  7 See D. Griffin, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ch. 8; S. N. Zwicker, ‘Milton, Dryden, and the politics of literary controversy’, in G. MacLean (ed.), Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 136–58; N.  von Maltzahn, ‘Dryden’s Milton and the theatre of imagination’, in D. Hopkins and P. Hammond (eds), John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 32–56; C. D’Addario, ‘Dryden and the historiography of exile: Milton and Virgil in Dryden’s late period’, HLQ, 67:4 (2004), pp. 553–72.  8 Zwicker, ‘Politics of literary controversy’, p. 140. On Milton’s imaginative response to Stuart spectacle, see. L. L. Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). See as well the essays in B. Hoxby and A. B. Coiro (eds), Milton in the Long Restoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).  9 Griffin, Regaining Paradise, p. 2. 10 See H. Love, English Clandestine Satire, 1660–1702 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), especially the central chapters on ‘The court lampoon’ and ‘State satire’. 11 S. Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, ed. R. Lonsdale, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2:149–50. 12 J. Toland, The Life of John Milton (London, 1699), p. 129. See the prefaces to Howard’s Four New Plays (1665) and The Great Favourite (1668) for his dispute with Dryden. 13 M. McKeon, ‘Paradise Lost in the long Restoration, 1660–1742: the parody of form’, in Milton in the Long Restoration, p. 503. 14 M. Freedman, ‘Milton and Dryden on rhyme’, HLQ, 24:4 (1961), p. 338. 15 See Achinstein, ‘Milton’s spectre’, p. 3. 16 The early reception of Paradise Lost is witnessed by Milton’s printer Samuel Simmons in a note added in 1668 to the remaining copies of the first edition: ‘Courteous Reader, There was no Argument at first intended to the Book, but for the satisfaction of many that have desired it, I have procur’d it, and withall a reason of that which stumbled many others, why the Poem Rimes not.’ Paradise Lost: A Poem in Ten Books (London, 1668), sig. A2r. 17 S. N. Zwicker, ‘John Dryden meets, rhymes, and says farewell to John Milton: a Restoration drama in three acts’, in Milton in the Long Restoration, p. 182. 18 The translation is that of S. H. Butcher in the Loeb Classical Library.

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augustine: how john dryden read his milton 19 N. von Maltzahn, ‘Milton’s readers’, in D. Danielson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1999), p. 247. See also von Maltzahn, ‘The first reception of Paradise Lost’, RES, 47 (1999), pp. 479–99; W. Poole, ‘The early reception of Paradise Lost’, Literature Compass, 1 (2004), pp. 1–13. 20 Johnson, Lives, p. 293. 21 H. Gardner, A Reading of ‘Paradise Lost’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 1. 22 R. Bell, in Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Great Britain, vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1839), p. 276, purports to cite this view from one of Waller’s letters, but the letter has not been traced. 23 Johnson, Lives, p. 290. 24 G. Teskey, ‘Milton’s early English verse’, in N. McDowell and N. Smith (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 88. 25 Griffin, Regaining Paradise, p. 144. 26 Cf. P. S. Havens, ‘Dryden’s “Tagged Version” of Paradise Lost’, in H. Craig (ed.), Essays in Dramatic Literature: The Parrott Presentation Volume (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935), p. 384: ‘[If] garbled versions had not got abroad, he never would have allowed it to be published.’ 27 See Dryden, Works, 20:370–2. 28 Von Maltzahn, ‘Theatre of imagination’, p. 40. 29 Achinstein, ‘Milton’s spectre’, p. 13. 30 Von Maltzahn, ‘Theatre of imagination’, pp. 39–40. 31 Though her argument runs slightly differently, M. Cowansage’s brief article ‘The libertine-libertarian dichotomy in Dryden’s The State of Innocence’, English Language Notes, 32:3 (1984), pp. 38–44, suggests the usefulness of these conceptual terms. See also K. W. Gransden, ‘Milton, Dryden, and the comedy of the fall’, Essays in Criticism, 26 (1976), pp. 116–33. 32 L. I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1934), p. 68. More fully, see B. King, ‘The significance of Dryden’s State of Innocence’, SEL, 4:3 (1964), pp. 373–91. 33 A. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, quoted in D. Farley Hills (ed.), Rochester: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1972), p. 170. 34 Von Maltzahn, ‘Theatre of imagination’, p. 37. 35 Welch, ‘Losing paradise’, p. 225. 36 J. G. Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 53. 37 P. Hume, Notes on Milton’s Paradise Lost (London, 1695), pp. 160–1. 38 D. Defoe, A Review of the State of the British Nation, 8:159 (29 March 1712), p. 638. 39 T. Corns, ‘John Milton, Roger Williams, and the limits of toleration’, in S. Achinstein and E. Sauer (eds), Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 83. 40 W. Prynne, Twelve considerable serious Questions touching Church Government (London, 1644), p. 7. 41 E. Pagitt, Heresiography (London, 2nd edn, 1645), p. 142. 42 R. Braverman, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 116.

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part iii: rethinking literary histories 43 Diaries and State Papers of Sir Edward Dering, Second Baronet, ed. M. F. Bond (London: HMSO, 1976), pp. 125–6. 44 Braverman, Plots and Counterplots, pp. 116–17. 45 P. Davis, ‘Dryden and the invention of Augustan culture’, in S. N. Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 79.

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Part IV: Afterword

On behalf of the Age of Andrew Marvell? Steven N. Zwicker

The Age of Shakespeare, of course; the Age of Milton, no doubt; the Age of Dryden, yes, and he would have been pleased by the notion that those contentious years from the Restoration of Charles II to the end of the century belonged to him – he had, variously, said as much. But the Age of Andrew Marvell? What would the elusive poet, that shadowy and eccentric figure, have made of such an idea? He tried hard to disappear from his own time: he wrote extraordinary lyric poetry only to secrete the verse not simply from public view but from view altogether; he wrote and circulated scalding satires on court corruption and cowardice but only from behind a veil of anonymity; he engaged in brilliant ridicule and polemic but feared shipwreck on the billows of print and publicity; he wrote hundreds of letters to the Hull Corporation and Trinity House but held his private life apart; he wrote more intimately to his nephew, Will Popple, but even then escaped at moments of trouble into third-person anonymity. Perhaps he married – Miscellaneous Poems includes a note to the reader, signed on behalf of her ‘late dear Husband’ by Mary Marvell – but there is almost no independent evidence of such a marriage. And just when we think that we have heard the poet’s distinctive voice, his particular rhythms and gestures, we discover that he was adopting the words of another. He was an astonishing ventriloquist. What could the Age of Andrew Marvell have meant to a figure of so many voices and evasions? And what does it mean for us so to imagine his time? Of course, Andrew Marvell was not only a figure of shadows and hesitations. He may have conducted his life as a series of disappearing acts, but he also made himself public in striking ways. He stood for Parliament in 1659 and was a member to the end of his life, giving speeches, being appointed to committees, provoking fisticuffs in the House. In the 1650s he was tutor to Mary Fairfax, Lord Fairfax’s daughter, and to William Dutton, Oliver Cromwell’s ward; during the Restoration he belonged 245

part iv: afterword to the Buckingham circle, had patronage relations with Philip Lord Wharton and the Earl of Anglesey, and at the Earl of Carlisle’s request joined diplomatic missions to Holland and to Muscovy. But if we return to the other side of the equation, to think of the life as a balancing act between privacy and publicity, there is the record of the strange and estranged acts of self-imagining that he left behind in his poetry: repeatedly a figure to the side, in the shadows, on a riverbank, encamped behind trees, bound by vines, stumbling on melons. Pastoral solitudes are part of this imaginative record, but the writings also offer images of heroic endeavour and of heraldic self-imagining, and it is not only in the strange turns of lyric poems like The Unfortunate Lover that the poet makes visible (but to whom?) the record of a hero’s life. He also seems poised for flight as political satirist, as the king’s truth-teller, as embattled knight on the ramparts of public knowledge, ready to strike blows on behalf of the kingdom of conscience. And we might complicate this portrait by offering a sense of Marvell’s political ideals, if there were any. Or perhaps there were too many, and not all of them fit together. Early on he paid tribute to the birth of Princess Anne in Latin and Greek verse; he wrote commemorative verse on Francis Lord Villiers, Royalist soldier and son of the Duke of Buckingham, slain in the Civil Wars; he wrote and signed commendatory verse to that perfect Cavalier, Richard Lovelace; he contributed to the book of elegies on Lord Hastings; later he wrote Latin distiches for Louis XIV’s Louvre. At some point, perhaps June or July of 1650, he commemorated, and in a manner that seems altogether superior to partisan response, the most transfixing event of a century full of transfixing events: the execution of Charles I and the founding of an English republic. An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland has been read brilliantly by generations of scholars and critics, but there is something asymptotic about it all, about every approach to the Ode: the closer we get, the more elusive the poem’s overt and angled sympathies grow, its lines holding one another in a most delicate embrace and a most delicate balance. If this seems too fine, too wiredrawn, we may recall the poet’s own estimate of the Civil Wars: ‘I think the Cause was too good to have been fought for.’ A beautiful verdict, but not entirely predictable from the poet either of The First Anniversary or Tom May’s Death. ‘And yet …’ (that phrase must be the standard rhetorical gesture for thinking about Andrew Marvell), before we get too caught up in delicate assays and adjustments, we should remember the abrupt, brutal imagery in the advice that Marvell gave to painters essaying court portraits, the portrait for example of Lady Castlemaine, to paint ‘Her, not her picture, for she now grows old’. The brilliant reading of Castlemaine in Last 246

zwicker: on behalf of the age of marvell? Instructions may not be the most indelicate of Marvell’s portraits – though it is quite indelicate enough – but it shows his remarkable ability at once to excoriate and to empathise. We might also want to place somewhere along a spectrum of political positions the envoi Marvell wrote for Last Instructions, where he imagines the perfectly constituted state. That ideal was essayed on behalf of the figure at the centre of the Restoration court, the person of the king himself, though earlier in Last Instructions Marvell had limned, by candlelight, the colours of the king’s bedchamber – for this poet both the erotic centre and the site of the deepest confusion and corruption of the court. The Age of Andrew Marvell – what singular conviction might cover his understanding of kingdom, commonwealth, and conscience over the decades from the outbreak of civil war in the 1640s to the battles over toleration in the 1670s? This Marvell may seem a shade too pliant: elegist to aristocrats, lyric poet to the Republic, laureate of the Lord Protector, client of aristocratic Puritans, scourge of court corruption, ally to the late Stuart princes in their pursuit of religious toleration (though mean-spirited critic of the tolerant and tolerationist Dutch Republic, too). But who among Marvell’s literary or intellectual contemporaries did not exhibit some flexibility in the pursuit of patronage and public service? Perhaps Milton is the prime example, the only exhibit of unwavering ideals. But even Milton’s great advocacy of writerly freedom from prepublication licensing seems compromised by the role of censor that he assumed in relation to his work for the Commonwealth Council’s Office of Foreign Tongues. There are, of course, other careers against which to measure Andrew Marvell’s, and many trail signs of convenience and compromise: that of John Locke, of Edmund Waller, of Abraham Cowley, of Thomas Hobbes, and of John Dryden whose career became a kind of flagship of political and spiritual compromise. And there were other such careers, perhaps now lost to view: portrait painters who turned from aristocratic patrons to Puritan worthies and back again, stationers who thrived under contradictory political regimes. Do Marvell’s accommodations – if we can discern them and follow their tracks and contradictions and oblique angles – offer a guide for the perplexed, a guide to his age? Different schools and generations of historicism have brought us close to the literary and political worlds in which Marvell worked. We have also developed a sense of Marvell’s social encounters, his relations among a network of patrons, friends, fellow poets – ancient and modern. These constituted both a form of sociality and a poetics: conventional allusion and imitation, but also borrowings, adaptations, echoes, and outright thefts. It was one thing to write an ode in imitation of Horace and to call it An Horatian Ode – though how exactly it imitates Horace 247

part iv: afterword is still a matter of debate – but it seems quite another to lift words, images, phrases, whole lines from contemporary or near-contemporary romances,  plays, and lyrics, to quote, to ventriloquise, and yet to turn ventriloquism into one’s own art. In honour of these patchwork assemblies some have called Marvell a magpie poet; a striking epithet, not only for the magpie’s  opportunistic and omnivorous habits but also for the magpie’s singular ability to recognise itself in a mirror. Ventriloquism and adaptation, echoes and mirrors – we are, of course, in the middle of a sociality and a poetics at once singular and yet inextricably linked to others, isolate  and yet worldly. Perhaps it is because (or in spite) of these relations  that Marvell developed a sense of the deep privacy of poetry, that it holds a mirror up to one’s most intimate arguments and dreams. Echoes and adaptations drew Marvell towards a world of ancient and modern poetry, but his textual encounters were not only intimate affiliations. There were also abrasions and antagonisms, and from these we can develop a sense of the poet, too, of the dangers of his polemical engagements, and of the attendant vulnerabilities he came to feel in doing battle with High Church intolerance or in the hunting of popery and arbitrary government. He knew very well how to perform, how to fashion hostile polemics – funny and abrasive demolition jobs – but he also registered his fears of such a world. He guarded himself with anonymity, but his authorship of squibs and scandals was often enough rumoured, and his assaults were answered in kind. To these encounters – though the poet may not have much appreciated the rumours and revelations – we owe our understanding not only of the character of Restoration publicity, and of Marvell’s programmes and ideals, but also of the reputation he gained in his years of public battle, and of the complex character that he came to inhabit. For the hostilities and the temper and bravado Marvell displayed in his polemics reveal aspects of the personality, even the psyche, of a writer too easily assimilated to the pastoral world – its silence and solitudes – that he created in his poetry and that he held apart from public life. He is the philosophe in The Garden, the champion of tender conscience, but also the smirking pamphleteer. To what age do such contradictory figures and figurations belong? In our own age of big data and distant reading we might be tempted to glance, thanks to Google, at numbers: searching ‘the Age of Shakespeare’ yields 455,000 results; ‘the Age of Milton’, 372,000 results; ‘the Age of Dryden’, 232,000 results; ‘the Age of Marvell’, 4 results. The numbers might surprise – not the large number of results for ‘the Age of Shakespeare’, though we might expect even more; Shakespeare seems only just to be edging out Milton despite the fact that Shakespeare is 248

zwicker: on behalf of the age of marvell? read worldwide, performed in many of the world’s languages, illustrated, adapted, filmed, fashioned and refashioned. In how many copies is his close competitor read? The number of results for Dryden may not surprise, but what is one to make of four results for Marvell? In one way it seems bizarre, given the superb scholarly work of the past few decades, the new editions of the poetry and the prose, the new biography, the conferences, papers, and monographs – together they give a sense of the writer now emergent from behind the handful of anthology pieces, emergent too from the misleading association with what were once called ‘the metaphysicals’, and from the long shadow of John Milton. And yet there is something about the visibility or rather the invisibility of the poet that may help us understand why there are not more ‘results’ when we query the Age of Marvell. Will in the World, as Stephen Greenblatt’s wonderful book is called, is beyond discussion; and so is ‘John Milton in the world’ – the poet himself had much to say on this score. It is more difficult to think of ‘Andrew Marvell in the world’ – he does not make such an enterprise easy. Nonetheless, in ways that I hope to have suggested, there is something about the contradictions and contingencies, the evasions and singular brilliance of Andrew Marvell that makes such a construct, such an age, not just imaginable but especially apt, for he opens the middle decades of the seventeenth century – those years of civil war, of revolution, and restoration – in incomparable ways. The Age of Marvell reminds us of how this world – his world – was bound together in a career and in writings and affinities, and yet how difficult it is to see that world in exact outline, with sharp divisions and clear lines of association. A blurred picture, an inexact image, Ludwig Wittgenstein once suggested, might be more useful, less distorting, than a clear picture, and so we might think that the blurred lines of affiliation and affection, the fluidity or mobility or uncertainty revealed in Marvell’s writings offer the correct degree of resolution for an image of his age. But we should add that Wittgenstein also asked if a blurred concept or an indistinct picture was a concept or picture at all. The Age of Marvell: four results may be just the right number. *** It remains for me to say what a pleasure it has been to be associated with the essays and imagination of this volume, and to have read, and thought about, and written about this age with two wonderful historians, Derek Hirst and Kevin Sharpe. It has also been a privilege to have studied the work of Marvell at a time when a cohort of Marvellians have transformed our understanding of the poet and polemicist, and to have read 249

part iv: afterword seventeenth-century literature with undergraduates and graduate students at Washington University over several decades. They have given patient and generous attention to what must have seemed, at times, a strange and challenging set of preoccupations. Their energies and intellectual engagement, their conversation and their writings – their companionship – have made our common enterprise wonderfully rewarding.

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Index

Index

Achinstein, S. 227, 233 Addison, J. 57–8 aesthetics 6, 17, 22, 25, 29–30, 34–5, 49, 99, 103, 105–7, 232 affect studies 2–3, 25–6, 104–7 Alighieri, D. 153 Anglicanism 2, 56 68–9, 120–3, 233 Anglo-Dutch relations First Anglo-Dutch War 57 Second Anglo-Dutch War 57, 172–6 Third Anglo-Dutch War 238 Ankersmit, F. 108 Aristotle 154 Augustine, M. C. 2, 5, 11–12 autobiography 87 Bacon, F. 77, 87 Bagshaw, E. 118–19, 126 Baker, H. 25 Barnes, J. 28 Baxter, R. 117 Behn, A. 19, 233 Berkenhead (Sir) J. 47 Blair, A. 77, 83 Bond, J. 132–3 Bramhall, J. 59, 66, 236 Braverman, R. 238–9 Browne, T. 95–8, 103–4, 108 Garden of Cyrus, The 98 Hydriotaphia, Urn-burial 97–8 Buckingham, Second Duke of 7, 60–5, 246 The Rehearsal 60–5 Burrow, C. 190, 192 Busby, J. 118 Busby, R. 118, 123–4 Butler, S. 119–20, 192

Cambers, A. 77–8 Campbell, L. 25 Carew, T. 114–15 Castlehaven, 2nd Earl of 115, 116 censorship 9, 131–43 Chambers, A. B. 198–9 Charles I of England 35, 37, 40–7, 105, 132, 171, 177, 195–6, 203 Eikon Basilike 40–2, 44–5, 105 execution 36, 37–47, 105 Charles II of England 1, 56–7, 63, 101, 149, 151, 155, 156, 158, 172–6, 196, 199–200, 203, 226, 230, 233, 245 Chartier, R. 76 child abuse, early modern 9, 113–26 Children’s Petition, The 120–6 Clarendon, First Earl of 173–4 Clegg, C. 132 coffeehouses 34, 56, 58, 61 cognitive literary studies 104–7 Cohen, J. J. 100 Collier, J. 150 Corns, T. 237 Cowley, A. 27–8, 101, 229–30, 231 Crane, M. T. 107 Croce, B. 102 Cromwell, O. 1, 11, 35–7, 43, 57, 63, 140, 191, 195, 206–19 Daniel, D. 107 Davis, K. 100 Davis, P. 239 deconstruction 19, 21 Defoe, D. 237 Dinshaw, C. 100 dissent, religious see nonconformity

251

index Donne, J. 18, 26–7, 103, 181, 183, 219 Douglas, A. 11, 189, 199, 201–3 Dryden, J. 1, 5, 6, 10–12, 23, 27, 34, 60–3, 103, 116, 175, 197, 208, 214 Age of 245, 248–9 Augustanism 12, 27, 226, 232, 238–9 heroic drama 12, 60–2, 65, 227–8, 231 imitation 11, 60–1 libertinism 12, 226, 232–7 Milton and 11–12, 23, 224–39 rhyme 227–9 works Absalom and Achitophel 155, 225, 226, 239 Aeneis 153, 225 Annus Mirabilis 155, 158, 175, 197, 227 Astraea Redux 156 Conquest of Granada 60, 227 Epistle Dedicatory for The Vocal and Instrumental Musick of the Prophetess 156 Essay of Dramatic Poesy 227 Hind and the Panther, The 156, 225 Indian Emperour, The 227 King Arthur 10, 149–66 Mac Flecknoe 239 Prologue to His Royal Highness 156 Prologue to the Dutchess, on Her Return from Scotland 156 Prologue to The Unhappy Favourite 155 Rival Ladies, The 23, 227 State of Innocence, The 11–12, 224–39 Threnodia Augustalis 155, 158 To His Sacred Majesty 155 Dubrow, H. 25 Dzelzainis, M. 190 ecocriticism 2–3, 10–11, 150 Eikon Alethine 40–1 Eikon e Piste 41 elegy 11, 35, 47, 184, 206–19 Empson, W. 18, 26 Engagement controversy 35–6 English Civil War 1, 7, 9–10, 23, 56–7, 97, 101–2, 131–2, 159, 176, 247–8 epic 11–12, 25, 161, 173, 190–4, 200–3, 224–5, 227, 230, 237–8 Etherege, G. 234 Evelyn, J. 157, 160–1, 170–1, 191–2

Fairfax, E. 193 Fairfax, M. 113, 202 Fairfax, T. 245 feminism 19–20 Fish, S. 98–9 Foucault, M. 28, 100 Friedman, D. 207 Gass, W. 7, 21–2, 33, 50 Gauden, J. 40 genre 8, 11, 20, 38, 41, 60, 76, 82, 86, 101, 103, 119, 190 Geoffrey of Monmouth 157 Ghibbesius, J. A. 169–70 Glorious Revolution 54, 149–51, 153, 156 Goldberg, J. 99–100 Góngora, L. de 10, 169, 177–85 Grady, H. 98–9 Greenblatt, S. 20, 99, 249 Griffin, D. 225 Habermas, J. 33, 57–8 Harrington, J. 172 Harrison, T. 83 Hartlib, S. 77, 83, 85 Hawkes, T. 98–9 Helgerson, R. 40 Herbert, G. 23–4, 27, 88 works The Church-porch 27 The Collar 23–4 Herrick R. 28–9 Hickeringill, E. 56, 58 Hills, H. 142 Hippocrates 154 Hirst, D. 5–9, 21, 41, 114, 189–90, 207, 249 historical phenomenology 104, 106–7 historicism 5–6, 8–9, 20–2, 25–6, 28–30, 95–108, 247 humoral psychology 154 Hobbes, T. 1–2, 101, 236 Hogan, P. C. 107 Holberton, E. 207, 214–15 Homer 22, 150, 219, 228, 229, 231 Howard (Sir) R. 116, 227, 228 Hume, P. 237 Hunscot, J. 139 Interregnum 56, 131 James, Duke of York see James II of England

252

index James I of England, 132 James II of England 56–7, 63–4, 149–50, 157, 159, 170, 174, 197, 200, 224, 230 Jermyn, T. 140–1 Johnson, S. 226, 230 Jonson, B. 26, 104, 229 King’s Cabinet Opened, The 42 Knoppers, L. L. 206, 213–14 Lake, P. 85 Lanyer, A. 29 Larner, W. 139 Lee, N. 232–3 Legouis, P. 206–7 Levellers 2, 137–43 Levinson, M. 25 Lex Forcia 123–5 licensing 9, 57, 135, 137 see also censorship; Parliament, Licensing Order of 1643 Lilburne, J. 138–43 trial 139–42 literary theory 19–20 pleasure, literary 25–30 Little Ice Age 10, 150 Locke, J. 101, 117 Love, H. 226 Lovelace, R. 156 Louis XIV of France 149, 155, 172 Maguire, N. K. 38 manuscript culture 44, 75–7, 86, 184, 226, 231–3 Marprelate, M. 139 Marshall, A. 206, 214 Marvell, A. 3–5, 7–11, 21, 33–4, 42, 63, 65, 113–14, 117, 120, 122–4, 126, 225, 226, 230, 232 Age of 245, 247, 249 ambivalence 35, 37, 43–7, 215 child abuse 9, 113–14, 117, 120–4 European context 169–85 Góngora, L. de and 177–85 imitation and allusion in 10–11, 33–4, 48–51, 64–5, 67–8, 71, 178–85, 198–203, 213–19 indeterminacy 3–4, 59 Milton and 42–3, 45, 225 politics of 3, 35–6, 38, 42–7, 63–4 print culture 7, 35–7, 44, 48–51, 69–72 romance 189–203

Shakespeare and 206–19 transnationalism 10–11, 169, 185 Waller and 189–203 works Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England, An 63–4 Character of Holland, The 174 Garden, The 248 Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, An 7, 34–8, 42–51, 246, 247–8 First Anniversary of the Government under O. C., The 216, 246 Last Instructions to a Painter, The 10–11, 171, 173, 189, 200–1, 246–7 Mower against Gardens, The 177 On Mr Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ 225 Poem upon the Death of O. C., A 11, 206–19 Rehearsal Transpros’d, The 7–8, 34, 56, 59–60, 63–72, 120–1, 123, 211–13, 219 Tom May’s Death 246 Unfortunate Lover, The 122, 124, 126, 246 Upon Appleton House 113, 176 Mary II of England 141, 150 McElligot, J. 134 McKeon, M. 227 Menon, M. 99–100 Mercurius Pragmaticus 39–40, 43 Milton, J. 1, 4, 11–12, 22–3, 40, 96, 136–7, 152, 154, 159, 161, 171, 216, 219 Age of 245, 248–9 literary form 22–3 Dryden and 11–12, 23, 224–5, 231–9 Marvell and 42–3 works Areopagitica 1, 132, 136–7 Eikonoklastes 40–3, 105 Paradise Lost 11–12, 22, 24, 96, 102, 152, 154, 159, 161–2, 224–39 Poems (1645) 97 Moderate, The 39 Monck, G. 202 Moretti, F. 9, 134 Nagel, A. 103 Narveson, K. 77–8, 86

253

index regicide see Charles I, execution of republicanism 2, 35, 172, 174 Restoration 56–7, 61, 63, 97, 101–2, 125, 155, 156 literary culture 11–12, 23, 61 print culture 7–8 Richards, I. A. 17–18 Rochester, 2nd Earl of 115, 197, 233 romance 190, 192, 195–6, 198, 200, 203 Ross, K. 104 royalism 2, 35, 38, 43–4, 46–7, 143 Ruyter, M. de 10, 173–4, 198

Nedham, M. 1, 36, 42, 50, 119–20 network theory 2–3 New Criticism 18–20 New Formalism 7, 24–5, 105–6 New Historicism 7, 20–1, 99, 102, 104, 106 newsbooks see pamphlets, political newspapers see pamphlets, political nonconformity 2, 56, 65–71, 85, 120 Overton, R. 139, 143 Ovid 154, 156, 191–2 Metamorphoses 154 Tristia 156 Pagitt, E. 237 pamphlets, political 7, 9, 33–7, 39–47, 49–50, 104, 132–5, 138–9, 143 panegyric 190, 195 Parker, G. 151, 159 Parker, S. 7, 59–60, 63–72, 120–1, 123, 211–12 Parliament (England) 1, 9, 38, 40, 47, 56–7, 63, 122–3, 125, 132–6, 138–9 Licensing Act of 1649 143 Licensing Order of 1643 9, 134–6, 138 Patterson, A. 219 Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages of Parliament, A 39, 45–6, 133 periodisation 100–2 Pope, A. 150, 170 presentism 98–100, 113 Prideaux, E. 140 Prince, T. 140, 142–3 print culture 6, 9, 33–4, 57–9, 131–6, 143 virtuality 58–9, 65, 67, 69–73 privacy 59 reading 78–9 Prynne, W. 138–9, 237 public sphere 7–8, 33, 57–9, 68, 71–3, 132 Purcell, H. 10, 149, 153 Puritanism 85 anti-theatricality 38 devotional reading and writing 8, 77–8, 82, 85–9 Quevedo, F. de 182–5 reading, history and habits of 2, 5–6, 8, 75–6, 78–89, 105

satire 11, 60, 63, 173–4, 184, 211, 213, 226, 231, 239 schoolroom, early modern 117–24 scribal culture see manuscript culture Seaver, P. 75 Sebald, W. G. 95–8, 104, 108 Austerlitz 97–8 Settle, E. 229 Shakespeare, W. 11, 26, 39, 42, 98, 104–5, 115–16, 157–9, 208–16, 219, 229 Age of 245, 248 works Antony and Cleopatra 115 Coriolanus 115–16 1 Henry IV 11 Henry V 159 Richard III 42 Tempest, The 157, 158–9 Sonnets 26, 65 Sharpe, K. 5, 76, 86, 249 Sidney (Sir), P. 27 Smith, N. 34, 191, 207, 209, 219 Spenser, E. 197–8 Stanley, T. 181–2 Starr, G. G. 106–7 Stationers Company, The 135–7, 139 Steele, R. 57–8 Stewart, A. 118–19 Stone, L. 117, 126 Strier, R. 25 Tasso, T. 11, 193, 197–9, 201–3, 229 Tate, N. 232 Terry, E. 139 theatricality 37–42 Thomas (Sir), K. 124, 125–6 Thirty Years War 159 toleration 3, 5, 34, 136, 156, 247 Tonson, J. 230

254

index Tory 2, 226 transnationalism 10–11 Turner, J. G. 237 Tusser, T. 117–18 Udall, N. 118 Virgil 116, 153, 193, 198, 201–3, 219, 228, 229, 231 von Maltzahn, N. 230, 232–3 Walker, C. 142–3 Wall, W. 29 Wallace, J. 3, 35 Waller, E. 11, 208, 214, 230 Instructions to a Painter 190, 200 Of a War with Spain, and a Fight at Sea 191–6, 201 On St. James’s Park 199 Wallington, N. 8, 75–89 devotional practice 77–8, 82, 85–9

Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington 75–89 reading and writing habits 75–6, 78–9 Walwyn, W. 137–8, 142–3 Whig 2, 120, 131, 154, 161, 238 government 154 Welch, A. 225 Wilcher, R. 35–6 William III of England 10, 150–1, 155, 157, 162 Williams, C. 37 Wilson-Okamura, D. S. 22 Winn, J. 160 Wittgenstein, L. 249 Woodward, H. 136–7 Worden, B. 35–6 Wycherley, W. 233 Zwicker, S. N. 5–6, 12, 21, 29, 33–4, 76, 86, 97, 114, 150, 189–90, 200, 207

255