Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature

Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature

Claude J. Summers Ted-Larry Pebworth, Editors

University of Missouri Press

Fault Lines and Controversies

in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature

This page intentionally left blank

Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature

Edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth

University of Missouri Press

Columbia and London

Copyright © 2002 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 06 05 04 03 02 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fault lines and controversies in the study of seventeenthcentury English literature / edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8262-1423-1 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700— History and criticism. 2. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—17th century. 3. Literature and history—Great Britain—History—17th century. 4. Great Britain—Intellectual life—17th century. 5. Great Britain—Civilization—17th century. I. Summers, Claude J. II. Pebworth, Ted-Larry. PR431 .F38 2002 820.9004—dc21 2002028797  ™ This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Kristie Lee Typesetter: The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printer and Binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Galliard and Nimbus Sans D Black

In Gratitude to

the Supporters of and Participants in the University of Michigan– Dearborn Biennial Renaissance Conference Series, 1974–2000

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth

Introduction

1

Robert C. Evans

“What Is Truth?”: Defining and Defending Theoretical Pluralism

10

Catherine Gimelli Martin

The Ahistoricism of the New Historicism: Knowledge as Power versus Power as Knowledge in Bacon’s New Atlantis 22 Dennis Flynn

Conjecture in the Writing of Donne’s Biography, with a Modest Proposal 50 Dan Jaeckle

Marvell’s “Mower against Gardens”: Reconsidering Bakhtinian Dialogism 62 Tobias Gregory

In Defense of Empson: A Reassessment of Milton’s God

73

Elizabeth Sauer

Milton and Dryden on the Restoration Stage

88

Kate Narveson

Profession or Performance? Religion in Early Modern Literary Study Jeffrey Johnson

John Donne and the Socinian Heresy

vii

130

111

viii

Contents

P. G. Stanwood

Critical Directions in the Study of Early Modern Sermons

140

Sharon Cadman Seelig

The Poets of the Renaissance; or, The Illusions of My Youth

156

Joan Faust

Donne on Love: Sometimes the End Just Doesn’t Justify the Means

170

Cristina Malcolmson

“The Explication of Whiteness and Blackness”: Skin Color and the Physics of Color in the Works of Robert Boyle and Margaret Cavendish 187 William Shullenberger

Milton’s Lady and Lady Milton: Chastity, Prophecy, and Gender in A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle 204 Notes on Contributors Index

231

227

Acknowledgments

This book and the scholarly meeting from which it originated have profited from the great effort, wide learning, and scholarly generosity of the conference steering committee: Diana Treviño Benet, Achsah Guibbory, Robert B. Hinman, Judith Scherer Herz, and Michael C. Schoenfeldt helped referee the submissions to the conference and offered valuable suggestions for revision. Their contributions have been extensive, and we join the authors of the essays in expressing gratitude for their insights and devotion. It is also our pleasure to acknowledge the support of Robert L. Simpson, provost and vice chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan–Dearborn.

ix

This page intentionally left blank

Fault Lines and Controversies

in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature

This page intentionally left blank

Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth

Introduction

This volume explores some of the significant theoretical and practical fault lines and controversies in the field of seventeenth-century literary study. The turn into the twenty-first century is an appropriate time to take stock of the state of the field. As part of that stock-taking, we need to assess both where literary study of the early modern period has been and where it might desirably go. Hence, many of the essays in this collection look both backward and forward. They chart the changes in the field over the past half century, while also looking forward to more change in the future. Indeed, most of the essays—either implicitly or explicitly—offer desiderata for the field. Some of the essays collected here explore the fault lines—or points of friction, vulnerability, and division—that emerged in literary study of all periods at the end of the twentieth century, such as theory, gender, sexuality, race, and religion, while others are more narrowly focused on fault lines and controversies peculiar to the study of Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature. Even as they confront large issues, however, nearly all of them also examine and illuminate particular works of literature. That is, these essays engage theory, but they also illustrate their points concretely by enacting practical criticism of works ranging from Bacon’s New Atlantis to Milton’s Samson Agonistes and from Calvinist meditations to Marvell’s “Mower against Gardens.” What emerges from the collection as a whole is a sense of the field’s dynamism and vitality. Rather than the exhaustion or ennui characteristic of fin de siècle assessment, the dominant mood of these essays is a cautious optimism. The contributors are by no means complacent, but they share a belief that the fault lines that have emerged in the field are variously and valuably instructive. Understanding divisions and controversies is itself a worthy exercise, but such understanding also represents opportunity. Exposing fault lines is a means of acknowledging differences and disagreements without covering them up or papering them over; it is also a prerequisite to bridging them. One

1

2

Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth

mark of the spirit of optimism that informs the collection is that so many of the essays not only identify fault lines but also constructively suggest ways of addressing them. The essays may be sorted into three general categories. The largest, consisting of six essays, is a group of studies that focuses on a range of theoretical questions central to the field of seventeenth-century literature. This group considers such issues as pluralism and historicism, Bakhtinian dialogism and interpretive communities, the place of extraliterary moral judgment in criticism and the question of conjecture in literary biography. For all their frank concern with broad theoretical issues, however, these essays illustrate their points with concrete reference to specific works of literature. Another is a cluster of three essays that addresses the study of early modern religious literature, again in terms of both theoretical and practical criticism. This group considers such questions as whether religious texts should be approached as articulations of propositional belief or as expressions of a cultural system imbricated in structures of power, gender, and sexuality; explicates controversies over the competing sources of authority in determining religious faith and practice in the period; and offers desiderata for the study of early modern sermons. The final category consists of four essays that confront related questions of gender, race, and sexuality, the fault lines that were so prominent in literary study at the end of the twentieth century. These essays chart the changes in the field of early modern literary studies as women writers have come to the fore and new understandings of race, gender, and sexuality have helped shape the field. These essays explain how the professionalization of literary study had as its consequence the erasure of women writers, place Donne’s attitudes toward sexual consummation in the context of the history of sexuality, demonstrate how the “scientific outlook” of the Royal Society inculcated a kind of racialized thinking, and examine Milton’s cult of chastity and theology of gender. The original, abbreviated versions of the essays included here were presented at the fourteenth (and final) biennial Renaissance conference at the University of Michigan–Dearborn on October 19–21, 2000.1 The versions print-

1. Selected papers from the previous Dearborn conferences have also been published: those from the 1974 conference as “Trust to Good Verses”: Herrick Tercentenary Essays, ed. Roger B. Rollin and J. Max Patrick (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978); those from the 1976 conference on seventeenth-century prose as a special issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination (10:2 [1977]), ed. William A. Sessions and James S. Tillman; those from the 1978 con-

Introduction

3

ed here have benefited from the stimulating exchanges and responses afforded by the conference, and they intersect, reinforce, and challenge each other in significant ways. However, the essays were written independently and without consultation among the authors. No topics or approaches were suggested or assigned, and none were proscribed. All the essays are historically grounded and critically vital, but they vary widely in their historical perspectives and critical allegiances and in their scope and focus. The only criterion for selection was that each essay contribute significantly to the understanding and informed appreciation of the fault lines and controversies in the field of early modern literary study. One of the major fault lines in the field of early modern literature is theory itself, or more precisely, the division wrought by the newer critical approaches, which threaten to balkanize literary study into camps of traditionalists and adherents of various schools of competing theories. The scholarly and critical debates in the field have sometimes been acrimonious, with tendentious and dogmatic arguments eroding collegiality and occasionally even civility. Hence, the collection opens with a wide-ranging essay by Robert C. Evans defining and defending theoretical pluralism, an approach that assumes that different theories, “by asking different kinds of questions, will provide different kinds

ference as “Too Rich to Clothe the Sunne”: Essays on George Herbert, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980); those from the 1980 conference as Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982); those from the 1982 conference as The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986); those from the 1984 conference as “Bright Shootes of Everlastingnesse”: The Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987); those from the 1986 conference as “The Muses Commonweale”: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988); those from the 1988 conference as On the Celebrated and Neglected Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992); those from the 1990 conference as Renaissance Discourses of Desire, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993); those from the 1992 conference as The Wit of Seventeenth-Century Poetry, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995); those from the 1994 conference as Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997); those from the 1996 conference as The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, ed. Claude J. Summers and TedLarry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999); and those from the 1998 conference as Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000).

4

Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth

of answers and that each kind of answer is at least potentially valuable in its own right.” Observing that pluralism is less a theory about literature itself than a method of evaluating competing theoretical claims, Evans points out the epistemological, ethical, psychological, and pragmatic benefits of pluralism, especially the spirit of tolerance and openness that it induces. Although pluralism may be “the de facto or default foundation of Anglo-American criticism,” it is only rarely deliberately pursued or self-consciously theorized. Evans articulates a number of principles that might underlie a self-conscious theory of pluralism and illustrates a pluralist approach by examining Ben Jonson’s epigram “To My Reader” from numerous perspectives. Basing her conclusions on new-historicist accounts of Bacon’s New Atlantis, Catherine Gimelli Martin questions the tenability of many of the premises of new historicism. She particularly challenges the Foucauldian propensity to see variety as a privilege restricted to the Middle Ages, while modernity supposedly reflects the dominance of a single discursive class. She finds that the “new historicists’ failure to account for . . . widely recognized discrepancies both in their own and in the Frankfort-Foucauldian account of the ‘privileged’ relationship between state and scientific power is by now so massive that their ahistoricity is increasingly obvious.” She concludes that the sterile and circular metalinguistic exercises of new historicism do little service either to literature or to history, and also fail to advance truly liberational political agendas. Addressing a crucial question of literary biography, Dennis Flynn proposes that the theory of scientific conjecture propounded by Karl Popper in his 1968 publication Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge be applied specifically to the first thirty years of John Donne’s life, for which so little artifactual information has as yet been uncovered. Popper distinguishes between probability and verisimilitude in conjecture. Probability (which has been the goal of most of Donne’s biographers) has the effect of inhibiting investigation and diminishing content. Verisimilitude in conjecture, on the other hand, is based on the willingness to make bold conjectures unsupported by known fact. Such conjectures invite refutation, the carrying out of which encourages the search for new facts, and so enlarges content. Flynn accuses R. C. Bald, in his John Donne: A Life, of making only conjectures that are probable, and that therefore have the effect of closing off debate and further research. Flynn’s “modest proposal” is that literary scholars “cease privileging the merely probable conjecture when the more informative, improbable conjecture”— aiming at verisimilitude—“is available for refutation.”

Introduction

5

Dan Jaeckle sees as a fault line in the field the separation of two kinds of ideological readings: one assumes that every work is politically committed and seeks to expose that commitment through analysis, while the other views literature more as a reflection of society than as a direct participant in its ideological struggles. Using Bakhtin’s theory of “dialogic literature,” which refracts the complex interaction among ideologies within the author’s society, and which Bakhtin applied to the novel, Jaeckle analyzes the attitudes toward horticulture in Marvell’s “Mower against Gardens,” finding that the poem presents—but does not reconcile—two conflicting views. He concludes that the approach via Bakhtinian dialogism “illustrates that the search for ideological positions in poetry is . . . more complex than is sometimes thought.” The reader must not only identify ideological positions, but also “trace the poet’s often intricate perspective” while remaining “attuned to the possibility that the poet may not be so much committing to an ideological position as putting various stances into play to test them against one another in an open-ended performance that refracts the ongoing dialogue within a constantly shifting social scene.” In an essay with widespread implications for both theory and practice, Tobias Gregory mounts a vigorous defense of William Empson’s controversial book Milton’s God. Using Empson as a case in point, Gregory examines a fault line in critical practice that extends well beyond the field of Milton studies, namely, the “metacritical issue” of “the place in literary criticism of extraliterary moral judgment.” Adopting Susan Noakes’s terminology, Gregory divides criticism into exegesis (the explication of what the author intended or what a work’s first readers would have understood) and interpretation (which adds to exegesis a consideration of the work’s contemporary relevance or a judgment of its value). He concludes, “The fault line between exegetes and interpreters divides two valuable modes of critical practice, not two sides in a debate that one may eventually win. There will always be room for both exegesis and interpretation.” Elizabeth Sauer locates Milton’s Samson Agonistes in a fault line of literary history: a product of the Restoration, it repudiates Restoration literary culture and hearkens back to the republican ideals of the preceding period. It advertises itself as a closet drama, yet reacts to Restoration stage drama; while “appealing to an elitist, republican readership, the text registers its discomfort with popular tastes, especially those cultivated by stage plays, whose final performance Milton fantasizes when Samson brings down the theater on his idolatrous Philistine audience.” By placing Samson Agonistes in the context of the literary and political culture in which Renaissance drama was generated, Sauer

6

Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth

exposes the fault lines in the critical tradition of the poem and in the Miltonic oeuvre. She concludes, “To put Samson Agonistes and Restoration drama on the stage together is ultimately to expose and redefine the fault lines in literary history. But more than that, it is to confront the competing and colliding ideologies, the various interpretive communities, and the fault lines that unsettle the fixed nature of any text and its received tradition. Finally, it means that readings of canonical works such as Samson Agonistes will be dramatically unsettled when the various practices of consumption that govern the reception of texts and inform their meanings are investigated.” The next three essays examine fault lines in the study of early modern religious texts. Several years ago, Janel Mueller declared that religion must be placed on a par with “the triad of race, class, and gender as a material determinant of human experience and expression.”2 In the present volume, Kate Narveson takes seriously Mueller’s dictum and critiques recent approaches to the study of early modern religious texts. She declares, “While approaches to religious texts became more varied during the 1990s, a divide remains between people for whom it matters whether John Donne was Anglo-Catholic or Calvinist—or avant-garde conformist or hypothetical universalist—and people for whom the real question is whether his religious behavior reveals an anxious negotiation with absolutism or a homoerotic Christ, that is, between those who look at religion as propositional belief and those for whom it is a cultural system imbricated in structures of power, gender, ritual, sexuality, and so forth.” After noting the contributions and limitations of recent work on the seventeenth-century religious lyric, Narveson then models a possible bridge between the two approaches. She examines Calvinist meditations, which are often seen as expressions of self-loathing and therefore of Calvinist anxiety, and argues that rather than being self-expressive, these works participate “in a broader reformulation of devotional disciplines that responded not to anxiety but to apathy.” They must be understood in terms of their cultural function as a kind of self-structuring exercise; however, that cultural function itself can be grasped only “if one attends to the way doctrinal belief informed the terms of self-understanding and, consequently, assumptions about the ways texts could affect selves.” Hence, Narveson attempts to bridge the divide between “profession and performance” by insisting that early modern religious texts 2. Mueller, “Complications of Intertextuality: John Fisher, Katherine Parr, and ‘The Book of the Crucifix,’” in Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. Summers and Pebworth, 41.

Introduction

7

must be understood both as theological professions and as cultural performances. In his exploration of Donne’s severe criticism of the antitrinitarian beliefs of the small Socinian sect, Jeffrey Johnson exposes a fault line in the theological controversies of the early modern period. Donne’s unequivocal condemnation of the Socinians was not merely because their position contradicted his own Trinity-centered theology, but also because Donne found their privileging of human reason in interpreting the Scriptures profoundly disturbing. “It is the fissures that open up between the competing sources of authority for determining faith and practice . . . that expose the controversies both between Protestants and Catholics and within Protestantism, as well as Donne’s own negotiation of those controversies,” Johnson contends. He concludes that Donne’s reaction to the Socinians illuminates the uniqueness of his own theology, which was neither Roman Catholic nor fully Protestant: “His own idiosyncratic via media rested purposefully, though uneasily, on a tectonics in which even the slightest theological shift of the three plates of the Word, tradition, and reason registered the seismic effects of heresy and religious persecution.” P. G. Stanwood assesses the current state of scholarship and criticism on early modern sermons. Reminding us that sermons “were once fundamental to the general culture and affected almost everyone,” he describes them as “the preeminent literary genre in earlier seventeenth-century England.” Stanwood notes that most recent critical work on the early modern sermons has concentrated on stylistics, political content, and context, and that the sermons are too often excerpted and not looked at as wholes. He sees as desirable an emphasis on “the management of the entire text” of individual sermons and a fuller exploration of the rhetorical traditions that lie behind them. He points to medieval and Renaissance rhetorical manuals as particularly important influences, arguing that their principle of elaboration through distinctiones illuminates “the ingenuity and generosity” of the “entire structure” of the seventeenth-century sermon. The final essays concern the fault lines of gender, race, and sexuality. Sharon Cadman Seelig opens her essay by noting that when she began literary study, the field of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature consisted almost exclusively of male writers. In a fascinating essay, she explores the history of the exclusion of women writers from the canon. She finds that either they were ignored outright or categorized as curiosities or their work was trivialized by being seen as a “civilizing” influence that softened male aggressiveness or nurtured male egos and careers. Seelig then traces the recent emergence of women

8

Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth

as accomplished writers who deserve and are now accorded critical appreciation. She concludes, “The English Renaissance with its heroic male figures— Donne, Jonson, and Milton, canonized, new criticized, and history of idealized—has given way to a far more complicated web of relationships. . . . The poetic landscape of early modern England is now indisputably of mixed gender, and it remains to be seen what we will discover there.” Joan Faust identifies the contradictory and ever unfolding history of sexuality as a fault line in early modern studies and relates to it the debate about Donne’s perplexing and often contradictory stances toward carnal love. Arguing that Donne’s rejection of sexual intimacy in some poems may be seen as a reaction to the clear and present physical danger that sexual intercourse was thought to pose in the seventeenth century, Faust brings to the fore a great deal of early modern scientific, medical, and religious lore about such dangers. She not only demonstrates the relevance of such knowledge to understanding particular poems, but also places Donne’s fear of physical intimacy within a larger cultural context. She concludes, “Echoes of classical and early modern medical, ecclesiastical, and philosophical apprehensions of physical consummation in Donne’s writings are too strong to ignore, and they help to trace a major fault line in the field, not only of literary studies but of early modern thought in general.” Cristina Malcolmson confronts the fault lines of race, gender, and science in her exploration of skin color and the physics of color in the works of Robert Boyle and Margaret Cavendish. Arguing that the “scientific outlook” of the Royal Society included a new kind of racialized thinking that influenced nineteenth-century constructions of race, she contrasts the attitudes of Boyle and Cavendish. In his Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours, Boyle moves science toward racialization by giving skin color new prominence as an object of study and experiment. In her books Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and The Blazing World, both published in 1666, Cavendish parodies Boyle’s coordination of the physics of color with skin color. Malcolmson argues that Cavendish’s exclusion from the universities and the Royal Society undoubtedly contributed to her skepticism and enabled her to see through racialized ideologies, but the duchess’s own position as a European Christian “determined that her analysis of Eurocentrism would be limited and that she, like the Royal Society, would justify the imperialism necessary to the development of England as the leading slave-trading nation.” In the final contribution to the volume, William Shullenberger also confronts questions of gender. Considering Milton (“or that complex of text and history that we agree to designate ‘Milton’”) a contested site—a fault line in

Introduction

9

the fields both of English Renaissance studies and of gender studies—Shullenberger explores the poet’s imaginative gender crossing in his creation of, and identification with, the heroic Lady of his Maske. Engaging such questions as Milton’s early radicalism, his cult of chastity, and his theology of gender, Shullenberger argues that chastity “is the gender crossroad where Milton discovers his prophetic voice, and that this voice, as articulated by the Lady, activates and authorizes, rather than appropriates and suppresses, a public speaking site for liberatory female speech.” The erasure of gender difference in Milton’s conception of chastity allows the chaste Lady of the masque to identify with the chaste Christ of the temptation and gives a vatic authority to her pronouncements. In their varied approaches and distinct conclusions, these essays contribute significantly to a fuller understanding of the vital and sometimes fiercely contested field of seventeenth-century literature. Addressing many of the crucial fault lines and controversies of the field, these essays cumulatively constitute a map to some of the most significant sites of contention in the study of early modern literature. However, they do more than merely identify fault lines and controversies: they also suggest constructive ways of addressing and bridging them. In so doing, they also illuminate particular texts and specific writers and call attention to recurrent themes and issues. Broaching some of the most significant questions that animate the study of early modern literature at the turn into a new century, the essays demonstrate the continuing vitality of the field.

Robert C. Evans

“What Is Truth?” Defining and Defending Theoretical Pluralism

Anyone studying literature today faces pressing questions that would have seemed less insistent earlier. Several decades of heated theoretical debate have called many basic assumptions of traditional literary study into doubt. Who, any longer, can answer with any confidence (or hope of consensus) such apparently simple questions as these: What is literature? What is an author? What is a fact? Are “facts” even possible? What makes an interpretation legitimate? Indeed, are “legitimate” interpretations possible? Why even study literature? In a real sense, all such questions boil down to Pilate’s famous query (echoed by Francis Bacon): what is truth? Obviously, such crucial questions deserve serious attention. To complicate matters even further, however, it is unclear if any of them can easily (or ever) be answered. In academe today, so many apparently mutually exclusive answers to such questions exist that many students and teachers are likely to feel a kind of intellectual vertigo. Moreover, debates about such issues are often so polemical, and advocates so adamant, and the means for deciding truth so uncertain or disputed, that many intelligent students will be tempted either to abandon literary study altogether or, perhaps worse, simply to take the line of least resistance, adopting whatever approach happens to seem most fashionable or marketable at the moment. One way to confront the difficulties just outlined is to explore one approach in particular: critical pluralism. Pluralism is less a theory about literature itself than a method of evaluating competing theoretical claims. Long associated with the work of Ronald Crane and Wayne Booth (but also advocated by other important theorists), pluralism assumes that every theory, by asking different kinds of questions, will provide different kinds of answers and that each

10

“What Is Truth?”

11

kind of answer is at least potentially valuable in its own right.1 Pluralism does not attempt to harmonize competing ways of thinking (that is, it is not a kind of eclecticism), nor does it radically doubt the validity of all ways of thought (that is, it is not a fundamentalist skepticism). Rather, it emphasizes how each theory can provide insights consistent with the specific assumptions the theory entails. Pluralists encourage practitioners of any approach to be as logical, consistent, and self-critical as possible in developing and applying their theories; pluralism also encourages proponents to give rivals a fair hearing.2 Pluralism thus shares with some other recent theories a suspicion of dogmatic, allembracing explanations, but it also encourages an intellectually responsible use of any particular approach. Pluralism, then, encourages the development of minds that are paradoxically both focused and open. When so described, pluralism might seem unobjectionably trite. In fact, however, it seriously threatens any exclusive or dogmatic approach (including many of the ones most current). The threat posed by pluralism has been denounced, for instance, in Ellen Rooney’s recent book Seductive Reasoning, a work that celebrates recent trends toward the politicizing and balkanizing of literary study.3 If anything, for Rooney these trends have not gone far enough,

1. See, for example, the influential anthology titled Critics and Criticism: Essays in Method, ed. Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953); and Crane, The Idea of the Humanities, and Other Essays Critical and Historical, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). In addition, see Booth, Now Don’t Try to Reason with Me: Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); and especially Booth, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). See also Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1948); and Hyman, Iago: Some Approaches to the Illusion of His Motivation (New York: Atheneum, 1970). In addition, see, for instance, Stamos Metzidakis, Difference Unbound: The Rise of Pluralism in Literature and Criticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995); Wendell V. Harris, Literary Meaning: Reclaiming the Study of Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Frederick J. Antczak, ed., Rhetoric and Pluralism: Legacies of Wayne Booth (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995); and James L. Battersby, Paradigms Regained: Pluralism and the Practice of Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). 2. On these matters, see Booth, Critical Understanding, esp. 1–34. See also Booth’s article on pluralism in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 3. Rooney, Seductive Reasoning: Pluralism as the Problematic of Contemporary Literary Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). Page numbers are hereinafter cited parenthetically.

12

Robert C. Evans

and rather than conceiving of literary study as conversation, she tends to think of it instead as war between competing and narrowly defined interest groups— a kind of combat in which victory is decided not by the “rightness” of an argument (since no concept of “right” seems valid) but by the power to exclude alternative points of view. Ironically, Rooney’s study is one of the few booklength treatments of pluralism, which often tends to be ignored in recent studies of critical theory. Rarely is pluralism discussed in detail (if at all) in surveys or encyclopedias, rarely is much attention paid to its history, and rarely is much effort made to articulate and practice it in an explicitly formulated way.4 Paradoxically, many standard anthologies of literary criticism seem to operate on pluralist principles, since they usually print essays representing diverse points of view. Rarely, though, is pluralism itself a subject of sustained or explicit discussion.5 The potential benefits of a self-conscious pluralism seem both numerous and wide-ranging. The epistemological benefits can include a renewed confidence that although no single way of knowing can be exclusively “correct,” competing (or even cooperating) approaches may actually enhance our understanding. The ethical benefits of pluralism can include a renewed respect and toleration for varied approaches, so long as their practitioners are themselves willing to assent to the fundamental pluralist assumption (which is basically a version of the golden rule). The political benefits of pluralism can include a principled (and therefore defensible) distrust of any idea entailing dogmatism or intellectual tyranny, while the psychological benefits of pluralism can include the sense that one can be open-minded without being emptyheaded. The pragmatic benefits of pluralism can include a willingness to hear (and be heard by) others, including one’s students. Of all these benefits, the ethical may be the most important: our conversations may never produce fi-

4. An exception is Irena R. Makaryk, ed., Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 116–19, 608–9. 5. A few examples will have to stand for many others. See, for instance, Wilfred L. Guerin et al., A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide (New York: Garland, 1999); Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds., Literary Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Martin Coyle et al., Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism (Detroit: Gale, 1990); and William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 8th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1999). In most cases, pluralism does not even appear as a term in the indexes.

“What Is Truth?”

13

nal answers, but pluralism can help prevent intellectual debates from degenerating into (en)trench(ed) academic warfare. Why then, given all these potential benefits, would (or how could) anyone possibly oppose pluralism? And why, in view of all these supposed attractions, is pluralism not more widely and explicitly embraced? For answers to such questions, a good place to turn is Ellen Rooney’s Seductive Reasoning. Rooney’s text is a full-scale assault on pluralist ideals and practices, and it is all the more interesting because it alleges that pluralism is not nearly as neglected as I have claimed. In fact, Rooney contends that pluralism is already the dominant mode of critical discourse, and she ups the ante by asserting that even many theorists not normally considered pluralists (either by themselves or by others) are closet or latent pluralists, and that some are not even aware of their pluralist tendencies. Thus, it is one thing for Rooney to label and condemn Wayne Booth as a pluralist, since Booth would readily embrace the charge. However, it is another (and a far more intriguing) thing for Rooney to assert, as she also does, that such critics as E. D. Hirsch, Stanley Fish, Paul DeMan, and even Fredric Jameson are all pluralists, despite their own self-definitions as something—anything—else. In Rooney’s view, pluralism already controls nearly the entire field, and it is this sense of being vastly outnumbered that helps give her book its often combative edge. From among the small library of books that discuss literary pluralism explicitly, hers is easily the most passionate.6 I hesitate to call Rooney’s book “persuasive,” because persuasion is the chief object of her attack. According to Rooney, the underlying assumption of all pluralist critics (which is to say, of nearly all critics) is that readers are—or should be—open to persuasion. As she puts it, “[P]luralistic forms of discourse first imagine a universal community in which every individual (reader) is a potential convert, vulnerable to persuasion, and then require that each critical utterance aim at the successful persuasion of this community in general. . . . This demand ensures a conversation in which every critic must address a general or universal audience,” and Rooney further calls this command “the only absolute [that] pluralism requires to sustain its practice” (1–2). Consequently, “[n]o discourse that challenges the theoretical possibility of general per6. In addition to the titles mentioned in my first note, see also, for example, Oscar Cargill, Toward a Pluralistic Criticism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965); Tobin Siebers, The Ethics of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); and the final chapter of James Phelan, Worlds from Words: A Theory of Language in Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

14

Robert C. Evans

suasion, no discourse that takes the process of exclusion to be necessary to the production of meaning or community . . . can function within pluralism” (5). Pluralists either ignore or deny the simple fact “that historically irreducible interests divide and define reading communities; that interests and reading are inextricably bound together” (6). Pluralists sidestep “the inescapable partisanship of the critical enterprise” (14), and although pluralism almost by definition “endorses a plurality of interpretations and methods, [it] stops well short of infinite textual dissemination” (22). In Rooney’s view, pluralism greatly minimizes the significance of such crucial factors as “community, gender, race, class positions, sexuality, nationality, and material interests,” treating them all as “accidents to be excluded in the construction of the general reader/writer” (62). Paradoxically, pluralism links “a polemic for inclusion with a commitment to essential exclusions, in particular, the exclusion of exclusion, and . . . of those who would exclude” (62). Thus, Wayne Booth ultimately seeks “to exclude those who would exclude others” (86); he can accept nearly every kind of critical theory under his big tent except a theory that is “irreconcilably closed to certain readers, and which, consequently, no longer seeks to persuade them” (98; emphasis in original). At a minimum, pluralism depends, if not on successful persuasion, then at least on the possibility of successful general “understanding” (102), but any such ideal always presumes that different understandings are merely accidental and erasable (106). In contrast, the antipluralist (such as Rooney) “posits a fundamentally divided ‘community’ composed of irreducibly differentiated readers” (148). Even Fredric Jameson does not escape the pluralist trap, since he “retains a pluralist’s model of audience and of the theoretic possibilities of persuasion” (201). Jameson, unfortunately, “refuses to judge, much less to condemn or dismiss, any of his potential readers” (212). Therefore, his somewhat effete Marxist “criticism [is] so eager for alliances that it graciously includes all methods and thus makes a generous appeal to all readers” (233). For Rooney, such bourgeois graciousness and generosity are not signs of charity but symptoms that are both enfeebling and enabling: by buying into the basic pluralist assumption, Jameson weakens his Marxist potential but thereby purchases a seat at the table of common critical discourse. Perhaps I would be ungracious myself—or perhaps even unintentionally insulting—if I admitted that I find much of Rooney’s discussion of pluralism quite persuasive. Her basic assumption strikes me as utterly convincing: many critics have indeed written as if readers might be open to rational argument and might even be willing to give such arguments a hearing. Her alternative

“What Is Truth?”

15

vision is of a world in which readers are segmented into interest groups whose differences are “historically irreducible,” whose “partisanship” is “inescapable,” that are “fundamentally divided” and “irreducibly differentiated,” and that have little in common except a shared interest in “irreconcilably” closing out “certain readers,” or even in judging, dismissing, or condemning them. Rooney is admirably blunt, but I must admit that when reading her book I kept wondering what it might be like to be her student and to have a genuine question to ask—or perhaps even a challenge to offer. Of course, why should a student even be in a class in the first place, unless to have the identity, or ideology, or the assumptions of his or her exclusive group affirmed? At what point, moreover, does the process of exclusion cease—if ever? Ultimately, I suppose, one could treat each individual person as his or her own unique monad—thus behaving like Jonson’s character Morose in Epicoene: excluding all voices but his own, listening to no one but himself, finding occasional common cause only with others who happen to share his own exclusive predilection (or predicament). I say this not to be sardonic and not in any way to dismiss the value of Rooney’s book. In fact, I find the book extremely valuable not only because it has genuinely helped me better understand some basic assumptions of pluralism, and not only because it inadvertently makes pluralism seem even more attractive to me, but also because the book helps remind me of how much is potentially at stake in the disagreements between pluralists and antipluralists. Seductive Reasoning is one of the few academic books I have ever read that literally gave me chills. The assumptions underlying it seemed utterly foreign to what I had always imagined as the goals of intellectual life. Many teachers and colleagues from whom I have learned the most have been people with whom I have deeply disagreed and whose efforts to persuade me I have often strongly resisted. But I never felt that any of them saw me as hopeless, as not worth at least trying to persuade—or at the very minimum as worth talking with (and occasionally listening to). When reading Seductive Reasoning, however, I sometimes felt that I faced only two options: be persuaded (and thus, paradoxically, confirm one of Rooney’s least favorite stereotypes) or be excluded— and possibly even judged, condemned, or irreducibly and irredeemably dismissed. I have discussed Rooney’s book at such length because I find it both persuasive and symptomatic. It sums up in an extremely clear fashion some central tendencies of recent literary theory. It would be easy enough to cite practical examples within our own field of the sort of principled intolerance

16

Robert C. Evans

championed by Rooney, including scathing attacks not just on particular critical performances but on whole schools and even generations of critics. At one point I worried that these intolerant tendencies might prevail; now, partly because of the excesses of their own proponents, I am slightly more hopeful that they may not. As alternatives to the stance proposed by Rooney, I would point to a few projects that, for me, represent the best impulses of recent criticism. I am thinking, for instance, of the Donne Variorium Edition, which juxtaposes the best insights of hundreds of commentators. Divergent and often conflicting comments jostle, side by side, allowing readers to consider many possible interpretations of Donne’s texts. The New Variorium Shakespeare is another such project, as are the annotated bibliographies published by Garland or G. K. Hall. And I would point, too, to the Dearborn conferences themselves and to the resulting volumes. For me, some of the most satisfying qualities of these conferences and books have always been their catholicity, civility, and commitment to airing fairly nearly every conceivable point of view. Of course, none of these projects has quite the excitement of the latest new thing, but I suspect that they will enjoy longer staying power than whatever is the newest latest fad. Ironically, the fads themselves may someday seem old-fashioned, if only because they are necessarily so narrow. The latest “latest developments” will probably survive only as parts of a larger, more ancient conversation. Rooney, then, is probably correct when she claims that pluralism is the de facto or default foundation of Anglo-American criticism, but this is only one reason it is so puzzling that so few self-conscious attempts have been made to define and defend the pluralist impulse. As a practical behavior, pluralism is widespread, but as a self-conscious theory—as a rigorously developed set of critical principles—it is nearly invisible. Even as a practice, moreover, pluralism is rarely deliberate or intentionally pursued. Instead, a kind of haphazard, random pluralism results simply from the accumulation of varied, discrete interpretations, much as a coral reef eventually results from the agglomeration, over time, of countless individual organisms. In the space remaining, I want to try to articulate several principles that might underlie a self-conscious theory of pluralism, and then I want to try to show how those principles might enhance our understanding of one relatively neglected poem. I also want to indicate how deliberately pursuing pluralism might revive the deliberately close reading of literature, a revival that strikes me as one main benefit of a self-consciously pluralist practice. A theory of pluralism might begin, then, by stating a few assumptions about authors, texts, audiences, critics, and the relations of all of them to “reality”

“What Is Truth?”

17

(however that term is defined).7 Thus, a pluralist might argue that an author can be viewed from multiple perspectives: as a craftsman, a psyche, a representative human, a member of a particular culture, a representative of a particular politics, a member of a specific gender, and so on, or as some combination of any or all these identities. The same might just as easily be said of the text, which could be viewed as a formal object; as a historical, social, or political document; as a revelation of one psyche or of some general psychology; and more. No single approach would be totally “right” or comprehensive; each would be appropriate in its own way; each would ideally reveal a different aspect of the text. Likewise, each reader would ideally strive to be as conscious as possible of the kinds of questions she was asking of a text and of the larger assumptions those questions took for granted. Ideally, each reader would realize that any answers elicited can be only partial ones (that is, answers relevant to and from one perspective), not absolutely or completely final. Such an assumption would be grounded in a perspectivist notion of reality. Whereas a “monist” assumes there is only one way to understand reality, and whereas a skeptic assumes there is no valid way of understanding it, and whereas an eclectic tries to pick and choose from different approaches to construct a comprehensive view, a pluralist assumes that different views spotlight different aspects of reality and that this is one value of using divergent approaches.8 A pluralist does not assume that “anything goes”—that an interpretation is valid simply because it is unique. Rather, a pluralist would try (1) to determine the premises from which any critic was working; (2) to decide whether those premises were coherent or contradictory (that is, whether they were selfconsistent); and (3) to assess whether an interpreter had applied them rigorously and consistently and had seen as much with them as they might allow him to see. How might pluralism be applied in practice? Consider a brief but widely anthologized lyric, Ben Jonson’s epigram “To My Reader”: “Pray thee, take care, that tak’st my booke in hand / To reade it well: that is, to vnderstand.”9 Obviously, much of this poem’s effect depends on its brevity, but a pluralist 7. For a fuller discussion of the points made in the following two paragraphs, see, for instance, my comments in the introduction to Short Fiction: A Critical Companion, ed. Robert C. Evans, Anne C. Little, and Barbara Wiedemann (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1997), xv– lxxvi, esp. lxxiii–lxxvi. 8. My remarks here are indebted to the opening chapter of Booth’s Critical Understanding. 9. For the text of this poem, see C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–1952), 8:27.

18

Robert C. Evans

critic would nonetheless find much to say about it. Or, rather, a pluralist would encourage us to examine the poem from numerous possible perspectives. Thus, a formalist critic, concerned with precise implications and with how they fit into a poem’s larger structure, might suggest that the phrase “take care” can be read both as a supplication and as a warning. As a supplication, it shows the reader respect, but as a warning it implies self-respect. A formalist might also notice the balanced syntax of the first four words as well as the echo of “take” and “tak’st,” as well as the balanced phrasing of the concluding line. A formalist might argue that Jonson’s simple diction contributes to the poem’s basic theme of clear understanding as well as to its rhetorical effectiveness, and he might also suggest the appropriateness of the rhyme, since “hand” implies physical possession while “vnderstand” implies a proper mental grasp. Finally, a formalist might also note that the poem’s only adverb (“well”) is crucial to Jonson’s typical emphasis on quality, merit, and clear distinctions. On the other hand, an archetypal critic, concerned with basic human desires and fears, might suggest that the poem exploits the basic human fear of losing control, as well as the basic desire for affirmation and acceptance. At some level the poem may even reflect the most basic dread of all: the dread of death (or, in this case, the failure of one’s thoughts to survive as one intended them). Meanwhile, a biographical critic might argue that Jonson’s personal history as well as his social and economic circumstances made him especially concerned with controlling how others responded to his texts. This contention, in turn, might also jibe with the interests of, say, a dialogical critic. Jonson’s epigram, after all, assumes the basic dialogical premise that every text is an implied dialogue, but in this case the poet tries to control the exchange by attempting to direct the reader’s response. By urging us to “vnderstand,” he implicitly encourages us to subordinate or submit ourselves to his intended meaning—literally, to “stand” (in a position of fixity) “under” it. Paradoxically, then, the poem can be seen as both an open admission that reading is dialogical and an attempt to manage that very process. A psychoanalyst, of course, might easily see this attempt as part of a more general anxiety often apparent in Jonson—as part of a more general compulsion to assert, maintain, or retain control. Such a critic might contend, for instance, that Jonson encourages readers to obey the demands of a cultural superego rather than being seduced by their individual egos or ids. Reader-response critics, of course, might argue that individual reactions to the text would almost inevitably vary. Thus, readers who favor “plain-style” poems might react differently from ones who prefer lusher styles, just as readers familiar with the epigram genre might respond differently from those who

“What Is Truth?”

19

are not. Indeed, critics who focus on genre would be especially interested in this poem’s status not simply as an epigram but also as an introduction to a collection of such poems. These critics might note that although the poem seems highly personal, its gestures are thoroughly conventional. Thus, just when Jonson seems to speak most as himself, he also shows a mastery of custom. A traditional historical critic, on the other hand, might place the poem in a social rather than literary context by arguing, for example, that the work reflects the rise of a rather impersonal system of marketing: printed books were not presented to individual readers (as manuscripts might once have been); instead, they were marketed to anonymous crowds. Marxist critics might also be interested in this economic dimension. They might suggest, for instance, that although Jonson tries to assert continued ownership of his text, the book can no longer be his once it enters the market. Paradoxically, Jonson speaks as if he is an owner, but his need to compete for readers makes him subject to others’ control. In this case, however, Jonson arguably seems less interested in transforming power relations than in ensuring that they work to his own advantage: his self-assertive tone is part of a competitive strategy. New-historicist theorists might also be interested in the ways the poem is embedded in relations of power; they might suggest, for instance, that Jonson’s confident tone uneasily masks his inevitable anxiety as he tries to assert more potency than he can realistically possess. For a new historicist, the word vnderstand might imply the kinds of hierarchy typical of Jonson’s culture, and in fact such a critic might even contend that although Jonson claims ownership of his book, both he and it are products of a far more complex system. The mere fact that Jonson must solicit (or demand) proper reading might suggest, to a new historicist, just how powerless he actually is. Conversely, a multiculturalist might emphasize the real power that this text takes for granted. Jonson speaks here not as a member of a minority but as a generic human. The poem implies nothing about the speaker’s age, sex, religion, race, class, or gender, and its studied indifference to such matters may enhance its rhetorical appeal: nothing in it invites readers to resist the speaker, yet the mere fact that Jonson could write and publish suggests the relative privilege he enjoyed. One of these privileges, of course, was his status as a male—a status that would naturally interest feminist critics. One kind of feminist, for example, might see the poem as typically male in its emphasis on clear ownership, proper procedure, and right reason. Although the speaker’s gender is nowhere stated explicitly, the almost aggressively self-assertive tone of the work, as well as the mere fact that it was published during the Renaissance, might lead us to conclude that both the author and the speaker were males. Alternatively, a thematic critic might note that proper understanding be-

20

Robert C. Evans

tween writer and reader is a central Jonsonian theme, while a structuralist might see this work as depending on a series of binary oppositions that, taken together, help constitute its underlying “code.” These include such pairs, for instance, as self-other, writer-reader, possession-loss, mental-physical, requesting-demanding, truth-falsity, and mere reading–real understanding. A deconstructor might highlight the same pairings but might argue that they disguise implicit hierarchies, which deconstruction can destabilize. Thus, the poem privileges true understanding over mere reading, but its very need to do so can suggest that understanding may be an illusion and that only “mere readings” are possible after all. Language reduced to writing (a deconstructor might say) is inevitably open to innumerable interpretations. It would be possible, of course, to continue offering brief glimpses of Jonson’s poem from any number of other critical perspectives, such as the postmodernist, the phenomenological, the hermeneutical, and many others, not to mention the Platonic, Aristotelian, Horatian, or Longinian possibilities. By now, though, my main point should be abundantly clear: viewing the poem from as many perspectives as possible, rather than merely from a single standpoint, immensely enriches our sense of the work’s complexity and richness. Only a self-consciously and deliberately pluralist theoretical perspective both encourages and justifies such a multidimensional approach. This is because pluralism, as stated above, assumes that each critical perspective, by asking different kinds of questions about literature, will provide different kinds of answers and that each kind of answer is at least potentially valuable in its own right. Pluralism does not attempt to harmonize competing ways of thinking, nor does it radically doubt the validity of all ways of thought. Rather, it emphasizes the likely value of a variety of approaches to literary texts. Simply as a pragmatic matter, then, pluralism has much to recommend it. For one thing, it makes the historical origins of a theory seem less important than its continued usefulness. One need not, for instance, accept the social, political, or religious views of a theorist (to name just a few potential complications) in order to find his methods productive. Second, the application of varied analytical methods can be justified because successful literary works themselves can be so varied in their purposes and effects. Third (and crucially), a self-consciously pluralist practice would help remind us of the need to focus on the detailed phrasing of a text rather than on any single simple, paraphrasable “meaning”—the kind that can always be reductively abstracted from any work. Pluralism would therefore have some value, especially in the current critical scene, if it did nothing else besides encourage a return to the “close reading”

“What Is Truth?”

21

of individual texts. By promoting such genuinely attentive attention, pluralism would help encourage the same respect for texts as it ideally cultivates in our dealings with authors and with other readers. It would not only give us securer logical and epistemological foundations for our interpretive efforts but also help foster a more ethical interpretive climate—one that puts a premium less on “winning” arguments than on doing them justice and using them with the fullest sense possible of both their strengths and their limitations. In such a climate, a critical “revolution” would not occur every decade (or less) as the latest critical fashion declared all previous methods outmoded. Theorists would not speak of their present colleagues or recent predecessors with smug contempt. Instead, the best minds of the present, past, and future would collaborate in an ongoing dialogue in which each insight is recognized as not only inevitably partial but also potentially worth considering. If pluralism today seems an attractive option, that is partly because of our experience, during the past century, and especially the past two decades, with what now seem the somewhat pointless battles of different critical sects, each claiming (at least in its crudest expressions) to have discovered the one and only “valid” approach. In contrast, the pluralist theory that Ellen Rooney finds so abhorrent is a theory that can simultaneously help explain, entrench, enhance, and extend whatever “progress” or “knowledge” literary study can claim to have achieved in its long and often highly contentious history.

Catherine Gimelli Martin

The Ahistoricism of the New Historicism Knowledge as Power versus Power as Knowledge in Bacon’s New Atlantis

It is easy to slide from “let us not oversimplify” into a theoretical justification, or a tacit assumption, of history as just one damn thing after another—a historical nihilism which is becoming fashionable today, for obvious sociological reasons. —Christopher Hill, “Puritanism, Capitalism, and the Scientific Revolution”

When Christopher Hill issued this warning against the increasing dominance of historical revisionism in the mid-seventies, he could hardly have suspected that the revisionists would soon be reinforced by their new literary counterpart: new historicism.1 While the two movements employ different methods and historical paradigms, both agree that revolutionary change was something of an illusion. Power changes hands, but so locally and arbitrarily that in the end only power remains. By explaining away the existence of authentically new ideological formations or modes of thought, both historical revisionists and new historicists thus effectively regard history as “just one damned thing after another”: a force without real agents, ideals, or goals. However, as Hill rightly observes, this view of history has proved attractive for some “obvious sociological reasons,” including the failure of the great political and social revolutions of the early twentieth century. These reasons also go far toward explaining the widespread currency of Stephen Greenblatt’s “sub1. For an overview of the debate as it then stood (including some well-founded critiques of Hill’s model of history), see Charles Webster, ed., The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Kegan Paul, 1974). This volume examines Hill’s support of the WeberTawney-Merton hypothesis concerning the interrelated rise of Puritanism, capitalism, and modern science; Hill’s retort to his critics appears on p. 253. For a recent overview of the rise and demise of historical revisionism, see Peter Lake’s new introduction to Geoffrey F. Nuttall’s classic study The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (1947; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ix–xxv.

22

Ahistoricism of the New Historicism

23

version and containment” model of early modern culture in the aftermath of the failed cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Yet as Greenblatt himself has repeatedly emphasized, he was by no means the sole much less the original theorist of the movement, which drew upon a wide range of late Marxist responses to revolutionary failure. These prominently include the work of British Marxists such as Raymond Williams as well as the even more influential accounts of ideological containment developed by Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. Althusser and Foucault were in turn indebted to the Nietzschean account of history formulated by the Marxist theoreticians of the Frankfort school, who replaced Marx and Engels’s empirical positivism with Nietzsche’s late German romantic reaction against science and “pure” reason.2 More recently, Jean-François Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition continues this critique by attributing postmodern anomie to the collapse of the “masternarratives” of progressive social change inherited from the Enlightenment and maintained in the earlier twentieth century by “scientific” versions of Marxism and Freudianism.3 Given this general background, it is not surprising that some of new historicism’s withering critiques of early modern culture aim at demystifying the scientific utopianism of Sir Francis Bacon, James I’s lord chancellor and the chief “projector” of the scientific revolution in England. In fact, the precedent for regarding his projects as subversive rather than genuinely productive of social change was much earlier established in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Written in the wake of the disillusionment caused by the wartime alliance between Stalin and Hitler (and Stalinism in general), Horkheimer and Adorno recast Bacon’s scientific materialism as 2. Greenblatt’s most complete discussion of these influences to date can be found in his coauthored work with Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–19, 49–74. These chapters also discuss the general influence of German romanticism (itself an important background for Frankfortians such as Walter Benjamin) and its links with British Marxist-materialism. The second chapter (pp. 20–48) discusses the influence of Clifford Geertz’s “thick” anthropological descriptions. 3. Although Marx and Freud obviously offer widely different models of liberation, they are associated here simply because both late Marxists such as Louis Althusser and the early vanguard of the cultural revolutions of the 1960s (most notably, Hill’s friend and fellow scholar Norman O. Brown) commonly did so. Edward O. Wilson provides a succinct summary of the contrast between the Enlightenment’s embrace of Baconian empiricism and the German romantic critique in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 14–44. The specifically Nietzschean and Heideggerian sources of the antiscientific bias against Bacon are discussed in Jerry Weinberger, Science, Faith, and Politics: Francis Bacon and the Utopian Roots of the Modern Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 17–20.

24

Catherine Gimelli Martin

the archenemy of historical materialism. Reversing Marx and Engels’s enthusiastic praise for Bacon’s discovery of the Sinnlichkeit, or sensual brilliance of matter, they instead damned him for destroying the sensuously “diffuse ideas” of the older “magical heritage” and thereby initiating “the subjection of the world” later completed by the industrial-military complex.4 When their work was republished in 1969, it seemed an even more prophetic indictment of the inherent counterrevolutionary impetus of a technological society deeply rooted in Baconian methods and ideals. Working along essentially the same lines in his first major work, Les mots et les choses (translated as The Order of Things), Foucault similarly held the empiricist or nominalist semiotics, or both, of the “Classic Age” responsible for destroying the humanistic “hieroglyphics” of analogy and correspondence earlier dominant in Renaissance hermeneutics.5 Thus, in either case, a new language of objectivity “subjugates” the world by embracing Bacon’s famous claim that for true empiricists, “knowledge itself is power.” Although Bacon’s claim seems to make both himself and his Classic Age counterparts the obvious targets of this kind of critique, it does little justice to the actual context of his remark, which limits supreme power-knowledge to God alone.6 Nevertheless, because he also grants a godlike status to the “sons of science,” not just the Frankfort school but a host of other critics have regarded him as the prophet of the “dissociation of sensibility” about to divide humanistic from empiricist culture. Thus, not just Marxist-leaning critics of the Left but also religious critics of the Right such as T. S. Eliot, L. C. Knights, and Harold Fisch have commonly lamented the loss of a uniform religiocultural sensibility in the post-Baconian era.7 Like Foucault but without his 4. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (1944; reprint, New York: Continuum Publishing, 1969), 14; cf. Engels and Marx, Die Heilige Familie oder Kritik der Kritishech Kritik: Gegen Bruno Bauer und Corsoten (Berlin: Kietz, 1953), 201– 2. The relation between Horkheimer and Adorno’s assessment of Bacon and the new-historicist critiques such as that of Robert Stillman is firmly established in the latter’s New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Hobbes, Wilkins (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995), which cites them to much the same effect (see 295). Greenblatt’s few references to Bacon in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 166, 173, seem also to reflect their influence. 5. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), 17–165. 6. Bacon, “Of Heresies,” in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longman, 1860), 7:253. Volume and page numbers are hereinafter cited parenthetically. 7. See Eliot, Of Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957); Knights, Explorations:

Ahistoricism of the New Historicism

25

antihumanist agenda, these foes of modernity agree that an abrupt and devastating “epistemic break” severed the holistic culture of the Renaissance from the dawning rationalism and secularism of early modernity. On the opposite side of the argument, intellectual historians such as Richard Foster Jones agree that the period is marked by an abrupt paradigm shift that positively transforms the older “magical heritage” by replacing it with Enlightenment values. Yet ironically, whereas historians have long since discredited Jones and his followers for offering a simplistically linear, triumphalist, or “Whig” version of scientific progress, or all three, the dark version of their paradigm not only survives but in fact thrives in the new historicists’ Foucauldian account of epistemic break. Robert Markley is broadly representative of just how and why this paradigm survives among critics who reject Jones’s account of the march to modernity. Based on both his own and related reevaluations by Brian Vickers and Hans Aarsleff, Markley sensibly debunks the idea that a newly objective “‘modern’ prose style resulted from the rise of modern science” as not only the product of “flimsy evidence handled in a slipshod manner,” but also a semidisguised literary form of the “Whiggish view of the rise of modern science that has since been attacked by a host of historians of science.” Nevertheless, because Markley also subscribes to “what Foucault calls the ‘positive unconscious of knowledge’ operat[ing] in ways . . . mysterious or inaccessible to . . . conscious forms of thought, language, and behavior,” he follows the new historicists in “guardedly” accepting Foucault’s related notion of “radical ruptures, massive binary divisions.” Yet like Foucault, Markley’s motive for doing so is self-evidently ideological, for as he freely admits, he needs this model to “explain” why apparently revolutionary or antiauthoritarian notions of language such as Bacon’s produce an “authoritative semiotics” that inevitably reinforces “the political, socioeconomic, and theological order.” But his commitment to this ideologically determined conclusion forces Markley simply to stand Jones’s triumphalist account of scientific history on its head: rather than inventing “ideally” objective language, Baconian semiotics now creates a “rupEssays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 108–28; and Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion: The Hebraic Factor in Seventeenth-Century Literature (New York: Schocken Books, 1964). New historicism is often recognized as combining T. S. Eliot’s antirevolutionary bias and E. M. Tillyard’s “Elizabethan world picture” with the “co-optation” theories of Foucault and Marcuse as well as Lacan’s “discourse of the Other.” On this synthesis, see Carol Thomas Neely, “Constructing the Subject: Feminist Practice and the New Renaissance Discourses,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 1, 5–18.

26

Catherine Gimelli Martin

ture” in which the authoritarian ideology of modernity can flourish.8 Yet Markley’s basic point is far more historically accurate than his tacit about-face: the idea of a sudden semiotic shift to “authoritarian” objectivity has indeed become untenable for modern historians of science and Bacon scholars alike. Beginning with Paolo Rossi, these scholars have uniformly refuted Jones’s simplistic but also ironically Foucauldian understanding of Bacon’s project as an attempt to make words into transparent signifiers of things. Instead recognizing that words will always “rebel,” Bacon accepted the fact that endless controversies will always arise concerning not just “reality, but names and words” as well.9 Although he also recognized that imprecise or overly metaphoric language would further worsen the situation, his actual solution was to reject the very possibility of transparent signifiers. Rather, as Ronald Levao shows, Bacon developed the open-ended, “mobile,” “self-testing,” and probabilistic methods explored in his Novum Organum, a loosely structured work built entirely upon aphorisms. Thus, while sympathetic to the value system of Bacon’s Foucauldian critics, Levao questions the historical credibility of their narrative as an improbable historical “allegory of dominant discourses proceeding along a salvational plot of original harmony, alienation, and the hope of redemption.” This narrative is particularly unhelpful in understanding Bacon: Even as the schema would locate the complex phenomenon of Baconian science within a broader cultural field, its dedication to a teleological, and highly moralized, narrative constrains the resourcefulness of both the texts and the culture it reads, telling through them a singular story whose own authority is protected rather than challenged by an acknowledgment of occulted, contradictory, residual, and emergent strains of discourse. Bacon . . . is just the sort of writer to encourage and destabilize such narratives, . . . [since his] recurring dilemmas about the work of human poesis . . . arise from a lateral as well as a progressive movement, a polymorphous curiosity about the 8. Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1–2, 23–25. Although Markley does not explicitly claim new-historicist affiliations, both his critical lineage (3) and his historical paradigm argument (namely, although there are historical winners and losers, nothing really changes because all power is Power) clearly mark him as a fellow traveler. 9. Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 170–71; see also 142. Jones’s influential but unfortunately reductive treatment of these matters has been reprinted in Richard Foster Jones, The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951).

Ahistoricism of the New Historicism

27

world and ways of knowing it that turns repeatedly into the fields it has declared off limits.

For Levao, this “polymorphously” progressive historical horizon precludes interpreting late Renaissance texts as simply reconsolidating “power,” much as it precludes regarding variety as “a privilege only of the Middle Ages, while ‘our modernity’ is marked by the accession to dominance . . . of a single discursive class.” Hence it also means rejecting a Foucauldian paradigm whose considerable “theoretical subtlety and scope” work to reestablish “idealized periods of harmony and fragmentation” that effectively reproduce “the reductiveness of the ‘static . . . Weltanschauung’” that it claims to repudiate. In the process, it greatly oversimplifies the inherent volatility not only of power but also of the cultural texts that simultaneously accommodate, exploit, and expand it.10 However, challenging Foucault’s monolithic and ultimately ahistorical episteme requires more than simply overturning the “allegory” Levao outlines. First of all, it requires reevaluating its assumptions about the “privileged” relationship supposedly existing between monarch and scientist in the early modern era, a connection early established within new historicism (as Levao notes) by Stephen Orgel’s highly influential work on political theater, The Illusion of Power. Second, it requires pinpointing the formalist methodologies that subtly reinforce the essential ahistoricism of its paradigm. Fortunately, the second part of this task has been made much simpler thanks to Alan Liu’s careful study of the historical “formalism” inherent in new historicism’s “prejudice for synchronic structure.” Because their “mythical” bias renders both actual and literary agents incapable of any but “a static, reversible, self-contained rictus of action not unlike myth in Lévi-Strauss’s formulation,” they necessarily eliminate action qua action in ways that (as Levao similarly complains) effectively reproduce a Hegelian phenomenology of the subject. With a single “spirit” of the age completely dominating all “historical epiphenomena,” all linguistic representation is ultimately collapsed into the amorphous agency of power. And once both real empirical-historical power (action qua agency) and

10. Levao, “Francis Bacon and the Mobility of Science,” Representations 40 (1992): 2, 25 n. 3. Levao’s footnote targets not Foucault himself but Timothy Reiss’s Foucauldian approach to “analytico-referential discourse.” Levao also quotes from Reiss, The Discourse of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 22–23, but does not consider Reiss’s predictably “disciplinary” critique of New Atlantis or connect its limitations to those of the new-historicist paradigm.

28

Catherine Gimelli Martin

real mimesis disappear, all that remains is an elusive “power of fictions” maintained by “shuffling” between “physical concepts originating in positivist explanations of reality—‘power,’ for example,” and the figurative power of texts. In the process, “the exact forms of a formalism the New Historicism claims to have left behind (‘ambiguity,’ ‘paradox,’ ‘contradiction,’ ‘irony’ and so forth) drift from their origination in literary study to figure the operations of history.” Thus, as he concludes, moving “from Empson’s . . . to Russian Formalism’s atomization of ‘motive’; to Saussure’s hugely demotivated langue (a structure of the arbitrary, contentless, unconscious); to Lévi-Strauss’s savage mind; to Foucault’s agentless archive; to mindless (i.e., Logo-less) differance; and to New Historicism’s paradigms uncertain in their Subject and action; is only to change our valorization.” Most unfortunately of all, this method does not even provide a truly viable formalism but only “a method of metaphor or cultural intertextuality void of any rigorously considered philosophy of cultural figure, trope, conceit, or ‘language.’ While joining text and context figuratively to create its Geertzian ‘symbolic’ of culture, it lacks the means to think the interdisciplinary medium of conjunction except by rote allusion to a miscellany of discursive systems and other borrowed methodology.”11 Yet while Levao, Liu, and other equally perceptive critics of new-historicist methodology have successfully linked its ahistoricism to its Foucauldian heritage, its methodological problems have not yet been linked to the underlying bias against both science and scientific history that it inherits from the Frankfort school. As a result, its critics have failed to notice that the new-historicist concept of ideological “demystification” is ironically grounded in the Frankfort school’s remystification of its own failed ideology. In recapitulating Horkheimer and Adorno’s postrevolutionary premise that “Enlightenment is totalitarian,” new historicists inevitably borrow their “tragic,” late Marxist apologetics. As we have seen, the central key to this apologetics is the claim that social progress is inevitably defeated by technological regimes in which “Power and knowledge are synonymous.”12 Foucault merely expands this 11. Liu, “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism,” ELH 56 (1989): 734–35, 739, 743, 756. 12. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4, 6. Liu wrongly dismisses most attempts to link new historicism with Marxism (“Power of Formalism,” 770 n. 92), a link clearly established in Stephen Greenblatt’s recent volume, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Levao implicitly refutes the main thrust of the Frankfort school’s claims by denying the privilege of political power in Bacon’s theory of knowledge, claiming (quite rightly) that “so copious are Bacon’s own comparisons that no analogy need be granted privilege” (“Bacon and Science,” 24 n. 3). Greenblatt again repeats his claim to “demystify”

Ahistoricism of the New Historicism

29

claim by exploring the exploitation of power-knowledge by “observing hierarchies” that “normalize” the value judgments internalized by epistemologically imprisoned subjects.13 This internalization then ceaselessly recirculates authoritarian energies and creates the collapsed Hegelian zeitgeist on which the system depends, a system effectively rendering advanced societies as static as the primitive mythic cultures studied by Lévi-Strauss. When this newhistorical “narrative” deprived of either an Enlightenment telos or a Marxian dialectic is adopted by the new historicists, its proponents are inevitably forced to tell the same unvarying tale told by Stephen Greenblatt: a tale of “subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us.”14 Although this antinarrative is not without value in subverting Whiggish complacencies, its depiction of the shift toward modernity as irretrievably nasty, brutish, and short is at least as reductive as what it would replace. As we have also seen, its account of important founders of modern empirical method such as Francis Bacon is both historically and hermeneutically inadequate.15 Historically, while some of Bacon’s strictures on language did in fact inspire an enthusiasm for universally clear and transparent modes of discourse among his followers, they never produced anything like a perfected “nominalist” discourse that destroyed the older “magical heritage” on the road to modernity. True, modernized schemas of grammar and logic began to appear at a much accelerated pace throughout the seventeenth century, but these efforts were as often rooted in earlier Ramist or later Cartesian schemas as in Baconian method. And those who, like John Comenius and John Wilkins, were directly inspired by Bacon not only never succeeded in disentangling mystical from rational linguistic ideals but also never succeeded in creating a workable universal language. Later, when the “Baconian” ideal of a noise-free scientific language resurfaced among the early-twentieth-century positivists, their dreams early modern poetics in Practicing New Historicism. For an explicit new-historicist endorsement (via Foucault) of Horkheimer and Adorno’s claim that “Enlightenment is totalitarian,” see John Michael Archer, “Surveillance and Enlightenment in Bacon’s New Atlantis,” Assays 6 (1991): 111–12. 13. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979), 184–85. 14. Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Shakespearean England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 65. 15. See Charles Whitney’s fine study, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 123. However, Whitney’s later conversion (discussed extensively below) to the new-historicist obsession with what might be called “state-fashioning” rather than “selffashioning” is not surprising given his agreement with Horkheimer and Adorno (2–3, 123).

30

Catherine Gimelli Martin

soon proved as unworkable as the self-clarifying universal language systems of Bacon’s day.16 Finally, although some linguistic reformers such as Wilkins did become influential members of the Royal Society after Bacon’s death, their efforts were generally greeted not with political patronage or power but with social parody, which both played and paid well on Restoration stage and page.17 Small wonder, then, that although Charles II served as the society’s official patron, it was so underfunded and so lacking in real prestige that the king (who was doing his best to resurrect most of Bacon’s demystified “Idols”) could casually refer to its members as his “jesters.”18 Yet ironically, Royal Society projects proved more respectable than Bacon’s own endeavors, which were scorned not only by James I but by Bacon’s influential uncle, Lord Burleigh, as well. Thus, if his utopian science had any real power to alienate anyone, that “subject” can only be Bacon himself. At the very time that he was mapping out his foundational statements on method, they were eclipsed by astrologers and natural magicians such as John Dee and Robert Fludd, who were welcomed in most of the courts of Europe while Bacon languished in virtual exile.19 Either for that reason or because of the inherent attraction of the natural-magic tradition, Bacon himself dabbled in the Paracelsan and alchemical “sciences” overtly denounced by his Advancement of Learning.20 16. For an overview of these phenomena, see Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1966); in relation to Bacon, see M. M. Slaughter, Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Twentieth-century attempts to create symbolic logic have been dramatically displaced by studies showing the metaphoric, emotional, or “bodily” basis, or all three, of language and cognition. Representative examples include Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994). 17. Two prominent examples include Samuel Butler’s Hudibras and Thomas Shadwell’s Virtuoso, whose parodies of the new science in general and the Royal Society in particular won wide acclaim. Although Charles II rewarded Hudibras with a generous pension, he denied the Royal Society’s poet laureate, Abraham Cowley, his much-hoped-for royal patronage. 18. See Harvey Wheeler, “Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: The ‘Mould’ of a Lawfinding Commonwealth,” in Francis Bacon’s Legacy of Texts, ed. William A. Sessions (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 201–310; and Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society (Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 1989). Like a number of other contemporary historians, Hunter believes that Thomas Sprat’s “triumphalist” History of the Royal Society was commissioned in an attempt to bolster its dangerously low social esteem; many of its own members failed to take its proceedings seriously for some of the reasons outlined above. 19. See Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 13–15. 20. On Bacon’s debts to Renaissance magic, see esp. Rossi, Francis Bacon. On his debt to Aristotelian essentialism (a more systematic, empiricist form of Platonic realism), see Lisa Jar-

Ahistoricism of the New Historicism

31

The new historicists’ failure to account for these among many other widely recognized discrepancies both in their own and in the Frankfort-Foucauldian account of the “privileged” relationship between state and scientific power is by now so massive that their ahistoricity is increasingly obvious even to those who at first ignored Liu’s “prophetic” warning that their “‘Renaissance’ . . . is really a simulation, a dream academy . . . coincident with the corridors and vaults of the postmodern intellect, . . . where [it] fantasizes safely about subversion and transgression against ‘the regime of power and knowledge that at once sustains and constrains us.’”21 Yet as suggested above, a more scientific historicism will continue to elude us so long as we continue to believe that something like the “disenchantment of the world” was set in motion by “Bacon’s nominalist credo” where, as Horkheimer and Adorno claim, “On the road to modern science, men renounce any claim to meaning. They substitute formula for concept, rule and probability for cause and motive. . . . Every spiritual resistance it encounters serves merely to increase its strength,” so that (as they famously conclude) “Enlightenment” itself is “totalitarian.” The key text in this analysis is Bacon’s “In Praise of Knowledge,” which supposedly begins disenchanting the world by making “the truth of being and the truth of knowing . . . all one.” According to Horkheimer and Adorno, this equation not only asserts a patriarchal “concordance between the mind of man and the nature of things,” but also invites “the human mind, which overcomes superstition, . . . to hold sway over a disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no obstacles: neither in the enslavement of men nor in compliance with the world’s rulers.”22 But as we should by now suspect, Bacon’s “In Praise of Knowledge” makes exactly the opposite claim: not that knowledge is power but that properly constituted knowledge can provide a crucial tool of power. The difference between the two formulations may seem slight, but in the end it is dramatic. As Bacon goes on to show, without an openness to real knowledge rarely found among monarchs, their interests and their agents will remain either outside or even opposed to the power that could set both themselves and their subjects free. Hence while sovereigns may promote knowledge, they can do so only by subjecting themselves to its demands, which are also those of a far broader hu-

dine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 21. Liu, “Power of Formalism,” 749. As he further remarks on the same page, “[T]he membrane of history between the Renaissance and postmodernity in Greenblatt’s studies sometimes stretches so thin that there is virtually no separation at all.” 22. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4–6.

32

Catherine Gimelli Martin

man sovereignty. Should they fail in any of these respects, kingly power will gain nothing from knowledge: “[T]he sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge; wherein many things are reserved, which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command; their spials and intelligencers can give no news of them, their seamen and discoverers cannot sail where they grow” (8:123, 125). Knowledge in this sense is thus wholly distinct from political power. Whereas political power is subject to knowledge, knowledge is not subject to it. Hence rather than praising a Faustian form of power-as-knowledge, Bacon affirms the existence of an undiscovered knowledge-as-power that “kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command.” At the same time, this knowledge-power is both holistically and organically liberating, for it will “grow” only in proportion to its harmony with the real nature of things. As a result, he attributes the power of Elizabeth I (to whom the “Praise” is officially dedicated) not to her ability to co-opt learning for narrow, self-interested political purposes, but to her willingness to set her authority impartially aside and “not prejudicing herself by looking . . . through too few windows” (8:139). Logically, then, the queen’s power will remain conditional upon her continuing openness to what she “sees” from multiple perspectives that may potentially conflict with her preconceived political interests. This kind of power is thus not strictly political but “polymorphously” conditional upon an empirical openness that, if it is collapsed into the unilateral modes of “accommodation” preferred by her Stuart heirs, Bacon rightly predicts will prove self-destructive of power itself.23 The key to understanding the difference between this attitude toward knowledge-power and the more Faustian enterprise that his detractors associate with him—a form of power-knowledge where might not only makes right in the sense of “just” but also in the sense of “true”—is contained in one of Bacon’s most deceptively simple but actually profound aphorisms: “Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.”24 This statement is contained in the third 23. This mode of “accommodation” is obviously the opposite of what Greenblatt means by the term in Shakespearean Negotiations: a hegemonic system of power relations disguised as openended exchange but lacking any real opportunity for flexibility or change. As in new historicism generally, progress succumbs to the infinite improvisation and (re)circulation of social energies notoriously unable to account for the actual causes of the English revolution. 24. As I have pointed out elsewhere, much of the “power” of Foucault’s argument rests on the multiple but too often undifferentiated senses of pouvoir-power, which (as in new-historicist discourse) typically fails to distinguish not only between potential and actual forms of power but also between the quite different “force” of physical “might” and moral “right.” For a refutation of Bacon’s Faustian or Promethean tendencies, or both, and a discussion of his affinities with natural magic, see Michèle Le Doeuff, “Man and Nature in the Gardens of Science,” in Bacon’s Legacy of Texts, ed. Sessions, 119–37.

Ahistoricism of the New Historicism

33

aphorism of New Organon; or, True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature, which initially seems to endorse a synthesis of knowledge and power similar to the one Horkheimer and Adorno blame for the subjugation of the world: “Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule” (4:47). Yet the precise kind of power unleashed when “causes” are transformed into “rules” is most accurately understood in the dialectic between the first and fourth aphorisms: “Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything” and “Towards the effecting of works, all that man can do is to put together or put asunder natural bodies. The rest is done by nature working within” (4:47). To make sense of this reasoning we must posit that: (1) human knowledge is limited by natural laws against which it neither can nor should work if anything beneficial (or anything at all) is to be accomplished; and (2) human “knowledge” in this sense concerns physical, mechanical, mathematical, chemical, or a combination thereof of causes (as the fifth aphorism goes on to specify), which do not and cannot directly contribute to social or political control because the causes of nature may be mastered without ever producing a comparable mastery of human “nature.” This limitation is inherent in Bacon’s essentially theological seventeenth-century understanding of human nature. Because, like his contemporaries, he believes human behavior is primarily rooted in supernatural rather than natural causes—in the divinely given, rational, immortal soul—both its final cause (God) and its highest “rules” (spirit) are at best partially knowable. Although both political and civil “science” can profitably study the material and efficient causes of human behavior, unlike the concretely knowable (if still largely unknown) sciences of matter, these “social” studies can produce only probable knowledge, not the “scientific” certainty he seeks.25 As a result, Bacon chiefly looks to the material sciences to restore what man lost by his fall: both “his state of innocency, and . . . his dominion over creation.” These losses “can even in this life be in some part repaired . . . in virtue of that charter, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,’” which he construes not as a curse but as an incentive to “various labours . . . subdued to the uses of human life.” Hence in The Great Instauration (or “great renewal”), the “The Plan of the Work” concludes with a prayer to God, “wherefore if we labour in thy works with the 25. See Weinberger, Science, Faith, and Politics, 302–4 ff.

34

Catherine Gimelli Martin

sweat of our brows thou will make us partakers of thy vision and thy sabbath” (4:33, 248). Unlike his Frankfort school critics, then, Bacon’s foundational assumptions are grounded in Christian humanism or pragmatism or both rather than in modern behaviorism, materialism, or determinism, which means that unlike them, he believes that no greater knowledge-power will ever be devised for controlling the human mind or psyche than the simple Christian “calling” to practical, charitable works. A truly humane polity will thus be one that most truly applies Christian revelation and morality, which, as both Moody Prior and Jerry Weinberger observe, convey the “powers” of human charity rather than human force. As Prior summarizes, Bacon’s pragmatic “identification of scientific truth with use and therefore with charity, with power and therefore with pity, is fundamental to Bacon’s concept of true learning”; as Weinberger adds, this learning is boundless only in the sense that “charity knows no excess.”26 However, in some sense like the invisible, mysterious, and semiinscrutable human soul, the visible gift of God-in-nature can benignly “supplement” human life so long as its giver is properly obeyed. Yet this condition even further limits human power, because it directly proceeds from the recognition that fallen human nature “is often hidden; sometimes overcome; seldom extinguished,” which means that it can never be “trust[ed] . . . too far; for nature will lay buried a great time, and yet arrive upon the occasion or temptation” to disrupt both human self-mastery and mastery of nature (6:469–70). Nevertheless, Bacon is cautiously optimistic about human progress, not simply due to the restraints imposed by his “true” inductive method but also because “there never was any philosophy, religion, or other discipline, which did so plainly and highly exalt the good which is communicative, and depress the good which is private and particular, as the Holy Faith” (3:421). Ignoring this central, spiritual, and ethical aspect of Baconian empiricism inevitably leads the Frankfort-school critics to commit category errors of a kind that Bacon himself never imagined, for as historical materialists, they believed that all causes and effects are subject to scientific laws. As a result, like Marx they understand knowledge as techne¯ rather than as sophrosyne: not as an art but as a craft able to produce technical “rules” fully capable of subjecting both nature and society according to the laws of the economic base. However, for a conventional Christian dualist like Bacon, this kind of “science” is virtually unthinkable because God alone has the power to know all the causes at 26. Prior, “Bacon’s Man of Science,” in Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1968), 147, emphasis added; Weinberger, Science, Faith, and Politics, 292.

Ahistoricism of the New Historicism

35

work in his creation. And although Bacon does tentatively envision a time in the distant future when human knowledge might begin to approach a godlike comprehensiveness, even then no human laws will ever fully explain or predict human behavior, whose final cause lies in its divine imago dei. This dualism severely limits certain human knowledge to testable, demonstrable physical laws carefully amassed over time, which The Advancement of Learning separates from the fully probabilistic realm of social and ethical knowledge. Bacon’s practical experience as a politician also seems to have contributed to his far greater awareness of the instability of “mere” social power than the Frankfortians or Foucauldians, who use the monolithic stability of ideology to explain their political disappointments.27 Instead, as even Horkheimer and Adorno admit, Bacon used his own political disappointments to build a program of demystification that would place power upon more rational foundations. As New Atlantis illustrates, he believed that this program also would provide greater social stability. However, these hopes were tempered both by an awareness that the human mind is at best only partially “disenchanted” and by a distrust in the ability of the hard sciences—astronomy, physics, and mathematics—immediately to improve or to stabilize “man’s estate.” While his new inductive method might well produce true theoretical rules, their practical applications might lag many years behind or never be discovered at all (4:48). Like most visionaries, Bacon was only partially right on these points: right about the fact that the hard sciences at first contributed little or nothing to practical improvements in contemporary navigation, agriculture, and medicine—the fields closest to real human priorities—and wrong about the social complacency that Newton’s clockwork universe would bequeath to the Enlightenment.28 However, Bacon would have found the later developments deeply disappointing not only upon utilitarian but upon spiritual grounds as well. While he dreamed of eventually reuniting the applied with the theoretical sciences, he never completely departed from the older contemplative ide27. Hence the profound instability of Bacon’s Essays, many of which are concerned with the tenuous aspects of social power. Stanley Fish’s famous essay “The Georgics of the Mind” explores their dynamics in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 78–155. 28. As Charles Webster long ago pointed out, “Baconian science was basically anti-authoritarian” because “its criteria of proof rested on an appeal to experiment which was seen as analogous to personal revelation.” During the revolutionary period, New Atlantis directly inspired numerous biological, agricultural, chemical, and medicinal reforms aimed at improving “man’s estate.” See The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660 (New York: Homes and Meier, 1975), 189, 249–50. The post-Restoration effects of Baconian empiricism are generally acknowledged as more conservative but (according to Hunter in Establishing the New Science) still profoundly mixed.

36

Catherine Gimelli Martin

al of knowledge as the chief agent of moral and spiritual liberation. Thus, unlike the social pragmatists of the following century, he still believed in the inherent superiority of theoretical “experiments of light” to “merely” utilitarian “experiments of fruit,” since only in and through this light can the holy “marriage” between the “mind of man and the nature of things” be consummated (4:17). These considerations again indicate that Bacon’s views of both technical mastery and social stability are directly opposed to those attributed to him by the Frankfort-school theoreticians, who not only materialize them in accordance with their own ideology, but also deprive them of the very factors that make New Atlantis a spiritual as well as a physical paradise. Even more problematically, they overlook just how thoroughly this paradise eliminates the hierarchical bureaucracies that destroyed not only Bacon’s brilliant career but also the brilliant hopes of Marxist communism. From that perspective alone, New Atlantis must be read as a contemporary rebuttal to the ideologically regimented society that Thomas More imagined would produce the “socialist paradise” of his Utopia. New historicists generally exclude this contemporary horizon by instead pursuing Foucault’s abstract critique of power-knowledge to its logical conclusion. The principal text in authorizing this maneuver is Discipline and Punish, in which Foucault rejects both Bacon’s pluralist vision of the humane society and his ideal of objectively verifiable knowledge as the proper tool for extending human sovereignty over nature. For Foucault, the ideal of impartial knowledge is not only an outright illusion but also an ideological construct falsely claiming that “knowledge can exist only where power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests.” Instead of lending credence to this belief, [w]e should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. These “power-knowledge relations” are to be analysed, therefore, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who knows, the objects to be known, and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations.29 29. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 27–28.

Ahistoricism of the New Historicism

37

This argument is literally powerful since in its own terms it is all but irrefutable. Presupposing what it seems to prove, the argument is that the “subjects” of knowledge cannot adopt a standpoint completely “outside” a field of knowledge that they are already “in” because that field is already permeated and controlled by power relations purveyed through language, the very medium supposedly extricating them from it. In one respect this analysis offers a fairly unobjectionable truism: language clearly does frame linguistic subjects and objects in advance of actual speakers or agents. What Foucault makes of this truism, though, is far from unobjectionable: that there is no authentic “free space” within words. According to his highly restrictive interpretation, language now not only precedes but also predetermines the content of thought, not just its tools, so that (according to the antihumanist position he has made famous) “language speaks us.” Yet in fact, Foucault’s conclusion is legitimate only if an entirely separate, unstated, and unproved assumption is added to his argument, namely, in addition to preceding linguistic agents, language also so completely shapes the ideas of those agents that what cannot be named cannot be thought. Like his epistemic zeitgeist, this idea—known in linguistics as the Whorfian hypothesis—once had some currency, but as Steven Pinker shows, it has long since been disproved on the basis of faulty data and overgeneralization.30 However, by not even mentioning this logical step, Foucault can simply go on to rule out any notion of semiotic “freedom” as a concept based on impossible preconditions: the absolute absence of all power relations, demands, and interests. While demands and interests are rarely absent from language, this analysis also pointedly overlooks J. L. Austin’s important distinction between the constative (passive and informative) dimension of language and its performative (active and declarative) dimensions. In the process, it implicitly makes all language become exclusively performative as well as univocal: it declares, and its subjects obey.31 Yet here again, his conclusion can be granted only by omit30. The Whorfian hypothesis has been discredited by studies detailing the spontaneous “creolization” or recomplexification of language among second-generation speakers of pidgin dialects. Whereas first-generation pidgin speakers are forced to employ a simplified vocabulary and grammar due to limited exposure to the dominant language and the mutual incompatibility of their various native tongues, second-generation speakers spontaneously reinvent complex concepts and verbal forms properly belonging to neither language stem. These verbal inventions either recover or improve upon the subtlety of the parent language(s), even when they have no direct exposure to the “pure” native or dominant tongue. See Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: William Morrow, 1994). 31. Austin discusses the constative and performative poles of language in How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).

38

Catherine Gimelli Martin

ting a crucial step in the argument. This oversight is the familiar but faulty assumption discredited by Levao: that Classic Age linguistics introduced a system in which tables of signs transparently replaced and controlled things, a system that effectively eliminated the free space of interpretation required by earlier Renaissance hermeneutics.32 The best concrete refutation of this power-knowledge thesis ironically lies in the notorious interpretive instability or “openness” of Bacon’s New Atlantis. Although Bacon’s fictive Bensalem or “Son of Peace” does in fact reap the fruit of social harmony through the light of its knowledge-power, this harmony is different both in kind and in degree from the univocal containment imposed by Foucault’s “panopticon” society. True, Bacon’s island society does gain considerable power from its concealed observation of the world as well as from its concealment from outsiders, but this closure is canceled by the very act of narration and publication that frames the tale. This tale also shows that far from controlling its inhabitants, the island’s concealment has allowed it to serve as a benign exception to the far different European rule of exploitation and conflict. Utterly unlike the Spanish conquistadors whose language it borrows only for foreign exchange, the island’s internal affairs are governed by a supremely successful system of social justice and voluntary negotiation. Externally, these principles not only prevent the citizens from either enslaving foreigners or condoning piracy, but actually mandate the physical and spiritual healing of all foreigners cast away on their island. These peaceful arts establish New Atlantis as the locus of a charitable Christian “light” so fruitful that Bacon implies that it must eventually spread to all nations of the world. Because the essence of this light consists in the art of learning how to allow nature to work with rather than against human needs, it is not ultimately distinct from the ethical disposition of the island’s inhabitants. These citizens practice forms of nurturance so humane that they spontaneously bring out the best in human nature, thereby creating an ideal community that (unlike either Plato’s Republic or More’s Utopia) functions with a minimum of social control and maximum of spontaneity. J. C. Davis’s extremely thorough study of this and other contemporaneous utopian fictions indicates just how uniquely open Bacon’s Bensalemite society is. In mainstream Protestant thought especially, utopian writers generally solve the problem of man’s propensity to do wrong through familial, institutional, and legal controls. But Bacon’s Bensalemites achieve a crime-free society by rewarding individualistic modes of child rearing, education, and personal 32. For this analysis, see Foucault, “The Prose of the World,” chap. 2 in Order of Things.

Ahistoricism of the New Historicism

39

problem solving largely detached from external controls. Encouraged by substantial social and material rewards for exemplary parenting, social harmony is further enhanced by voluntary sexual chastity, which Bacon imagines increasing in proportion to the elimination of the sexual double standards still prevalent in Europe. In these and related matters, he thus assumes that no sanctions upon misbehavior will be required by a people who have seriously applied the sage advice provided in his Christmas entertainment: “Trust not to your laws for correcting the times, but give all strength to good education; see to the government of your universities and all seminaries of youth, and to the private order of families, maintaining the due obedience of children toward their parents, and reverence of the younger sort toward the ancient” (8:340). As this dictum implies, Bacon’s utopia is hardly free from the patriarchal assumptions common to the other utopian writers of his day and age, when even radical reformers such as Gerard Winstanley took them for granted. Yet as Davis concludes, Bacon uniquely imagines these ideals as freely expressing, not molding, the will of his chosen people.33 Yet for new historicists armed with Frankfortian-Foucauldian assumptions, Bacon’s New Atlantis predictably becomes a prison house of power-knowledge. Despite the school’s putative preference for “thick” anthropological descriptions, the result is a series of remarkably thin, airless, and predictably “closed” portraits of Bacon’s open society. John Michael Archer provides a typical case in point: while noting the “oddly maternal” aspects of its nurturing ethos, he concludes that this ethos is intended to disguise the fact that the island is really the site of monarchical and theatrical power-knowledge. Bensalem thus becomes not only a “theater for the relocation of [Elizabeth’s] sovereignty,” but also the site where “the general sovereignty of ‘man’” is appropriated by “some hidden place within [her] knowledge.” Although the Frankfortian critique of Bacon’s “Praise” is clearly apparent here, any real appeal to historical context is not. Archer does not even attempt to explain why he would wish to exalt a long-dead queen whose undying enmity to the Essex circle effectively blocked his political career as long as she lived. He also fails to explain how or why the queen has replaced the absent semimythic king who officially rules an island actually ruled by the perfect, virtually self-administering system of laws instituted by its founder, the appropriately named King Solamona. Fi33. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: English Utopian Writing, 1517–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 69 (cf. 43, 82–83, 104 ff.), 117–19, 182. Unlike more authoritarian utopias, Bacon’s fable rapidly went through eight editions; see Webster, Great Instauration, 249–50.

40

Catherine Gimelli Martin

nally, although Archer does admit the striking differences between New Atlantis and More’s Utopia, where everyone is “watched by everyone else,” his new-historical model causes him to focus obsessively upon the only two forms of surveillance that Bensalem does include: (1) the quarantining of visiting seamen in a Stranger’s House where, free of charge, they are cured of their ailments and “hostilely” surveyed only for signs of piracy; and (2) the “laws of secrecy” by which the Bensalemites “know well most parts of the habitable world” but are themselves “unknown” (3:136). Finally, despite its lack of a capitalist economy, he accuses its inhabitants of the prime panoptic sin of “industrial and political espionage.”34 In this he has been seconded by Charles Whitney, who believes that while the merchants of Salomon’s House say they trade only for “Light” rather than for financial profit, they are actually masters of industrial surveillance (3:146– 47). As their secret identity “proves,” they must also buy light at “ridiculously low prices” from “sellers [that] do not know the use value of their products.” But this Marxian-inflected critique of capitalism is nowhere justified either by Bacon’s noncommercial island or by its Salomon’s House, which freely dispenses useful industrial “secrets” to the population at large. Both Archer and Whitney must therefore justify their critique by referring back to the knowledge-power model they presuppose. For Whitney, this means that “[t]he absolute difference between knower and known . . . insure[s] the freedom and sovereignty of Bensalem’s science [and] goes along with a distinctly colonialist trait . . . [like] racism.” However, because racism is overtly absent from a nation that includes representatives “of most of the world’s peoples” and religions, who coexist “freely and harmoniously,” Whitney is forced to “prove” this charge via the very existence of Salomon’s House, the institution whose “differential” power decrees the inferiority of all “Others” outside “the happy Pale.” This damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t logic (that is, even including Others “impales” them) then leads to the typical counterutopian accusation that Bensalem’s “weak pluralism” affords only an inadequate “salad bowl” society. Because “differences . . . only exist within a larger homogeneity,” no real equity exists. But again, this conclusion makes sense only within the familiar paradigm it presupposes, in which social “freedom” is possible only within a free-floating hermeneutics of analogy and cor34. Archer, “Surveillance and Enlightenment,” 112, 113, 116, 120. As noted above, theatrical metaphor is well known as a key term in the new-historicist analysis of power; see Liu, “Power of Formalism,” 723; and Anthony B. Dawson, “Measure for Measure, New Historicism, and Theatrical Power,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 334.

Ahistoricism of the New Historicism

41

respondence, not within a pluralist society guided by uniform criteria of social equity and truth. However, for Whitney, this ethos is cruel even though it abolishes what every traditional Christian society would regard as social ills: “prostitution, adultery, and homosexuality.” This anachronistic outlook also fuels his complaints against the island’s “compulsive heterosexuality,” which in context completely misrepresents Bacon’s obvious historical point: that many of the sociosexual ills then rampant in Europe (of which his Jewish informant reminds the narrator) could be eliminated by permitting young consenting couples to marry without regard for the social and financial pressures imposed by parents and their sometimes cruelly selfish prerogatives. Here Bacon may be accused of naive optimism, but hardly of homophobia—a peculiar charge to level at a man whose homosexuality is so well documented, but no more strange than Whitney’s corollary: that his goal is to use scientific humanism as a “force for social stability rather than change.”35 In hindsight, of course, most utopias rarely if ever look as progressive as they once did to sympathetic members of their original audience. Nevertheless, it seems clear that most modern intellectual historians and literary critics operating outside of the new-historicist paradigm come to diametrically opposite conclusions about Bacon’s humanistic agenda. Kevin Dunn, for instance, casually observes as a simple matter of fact that he “feared nothing more than premature profit taking from his new method.” Hence, his ideal “merchants do . . . carry commodity of matter,’ but only to trade for ‘God’s first creature.’ They remain resolutely uninterested in monetary profit.” Although later Baconians departed from this humanistic ideal, Dunn notes that even after for-profit merchants entered the picture, his followers remained faithful to Bacon’s pragmatic vision both by eliminating the aristocracy as the central “organ” of circulation and by replacing it with a system of private acts that benefited the larger public. In the long run, this reorientation had profound economic and “radically democratizing effect[s] on the hierarchical body of classical political theory.” Maurice Slawinski supports these conclusions by noting that Bacon’s new philosophy “ran counter to the most fundamental ideological tenets of elite culture in the ancien régime, which tended to attribute greater value to one thing or activity over another” at the expense of the “‘vulgar’ majority.” But by completely ignoring this concrete historical context, Whitney and others also screen out the actual complexities of New Atlantis and turn it into an elitist, antiprogressive, and disciplinary culture where authority is always 35. Whitney, “Merchants of Light: Science as Colonization in the New Atlantis,” in Bacon’s Legacy of Texts, ed. Sessions, 258–60; cf. Stillman, New Philosophy, 103.

42

Catherine Gimelli Martin

internalized in a work ethic, obedience, restraint, and racism. With such internalization, there would be less need in England for displays and exercises of physical power. Toleration could increase; substantial existing fears about popular assembly and riotous, blasphemous, popular festivals would be needless if festivals were themselves orderly and expressed not misrule but acquiescence. Bensalem thus offers a glimpse of Michel Foucault’s modern “disciplinary technologies” in operation, internal codes that characterize the modern age, and that render a degree of physical force and theatrical display of power obsolete.36

In other words, Frankfortian-Foucauldian semiotics-as-alienation and alienation-as–co-optation guarantee that although Bensalem superficially appears to increase toleration, its secret “internal codes” actually decrease it because it could never do anything other than reproduce the subversion-containment tactics of the dominant ideology.37 Although Whitney stops short of spelling out just how this semiotic prison house is constructed, Robert Stillman’s complementary account of New Atlantis clearly identifies the oppressor as the nominalist or “man-made sign,” the Foucauldian transparent signifier that “at the peak of its activity” becomes “the purveyor of analytical power.” By alienating the subject from the “creative” analogies of the earlier Renaissance, this “sign” internally manipulates and ultimately cancels desire. While acknowledging the multivalent senses that Bacon gives to desire, Stillman sees them all operating “consistently in Bacon’s writings to designate a certain force or set of ‘motions’ in need of lawful regulation by sovereign authority”: “scientific reason, natural philosopher, king or God.” This collapse of polysemy into enforced différance, deferral, and monological manipulation is thus the key that finally “turns the lock upon Bacon’s seventeenth-century version of the prison house of language.” Nonetheless, Stillman’s metaphor is unfortunate insofar as it reminds us that Fredric Jameson’s Prison House of Language links the failures of French structuralism 36. Dunn, “Milton among the Monopolists: Areopagitica, Intellectual Property, and the Hartlib Circle,” in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 180, 182, 184; Slawinski, “Rhetoric and Science/Rhetoric of Science/Rhetoric as Science,” in Science, Culture, and Popular Belief in Renaissance Europe, ed. Stephen Pumfrey, Paolo L. Rossi, and Maurice Slawinski (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1991), 82; Whitney, “Merchants of Light,” 265–66. 37. For a famous new-historicist approach to the work of subversion-containment in carnival, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

Ahistoricism of the New Historicism

43

to the limitations of Ferdinand de Saussure’s ultranominalist linguistics. Because here, as in Foucault’s system, signs replace and thereby control things, the structural “power” of Saussure’s langue endlessly manipulates parole without being subject to the “reality checks” of external historical agency. Foucault himself, of course, always denied any link between his archaeology of knowledge and the structuralist enterprise, but this disclaimer is called into question by his own and his followers’ adherence to the central Saussurean teaching that nothing exists outside the dominant discourse (langue). The ideological limitations of these assumptions are thus once again demonstrated by the fact that Stillman’s case rests almost exclusively on identifying Bacon as a nominalist, which by definition “proves” that his fiction expresses the “familiar expansionist language” of repressive power.38 The formal circularity and inherent ahistoricity of this new-historicist critique becomes even more obvious in the course of Stillman’s demonstration that Baconianism actually preserved the status quo rather than calling “all in doubt.” Although Bacon’s new inductive method may have appeared “dangerous because of the potential license it afforded to widen its attack upon ancient authorities, such as Aristotle, into an assault upon any number of instituted authorities in contemporary culture,” it was not truly “antiauthoritarian” because Bacon was in the business not of “undoing authority,” but only of “attempting to displace old authorities by new, more reliable, more certain authorities.”39 But given this circular definition of authority, what revolutionary can be antiauthoritarian? What society, old or new, can dispense with all structures of authority, well established, transitional, or disruptive? And what language can dispense with syntactical hierarchies, which is where (rather than in “dominant” signs” or discourses or both) recent linguistics has located its ability to communicate knowledge? To make sense of Stillman’s argument (insofar as it has any), one must therefore suppose that the “more certain” authority becomes, the more repressive it will be.40 In other words, ver38. Stillman, New Philosophy, 41, 97, 82, 99. 39. Ibid., 287 n. 67. 40. See Derek Bickerton’s groundbreaking work Language and Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), esp. 144–50, where he points out that the selective advantage inherent in human language stems from its ability to communicate an absent situation, a power apparent not in signs per se (for sign making itself is common among primates) but in syntax. In other words, linguistic power is traceable not to nominalist naming, but rather to our syntactical ability to represent a deep visual field. Even more significantly, Bickerton posits that this ability develops from the open-ended activities of play, which though they mimic power relations also reverse, reinvent, or even cancel them, as Gregory Bateson seminally conjectured in Steps to an Ecology of the Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972).

44

Catherine Gimelli Martin

ifiability must be equivalent to domination, just as knowledge is equivalent to power. Again, though, this thesis contradicts all available historical evidence, for as Walter Ong and others have shown, oral ritual culture is considerably more conservative and less volatile than literate cultures that utilize independently verifiable or “back-scanning” modes of knowledge, or both.41 Thus, like other new-historicist approaches to New Atlantis, Stillman’s modus operandi effectively insulates Bacon’s narrative not only from its own historical conditions—the social, physical, and empirical “ills” that it imagines eliminating—but also from the enormously “thick” nexus of utopian texts surrounding it. By failing to offer even a cursory comparative analysis of these texts—The City of the Sun, Christianopolis, and Macaria, to name but a few— the method completely invalidates its claim to provide anthropologically “thick descriptions” of social or textual reality. In the process, it disguises the fact that nearly all of these utopias—including those written by middle- and working-class writers such as Robert Burton and Gabriel Plattes—are typically not only more authoritarian but also more overtly monarchist than Bacon’s. At the same time, the new historicists’ readiness to exalt collectivist mentalities at any price clearly reveals the school’s Frankfort-school affinities.42 This tendency is evident even when some attempt at contemporary comparison is offered, as in Carolyn Merchant’s complementary feminist critique of New Atlantis. Writing at virtually the same time and from a political perspective roughly resembling Greenblatt’s, Merchant’s uniformly pejorative comparison of Bacon’s scientific community with Campanella’s more communitarian, “natural,” and less patriarchal City of the Sun has influenced later new historicists such as Denise Albanese. However, as Judah Bierman has pointed out (and here even Whitney would partially agree), although Campanella’s Solarians hold women in common, by basing their mating practices on strictly governed breeding and astrological criteria, they are so far from achieving liberty or equality that they actually “surrender . . . sexual individuality to the state in the name of eugenic rationality.” By the same token, although they emphasize natural knowledge, their tightly walled city offers “no place for exploring new knowledge” because everything has already been “fully known, codified

41. For a succinct introduction, see Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982). 42. On the working-class background of Plattes’ Macaria, see Charles Webster, “The Authorship and Significance of ‘Macaria,’” in Intellectual Revolution, 369–85; on Burton’s middleclass authoritarian fantasies in The Anatomy of Melancholy (which closely parallels Johann Andreae’s in Christianopolis), see Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society.

Ahistoricism of the New Historicism

45

and exhibited.” The end result is a form of mental uniformity mirroring the environmental uniformity of the Solarian city-state.43 In contrast, although Salomon’s House is a hierarchically structured, collaborative scientific community, its members reflect the diversity of Bensalemite society by pursuing highly individualized “callings” intended to maximize their production of new knowledge. This careful balance of individualism and collectivism is further reflected in their diffuse governmental system. Although Bacon’s fragmentary narrative fails to reveal many details of Solamona’s perfected legal system, we do receive glimpses of how his laws are dispensed. Family disputes are worked out locally by a Tirsan (or family head) in collaboration with three friends and—apparently to avoid the perils of petty paternalism—the local governors.44 However, when no Tirsan is available (or able) to decide disputes, or when extrafamilial affairs are concerned, the conflicts are voluntarily referred to visiting members of Salomon’s House, who possess the ideal “scientific” virtues—impartiality, beneficence, and wisdom—of its mythical-biblical founder. Yet these details are irrelevant to Bacon’s newhistoricist critics, who, rather than weighing the voluntarism of New Atlantis against the authoritarianism of comparable literary utopias, merely wish to indict Bacon’s scientific project as the antecedent of the all-fictive or actual modernist dystopias that it supposedly “fathers.” However, the disservice done to actual history by new historicists (who are in any case unwilling to grant history any independent, extratextual existence) is actually greater than their disservice to literary texts. Had they looked into the actual historical prototype of Bacon’s Salomon’s House—Uraniborg, the castle Tycho Brahe built for his feudal island of empirical astronomers in the late sixteenth century—the far greater benevolence of Bacon’s fictive scientific institute would clearly emerge. As John North observes, while “Tycho was in some respects the sort of person that Francis Bacon might have envisaged

43. Bierman, “Science and Society in the New Atlantis and Other Renaissance Utopias,” PMLA 78 (1963): 495. For Whitney’s partial critique of Merchant, see Francis Bacon and Modernity, 123. Merchant’s views on Bacon, Campanella, and Andreae appear in The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), 83–111, 164–65, 176–90. A new-historicist version of Merchant’s views (minus only her feminist “essentialism”) appears in Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); see esp. 38, 47, 56. 44. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society, 113–14, 133. Davis also emphasizes the patriarchal foundations of these institutions, though without enough attention to their “Reformed” aspect, including the fact that couples not only may marry without parental consent, but also may not be penalized beyond one-third of their natural inheritance if they do so.

46

Catherine Gimelli Martin

as a Father of Solomon’s House, the main difference . . . [is] that his ends were his own, rather than those of a community. . . . He was an empire-builder, and he was the emperor,” but his quite self-centered “utopia” failed to leave its mark on history because of its dedication to a narrow ideological program. Thus, despite his enormous hereditary and acquired power (unlike Bacon, Brahe was a “master of the patronage system”), his attempt to manipulate power-knowledge ultimately collapsed along with his non-Ptolemaic, geocentric model of the universe. This model was ironically disproved by Brahe’s own humble disciple, Johannes Kepler, whose dedication to the hard data gathered at Uraniborg and whose openness to alternate constructs ultimately persuaded him to abandon the circular planetary orbits (which as a mystic he personally favored) for ellipses.45 Thus, Kepler’s nonideological laws, not Brahe’s ideological geocentrism, came to provide an important foundation of the Newtonian universe. In the process, Kepler validated Baconian standards of falsifiability (knowledge-as-power) rather than the Foucauldian analysis of empirical ideology (power-as-knowledge). In Foucault’s self-contained model of scientific power, falsifiability—the reality check destabilizing or overturning unverified data—simply does not exist. Yet as historians of science generally recognize, the early scientific enterprise was as deeply indebted to mysticism as to hardheaded objectivity, qualities oddly fused (especially for their modern critics) in figures such as Kepler and Bacon. Hence, it is hardly surprising that the Baconian Fathers of Salomon’s House continue to exercise a sort of mystified ritual power among the Bensalemites, where they act as “guardians” of knowledge in ways not utterly distinct from the guardians of Plato’s Republic. However, as Moody Prior points out, for Bacon if not for us, these details were consistent with a conception of “the career of science . . . [as] something of a religion in its selflessness and sense of dedication,” which explains not only why “he at times spoke of the future scientists as though they were a priesthood,” but also why the Fathers of Salomon’s House bear the symbolic insignia of the cherubim, the divine “agents” of charity. Nevertheless, his Fathers are priests only in the highly open-ended Protestant sense of spiritual leaders rather than spiritual or ritual monopolists. As David Renaker significantly observes, Bacon clearly designed Bensalem’s introduction to Christianity to “authenticate a book rather than a man or a group of men,” and each individual can read the revelation in his own tongue. Because the entire island simultaneously receives the Word in an

45. North, “The Odyssey of Tycho Brahe,” TLS (August 18, 2000): 5–6.

Ahistoricism of the New Historicism

47

ark floating upon the waters beneath a huge cross of light, the inhabitants’ conversion is not only communal rather than priestly or authoritarian, but also designed to promote the broad religious toleration later observed there. Thus, the Father who authenticates the miracle merely acts as an objective witness to events that can never be ritualized; since they occur at sea, “[n]o shrine, no pilgrimage, hence no temptation of a resident priesthood or monastic community . . . [can] exploit the curiosity or credulity of pilgrims with [its] sacred relics.”46 Pace the new historicists, these narrative details suggest that the “Reformed” social order of Bacon’s New Atlantis is founded upon the newly personalized and tentatively “democratized” Protestant family structure described by Christopher Hill, not the residually feudal structure of the dominant Elizabethan-Jacobean ideology. By stressing vocation and election not just in Salomon’s House but in all of society, Bacon effectively dissolves the power of the older feudal hierarchies even though no fully revolutionary order has as yet taken hold.47 Despite its Old Testament overtones, Bensalem’s “Feast of the Family” exhibits this greater social fluidity by partially overriding both primogeniture and, to a lesser extent, gender hierarchy. Ranking family members according not to sex but to seniority under a “Son of the Vine” chosen by merit, not birth, the feast celebrates the family as a whole as well as its patriarch in particular (3:150). And while the family receives governmental privileges in reward for its success in reproducing itself, these rewards are chiefly prized as signs of its moral and spiritual health. And while the Son presides over the feast while the family matriarch is concealed “from the open display of power,” she occupies “the same position in relation to her family that Bensalem is [in] to the rest of the world”: both are enveloped in a “chaste” secrecy not unlike that of Salomon’s House, which includes women in unspecified roles.48 Thus, the allegorically “veiled” matriarch can be read as a

46. Prior, “Bacon’s Man of Science,” 155. On Bacon’s use of the cherubim symbols, see Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Bacon and the Cherubim: An Iconographical Reading of the New Atlantis,” English Literary Renaissance 2 (1972): 333–55. Renaker, “A Miracle of Engineering: The Conversion of Bensalem in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis,” Studies in Philosophy 87 (1990): 192, 188. 47. Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in the Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), 443–79. Although he disagrees with Hill’s conviction that this system represents a complete challenge to emergent capitalism, Davis also firmly rejects critics who believe that Bensalem’s social structure merely reaffirms Jacobean institutions or “contains” social change or both (Utopia and the Ideal Society, 116). 48. Archer, “Surveillance and Enlightenment,” 120–23.

48

Catherine Gimelli Martin

figure of fecund “mother” nature mysteriously blessing if not actually presiding over the subjects she has literally conceived, or the feasting family as a whole can alternately be read as a model for the “incorporated families” who could and would play an important role in the technical innovations central to nascent capitalism.49 In either case, the main thrust of the parable is clear: in the ideal society, nature and nurture will work hand in hand to create a civil and bountiful “Son of Peace” whose light and fruit will spread to all the world. Yet Bacon’s narrative does not merely anticipate an emergent family or capitalist ideology but, in an equally real sense, compensates for what never was. Since his “childish” truths never won the support of his king or his nation, Bacon died both a political exile and a self-proclaimed failure (3:386). But perhaps James I was right to ignore his dreams, for as Bacon himself knew only too well, the technology of his day was advancing at a pace far beyond that of the “pure” science in which he invested his own hopes for curing humanity’s ills: hunger, poverty, infant mortality, disease, and early death, all of which are “miraculously” banished from Bensalem. Thus, when the Industrial Revolution finally did get under way more than a century later, it would be the work not of the humane “Fathers” of Salomon’s House but of technologists and engineers who finally found “good” economic uses for a steam engine whose principles had been known seventeen hundred years earlier.50 As for Bacon’s biological and therapeutic dreams of “advancement” in medicine, nutrition, agriculture, and weather control, all would have to wait until relatively recent times, when they would be tragically undermined by ecological and military nightmares produced by the technology that Bacon wanted to place under the charitable guardianship of a Salomon’s House. Here, however, Bacon’s prophetic insight is as “fortunately” limited as his utopian fragment, whose unfinished state seems to reflect his attitude to the fortuitously unfinished state of the human race. Tragic as that state still remains, its open-endedness continues to point to the lasting potential of human hope, the supreme “epistemo-theological virtue” privileged by New At49. See Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity, 200–201; and Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Social Context of Innovation: Bureaucrats, Families, and Heroes in the Early Industrial Revolution, as Foreseen in Bacon’s “New Atlantis” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 63– 67. 50. See Peter Mathias, “Who Unbound Prometheus? Science and Technical Change, 1600– 1800,” in Science and Society, 1600–1900, ed. Mathias (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 72–73. The essays in this collection provide a particularly valuable corrective to the sweeping economic generalizations of the Frankfortians, Foucauldians, and new historicists.

Ahistoricism of the New Historicism

49

lantis as mankind’s surest key “to something entirely other, or to ‘another world’ ultimately assimilable to the kingdom of heaven,” to a progressive “movement beyond boundaries and beyond closure.”51 Recognizing these virtues or even these “impossible dreams” in New Atlantis does not necessarily mean contributing to the new historicists’ worst nightmare: simply subscribing to a “sentimental and ultimately sterile mystique of pure subversion” or “humanist” boundary crossing for its own sake.52 Nor does it mean sealing the past off from the present, for a careful and truly historical examination of the cultural crisis in which this like most utopias is born would reveal that while Baconian empiricism is a real and potentially workable response to contemporary problems, like hope, their only real solutions belong to the future.53 51. Michèle Le Doeuff, “Hope in Science,” in Bacon’s Legacy of Texts, ed. Sessions, 9–13. Weinberger seconds this view by noting that for Bacon, utopian hopes are actually more realistic than Machiavellian realism, for they draw upon the charitable foundations of a Christianized polis in which “the force of charity so affects political life that the only effective management of political affairs is to direct the hope for local freedom to a more universal hope for political freedom” (Science, Faith, and Politics, 318). 52. Jonathan Crewe, Hidden Designs: The Critical Profession and Renaissance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986), 20. 53. On Bacon’s contemporary natural-philosophical reasons “for deepening taxonomic hierarchies” in the midst of the “knowledge explosion”/“information explosion” brought about by the demise of Aristotelian science and its Great Chain of Being, see Slaughter, Universal Languages, 56 ff.

Dennis Flynn

Conjecture in the Writing of Donne’s Biography, with a Modest Proposal In our infinite ignorance we are all equal. —Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge

In the writing of Donne’s biography, according to Helen Gardner, “conjecture is required.” Karl R. Popper, concerned with the growth of scientific knowledge, also relates his notions about conjecture to inquiry in the humanities, especially in areas where conjectures cry out for refutation.1 In early modern English and English historical studies we are accustomed both to making conjectures—often quite wild ones—and to deprecating conjecture as “speculation,” something unseemly and futile. In taking both these positions, scholars in the fields of English and history are not different from many in the sciences and indeed in the history of science. To all of us, Popper makes two perhaps startling but important points: on one hand, knowledge cannot advance without conjecture—trial and error is the universal mode of achieving knowledge; and, on the other hand (but not paradoxically), the best use of any conjecture is to refute it. Only through the refutation of conjectures can knowledge be advanced. Popper understands rational inquiry, whether in the sciences or the humanities, as a process in which we try to find out about the actuality and situation of things by means of guesses that are subject to discussion and revision. These guesses or conjectures are never final truths, but are to be tested through discussion and criticism, as a means of getting nearer to the truth. Rational inquiry so understood allows for “bold conjectures” such as have been felt to characterize the tradition of scientific and rational inquiry distinguishing Western civilization. “In this rationalist tradition bold changes of doctrine are not forbidden. On the contrary, innovation is encouraged, and is regard1. Gardner, review of John Donne: A Life, by R. C. Bald, “All the Facts,” New Statesman 79 (1970): 370. Page numbers to Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1968) are hereinafter cited parenthetically.

50

Conjecture in Donne’s Biography

51

ed as success, as improvement, if it is based on the result of a critical discussion of its predecessors. The very boldness of innovation is admired; for it can be controlled by the severity of its critical examination” (151). Popper further makes an important distinction between probability and verisimilitude in conjectures. Probability he understands as a function of certainty, a subjective perception, whereas verisimilitude he understands as a function of objective truth. Through increasing the probability of our conjectures we can approach logical certainty, or tautological truth, but only through a gradual diminution of informative content. Through increasing the verisimilitude of conjectures, on the other hand, we can approach comprehensive and objective truth. Verisimilitude thus combines truth and content, while probability combines truth with lack of content. An intuitive preference for probability in conjectures seems so appropriate to many people that they are not prepared to consider it critically. However, Popper contends, this preference for probability in conjectures is in fact a deeply ingrained prejudice. The feeling that science should aim at probability stems, Popper suggests, “from a misguided ‘intuition’—from the intuitive confusion between the two notions of verisimilitude and of probability which, as it now turns out, are utterly different” (237). To repeat, the root of this prejudice is a confusion of probability and verisimilitude, a confusion of subjective feeling and objective fact content. According to Popper, the growth of knowledge leads us to formulate conjectures that have increasing content; at the same time, however, it also leads us to formulate conjectures that have decreasing probability. We want conjectures to have not probability but verisimilitude, not relative certainty but more explanatory power. Moreover, the more a conjecture asserts, the less probable it is. In Popper’s view, a conjecture’s value is to be measured by “the increase of logical improbability or explanatory power of the proposed new answer, as compared with the best theory or conjecture previously proposed in the field” (230). Thus if we conjecture, “Donne attended university for six years because he was an ambitious young writer,” the conjecture has a certain probability and will appeal to our sense of relative certainty (especially if we do not add, “according to Izaak Walton”). But if we conjecture, “Donne attended university for only one Oxford term, because he would otherwise have been required to swear the Oath of Supremacy,” this second conjecture has less probability, and appeals less to our sense of relative certainty, because it asserts more. This increase in explanatory power is based in part on growth in our background knowledge about Catholicism at Elizabethan Oxford. The improbability of a conjecture gradually increases the more informative content the conjecture expresses.

52

Dennis Flynn

Despite its being less probable, then, the second conjecture is more valuable, precisely because it asserts more and thereby promises more explanatory power. In this connection, Popper has defined for evaluating conjectures what he calls “a criterion of relative potential satisfactoriness,” characterizing as preferable a conjecture that “tells us more.” In other words, the preferable conjecture is one that contains the greater amount of empirical information, reflects greater background knowledge, is logically stronger, and therefore can be tested and even refuted by comparison of discovered facts with its content. “In short, we prefer an interesting, daring, and highly informative theory to a trivial one” (217). One more point about Popper’s thinking: If he conceives of all rational inquiry as conjecture, he also observes that not all conjectures are so framed as to encourage critical examination. It is possible to organize conjectures so that they tend to compel a sense of irrefutability by creating an impression of prestigious authority, or of comprehensive research and documentation, or of overwhelming verification by evidence, minimizing or hiding the element of uncertainty that is part of any conjecture. Such conjectures depend for their continued success on a subjective intuition “that truth is what we are justified in believing or in accepting.” Popper points out, however, that an objective theory of truth would lead to quite different conclusions. In this light, a conjecture “may be true even though nobody believes it, and even though we have no reason for accepting it, or for believing that it is true”; on the other hand, another conjecture “may be false, although we have comparatively good reasons for accepting it” (225). In other words, it is a mistake to think that the value of any conjecture lies in the impossibility of refuting it. Conjectures should be designed not to be irrefutable but to help advance knowledge. And to help advance knowledge a conjecture should be designed with boldness enough not only to face the possibility of refutation through discovery of new facts but also to focus and encourage such a possibility through the inclusion of factual content that can be tested. The probability of a conjecture does not enhance its value. What makes a conjecture valuable is the degree to which its fact content enables refutation, because it is only through the refutation of conjectures that we learn anything. We learn little from conjectural commonplaces, however much evidence can be found to support them, because they are designed to be irrefutable. R. C. Bald’s “standard” biography of Donne was designed to be irrefutable.2 It embodies the kind of conjecture that appeals to subjective prejudice 2. Page numbers to Bald’s John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) are hereinafter cited parenthetically.

Conjecture in Donne’s Biography

53

about the value of probability. Bald employed a vast quantity of archival data to verify a conjecture: that not only Donne’s supposed early religious conversion from Catholic to Protestant, but also his secret wedding, and his subsequent career in Church of England pulpits, can best be explained by his characteristic and necessary ambition, his place seeking, his interest in advancing his standing in society. In different ways, all three of these conclusions stem from the work of Donne’s first biographer, Izaak Walton. Bald was not unaware of problems in Walton’s Life of Donne, which he characterized as “propaganda—in the same sense as a religious tract is propaganda.” Bald further spoke of a “degree of falsification, intentional or unintentional, in what Walton tells us about Donne.”3 Nevertheless, despite his early suspicions of Walton’s probity, Bald ultimately allows, in the introduction to John Donne: A Life, that “unquestionably [Walton] has traced the main outlines of Donne’s life; even if the pattern has since had to be modified here and there, the essential impression remains” (13). A work of religious propaganda that, intentionally or unintentionally, falsified its subject, Walton’s Life for some reason was nevertheless compelling enough to provide Bald with a “pattern” for his own work, although he updated the meaning of Donne’s life, giving it a more secular center of gravity. Bald’s influential adherence to Walton’s falsifying pattern has been and remains a chief obstacle to greater clarity about many issues in Donne studies. Among these issues, one that has prompted much confusion is Bald’s acceptance of the moral censure implicit in Walton’s reference to Donne’s wedding as “the remarkable error of his life” (a phrase in which my italics emphasize a glibness of patriarchy). That the marriage was Donne’s error was an opinion of Walton and of following biographers and critics, including Bald. Bald tacitly ratifies Walton’s opinion with laconic disregard for Anne More, devoting little attention to explaining her part in Donne’s life except by wresting certain passages from their contexts in Donne’s letters and poems. Reconsidered in context, such passages will show that, even though Donne’s secret wedding precipitated “Metaphoricall death,” imprisonment, and removal from office, he did not himself regard it as what Walton simplistically terms an “error” 3. Bald, “Historical Doubts Respecting Walton’s Life of Donne,” in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 69. (Bald’s use of the word falsification is conventional and should not be confused with Popper’s technical use of the term in the different sense of “refutation” or “showing to be false.”) In these remarks, without saying so, Bald appears to extend the then recent work of David Novarr (The Making of Walton’s “Lives” [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958]). Novarr, however, never used the word propaganda.

54

Dennis Flynn

(whether his own error or an error shared with Anne Donne), and certainly did not ever after think himself (as not Walton but other biographers have suggested he did) shackled to an illiterate vessel fit mainly for procreation.4 Quite unremarked by Bald and many other biographers have been Walton’s descriptions of Anne More Donne as Donne’s soul mate and partner, especially his observation that she “had been curiously and plentifully educated.”5 Disregard of this point, when Walton is so faithfully followed in other respects, is puzzling. Without any supporting evidence, John Carey has been particularly blunt about Anne Donne’s supposed unfitness as a wife for Donne. Carey’s assurance on this point, used in effect to calumniate Donne, has been especially influential. However, his condescension about Donne’s wife probably stems from the disregard shown by Bald and previous biographers. Less influential biographies by Evelyn Hardy, K. W. Gransden, Richard Hughes, and Edward LeComte likewise make no mention of Walton’s testimony about Anne More’s education; Hardy and Gransden like Carey gratuitously denigrate Anne Donne’s intellect. Janet E. Halley argues that all we find in either the historical record or in Donne’s writings is Anne Donne’s absence, her “silent actuality,” a privation useful only to the literary historian of women’s exploitation.6 A second issue stemming from Bald’s acceptance of Walton’s “pattern” has been what is termed Donne’s “desperate ambition.” Walton, given his central mission as a biographer, contends that Donne’s service as a minister, a period 4. For Walton’s opinions about the “error” of Donne’s marriage to Anne More Donne, see The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Dr. Robert Sanderson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 27, 36, 60. 5. For Walton’s information about Anne More, see ibid., 31, 41–44, 51–52. 6. Carey’s strictures are in John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 74; his influence can be seen most starkly in Deborah H. Lockwood’s “Donne’s Idea of Woman in the Songs and Sonets,” Essays in Literature 14 (1987): 37–38. Among Carey’s other successors and predecessors, see Edmund Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1899), 1:118; Bald, John Donne: A Life, 326; Hardy, Donne: A Spirit in Conflict (London: Constable, 1942), 108; Gransden, John Donne (London: Longman, Green, 1954), 17; and Halley, “Textual Intercourse: Anne Donne, John Donne, and the Sexual Poetics of Textual Exchange,” in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, ed. Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 188–91 (citing Bald, John Donne: A Life, 326; and Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986], 139). For incisive criticism of Halley’s work, see Camille Wells Slights, “A Pattern of Love: Representations of Anne Donne,” in John Donne’s “Desire of More”: The Subject of Anne More in His Poetry, ed. M. Thomas Hester (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 67.

Conjecture in Donne’s Biography

55

of sixteen years, was more important than anything else that happened during the fifty-nine years of his life. In treating Donne’s life before ordination, Walton focuses on Donne’s “remarkable error” as not merely an error of moral or social conduct but also (if not an actual sin) an imprudence that flouted the will of God. Walton implied that Donne’s persistence in leading a secular life was a willful, worldly struggle with poverty, an avoidance of both responsibilities and prosperity prepared for him by the hand of God in the ministry of the Church of England. Following biographers and critics have departed from Walton in treating Donne’s secular life at somewhat greater length than his ministry, but have at the same time accepted Walton’s idea that career problems, caused by the “remarkable error” of Donne’s wedding, were the main subject for narration in the years preceding Donne’s ordination. Bald in particular emphasizes Donne’s ambition, with a copiousness of example greatly admired by his adherents, who like to refer to his theory’s “foundation stones” and the “impressive structure they support.”7 Whatever the particular circumstances, in Bald’s treatment virtually whatever Donne does or says becomes evidence of his ambition. Such evidence of ambition explains nothing, however, when it is used to amalgamate such diverse kinds of behavior as, for example, Donne’s choice of educational institutions, his military service under fire, and his courtship and marriage. Even when Donne secluded himself for years with his wife and family at Pyrford, ignoring the pleas of friends at court who urged that he come to gather up preferment windfalls profusely available, for Bald Donne’s isolation means only that his ambition was desperate. Beginning with Donne’s university experience, everywhere Bald looks in Donne’s life he finds evidence to confirm what emerges as the central contention of his book: that Donne sought to advance himself in society. Although Bald mentions that Donne and his brother were sent to Hart Hall at Oxford when they were twelve and eleven years old, respectively, and that they reported their ages as a year less than they were, he assures us that these facts need not indicate anything unusual. The presence of the young Donnes at Oxford, according to Bald, was natural, for “many examples can be cited of others who entered the university at similar ages” (42). Donne’s lifelong contacts with young Oxford contemporaries, Bald conjectures, were networked here: “[S]uch a group of boys, all destined to win distinction and all possessed of literary talent, must have been capable of providing lively companionship for 7. Arthur F. Marotti, review of John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility, by Dennis Flynn, JEGP 96 (1997): 612.

56

Dennis Flynn

one another” (43). A list of celebrated Oxonians is joined to evidence about the curriculum, rounding out a picture of Donne preparing himself for a career. Such pursuits of glittering prizes, Bald again conjectures, were not only extended at Oxford for three years but then continued at Cambridge as well, which “may have been more interesting than Oxford to a young writer ambitious of contributing to English letters” (46–47).8 In discussing Donne’s participation in the earl of Essex’s voyages to Cadiz and the Azores, Bald conjectures that Donne’s motives were ambitious. Without considering any possible political motive for Donne’s service, Bald focuses his conjecture on the notion that Donne “had been living extravagantly and his inheritance was dwindling, so that hopes of booty could not be ignored” (81). After joining in the general looting at Cadiz, Bald conjectures, Donne returned home with “his fortunes somewhat repaired” (86). A year later, the Azores expedition disappointed Donne’s hopes for further booty, and he had no more opportunity to pillage until the Essex expedition to Ireland, by which time, however, “Donne had found a career, and his days of military service were over” (92). Yet, a career could not satisfy Donne’s ambition either, so he married “a girl of wealthy family” (130) and then, “without employment and with a young wife to care for” (140), struggled to get a job . . . for the next thirteen years! Setting aside the ludicrous notion that John Donne, with a growing family, desperately in need of regular income, would be unable to find any employment for thirteen years, what does all Bald’s evidence confirm? It confirms no more than that Donne’s case can be interpreted in the light of Bald’s conjecture about ambition. But what does this amount to? Most people’s lives, just about every person’s life, in Donne’s society or in our own, could be interpreted in the same way. Not that Donne (or anyone else) can have been free of ambition or material concerns. After all, as Frank Whigham and others have argued, simply to be a courtier, to be a member of a class of individuals living in some sense at or at the periphery of the court, in itself meant to function in a way that can be described as ambitious.9 In this sense, to say that Donne was ambitious is simply to say that he was a member of this class. Biography on

8. In John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 130–33, I have argued that Donne attended Oxford for only one term—Michaelmas 1584—and never attended Cambridge at all. 9. Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 20–22, making reference to Foucault and other writers.

Conjecture in Donne’s Biography

57

such a level approaches the tautological. According to Bald, the explanation of Donne’s life is a commonplace. This conjecture, however massively verified by evidence, is trivial and uninteresting. That ambition for advancement is so copiously revealed in the evidence Bald cites is, in the eyes of some, the strongest argument in favor of Bald’s conjecture. On the contrary, others may reason, when looking at some of the ways Bald uses evidence, this supposed strength of his conjecture is in fact its weakness. A third issue, perhaps the most fundamental one defined by Bald’s acceptance of Walton’s “pattern,” has been the idea that Donne early in his life rejected the Catholic religion of his family and chose instead to reinvent himself as a Protestant. Walton supposes that Donne’s change of religion came when, “considering how much it concern’d his soul to choose the most Orthodox,” he suspended his study of law at Lincoln’s Inn in order to make a “survey,” including a study of writings by the Jesuit theologian Robert Bellarmine. Within the span of his nineteenth year, Walton suggests, through a scholarly and dispassionate course of reading, Donne had found the truth of Protestantism and showed his notes on Bellarmine to “the then Dean of Gloucester (whose name my memory hath now lost).” From 1640 to 1675, through three extensively revised editions, Walton remained content in this lapse of memory, never bothering to remember or inquire about the name of this dean of Gloucester who had, he claimed, received the first confession of Donne’s early Protestantism.10 Moreover, in relating the last forty years of Donne’s life, Walton makes no further mention of Catholicism. Bald accepts Walton’s bizarre and hazy recollections as a believable account of Donne’s early “spiritual progression,” although he stipulates that “there is considerable chronological telescoping in this part of the Life,” and that in other ways as well Walton’s account is “an over-simplification.” Accordingly, Bald labors to explain why Donne would initiate a study of Bellarmine’s writ-

10. Walton, Lives (1956), 25 –26. Walton’s eighteenth-century editor, Thomas Zouch, first identified Antony Rudd as having been dean of Gloucester from 1584 to 1594 (Lives [York, 1796], 31). Apart from what Walton says, neither Zouch nor anyone else has found any connection between Donne and Antony Rudd. Evidently, to judge by Walton’s wording in this passage of the Life of Donne, for his theory of Donne’s early change of religions he had no further warrant than a passage from the preface to Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr, which actually says something quite different from Walton’s tendentious paraphrase. Walton’s account should be compared carefully to Donne’s own (Pseudo-Martyr [London: Walter Burre, 1610], sig. B3). Novarr addressed the matter in Making of Walton’s “Lives,” 60, after observing that “often Walton quoted incorrectly, and he did not scruple to make a passage mean what he wished rather than what the author intended” (57).

58

Dennis Flynn

ings in the early 1590s. He conjectures that underground Jesuit missionaries might have encouraged the exercise for the purpose of strengthening Donne’s Catholicism; or perhaps suspicious government officials had forced Donne to make an evenhanded review of theological controversy after his younger brother had been arrested for harboring a priest at Thavies Inn, in 1593, when Donne was twenty-one. On the whole, Bald tends to downplay Walton’s story of dispassionate inquiry by emphasizing the effects of governmental repression. Bald also explains that, if Donne’s Satyres of the later 1590s “may perhaps reveal a greater intimacy with Catholicism than other contemporary satirists,” Donne was then less firm a Protestant than Walton says he was, because of his “natural inclination to skepticism,” something Walton had neglected to mention (64–71). Bald deserves credit for these departures from Walton’s pattern. However, during his next five chapters, dealing with Donne’s married years, he makes only two passing references to the continuing effects of Catholicism on Donne’s life. Concerning Catholicism later in Donne’s life, Bald mentions “the fact that some of his friends were still Catholics” in discussing Donne’s role in the controversy over the Oath of Allegiance (214). Bald does not elsewhere make any mention of these friends or the nature of Donne’s relations to them, though he spends forty pages discussing Donne’s other friends and acquaintances during the years of his marriage. His only other mention of Catholicism in narrating these years is his observation that Donne’s positions in Pseudo-Martyr show some relation to Gallican Catholicism (222). The picture of Donne rendered here is one that, while departing marginally from Walton’s account, does not risk much chance of refutation and does not envision much factual content. Consider in contrast, for example, the quite different work of Augustus Jessopp, for whom Donne’s commonplace ambition did not loom so large. Jessopp’s work is bold and risky in comparison to Bald’s. Jessopp, for example, makes the improbable argument that Donne did not merely go to university as did most ambitious young men of his age and class. Jessopp here puts aside Walton’s statements about Donne’s spending six years at Oxford and Cambridge. He argues instead that Donne fought on the side of the Dutch in the Netherlands during the years when Walton says he was at university—and not for the sake of ambition (or booty) but for political and religious reasons.11 Although mistaken about the specifics of this military service, Jessopp is at least able to see Donne acting on some set of principles rather than seeing him in these years, as Bald does, feeding and enlarging his prospects. 11. See Jessopp’s edition of Donne’s Essayes in Divinity (London: J. Tupling, 1855), xiii.

Conjecture in Donne’s Biography

59

The biggest methodological difference between Bald’s and Jessopp’s works is that Bald is so concerned to make refutation of his conjecture difficult. It is modestly built and hedged by facts. Although what Bald asserts is a commonplace, for that reason it cannot easily be overturned. Bald’s theory risks little because it is designed to withstand and even to discourage imaginable discoveries of fact.12 The striking contrast about Jessopp’s work is that it prompted searches for, and could be refuted by, particular discoveries of new facts. And it was. The poignant story of Jessopp’s conjecture and its refutation can be reviewed in a series of articles and correspondence by various authors in 1873 issues of the Athenaeum. These exchanges were prompted by Alexander Grosart’s refutation of Jessopp’s conjecture that Donne’s translated Latin epigrams constituted evidence of his presence in the Netherlands in the mid1580s.13 Grosart, supported in the controversy by two historians, argues that references in the translations to events as late as 1628 must rule out Donne’s having written the poems. Jessopp was persuaded by this evidence and thereafter dropped his claim that the poems were authentic. The episode not only illustrates how conjecture and refutation advance knowledge (since by refuting Jessopp’s conjecture Grosart and his supporters partly explain certain puzzling references in the poems) but also reveals Jessopp’s boldness in conjecture. In the long run, the important point here is not that Jessopp mistook the date and place to which Donne’s Latin epigrams must have pertained (points about which Grosart and his supporters are just as wrong). Nor is it most important (though it is important) that on the material point at issue—whether Donne was in fact the author of Latin epigrams translated by Jasper Mayne—Jessopp was right, pace Grosart and all but the most recent editors of Donne’s poetry.14 The really important point here is Jessopp’s boldness in choosing to discount the authority of Walton in regard to Donne’s early years. Jessopp’s conjecture was advanced as a challenge: it was incompatible with certain possible discoveries that, moreover, were easy to anticipate at the time when Jessopp wrote. For Jessopp to advance his conjecture meant a kind of risk Bald nowhere undertakes. Moreover, from Jes12. Bald seems to discourage questions about his archival findings at several points in John Donne: A Life (see 18, 105–6). 13. Grosart, ed., Complete Poems of John Donne, 2 vols. (London: Robson and Sons, 1873), 2:xviii–xxv. 14. Donne’s earliest poems, the translated Latin epigrams, were all printed for the first time since 1652 by Gary A. Stringer et al., eds., The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 8, The Epigrams, Epithalamions, Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and Miscellaneous Poems (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 255–69. The history of critical commentary on these poems is summarized on pp. 472–80.

60

Dennis Flynn

sopp’s conjecture and from its refutation we learned something, a kind of factual discovery we could never learn from efforts to refute a commonplace. A more recent example of risky and therefore comparatively valuable conjecture is John Carey’s theory that Donne was an “apostate” who deserted the religion of his family not only because he was ambitious but also because of the intense persecution of Catholics by Queen Elizabeth’s government. Carey accepts Bald’s conjecture about ambition, and himself presents Donne as even more obsessively ambitious than Bald does. But according to Carey, “The first thing to remember about Donne is that he was a Catholic; the second, that he betrayed his Faith.” Donne’s “Catholic upbringing had marked him indelibly,” and the lifelong consequence was that Donne remained sympathetic toward “persecuted Catholics, though he had joined their persecutors.” Donne’s guilt over this maneuver kept Catholicism throughout his life always “close to his mind as a reproach or a threat, or as an adversary with which he hoped he might finally be reconciled.”15 In the case of Carey’s relatively improbable conjecture, refutation has been suggested by increased background information concerning the conditions of Elizabethan Catholicism, available through the work of historians since the 1970s. To label Donne an “apostate,” and moreover to use this term as a rhetorical flourish rather than as a meaningful theological distinction, was admittedly an unhistorical distortion.16 Nevertheless, Carey’s conjecture presents an increase in factual content compared to Bald’s relatively commonplace conjecture. Carey’s conjecture has had the conspicuous virtue of all bold conjectures: it invites and even prompts refutation. Another example is Paul Sellin’s conjecture, in a series of articles and books beginning in 1976, that as a chaplain for the 1619–1620 embassy of James Hay, viscount Doncaster, Donne “held a position considerably higher and more responsible” than had been acknowledged by previous Donne scholars.17 Sellin argues the importance, for example, of a medallion awarded 15. Carey, John Donne, 15, 35, passim. Carey also in passing characterizes Tudor religious repression as quasi-totalitarian, although his main emphasis is on the psychological pathology of Donne’s conversion, rather than on its context in the historical conflict between the religions. 16. See Dennis Flynn, “Donne the Survivor,” in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 15–24. A more historical account of Donne’s Catholicism to the mid-1580s was the purpose of my Donne and Catholic Nobility. Donne’s biography from the mid-1580s until his marriage is the most difficult to discern, a problem requiring further research. 17. Sellin’s argument was broached in two Huntington Library Quarterly articles: “John Donne: The Poet as Diplomat and Divine,” HLQ 39 (1976): 267–75; and “The Proper Dat-

Conjecture in Donne’s Biography

61

Donne in The Hague by the States General, commemorating the Synod of Dort. Sellin conjectures that Donne’s gift had both religious and political implications as yet unrecognized in Donne studies. Sellin’s work in Dutch archives contributes new understanding of this episode in Donne’s career, especially his preaching at The Hague, which can no longer be seen as the function of a sinecure but must be seen as integral to the design and development of the embassy and moreover strongly suggests (what many still think improbable) Donne’s sympathy with the Calvinism set forth in the Articles of Dort. The verisimilitude of factual content presented as part of Sellin’s bold conjecture offers significant opportunity for refutation, though none so far has appeared. Yet another example would be the conjecture of Ilona Bell, first presented at this conference in 1982, that three letters in the Burley manuscript are love letters from John Donne to Anne More.18 This conjecture again presents a distinct increase in factual content compared to earlier theories about the three letters. Bell’s improbable conjecture integrates many factual details offering opportunities for refutation. As a conjecture this is its value, to this day undiminished—and just as unenhanced by the fact that no refutation has yet been advanced. Up to now, Bell’s conjecture about these letters is the best one so far proposed. Finally, I offer my modest proposal—not so shocking perhaps as Swift’s, but perhaps to be regarded with comparable horror by some—that we cease privileging the merely probable conjecture when the more informative, improbable conjecture is available for refutation.

ing of John Donne’s ‘Satyre III,’” HLQ 43 (1980): 275–312. It was expanded in John Donne and “Calvinist” Views of Grace (Amsterdam: VU Boekhandel/Uitgeverij, 1983) and especially in “So Doth, So Is Religion”: John Donne and Diplomatic Contexts in the Reformed Netherlands, 1619–1620 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988). 18. Bell, “‘Under ye Rage of a Hott Sunn & yr Eyes’: John Donne’s Love Letters to Ann More,” in Eagle and Dove, ed. Summers and Pebworth.

Dan Jaeckle

Marvell’s “Mower against Gardens” Reconsidering Bakhtinian Dialogism

One fault line in current seventeenth-century literary studies separates two kinds of ideological readings. The first type assumes that every work is politically committed and seeks to expose that commitment through analysis. The second type views literature more as a reflection or refraction of society than as a direct participant in its ideological struggles. It assesses the picture of society that the work presents by examining the style by means of which that picture is fashioned. The result of the recent focus on literature as overtly polemical has been healthy to the extent that the field has become more fully aware of the ways in which many works traditionally considered literary resemble other works previously classed as nonliterary. This refiguring of the ideas of canon and context has provided scholars with a more complete and coherent picture of seventeenth-century British society.1 However, such readings come with a cost. Not all literary works seek primarily to participate in the ideological wars of their day. For those that attempt instead to reflect ideological contests by organizing them in and through their styles, strategies of reading that attend to the refractive angles of style are needed. One helpful approach is that which Mikhail Bakhtin develops in his essay “Discourse in the Novel.” As is by now well known, for Bakhtin the key feature of what he calls dialogic literature is its ability to refract the complex interaction among ideologies within the society of the author. When the dialo-

1. Historical and political criticism of Marvell’s work dominated the 1990s, inaugurated by Conal Condren and A. D. Cousins, eds., The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1990); and concluded by Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis, eds., Marvell and Liberty (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). Both collections generously treat his Restoration prose and satiric poetry, although the essays vary widely in their approaches to historical contextualization, especially in the latter collection.

62

Marvell’s “Mower against Gardens”

63

gized work includes words and phrases from the languages of different professions, age groups, political and religious camps, and other linguistically identifiable segments of society, the ideologies that inform these languages necessarily interact, and the work thereby captures in its confines a meaningful part of the ideological dialogue occurring in the society at large. According to this perspective, the primary artistry of the dialogized text is to be found in the way in which the author sets these languages against one another. The author in effect becomes a composer orchestrating a struggle among ideologies through the telling placement of the social languages bearing them. Among the host of elements that constitute literary works Bakhtin lists four that are most amenable to dialogizing strategies: “Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters.”2 Each affords the possibility of dialogization, though obviously in different works different elements provide the principal means of incorporating multiple social languages. Although Bakhtin himself sometimes wrote as if the dialogism of the novel is impossible in poetry, and although his method provides scant help for analyzing either sound patterns or figures such as metaphor and symbol, in fact a significant number of seventeenth-century poems are dialogized in ways that he describes as characteristic of the novel. The analytic he develops therefore can aid in the reading of certain poems by calling attention to the intersection between their ideological dimensions and their styles. One such work is Andrew Marvell’s “Mower against Gardens.” In this poem, Marvell uses a fictional persona in most complex ways to create an unresolved conflict between opposing ideologies. On one side of this conflict is the promeadows ideology of the Mower himself. It is difficult to dismiss his argument against gardens on the basis of his eccentricities, for despite his obsession with sexuality and his consistently hostile tone, he knows the behavior and values of the horticulturalists and is able to judge them against the standard of his simpler and purer world. On the other side is the ideology favoring horticultural improvement of nature. By assigning to the Mower a level of knowledge sufficient to allow specific references to fertilizing, grafting, and budding, Marvell suggests the wondrous results of the civilized art of gardening. Moreover, by keeping his distance from his obsessed and mystified speaker, the poet calls attention to the intransigence and varied blindnesses of the Mower’s position. 2. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 263.

64

Dan Jaeckle

As a result of these strategies, readers are encouraged not to take sides, but to stand outside the struggle between the horticulturalists and the Mower in order to read the poem as a barometer of a conflicted and changing society.3 The Mower levels four major charges against gardens and the “Luxurious Man” who creates them.4 The first is that the horticulturalist, after having been seduced into corruption himself, has seduced the world of his garden and turned it into an anti-Eden made in his own image. He has brought his “Vice in use” (1) by enclosing gardens and trapping plants native to the meadows and fields inside: He first enclos’d within the Gardens square A dead and standing pool of Air: And a more luscious Earth for them did knead, Which stupifi’d them while it fed. (5 – 8)

According to the first couplet, the imposition of order in the art of horticulture may be a way to humanize nature, but because humanization means corruption it is also a form of death. A similar point is made in the couplet on fertilizer. Even though mankind knows how to enrich the soil of a garden, paradoxically the result is not a more vibrant vegetative world but stupefaction of the plants and flowers. The Mower clearly believes that mankind should leave to nature the feeding of her children. His second charge against horticulture is that by its means the duplicity of mankind is transferred to the flowers themselves: The Pink grew then as double as his Mind; The nutriment did change the kind. With strange perfumes he did the Roses taint. And Flow’rs themselves were taught to paint. The Tulip, white, did for complexion seek; And learn’d to interline its cheek. (9–14)

3. Rosalie L. Colie makes a similar point, the first half of which I endorse: “The poet, one feels, knows the values of both meadows and gardens, and rejects the competition to embrace a world in which all sorts of flowers and plants may grow” (“My Ecchoing Song”: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970], 41). I submit, however, that he is not rejecting ideological competition so much as recording it. 4. The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3d ed., vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 43, l. 1. Line numbers are hereinafter cited parenthetically.

Marvell’s “Mower against Gardens”

65

As A. M. Cinquemani has noted, the pink “doubles” by converting its stamens and carpels into petals to create a fuller flower.5 However much more beautiful the result may be, the Mower condemns the practice as corrupting the original nature of the plant. Adding perfume to the rose, again a process that might be construed as an improvement upon nature, the Mower calls tainting. And the streaking of color onto the tulip petals he equates with the use of cosmetics. It is as if in this passage the “Man” of the poem’s first line takes on a male role, while the flowers assume the traits of fallen women. Men become duplicitous seducers, while the plants, forced to live in a world ruled by dominating males and to conform to their expectations, transform their natural beauty into the false attractiveness of women whose sole purpose is to please the opposite sex.6 The Mower’s third charge against horticulture is that its practitioners have lost sight of true value in their search for the rare and exotic plant: Its Onion root [tulip bulb] they then so high did hold, That one was for a Meadow sold. Another World was search’d, through Oceans new, To find the Marvel of Peru. (15–18)

The first couplet refers to the tulip craze of the 1630s, during the height of which one bulb sold for 550 times the value of a sheep.7 The Mower combines knowledge of this most revealing economic phenomenon with a wonderful simplicity: to emphasize the extravagant price of tulips he can think of no higher cost than a meadow. He is likewise aware of the fact that the Marvel of Peru, Mirabilis jalapa, was imported from the New World to adorn European gardens, even if he mistakenly thinks whole expeditions were sent to Peru for the sole purpose of bringing back this plant. For the Mower, the prob5. Cinquemani, “Marvell’s ‘The Mower against Gardens,’ 9–10,” Explicator 20 (May 1962): 77. 6. See Rosemary Kegl, “‘Joyning My Labour to My Pain’: The Politics of Labor in Marvell’s Mower Poems,” in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 107. Cristina Malcolmson, “The Garden Enclosed/the Woman Enclosed: Marvell and the Cavalier Poets,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 251–69, explores in detail the ties between enclosure and women in the poem. 7. Margoliouth, Poems and Letters of Marvell, 1. 262. See also Malcolmson, “Garden Enclosed,” 256–57, for the incredible price one Dutchman paid for a bulb.

66

Dan Jaeckle

lem of importing the tulip and the Marvel of Peru is twofold. Not only have the horticulturalists lost all sense of what is truly valuable, but they are unsatisfied with plants native to England as well. He condemns the gardeners for their failure to understand that no flowers are as pure and beautiful as those which grow naturally on their native soil. The final charge against horticulture culminates the series. All the other errors might have been allowed if only sovereign and proud man had “not dealt between the Bark and Tree / Forbidden mixtures there to see” (21–22). Nowhere is the Mower’s intimate knowledge of horticulture more clearly revealed than in his account of these forbidden mixtures. As the following lines indicate, he knows that by means of grafting gardeners can grow multiple fruits on a single tree, that the tame scion is inserted into the wild stock to change the flavor of the fruit produced, and that the cherry can procreate without sex, a reference either to budding or to the creation of the stoneless cherry.8 In fact, so vast is his knowledge that, according to Nicholas A. Salerno, Marvell had the expertise of a first-rate horticulturalist.9 But, of course, the Mower is concerned less with describing the gardening arts than with condemning them. Violating nature by dealing between the bark and the tree is a mark of human arrogance that must be exposed as such. To conclude his diatribe, the Mower turns to the fields and meadows as the standard against which gardens must be judged and as the alternative to which mankind should return: ’Tis all enforc’d; the Fountain and the Grot; While the sweet Fields do lye forgot: Where willing Nature does to all dispence A wild and fragrant Innocence: And Fauns and Faryes do the Meadows till, More by their presence then their skill. Their Statues polish’d by some ancient hand, May to adorn the Gardens stand: 8. See Nicholas A. Salerno, “Andrew Marvell and the Grafter’s Art,” Études Anglaises 21 (1968): 125–32; and Robert Wilcher, “Marvell’s Cherry: A Reply to Mr. Salerno,” Études Anglaises 23 (1970): 406–9. 9. Salerno, “Andrew Marvell and the Furor Hortensis,” Studies in English Literature 8 (1968): 103–20. In “Marvell and the Grafter’s Art,” 132 n, Salerno calls attention to a contemporary’s letter that refers to Marvell as a “poet and botanist.” Marvell may have gotten some of his knowledge of horticulture from books such as Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (1627), but he surely also learned much from his travels in Europe and his own experiences in England. On the gardens of Europe along the likely route that Marvell took when abroad in the 1640s, see John Dixon Hunt, Andrew Marvell: His Life and Writings (London: Paul Elek, 1978), 26–56.

Marvell’s “Mower against Gardens”

67

But howso’ere the Figures do excel, The Gods themselves with us do dwell. (31–40)

The passage implies three ideological positions. First, in contrast to the metaphors of sexual misconduct in reference to the gardens, in the meadows nature is willing to dispense a “wild and fragrant Innocence” (34) in an equally innocent way. Second, as the reference to fauns and fairies indicates, the labor of mowing is suppressed in favor of a mythology that has supernatural beings tilling the fields without effort. And third, the Mower envisions a harmony among nature, the rural gods, and those people who still share that pure life.10 In contrast to the gardener, who has seduced the world from its pristine, Edenic state to his own viciousness, the Mower believes that he lives in a georgic paradise, in which the gods continue to dwell with the unfallen. The Mower’s point could hardly be made more clearly. Given a choice between corruption and purity, between duplicity and integrity, between the exotic and the native, between perverse sexual practices and innocence, between living with statues and living with the gods themselves, only a proud man would choose any of the first options. However, throughout the poem Marvell provides a subtext that undermines the ideology of the Mower and at least partly reestablishes the viability of the enclosed garden. This second evaluation of gardens is most apparent in the Mower’s attention to the techniques of horticulture described at times in such technical terms as nutriment, Stock, and grafts. J. B. Leishman comments on this attention to detail by contrasting Marvell’s way of working with that of Donne: “Had Donne written a poem about Nature and Art, and, in the course of it, had incidentally referred to gardens and orchards, flowers and fruit-trees, he would not have conveyed the impression that he had any particular affection for them, and we should not remember his poem as being about them; most readers, however, probably remember Marvell’s poem even more as an evocation of gardens and orchards than as an argument about Nature and Art.”11 Although Leishman may overstate the case, he is right to stress that however much the Mower may criticize horticulture, the poem is 10. Michael Craze, The Life and Lyrics of Andrew Marvell (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), 139, argues that the “us” of the poem’s final line refers to the Mower and his meadows. More persuasive, though, is Michael Long, Marvell, Nabokov: Childhood and Arcadia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 101, when he suggests that, unlike Damon, this Mower is not alone. 11. Leishman, The Art of Marvell’s Poetry, 2d ed. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), 130.

68

Dan Jaeckle

at the same time a tribute to its successes. Even the Mower cannot avoid recognizing that this art has created new floral scents and colors, accomplishments worthy of praise from any perspective other than his doctrine of sola natura. Similarly, introducing foreign plants into gardens for variety, creating new tastes by grafting, and having cherries procreate without sex are achievements more to be celebrated than condemned. Despite his rhetorical purpose, then, the Mower’s descriptions bring all these marvels and the art that makes them possible to the admiring attention of those more disinterested than he. However, Marvell does more than praise horticulture through the underside of the Mower’s comments. He also rehabilitates the art both by implicit criticisms of the Mower’s view and by reveling in his own artfulness as the poem unfolds. The implicit criticisms of his persona’s position emerge from the facts that the Mower manifests his own form of duplicity through his puns, that he displays a propensity for defining those things he most fears in sexual terms, and that he mystifies the need for labor in the meadows despite his own label of “mower.” In addition, Marvell himself engages in multiple forms of literary play over the head of the Mower and so reveals his own joy in the artfulness that his speaker condemns. Although it is difficult to tell which puns in the poem belong to the Mower and which to Marvell himself, at least two seem to be consistent with what we know of the Mower. The first occurs in his description of the tulip’s duplicity: “The Tulip, white, did for complexion seek” (13). The word complexion denotes the facial coloration provided by cosmetics, but also suggests the complexity that comes with coloring the original whiteness of the tulip. The other pun is to be found in the couplet “That the uncertain and adult’rate fruit / Might put the Palate in dispute” (25–26). The primary meaning of “adult’rate” here is that grafting adds impurities to the fruit. In the context of repeated references to human sexuality, though, the Mower may also have in mind adultery in the sense of the decalogue. The irony of these two wordplays is patent: the Mower seems blind to the fact that his propensity for puns is itself a form of the duplicity of civilization that he is so keen to criticize.12 That Marvell has his speaker mouth these two puns helps to problematize a facile identification of the Mower’s ideology with that of the poet. Identification of poet and speaker becomes more difficult still in light of the Mower’s obsession with perverse sexuality. In spite of the relative brevity of his diatribe, he manages to create a rather lengthy list of comparisons between horticultural techniques and sexual misconduct: bringing plants into an en12. On the Mower’s duplicity, see Judith Haber, Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 106–10.

Marvell’s “Mower against Gardens”

69

closed garden is a form of seduction, fertilizing flowers transforms them into meretricious women, sexless cherries have been castrated, and the forcing of all things in the garden suggests rape.13 The Mower’s obsession may be partly explained in moral terms, of course: he makes horticulture a metaphor for sexual perversion because both turn the natural into the corrupt. Most critics agree, though, that some form of psychological disturbance also underlies his habit of using sexual images. Indeed, Rosalie L. Colie comments that, if taken seriously, the Mower must be judged insane: “He is tense, obsessed, hostile in just the way the classical wish-fulfilling pastoralist considered the negotiating city-dweller to be tense, obsessed, and hostile.”14 Perhaps the source of his obsession is his fear that as a result of the gardener’s art, no plant now knows the stock from which it has come, a vegetative version of the fundamental anxiety of patriarchy.15 Whatever the cause of the Mower’s problem, Marvell keeps his distance. Whereas the Mower lives his obsession, the poet objectifies it in his persona and thereby holds it up to examination. Marvell also distances himself from his speaker by having the Mower mystify labor in the meadows. The speaker may project the rural work onto fairies and fauns, but if he is in fact a mower, then in performing his function he too, like the gardener, operates on nature. It is a most unusual mower who does not, in the words of “Upon Appleton House,” “Massacre the Grass” (394) or, to use Damon’s language, depopulate the ground (“Damon the Mower” [74]). The persona may wish to paint a portrait of georgic repose in the meadows in order to establish his way of life as the standard against which to judge the corruption of gardens, but Marvell does not miss the contradiction im-

13. Recent discussions of sexuality in Marvell throw helpful light on this poem. See especially Paul Hammond, “Marvell’s Sexuality,” Seventeenth Century 11 (1996): 87–123; and Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker, “Andrew Marvell and the Toils of Patriarchy: Fatherhood, Longing, and the Body Politic,” ELH 66 (1999): 629–54. 14. Colie, “My Ecchoing Song,” 38. The Mower may rank first among Marvell’s creations in the number of names he has been called. For example, Linda Anderson, “The Nature of Marvell’s Mower,” Studies in English Literature 31 (1991): 142, calls him Peter Pan; while Harold E. Toliver, Marvell’s Ironic Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 104, sees him as a modern-day Diogenes. 15. Carol Marks Sicherman, “The Mocking Voices of Donne and Marvell,” Bucknell Review 17 (1969): 41, sees the Mower’s problem not as fear, but as the anger and frustration following from unrequited love. Perhaps she is right, but the text provides no specific information to confirm her hypothesis. Kegl, “‘Joyning My Labour,’” 108, asks why the horticultural practices described early in the poem might be allowed, but not the latter ones, and answers that the artfulness becomes visible in the second part. It seems more likely, however, that the Mower fears grafting and budding more than fertilizing because plants can no longer know their ancestry.

70

Dan Jaeckle

plicit in the Mower’s ideal of otium. Only the wealthy, and the unemployed, live without laboring. In addition to these techniques for undermining the ideology of the meadows, Marvell also distances himself from his persona by playing literary games beyond the ken of his Mower. The first of these is the pun in the poem’s opening word. As H. M. Margoliouth correctly notes, in the seventeenth century the word luxurious meant voluptuous or lecherous. The Mower thus uses the word as part of the sexually loaded language that frequently characterizes his critique of gardens. However, Marvell knew that the Latin word “luxuriosus” primarily refers to the exuberant growth of plants, and only by extension comes to mean dissoluteness in people.16 By conjoining the adjective Luxurious with the noun Man, then, he reverses this order, suggesting that instead of dissolute people being like exuberant plants, people make plants luxurious in imitation of themselves. Marvell seems to relish both the bilingual wordplay and the fact that the Mower is unaware of it. Second, as a couple of critics have recently noted, the poet enjoys putting his own name into the poem in the phrase “the Marvel of Peru.” It may be too much to say with Cristina Malcolmson that by means of this wordplay Marvell links himself with “excessively priced commodities, and disrupts the Mower’s otherwise quite powerful demystification of the role of the market in determining value.” Nonetheless, on the theory that no word in Marvell’s poetic corpus functions innocently, one might pause to ask if he is not having fun with the Mower by having him attack the importation of a plant that shares the poet’s own name. Third, as Frank Kermode and J. B. Leishman have remarked, unbeknownst to the Mower the poem responds to Cavalier poetry that argues for promiscuity on the basis of nature’s sexual laxity.17 In particular, Marvell seems to be reversing the analogical argument of Thomas Randolph’s “Upon Love Refus’d for Conscience Sake.” Whereas Randolph uses grafting as a sign of nature’s openness and therefore as a summons to illicit love, Marvell creates a speaker to argue that only human depravity could think of a process as perverted as grafting. The fact that Marvell engages in such literary dialogue, even to the

16. Margoliouth, Poems and Letters of Marvell, 1. 262. Compare the comments of Edward William Tayler, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 156, on luxuriant in “The Mower’s Song” and Luxurious here. 17. Malcolmson, “Garden Enclosed,” 257. See also Jonathan Crewe, “The Garden State: Marvell’s Poetics of Enclosure,” in Enclosure Acts, ed. Burt and Archer, 279. Kermode, “Two Notes on Marvell,” Notes and Queries 197 (March 1952): 136–37; Leishman, Art of Marvell’s Poetry, 132–34.

Marvell’s “Mower against Gardens”

71

point of using Randolph’s poetic form for the only time in his canon, bespeaks his commitment to a playful art in sharp contrast to the Mower’s ideology of natural purity. In discussing these multiple forms of distancing between poet and persona, I do not mean to imply that Marvell created the character of the Mower merely to serve as a foil for his own tacit position that art improves on nature. Despite these several types of distancing gestures, the Mower must be credited with a sound knowledge of horticulture and with an awareness of the dangers of commodifying the natural world. By means of the Mower’s insight and rigor, Marvell questions the values of a horticultural art so diametrically opposed to the pure meadows. At the same time, however, he never allows the Mower’s voice to completely control the ideology of the poem, but rather remains detached from and even critical of his speaker. As a result, the poem achieves the dialogic interplay that Marvell seeks. All is open for reconsideration: the ideology of horticulture, the definition of “Luxurious Man,” the mythology of fauns and fairies, the extremity of the Mower’s diatribe, and the ties between vegetative and human sexuality. Even the relationship between poet and persona remains open-ended, constantly shifting in each new set of couplets and far from resolved by an ending whose tone is difficult to determine. These conclusions have implications for the class conflict that critics have frequently found in the poem. Ever since Bruce King proposed that Marvell had the Leveller and Digger movements in mind as he created his speaker, various readers have argued that the leveling Mower attacks the ideology of the rich by condemning gardens filled with fountains, statues, and foreign plants, and lavished by expensive care of the soil, flowers, and trees.18 Nevertheless, it bears noting that the Mower never complains about a lack of land to work and is therefore not interested in, much less campaigning for, socioeconomic leveling. Not only has he mystified labor in the meadows so that his means of earning a living all but disappears from view, but even more important he does not want what the wealthy garden owners have. From his perspective, in fact, he has what they should want, a world in which the gods dwell with the people of the meadows. Although the distinction may be subtle, his diatribe is based on spiritual and moral more than economic concerns: enclosed gardens

18. King, “‘The Mower against Gardens’ and the Levellers,” Huntington Library Quarterly 33 (1970): 237–42. Malcolmson, “Garden Enclosed,” 255–56, also connects the Mower to the Diggers. See also Michael McKeon, “Pastoralism, Puritanism, Imperialism, Scientism: Andrew Marvell and the Problem of Mediation,” Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 60–61, on the issue of commodification in the poem.

72

Dan Jaeckle

are more a sign of human corruption than of an economic system that oppresses the poor. That having been said, however, the distance between Marvell and the Mower raises the possibility that the poet himself was more aware of the economic dimensions of the diatribe than he allowed his relatively naive speaker to be. As a person who had grown up in Hull and had perhaps worked in one of the commercial enterprises of the city, Marvell was from an early age positioned to view the economic changes that his society was undergoing during his lifetime. He might well have created the Mower to voice in an idealist key his recognition that rural workers were increasingly becoming wage laborers or were being displaced from the land, while the rich created little civilized gardens even as they exploited the laborers in the fields. He certainly recognized the commodification of plants and the international economy that brought exotic varieties to England. However, the fact that he did not attack such developments directly but through the mediation of the Mower suggests that Marvell may have been ambivalent about the socioeconomic changes he saw. Something was being lost, but it was not exactly the harmony that the Mower thought it was. Meanwhile, something was being gained, though it was not as innocent as the horticulturalists might have believed. By fashioning a mower against gardens, then, Marvell recorded some of the ideological complexity of the times and withheld judgment. Brief as this analysis of “The Mower against Gardens” has been, I hope it suggests that a Bakhtinian approach illustrates that the search for ideological positions in poetry is in two ways more complex than is sometimes thought. First, isolating overt ideological positions in the content of poetry is not enough. The reader must go through the exigencies of style to trace the poet’s often intricate perspective. And second, readers should be attuned to the possibility that the poet may not be so much committing to an ideological position as putting various stances into play to test them against one another in an open-ended performance that refracts the ongoing dialogue within a constantly shifting social scene. Not all poems function in such a dialogized way, of course, but for those that do, Bakhtin gives us interesting perspectives on the poet’s view of the interaction among ideologies in his or her culture.

Tobias Gregory

In Defense of Empson A Reassessment of Milton’s God

In 1961, William Empson’s Milton’s God made bold entrance into the critical debate over Paradise Lost. Its argument picks up where Shelley had left off. In Paradise Lost, Empson claims, Milton provides his God with the strongest defense he possibly could, and succeeds in representing a deity “noticeably less wicked than the traditional Christian one”; despite the poet’s best efforts, however, he cannot alter the basic facts of the case, and the inherent wickedness of the Christian God rubs off on Milton’s version as well.1 The book caused a stir when it appeared, and its bold argument and vigorous prose have continued to provoke strong reactions for four decades; in 1995 the Milton Society of America recognized the importance of Milton’s God by naming Empson posthumously as one of its honored scholars, though the decision prompted sharply dissenting opinions from a number of the society’s members. While Milton’s God is generally acknowledged as a landmark in the field, it remains a landmark in whose vicinity later scholars have been reluctant to build. Secular-minded Miltonists tend to view Empson’s book as an interesting wrong turn, an idiosyncratic reading by a brilliant critic; scholars sympathetic to Christianity tend to view the book as willfully perverse, and have spent considerable energy trying to refute it. At the present it is widely assumed that their efforts have succeeded, and direct response to Empson is in abeyance.2 Milton’s God occupies a singular position; it belongs to that rare class of critical works still widely read forty years after initial publication, yet 1. Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 11. Page numbers are hereinafter cited parenthetically. 2. This lack of substantive engagement was evident at a 1998 MLA session devoted to Milton’s God (the character, not the book), at which each of the panelists began with a nod to Empson’s work, but none presumed to take a stand on his central thesis.

73

74

Tobias Gregory

its ideas have been but little absorbed into the mainstream of Milton studies. Nowadays it is most often cited in disagreement, or paid the dubious compliment of “having sparked fruitful debate” (which amounts to saying “it prompted the genuinely valuable work that was written in answer to it”). All students of Milton acknowledge the book’s originality; many admire its boldness; few can stomach its conclusions. Virtually no one maintains that Empson is actually right about Paradise Lost. To lay my cards on the table, I think that Empson is actually right about Paradise Lost—wrong on many details (most frequently in his attempts to defend Satan) but right in his central thesis. My purpose here is not to argue that case in full, which could scarcely be accomplished in the space available. I have two other aims instead. First, I want to dispel the idea that Empson has been satisfactorily answered long ago. Rather, I will argue, his best insights have not yet been assimilated, as later critics have ended up simply replicating the assumptions he was most concerned to contest. Second, I will argue that the scholarly response to Empson brings to the fore an enduring metacritical issue: what is the place in literary criticism of extraliterary moral judgment? On this issue, Empson’s work stands in contrast to that of another influential Miltonist, Stanley Fish. Milton’s God, I will argue, is immune to the powerful objections that Fish raises against contemporary political criticism, and provides a model for those who aspire to write ethically engaged criticism today. To understand the polemical force of Empson’s argument, one should keep in mind the views he set out to argue against. Though often misdescribed as an anti-Miltonist, Empson in fact wrote in defense of Milton against a spate of influential detractors, from F. R. Leavis to T. S. Eliot to Yvor Winters. These detractors had charged Milton, among other things, with getting God wrong: either on the grounds that any attempt to represent the Christian God is bound to get him wrong and that Milton was therefore unwise to try, or on the grounds that Milton’s particular representation was especially distasteful. (Both lines of objection, by the way, date back to the early eighteenth century.) In Empson’s view, those who fault Milton for making God wicked are right about God but wrong to blame it on the poet; Milton had to stick to the received story, and if the God of Genesis is unjustifiable, then Milton’s failure to justify him is not his fault. The problem, in short, is not with Milton but with Christianity. Empson reads Paradise Lost as the valiant effort of an intelligent and courageous author searching to make an inherently wicked God appear just: “That this searching goes on in Paradise Lost, I submit, is the chief source of its fascination and poignancy; and to realize that it is going on makes the poem feel much better at many points, indeed clears up most of the ob-

In Defense of Empson

75

jections to it. I thus tend to accept the details of interpretation which various recent critics have used to prove the poem bad, and then try to show that they make it good” (11). Empson was equally concerned, however, to challenge those whom he saw as praising Milton’s epic for the wrong reasons. A second line of polemic in Milton’s God is directed at critics whom Empson describes as “neo-Christian,” “some of whom believe in Christianity and some not, who interpret any literary work they admire by finding in it a supposed Christian tradition” (229). Empson was responding in particular to C. S. Lewis, who locates Paradise Lost safely within the Augustinian mainstream of Christian thought. For Lewis, the poem is basically orthodox in its theology and teaches a moral that is “dazzlingly simple”: obedience to God brings happiness; disobedience to God causes woe.3 Against this view of Paradise Lost, Empson conducts a defense of the created characters, Eve, Adam, and Satan, and, notoriously, a scathing denunciation of God—not just Milton’s version, but the God of Genesis, as understood in Lewis’s central Augustinian Christian tradition. For Empson, critics such as Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard were blind to the latent horror embedded in the Christian religion from its origins. The complacency of modern neo-Christians, Empson thought, stands in sharp contrast to the urgency felt by Milton himself, who with his unequaled learning, keen intelligence, and strong moral sense was intimately aware of the sticky points in the case for God’s defense and struggled to deal with them as best he could. “It is only if you realize what a difficult and unpleasant thing Milton was trying to handle,” Empson argues, “that you can give him his due for the way he handled it” (229). Milton’s God conducts a polemic on two fronts: it offers, on the one hand, a defense of the poem’s artistic value against its detractors and, on the other, an attack on those who would preserve Paradise Lost for Christian orthodoxy. Empson’s two strands of argument share the premise that the literary merit of the poem is independent of the success of its stated theodical aim, to “justify the ways of God to men.” The reason Empson’s argument gets misunderstood as an attack on Paradise Lost is that this premise is still commonly denied; it is often assumed that the artistic value of Milton’s poem depends upon the success of its theodicy. As Dennis Danielson states, “If Milton presents a God who is wicked, or untruthful, or manipulative, or feeble, or unwise, then his epic poem must suffer accordingly.” Alastair Fowler raises the

3. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), 70.

76

Tobias Gregory

stakes: “[I]f one is left at the end in any doubt as to God’s justice and love, the poem has failed, not on a single count, but altogether.”4 These assumptions are unwarranted. A poem’s failure or success is not an all-or-nothing affair, and to my mind its success depends much more on the poem’s capacity to fascinate new readers after the world has changed than on its capacity to convince those culturally remote readers of the author’s theological views. Cowley’s Davideis or Blackmore’s Prince Arthur, gathering dust on research library shelves, are the poems that have failed altogether, not Paradise Lost. Fowler and Danielson both attempt in many places to answer Milton’s God, but in stating that Paradise Lost stands or falls on its theodicy, they merely repeat an assumption Empson had explicitly challenged, without responding to that challenge. For Empson, far from the poem’s success depending on its defense of God, “the reason why the poem is so good is that it makes God so bad” (275). The “good” in the first clause is a judgment of literary merit, and the “bad” in the second clause is a judgment of morality; admittedly, the conjunction “because” skips several steps in Empson’s argument, so one has to understand the rest of the book to understand this sound bite. Empson is not saying that the poem’s literary merit derives from the wickedness of its omnipotent character, but rather that its great literary merit comes to light once we understand the poem as a heroic attempt to answer a genuinely pressing question: how can the God of Genesis be considered just? Once you recognize that “Milton genuinely considered God in need of defense,” Empson argues, then the poem appears neither presumptuous nor pompous, as its detractors had described it, but powerfully sincere (204). Milton’s stated aim to justify the ways of God to men is no mere figure of speech, still less a didactic exercise in the service of a foregone conclusion, but an entirely serious effort to perform what the poet perceived as a much needed task. To illustrate this important point, Empson cites a series of passages from De Doctrina Christiana, which show that Milton, far from taking God’s justice for granted, was closely aware of the objections and was willing to entertain unorthodox views if they improved God’s moral position. Milton opposes, for example, the standard Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, which holds that God from eternity foresaw and decreed that some would be saved and others damned. He inclines instead toward the gentler Arminian position that God created man wholly good and only foresaw, but did not de4. Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2d ed. (London: Longman, 1998), bk. 1, l. 25; Danielson, Milton’s Good God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), ix; Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, p. 39.

In Defense of Empson

77

cree, his fall.5 It is this view that lies behind God’s famous distinction between foreknowledge and causality in Paradise Lost: As if predestination overruled Their will, disposed by absolute decree Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed Their own revolt, not I: if I foreknew, Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.6

In Scripture, Milton claims in De Doctrina, the term predestination is used to refer not to reprobation but to election only; election, then, is a possibility offered generally to all mankind, contingent upon each individual’s acceptance of God’s freely offered grace.7 Hence the importance of human free will in accepting or rejecting it. The distinction between general and special election may seem a subtle one, but Milton recognized what was at stake: in the latter, Calvinist view, God is working from all eternity toward the damnation of infinite numbers of specific individuals, a view that makes God unacceptably horrible: “Predestination, strictly speaking, includes a concept of aim, namely the salvation of believers, a thing in itself desirable. The aim of reprobation, on the other hand, is the destruction of unbelievers, a thing in itself repulsive and hateful. Clearly, then, God did not predestine reprobation at all, or make it his aim” (DDC 1.iv; YP, 6:173).8 Empson could have quoted this passage, but chooses another one where Milton makes a similar point: 5. In two recent articles Stephen Fallon has provided a cogent assessment and reaffirmation of Milton’s Arminianism: “‘Elect above the Rest’: Theology as Self-Representation in Milton,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 93–116; and “Milton’s Arminianism and the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41:3 (1999): 103–27. 6. Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, bk. 3, ll. 114–19. 7. De Doctrina Christiana, 1.iv, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–1982), 6:173. Book and line numbers for De Doctrina Christiana are hereinafter cited parenthetically as DDC; this edition’s volume and page numbers are hereinafter cited parenthetically as YP. 8. John Calvin, too, was aware of this consequence, and admitted that the doctrine of special election was “dreadful,” but concluded that it was the hard truth and that we had better face up to it: “The decree is dreadful indeed, I confess. [Decretum quidem horribile, fateor.] Yet no one can deny that God foreknew what end man was to have before he created him, and consequently foreknew because he so ordained by his decree. If anyone inveighs against God’s foreknowledge at this point, he stumbles rashly and heedlessly. What reason is there to accuse the Heavenly Judge because he was not ignorant of what was to happen? If there is any just or man-

78

Tobias Gregory

As a vindication of God’s justice, especially when he calls man, it is obviously fitting that some measure of free will be allowed to man, whether this is something left over from his primitive state, or something restored to him as a result of the call of grace . . . if he turns man’s will to moral good or evil just as he likes, and then rewards the good and punishes the wicked, it will cause an outcry against divine justice from all sides. (DDC 1.xii; YP, 6:397)

Milton’s emphasis on the freedom of the human will is evident to the most casual student of his poetry or prose; what Empson sees is the reason it plays such a prominent role in his thought, namely, that he needs something, anything, to answer the “outcry” or protest (expostulatio)9 against God for setting up the human condition as he did. Had Empson availed himself of Maurice Kelley’s This Great Argument, published in 1941, he would have found ample further evidence for his view that “Milton genuinely considered God in need of defense,” though Kelley would not have put the matter in quite those terms. Empson, it must be said, was largely inattentive to the achievements of American Miltonists, but if he was aware of Kelley’s work he may have felt that he did not need it. Kelley’s theses—that the theology of De Doctrina agrees with that of Paradise Lost, that both epic and treatise contain a number of significant unorthodox doctrines (for example, Arianism, Arminianism, mortalism, and creation from preexistent matter), and that Milton was indeed the author of the treatise—are all points that Empson accepted fully and treated as uncontroversially true. These questions have been reopened since, and debated not without dust and heat; after various rounds of learned discussion, a new consensus appears to be forming around the Kelleyan positions that Empson took for granted.10 Milton was an exceptionally rationalist religious ifest complaint, it applies to predestination. And it ought not to seem absurd for me to say that God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruins of his descendants, but also meted it out in accordance with his own decision. For as it pertains to his wisdom to foreknow everything that is to happen, so it pertains to his might to rule and control everything by his hand” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960], 955–56). 9. Milton’s Latin reads, “adversus divinam iustitiam hinc omnis expostulatio oritur”; literally, “from here the whole protest against divine justice originates.” I cite the Latin text from The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), 15:214. 10. On the question of Milton’s Arianism, for example, Kelley maintains that anti-Trinitarian or Arian views pervade both De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost (This Great Argument [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941]). A generation later, William B. Hunter, C. A. Patrides, and J. A. Adamson reasserted Milton’s orthodoxy on the Trinity, at least regarding Paradise Lost, arguing that whatever the views Milton expressed in De Doctrina Christiana, the the-

In Defense of Empson

79

thinker. Not only did he believe that individuals, through hard study, could reason their way to right understanding of God’s word, but he also believed that it was one’s Christian duty to do so: “God has revealed the way of eternal salvation only to the individual faith of each man, and demands of us that any man who wishes to be saved should work out his beliefs for himself ” (DDC, epistle; YP, 6:118). Atypical though it was among seventeenth-century Protestants, Milton’s rationalism is no incidental feature of his thought. The idea that each person must work out the truth to his own intellectual satisfaction can be found throughout his writings, from the statement in Areopagitica that “a man may be a heretick in the truth” (YP, 2:543) to his blasts in the late pamphlet Of True Religion (YP, 8:408–40) against those of “implicit faith,” by which he means those who merely accept the opinions of others. That he would undertake a theodicy is wholly in keeping with his rationalist spirit.11 Milton would not have wished his readers to begin by assuming that God is just because he said so, or because their pastor or their schoolmaster had always said so; rather, he would expect them to study his poem carefully, cross-reference it with their own reading of Scripture, and come to understand the matter for themselves. With so many paths leading to the opposite conclusion, and so many pastors and schoolmasters teaching doctrine that Milton clearly saw made God look horrible, he would have viewed his theodical epic as a means of shedding much needed light on a murky issue, work of potentially great public benefit if the public would give it the considered attention it deserves. Yet Milton scholars, Empson observes in Milton’s God, cannot bring themselves to accept that his rationalism extends to his poem’s central purpose:

ology of the epic is not Arian but “subordinationist” (Bright Essence [Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1971]). (Hunter has since gone so far as to deny Milton’s authorship of De Doctrina Christiana, a view that has not gained general acceptance.) For some years after the appearance of Bright Essence, Miltonists commonly described Milton’s conception of the Trinity as subordinationist rather than Arian, despite the fact that the former term was unknown in the seventeenth century; however, Michael Bauman’s Milton’s Arianism (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1987) makes a detailed and convincing case in confirmation of Kelley’s original assessment. John Rumrich describes the scholarly denial of Milton’s Arianism as a recent example of the longstanding effort to downplay Milton’s heretical views (“Milton’s Arianism: Why It Matters,” Milton and Heresy, ed. Dobranski and Rumrich, 75–92). For Empson, who never missed the forest for the trees, the issue was quite obvious: “The poem makes the Son and the Father about as unidentical as a terrier and a camel” (278). 11. As Richard Strier has pointed out, theodicy is a quintessentially rationalist project, and in his willingness to undertake it Milton departs from the main currents of Reformed thought; both Luther and Calvin found the notion of theodicy blasphemous (“Milton’s Fetters; or, Why Eden Is Better Than Heaven,” Milton Studies 38 [2000]: 169).

80

Tobias Gregory

[W]hen Milton said at the beginning of his epic he intended to justify God, he was so far from expecting a reader to think the phrase poetical rhetoric that he was not even stepping out of the usual procedure of his prose. A curious trick is being played on modern readers here; they are told: “Why, but of course you must read the poem taking for granted that Milton’s God is good; not to do that would be absurdly unhistorical. Why, the first business of a literary critic is to sink his mind wholly into the mental world of the author, and in a case like this you must accept what they all thought way back in early times.” I think this literary doctrine is all nonsense anyhow; a critic ought to use his own moral judgement, for what it is worth, as well as try to understand the author’s, and that is the only way he can arrive at a “total reaction.” But in a case like this the argument is also grossly unhistorical. No doubt Milton would only have snorted if a Victorian had come up and praised him for making Satan good, but anyone who told him he had made God wicked would find his mind surprisingly at home; there would be some severe cross-questioning (is this a Jesuit or merely an Arminian?) but if that passed off all right he would ask the visitor to sit down and discuss the point at length. (204–5)

Empson’s diagnosis of the “curious trick” played on modern readers remains timely. We are still often told that in reading Paradise Lost one is supposed to assume God’s benevolence and justice in advance. Thus, Georgia Christopher notes that “taking a position on God’s character comes before a reading of his words.” If this is so, it becomes hard to see why Milton wrote those words, since nothing is riding on them; Milton’s God would be arguing (well or badly, it does not matter) in the service of a conclusion that readers are already supposed to have arrived at in advance. Likewise, Stanley Fish claims that “[t]he promise to justify God’s ways to men, for instance, cannot, we discover, be fulfilled within the rational and linear framework of Paradise Lost; but it is fulfilled when the reader, who has been led to an intuitive understanding of Christ’s significance, understands, at that moment, how much the mercy of God exceeds the requirements of reason.” Here Fish seems to admit, as he is loath to elsewhere, that the defense of God in the poem does not entirely succeed, and so falls back on the deus ex machina of readerly intuition that somehow trumps the requirements of reason. In a similar move, Northrop Frye acknowledges that Milton’s God presents a problem for the reader, namely, the troubling disjunction between the dramatic (how God appears in the poem) and the conceptual (how we are supposed to think about him). Then, in an about-face that Frye’s elegant prose makes look smoother than it really is, he asserts that “the cleavage between the dramatic and the conceptual clears up when we realize that the one is the opposite of the oth-

In Defense of Empson

81

er.”12 Just how or why we are supposed to realize that black is white Frye does not explain. Each of these otherwise splendid critics denies that God’s justice is actually a live issue in the poem. In each case—Christopher’s view that we must assume that God is good before we encounter him, Fish’s falling back on the reader’s “intuitive understanding,” Frye’s elevation of the conceptual over the dramatic—we find a move away from Milton’s text to a prior understanding of God as good that must, at some level, be taken for granted. The benevolence of God, in short, is treated as a premise, not something that Milton was seriously trying to prove. The problem with this line of thought is that it begs the question to which the poem was written as an answer. It leaves Paradise Lost open to the charges of dogmatism and didacticism that those who dislike the poem still level against it. It also makes it hard to imagine for whom Milton took himself to be writing. Milton firmly believed that there were classes of adversaries, such as Catholics or atheists, with whom it was not worth the trouble to argue; he would scarcely have undertaken to write a poem justifying the ways of God to men had he thought that only impious fools would question the justice of God’s ways.13 Finally, God’s goodness and justice cannot be assumed in advance simply because in fiction these attributes must be demonstrated to be rendered meaningful. Divine omnipotence and omniscience can be readily enough accepted as premises of the narrative, as we accept winged horses and rings of invisibility when we read Ariosto. Benevolence, however, is not the sort of property that can be accepted on the author’s say-so. On this score, we readers must decide for ourselves. Such, indeed, is Empson’s point when he says that all characters are on trial in any civilized narrative; the word civilized distinguishes between ancient myth and its modern retellings. 12. Christopher, Milton and the Science of the Saints, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 93; Fish, “Discovery as Form in Paradise Lost,” reprinted in Surprised by Sin, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 354 (page numbers to this edition are hereinafter cited parenthetically); Frye, The Return of Eden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 111. 13. Fish addresses this question briefly in saying that Milton wrote not for the atheist but for the “cold Christian” (44). I think he is right about this; atheists did not constitute a large or outspoken segment of the population in seventeenth-century England, and Milton would not have taken their views seriously. Nonetheless, from the fact that Milton addressed a Christian audience it does not follow that he did not take the theodical question to be a live one. To the contrary, cold Christians are precisely those for whom doubts about God’s justice may present genuine obstacles to belief (for an atheist, the issue is meaningless). Milton aimed to get cold Christians back on track not by reminding them of what they already knew but by addressing their doubts with rational argument based on a lifetime’s study of and reflection upon Scripture.

82

Tobias Gregory

Empson’s reading of Paradise Lost rests, as he frankly admits, on an extraliterary judgment about the basic wickedness of the Christian God. Empson saw Milton as a supremely intelligent and moral man stuck with a fundamentally immoral religion; the poet did the best he could with the Christian God, but the latter’s Stalinesque qualities were bound to emerge once Milton committed himself to adding narrative flesh to the bones of the Genesis story. At bottom, it is Empson’s general denunciation of Christianity, beyond the particular arguments I have mentioned above, that is so difficult for most contemporary Miltonists to accept. Some, as Christians themselves, naturally do not believe such a denunciation warranted. Others, whatever their personal religious views, reject Empson’s reading of Milton because they consider his forthright opining irrelevant to the aims of literary scholarship. The reception of Milton’s God thus brings to the fore a broader issue: To what extent is it valuable to read old poems by our own lights? Is the critic’s task to explain, or also to pass judgment? Here we arrive at that fault line in literary studies that has been variously described as the difference between scholarship and criticism, between intrinsic and extrinsic reading, or recently by Susan Noakes as the difference between exegesis and interpretation.14 The former sort of critic explicates what the author intended or what first readers would have understood; the latter also discusses its contemporary relevance or judges its value. Within Milton studies, this fault line separates Milton’s God from another landmark book written shortly after Empson’s, Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin. According to Fish, Paradise Lost instructs its readers by provoking and then correcting our errant responses to the story it tells. Milton makes the devils’ rhetoric powerfully seductive to capture our initial sympathy; likewise, he makes the fatal choice of Adam and Eve superficially defensible, so that we are quite likely to fall with them. In the process of reading Paradise Lost, we keep falling into error, and the poem keeps rebuking us for doing so. In this way, the poem leads us to a surprised awareness of our own sinful nature—we readers, too, are fallen, and the sin we are surprised by is our own. When I first read Surprised by Sin as a graduate student, I was at once impressed by its powerful logic and troubled by the sense that something in Fish’s argument was extremely strange, and after some puzzling I figured out what it was: Fish treats the notion of “fallen readers” entirely literally. To be told that Milton’s poem makes “us,” his readers, continually aware of our fallen state sounds metaphorical to those who understand the Genesis story of the expulsion from Eden as ancient Hebrew 14. Noakes, Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

In Defense of Empson

83

myth, rather than as the truth about humanity’s general origin. I continued to suspect that I had been misunderstanding Surprised by Sin until I read Fish’s splendid new preface to the second edition, and found that his literalizing tendency had if anything intensified. “Paradise Lost,” Fish asserts, “is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are,” that is, fallen (x). The new preface concludes with the following declaration: “[T]he structure of the poem and the structure of the universe is such that all free creatures—angels, men, women, readers—have many more ways to go wrong than right, and when they do go wrong, the safety net of a fortunate universe, presided over by a God who can bring good out of evil, will always be there to catch them whether they welcome it or not” (lxvi–lxvii). This sentence lumps together literary characters and readers, inhabitants of the poem’s fictional universe and inhabitants of the real world, and ends up with God catching all of us willynilly in his safety net, an image that entails that the God-centered universe of the poem is the one we actually inhabit. Such conflation of fiction and reality stems less from actual belief on Fish’s part, I suspect, than from the assumption that readers will or should make such an imaginative identification (or else we are reading the poem quite literally in bad faith). However, we are no more required to pretend that we are fallen descendants of Adam and Eve when we read Paradise Lost than we are required to pretend that we are Romans of Trojan ancestry when we read the Aeneid. Fish assumes that a fit reader is a Christian reader (or will make the effort to think like a Christian reader) because Milton would have so assumed. He is impatient with those who do otherwise: Not that the poem is finally ambiguous, at least not as a moral statement; rather, its readers are ambiguous, and their ambiguities (crookednesses) are reflected in the interpretations they arrive at. There is, however, only one true interpretation of Paradise Lost, and it is the reward of those readers who have entered into the spirit of Milton’s “good temptation” and so “become wiser by experience”: others “sport in the shade” with half-truths and self-serving equivocations and end up by accusing God or by writing volumes to expose the illogic of His ways. (272).

Both Empson and Fish are intentionalist readers, in that both seek to reconstruct Milton’s intentions, aims, or purposes when he wrote (both, I take it, would cheerfully grant that such reconstruction is necessarily incomplete and imprecise).15 But they are intentionalists of different stripes. Fish’s great

15. According to Empson, “At bottom, you are trying to imagine the mind of the author at the moment of composition, but this may be too hard taken alone, so you need to remember

84

Tobias Gregory

achievement lies in showing the unity and profound coherence of Milton’s thought. For Fish, Milton in Paradise Lost is continually testing the reader’s understanding from different angles, but the lesson he teaches is always the same: “[A]ll virtues are one virtue—acknowledgment of and obedience to God—and all errors one error—falling away from the worship of God to the worship of secondary forms” (lxv–lxvi). Empson, by contrast, attempts to “follow the mind of Milton” as the poet negotiates a series of narrative and theological difficulties in fleshing out the Genesis account of the Fall. Is the forbidden fruit, once tasted, to be represented as genuinely psychoactive or as a placebo? Why does the serpent have to be cursed? Why would Milton embrace the mortalist heresy? Empson is well aware, of course, that Milton would not have shared his own anti-Christian conclusions; his point is not that Milton somehow meant to produce a wicked God but that the question of divine justice was for Milton a genuine issue. Fish’s Milton is a master teacher, systematic and uncompromising. Empson’s Milton is a solitary intellectual hero, striving mightily to accomplish an impossible task. Fish emphasizes the poem’s deep coherence, Empson the poem’s deep tensions. The above is a difference of emphasis, not of method; for the methodological difference between Fish and Empson, we must return to Empson’s statement, quoted above, that “a critic ought to use his own moral judgement, for what it is worth, as well as try to understand the author’s, and that is the only way he can arrive at a ‘total reaction.’” For Fish, Empson sports in the shade, having refused to enter into the spirit of the good temptation; for Empson, the injunction to enter into the spirit of the good temptation would appear a question-begging formula, a refusal to use one’s own moral judgment. We do not hear a word of Fish’s own judgment in the 330 pages of Surprised by Sin, nor in the 570 pages of his 2001 collection of essays, How Milton Works; he is explicating Milton throughout, and presumably does not take it as his business to comment.16 For his part, Empson would have no truck with statethat he was intensely concerned at that moment with whether the words he had found ‘expressed’ what he was trying to say, that is, whether they would have the effect he wanted upon the audience he was imagining” (28). And as Fish points out, “Milton’s purpose is to educate the reader to an awareness of his position and responsibilities as a fallen man, and to a sense of the distance which separates him from the innocence once his” (1). 16. This may appear a surprising statement about Fish, who is not shy about expressing judgments of value on matters non-Miltonic, from academic politics to First Amendment law. In How Milton Works (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), he argues that Milton was an antiempiricist Christian monist, not a liberal; that this vision remains basically consistent throughout Milton’s career, and is discernible throughout his poetry and prose; and that most

In Defense of Empson

85

ments such as “there is one true interpretation of Paradise Lost.” Nor would he speak as Fish does of different readings as “contender[s] for the prize of saying what Paradise Lost really means” (lx). Rather, he might say, the designation of truth or falsehood is a blunt instrument with which to assess the varying worth of literary interpretations; interpretations differ in sensitivity, learning, eloquence, logic, wisdom, and, yes, morality. For Empson, following the mind of the author is an indispensable element in any interesting work of criticism, but it is not the be-all and end-all. The methodological fault line between Fish and Empson is not that between critics who do and do not care about understanding the intentions of poets in the context of their time, but between those who do and do not take the additional step of bringing to bear their moral judgment, “for what it is worth.” To Fish’s superbly logical exposition of Milton’s “God-centered universe” Empson would reply, “Very well; and you appear to have no idea how ghastly such a universe would be.” In his book Professional Correctness, published in 1995, Fish takes to task political criticism, by which he means criticism that treats writing about literature not as an end in itself but as a means to further a desired political cause. Fish’s objections to this type of criticism are as devastating as they are straightforward: (1) It is bound to fail in its attempt to bring about political change, because the people it would need to reach in order to succeed—legislators, CEOs, community activists, and journalists—pay little attention to the productions of academic critics; they don’t read Milton Studies or Critical Inquiry. (2) It is not really literary criticism, because it subordinates the distinctive goal of criticism—that of illuminating a work of literature—to the goal of advancing an extraliterary cause. Instead of asking, “What do I have to say about Paradise Lost?” the political critic asks, “What do I have to say about Paradise Lost that will best promote equality of the sexes, or school prayer, or gun control?” thus putting the political cart before the literary horse. The attempt to combine criticism with activism, Fish points out, produces neither. Empson’s work can provide a better model for morally engaged criticism than the work of the political critics Fish deplores.17 Though he wears his of today’s Miltonists get Milton wrong because they cannot resist making him into a postEnlightenment liberal like themselves. What Fish never does in his writing on Milton is proceed beyond questions of exegesis—“What is Milton about?” “How does Milton work?”—to questions of value: “Where does the Miltonic vision take us?” “What are its uses and disadvantages for life?” 17. One refreshing aspect of reading Empson today is his willingness to talk about morality. Many recent critics, particularly those of leftist sympathy, speak of “politics” rather than “morality” even when they are clearly discussing moral issues, and describe their own commitments as

86

Tobias Gregory

opinions on his sleeve, Empson never says that he critiques Milton in order to advance any extraliterary cause. He wrote about Milton for the sake of writing about Milton, and simply makes no attempt to divorce his views about Christianity from his views about Milton’s Christian poetry. The Empsonian ideal of the “total reaction” employs extraliterary judgment in the service of literary judgment, not the other way around. As such, it sets a strong example for those contemporary critics who are inclined to interpretation rather than exegesis, who want to write about literature without checking their moral judgment at the door, but at the same time wish to avoid the cart-before-thehorse errors Fish rightly criticizes. Rather than saying, “I write about Milton in order to do what I can to end violence against women, or to reform the American campaign finance laws,” such a critic could say, “I write about Milton because I am interested in Milton. But I am also interested in many other things, including contemporary political issues, and these extraliterary interests (beliefs, opinions, commitments, and moral judgments) affect and enrich what I have to say about Milton. In studying Milton, in fact, I often discover analogies between the issues that exercised him in the seventeenth century and the issues that exercise me in the twenty-first. The fact that Milton wrote on subjects that we still argue about is one reason I became interested in Milton in the first place.” One does not have to make this presentist move, of course. If the task you have set yourself is primarily exegetical—if you aim to set the record straight about Milton’s relation to the Socinians, or to produce a new edition of the De Doctrina—you will do best to treat extraliterary moralizing according to the advice of Shakespeare’s Henry IV: “a little more than a little is by much too much.” Extraliterary moralizing is always a risky business, and Empson’s own words—“a critic ought to use his own moral judgement, for what it is worth” (emphasis added)—show awareness of a hard truth: not everyone can write with equal moral authority. Empson’s work is extraordinary because he possessed the full package: not only the courage of his convictions, but the learning to back them up, the eloquence to express them with verve and zing, and last but not least a genuine moral seriousness that shines through on every page of Milton’s God, without which his indictment of Christianity would have been merely flippant—as, unfortunately, such indictments often are. The fault line between exegetes and interpreters divides two valuable modes of critical practice, not two sides in a debate that one may eventually win. political rather than moral even when those commitments are clearly based on moral judgments. Quite unnecessarily, they concede the term morality to the Christian Right.

In Defense of Empson

87

There will always be room for both exegesis and interpretation. In the specific cases of Fish and Empson, we may, as Goethe put it in another context, simply be glad that we have both of them. In the past three decades, however, Fish’s exegetical approach has predominated in Milton studies, and the field would benefit from a fresh dose of Empsonianism. In recent years, professors of Renaissance literature have not hesitated to express personal judgments on the subjects of imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, but when it comes to religion we tend to keep our opinions to ourselves. It would be invigorating, I believe, if more critics would acknowledge in print that what one thinks about Paradise Lost cannot but be inflected by what one thinks about Christianity in general—I would go a step further and say monotheism in general. Forty years later, Empson’s book still has much to teach us. In terms of its content, the point that for Milton God’s justice is a conclusion, not a premise, remains an insight of the first importance that has yet to be absorbed. In terms of its method, Milton’s God provides an example of interpretive criticism of the highest order. It is one of those rare books that expands our sense of the possibilities of its genre; Milton’s God shows us what a high-stakes enterprise literary criticism can be.

Elizabeth Sauer

Milton and Dryden on the Restoration Stage

An examination of early Restoration theater culture and the various contesting interpretive communities of England in the 1660s offers an illuminating context for rereading John Milton’s Samson Agonistes.1 As much as any text can be, Milton’s dramatic poem is located in the fault lines of literary history. Likely a product of the Restoration, Samson Agonistes was nevertheless composed by a poet who repudiates Restoration literary culture and who in our day has been claimed by scholars of seventeenth-century studies.2 Furthermore, Samson Agonistes negotiates between print and performance: it advertises itself both as a readerly text and as a drama; yet, as a tragedy it imitates Greek rather than newly restored Roman models and denies its performability. Finally, while appealing to an elitist, republican readership, the text registers its discomfort with popular tastes, especially those cultivated by stage plays, whose final performance Milton fantasizes when Samson brings down the theater on his idolatrous Philistine audience. An exploration of the literary and political culture in which Restoration drama was generated and to which Samson Agonistes responds exposes the fault lines in the critical tradition of the poem and in the Miltonic oeuvre, which have commonly been buffered from “infamy” and problems of textual variability. To reread Samson Agonistes as a text that responds to popular influences is to oppose the strong tendency in Milton studies to enshrine the poem as a sacred text, a practice criticized in recent years by Leah S. Marcus, John P. Rumrich, and Stephen B. Dobranski, who have exposed its indeterminacy and internal difference. With the exception of Jackson Cope and, more re1. Research for this article was funded through the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Canada Council. 2. On the controversy about the dating of the text that I examine as a product of the Restoration, see Anthony Low, “Milton’s Samson and the Stage, with Implications for Dating the Play,” Huntington Library Quarterly 40 (1977): 313–24.

88

Milton and Dryden

89

cently, Steven Zwicker, Peggy Samuels, and Nancy Klein Maguire, scholars have not examined Milton’s volume in relation to early modern drama, and none of these critics has conducted an extensive study of Samson Agonistes as a readerly text subject to the practices of cultural consumption in Milton’s day.3 The preface of Samson Agonistes designates the poem as part of a vertical genealogy extending from classical tragedy. Milton’s intended audience of republican, Christian readers would see itself as performing the cultural and political work of carrying on that tradition. Another interpretive community invoked by the text is the encroaching, antagonistic world of Restoration drama, which Milton rebukes in his preface in remarking on the “infamy, which . . . [tragedy] undergoes at this day.”4 Milton is uncomfortably aware that certain readers will bring their expectations of heroic drama to their experience of the poem. “How else could Milton have responded but with intense curiosity and competitiveness when a form suddenly appeared in the mid-1660s that claimed to do exactly what had preoccupied him in the 1640s and toward which he had made his own notes and plan?” Zwicker asks in his study of Paradise Regained as a poem that interrogates the themes of Restoration heroic drama: love, empire, and glory. Samson Agonistes, which was published to-

3. See Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (New York: Routledge, 1996); Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Dobranksi, “Samson and the Omissa,” Studies in English Literature 36 (1996): 149–69; Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Cope, “Paradise Regained: Inner Ritual,” Milton Studies 1 (1969): 53–54; Zwicker, “Milton, Dryden, and the Politics of Literary Controversy,” in Heirs of Fame: Milton and Writers of the English Renaissance, ed. Margo Swiss and David A. Kent (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 270–89, and in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration, ed. Gerald MacLean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 137– 58, on Paradise Regained as a repudiation of Restoration drama; Samuels, “Fire Not Light: Milton’s Simulacrum of Tragicomedy,” Milton Quarterly 30 (1996): 1–15, which develops a convincing reading of Samson Agonistes’ engagement with the concerns and structures of tragicomedy, but does not examine Restoration drama specifically; and Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), a fascinating study on Caroline tragicomedy that barely mentions Milton. See also Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 1660–71 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), which examines Restoration drama and Samson Agonistes in two illuminating chapters; and John D. Cox, “Renaissance Power and Stuart Dramaturgy: Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden,” Comparative Drama 22:4 (1988–1989): 323–58. 4. Milton, preface to Samson Agonistes, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 550, ll. 24–25. Page or line numbers, as applicable, are hereinafter cited parenthetically as SA.

90

Elizabeth Sauer

gether with Paradise Regained, was in fact in commercial competition with a culture Milton could not effectively resist. Both the royalist-sponsored theater—dominated by John Dryden—and the bookstore community impeded Milton’s efforts at controlling the reception of his text. A study of the received tradition of Samson Agonistes effectively demonstrates how the actual uses of texts defy the intentions of their authors and “the desires of those who produced the discourses and fashioned the norms.”5 The interpretive communities of relevance to this discussion develop in response to Caroline theater culture and the marketplace, both of which were used to secure the recently restored monarchical control. The new regime at this time was responsible for a “sharp contraction” of the public sphere as it exerted its influence over the press and modes of cultural production. Playwrights sympathetic to royalism closed off their texts from dissent by addressing a like-minded clientele captivated by spectacle. Milton responded by establishing an antagonistic relationship with the theater and marketplace, which provided the immediate contexts and material communities for his 1671 volume. As a closet drama indebted to the classical tragedy, Samson Agonistes appeals to an imagined community of partisan readers—“an invisible public of like-minded readers”—whose critical interpretation of the text becomes an “internalised, read-only, version” of the collective experience that theaters in the ancient republics had enabled.6 The text, then, takes on the form of an oppositional drama, written in a climate where court sponsorship of the theater otherwise precluded the production of such writings. This reading of Samson Agonistes and its indebtedness to Greek and biblical models rather than heroic drama, tragicomedy, and sentimental plays concludes with competing accounts of Samson’s act of (self-)destruction and sets the stage for the poem’s controversial reading history. Both as a dramatic poem and a cultural and commercial object, Samson Agonistes repudiated Restoration plays—on the stage and in the marketplace. Practices of collective identification and consumption include for the purposes 5. Zwicker, “Milton, Dryden, and Politics,” 275; Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 7. 6. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance, 211; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 92. See also Elizabeth Sauer, “The Politics of Performance in the Inner Theatre: Samson Agonistes as Closet Drama,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranksi and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 199–215.

Milton and Dryden

91

of this paper the reading and purchasing of texts as well as theater attendance. A description of the cultural and political world of the theater Milton occupied and struggled to renounce follows, with reference to some of the more popular dramas of the day. In England heroic sentiment developed during the reign of Charles I in the court of Henrietta Maria. The heroic emphasis in literature, notably the enthusiastic response to idealized notions of love and honor—conventionally identified with the epic and romance—found its way into the theater. The heroic tradition lay dormant during the 1640s and ’50s, awaiting the revival that accompanied the Restoration. Charles II, who was expected to usher in the heroic age, influenced literary taste by helping to establish the rhymed heroic drama—an expression perhaps of his desire for absolute power, like that enjoyed by the French monarch across the Channel. Heroic dramas featured excessive spectacles; epic plots; love-and-honor themes; bombastic, hyperbolic speeches; stock heroes and villains; rhymed couplets; and grand and violent action. The genre developed from the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, English opera, and French court romances, and defended the spirit of the Restoration through the use of exalted verse, imperial overtones, and historical plots highlighting the restoration of monarchy or of law and order. The anonymous Unfortunate Usurper draws attention to the political work of the genre: “True Monarchy’s supported by our play.” The Generall, by Roger Boyle, the earl of Orrery, was the first rhymed heroic play in English of which the popular The Siege of Rhodes was a prototype. Taking his lead from Ariosto and from his contemporary William Davenant, John Dryden declares in Of Heroique Playes: An Essay (the preface to The Conquest of Granada, Part I) that “an Heroick Play ought to be an imitation, in little of an Heroick Poem: and consequently . . . Love and Valour ought to be the Subject of it.”7 Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, which appeared on the stage at the same time that Samson Agonistes was published (1670–1671), is generally regarded as the culmination of this form. Though much discussed in the Restoration, heroic dramas were nevertheless relatively few in number. Nancy Klein Maguire contends, in fact, that real tragedies were “impossible” after 1660 because art could not imitate the “real tragedies” performed on the scaffold in the midcentury. She identifies Thomas 7. Unfortunate Usurper (1663), sig. K4r; Dryden, Conquest of Granada, Part I (1672), in The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956–), 11:10 (volume and page numbers or volume and act, scene, and line numbers, as applicable, are hereinafter cited parenthetically as Works).

92

Elizabeth Sauer

Porter’s Villain (1662) as the only genuine tragedy of the decade, and mentions one other traditional tragedy: William Joyner’s Roman Empress, which was probably acted in the same year that Samson Agonistes appeared.8 Additional works of drama that were predominantly tragic include Roger Boyle’s Black Prince and Tryphon, John Caryll’s English Princess, and Dryden’s plays The Indian Queen, Tyrannic Love, and Aureng-Zebe.9 Yet even in these plays, generic distinctions frequently break down. Boyle’s Tryphon is, for example, modeled on heroic romance, while Caryll’s play, by emphasizing Richard’s death rather than Henry VII’s crowning, is a serious tragicomedy rather than a heroic play. And Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe itself is not without its humorous extravagances. “[D]oubtless the Poet intended those to make his Spectators laugh, while they admir’d them,” Colley Cibber observes in a critique of Barton Booth’s attempt at restoring to the drama a tone of high seriousness through the “scrupulous Coldness, and unmov’d Delivery” of his performance.10 Along with The Villain, The Siege of Rhodes, Hamlet, The Indian Emperour, Macbeth, Mustapha, and Conquest of Granada, parts 1 and 2 were among the most often performed tragic plays in the first half of the Restoration period.11 These “tragedies”—frequently characterized as problem plays—enjoyed the kind of popularity that some, more strictly defined, heroic dramas did not; like the latter, though, they also tended toward abstractions and heroic exaltations and excesses. Whether such dramas were too removed from social and political realities to last or, as Nicholas Jose observes, “simply too close to the interests of the 1660s” remains, like the genres of the plays themselves, a subject of dispute among critics of Restoration drama.12 Criticism of the heroic drama grew up virtually alongside the genre. The duke of Buckingham’s Rehearsal, for example, wastes no time in making a laughingstock of heroic drama. The first version of The Rehearsal (ca. 1665) 8. Maguire, Regicide and Restoration, 35; see The London Stage, 1660–1800, 11 vols., 5 pts. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–1968), pt. 1, ed. William Van Lennep et al. (1965), 1:171. 9. Robert D. Hume, The Development of the English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 250. 10. On Tryphon as heroic romance, see Susan Staves, Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 57–60; Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, ed. B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 72. 11. Frances M. Kavenik, British Drama, 1660–1779: A Critical History (New York: Twayne, 1995), 30. 12. Jose, Ideas of the Restoration, 141.

Milton and Dryden

93

seems to have had a diffuse target since it attacks Robert Stapylton’s Slighted Maid and comedies such as The English Mounsieur, both produced in 1663. However, the revised version (printed in 1672) aims directly at the heroic tradition. While the genre of heroic drama did not fall into immediate disuse— later editions of The Rehearsal in fact continued the assault into the eighteenth century—Buckingham’s satire helped precipitate its demise. Not that the plays were not already self-combusting. The glorification of the hero and the concern with radical individualism, which prevented the examination of serious moral problems, led the situations and characters to grow trite. Already in the late 1660s the stage and the spirit of the age were giving way to tragicomedy and comedy—under the direction of the Merry Monarch himself. In the end, as John Dryden himself would realize, heroic drama could not compete with the tragicomedy, the sentimental play, or the opera in pleasing and appealing to the emotions of the audience. The first comedies of George Etherege, William Wycherley, Thomas Shadwell, and Aphra Behn were performed before or during the year Samson Agonistes was published. Perhaps this is why Milton, in consciously dissociating himself from the theater and England’s political stage, prefaced his poem by establishing its genre and situating it in a classical—specifically Greek—tradition. The fissures separating seventeenth-century and Restoration scholarship, as well as high and popular culture, have prevented Milton and Samuel Pepys from sharing the stage or even from being studied comparatively. However, Milton had avid playgoers like Pepys in mind when he composed his scornful prefatory remarks about contemporary theater culture. Much of our information about the colorful theater scene and the growing appeal of tragicomedy in particular is in fact derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys.13 As a frequenter of the theater, a book collector, and a consumer and reader of printed plays, Pepys offers a significant point of entry into the world of the theater, including the public reception to drama off the stage against which the production of Samson Agonistes is set and Milton’s own response must ultimately be judged. Pepys’s accounts of his theatergoing are interspersed with references to purchasing or reading books, since Restoration drama made its way not only into the theater but also into the literary marketplace. After seeing Philip Mas13. Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), 9:367. Volume and page numbers are hereinafter cited parenthetically as Diary. For Pepys’s reading of Restoration audiences, see Helen McAfee, Pepys on the Restoration Stage (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1916), 277– 85.

94

Elizabeth Sauer

singer’s Bondman performed for the third time, Pepys bought a copy of the tragicomedy at St. Paul’s Churchyard (May 25, 1661; Diary, 2:106). Over the next years he attended several more productions of the play, which, as he states in an entry for November 2, 1666, he read multiple times (Diary, 7:352). In his entries for September 23, 1664; October 1, 1665; August 5, 1666; and December 19, 1668, he mentions reading Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes and having it read to him (Diary, 5:278, 6:247, 7:235, 9:352). He also makes note of his and Mrs. Elizabeth Pepys’s efforts at memorizing Hamlet’s soliloquy “without book” (November 13, 1664; Diary, 5:320). Elizabeth’s readings of Mustapha are cited in entries for June 15 and 16, 1668, that being the year in which the first printed edition of the 1665 play appeared (Diary, 9:241, 242).14 Reading a play (or hearing it read) is quite different from attending a performance, yet with few exceptions Pepys regarded such experiences as complementary and continuous, though always as supplementary exercises. For example, after a performance of Boyle’s Black Prince—a rhymed heroic tragedy with a happy ending—Pepys retired to his chamber to read “the true story” on which the play was based in John Speed’s Historie of Great Britaine (October 23, 1667; Diary, 8:498). For histories, volumes of poetry, romances, and plays, as well as for news and rendezvous of all kinds, Pepys frequently visited the shop of Henry Herringman, the famous bookseller of the New Exchange (August 10 and 12, 1667; Diary, 8:380, 383). A comparison of the kinds of texts printed for or sold by Herringman with those in John Starkey’s shop enables a broader examination of popular tastes and reading habits during this period. Along with the volume containing Samson Agonistes, political histories and religious writings, including collections of sermons and works about heresy such as Gerard Roberts’s Impudency and Ranterism rebvked, were printed for Starkey in 1671. Herringman’s shop appealed to a different consumer: plays—mainly comedies—by William Cartwright, John Caryll, John Dryden, George Etherege, Edward Howard, Robert Howard, William Joyner, Thomas Shadwell, and Sir Samuel Tuke were available in Herringman’s shop in 1671, and would have contributed to Milton’s anxiety over the encroaching world of the drama, this time as a commercial object. Because Pepys was an informed critic, it may be surprising that he reserved no place in the Diary for Milton. Moreover, Milton was virtually unrepre14. David Roberts, chap. 2 in The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama, 1660– 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), offers a useful account of Elizabeth and Samuel Pepys’s habits of theatergoing and play reading.

Milton and Dryden

95

sented in his library. While minor works of Milton and a biography of him appear in the catalog, Paradise Lost, like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, is conspicuously absent. Literary taste was partly determined by political allegiances; as an employee in the court of Charles II, Pepys would in fact have judged Milton’s writings as “pernicious and subversive.”15

Genre, Subject, Performance

Pepys discontinued his Diary in the spring of 1669. The 1669–1670 season is, therefore, different from the previous in that we know much less about it. On June 20, 1670, the duchess of Orleans, sister of the king, died, and the theaters were closed for about six weeks while the court mourned. During this period, on July 2, the volume containing Samson Agonistes was licensed for publication. The antiheroic brief epic Paradise Regained and its companion piece—unintended for the stage—were authorized in the (official) silence of the stage, whose final destruction Milton prophesies in Samson Agonistes.16 Anticipating the unpopularity of his poem from the start, Milton delays Samson’s entry in Samson Agonistes by supplying a preface, which is sometimes used “in case of self defence, or explanation” in classical tragedies (SA, p. 550). Though Milton distinguishes his preface—presented as an epistle to the reader—from the kind of verse prologues prefixed to plays by Dryden, it resembles the prefaces and prologues used by Restoration playwrights in justifying their undertakings or publishing their anxieties. “There is nothing more difficult; or which requires a more elevated wit, richer fancy, or subtiler judgement” than playwriting, William Joyner laments in the preface to The Roman Empress (sig. A1v). In his Defence of the Epilogue. Or, An Essay on the Dramatique Poetry of the last Age, which serves as a postscript for The Conquest of Granada, Part II, Dryden fights back, declaring that the language, wit, and conversation of the present day are superior to literary expressions of the “Golden Age of Poetry,” when Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson ruled the

15. Richard Ollard, Pepys: A Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974), 212. 16. No copy of the volume with a date of 1670 is known, although this date is given by some early biographers and library catalogs. A Catalogue of Books Printed and Published at London in Michaelmass-term, 1670, no. 3, dated November 22, 1670, lists the volume, and it was also advertised in A Catalogue of Books: Printed for John Starkey, dated, in part, May 1670. Various other post-1670 catalogs printed for Starkey contain this entry. A second edition of Samson Agonistes was published in 1680 as were two more issues, not surprisingly, in 1688.

96

Elizabeth Sauer

stage (Works, 11:207). Even the work of the great Jonson, “a most Judicious Writer,” is now judged as replete with errors. The “gallantry and civility” of the age have raised the standards, making it impossible for any playwright to remain unscathed (Works, 11:218). Like Samson before the Philistine spectators, Dryden casts himself in the epilogue to Aureng-Zebe as a fool who performs for fools (Works, 12:249–50). However, in the dedication to John, Lord Haughton in The Spanish Fryar (1681), Dryden condemns “all those Dalilahs of the Theatre” and resolves to “settle [him]self no reputation by the applause of fools” (Works, 14:101). Although such commentaries do not necessarily reflect the state of theater or even the concerns of the dramatists precisely, the brief life span of the heroic drama does lend some credibility to the repeated charges of infamy and harassment recorded in plays and dramatic criticism of this period. In the preface to Samson Agonistes, Milton defends tragedy against “the small esteem, or rather infamy, which in the account of many it undergoes at this day with other common Interludes” (SA, p. 550). The interludes to which he refers would include the kind of dramatic pieces identified in “A True, perfect, and exact Catalogue of all the Comedies, Tragedies, Tragi-Comedies, Pastorals, Masques, and Interludes,” which was added to Francis Kirkman’s 1671 Nicomede: A Tragi-Comedy. The attention devoted in the preface to the genre of Samson Agonistes reveals the poet’s efforts at locking the text in particular interpretive traditions. Michael R. G. Spiller in “Directing the Audience in Samson Agonistes” decides that the preface is “preoccupied with details of form to the exclusion of statements of purpose; certainly it reveals nothing of Milton’s intentions.” However, the designation of a particular genre is itself a political act. Thomas Healy contends that genre is a more powerful agent of expression than critics often assume by enabling the writer “to be more than just a force of social and cultural agency which originates the text. Exploitation of generic conventions enables the structures which allow a re-figuring of accepted representations.”17 Milton’s preface performs the political work of establishing the genre of the text and appealing to a readership removed from popular culture. Renaissance theories of tragicomedy are specifically invoked in Milton’s repudiation of “intermixing Comic stuff with Tragic sadness and gravity” and of the inclusion of “trivial and vulgar persons” in 17. Spiller, “Directing the Audience,” in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. P. G. Stanwood (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 122; Healy, New Latitudes: Theory and English Renaissance Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), 172.

Milton and Dryden

97

works of tragedy (SA, p. 550). Through his identification with the traditions, conventions, and writings of antiquity and of Scripture, he situates Samson Agonistes in a canon of his making, a canon separate from the works that dominated the Restoration literary scene.18 The alternative readership “hypothesized” by Milton or “postulated” by Samson Agonistes consists first of all of imitators or defenders of the ancients. His fit readers, for example, will be familiar with the Aristotelian theory of catharsis, the philosophy of Cicero and Plutarch, the works of Seneca and Martial, and the Renaissance tragedies of Italian playwrights who followed the ancients. The best judges of Samson Agonistes will, moreover, not be unacquainted with the greatest Greek playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—“the three Tragic poets unequall’d yet by any” (SA, p. 550)—who offer models for the design of the plot. Milton nevertheless directs his poem at a readerly rather than a theater audience, meaning that his imagined community—a communitas composed of individual readers—is even more narrowly defined. He thus stands up against the theatergoers and consumers of mass culture, a Restoration version of “Image-doting rabble” who had been seduced by Eikon Basilike and Charles’s tragic performance on the scaffold.19 In recognizing “the radical politics of his own reading,” Milton develops an alternative notion of the performance as active engagement with a dramatic poem and casts the republican-minded reader as the poem’s final authority.20 In the end, however, Milton is no more able to compete successfully with the heroic drama and tragicomedy, which Charles I’s stage performance anticipated, than he can with the numerous editions of the widely circulated Eikon Basilike. In his Essay of Dramatick Poesie, Dryden, the main apologist and practitioner of heroic drama in his day, uses the character Neander in defense of tragicomedy as a “more pleasant way of writing for the Stage then was ever known to the Ancients or Moderns of any Nation”; he adds that tragicomedy is in fact produced “in the honour of our Nation” (Works, 17:46). If Milton read the Essay, he disregarded first of all Neander’s views on rhyme, as the 1667 edition of Paradise Lost—which “must have come upon [Dryden] like 18. Milton’s earlier readers had been replaced by a critical, even hostile, royalist readership “bent on revenge” (Nicholas von Maltzahn, “Milton’s Readers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson, 2d ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 241). 19. Milton, Eikonoklastes, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–1982), 3:601. 20. Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 291.

98

Elizabeth Sauer

a revelation or a thunderbolt”—abundantly illustrates.21 And certainly Milton would have disagreed with the Essay’s defense of tragicomedy when he cites in Samson Agonistes “the poet’s error of intermixing Comic stuff with Tragic sadness and gravity” (SA, p. 550). Further, Milton, of course, envisioned a different kind of nation; there is a political subtext to his comments on genre, decorum, and aesthetics, as there is for Dryden and his character Neander. Both Milton and Dryden were (re)imagining the nation by using their readings of the stage to advance their respective cultural and political programs. Neander connects the revival of the theater with recent events on England’s political stage: “with the restoration of our happiness, we see reviv’d Poesie lifting up its head, & already shaking off the rubbish which lay so heavy on it” (Works, 17:63). In Samson Agonistes, Milton’s earlier prophecy of the “noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks” is fulfilled when Israel’s deliverer destroys the Philistine theater.22 In Milton’s mind’s eye, the colorful 1660s theater culture mirrored a nation thrown into confusion and mesmerized by spectacles that bolstered royalist power. “Heroique Poesie has alwayes been sacred to Princes and to Heroes,” Dryden states in his dedication to the future James II in The Conquest of Granada (1672). Milton’s dramatic poem, in contrast, sets the stage for the last act of royalist theater history while attempting to reclaim the heroic for the republican and providential cause. The largely overlooked encounter between Milton and Restoration drama is played out not only in Milton’s meditations on genre but also in his choice of subject matter for Samson Agonistes. Milton’s Samson exhibits a form of heroism that is at odds with the Restoration “ideal,” on which characters such as Dryden’s Almanzor and Aureng-Zebe are modeled. “Who would not be the Hero of an Age?” Arimant asks the emperor in an exchange about AurengZebe (Works, 12:222). It is true that by the time Samson Agonistes appeared, the heyday of Restoration heroic drama had already passed. Protagonists of heroic dramas in the later 1660s and ’70s became caught, like the playwrights themselves, in the rift between romantic idealizations and actual experience. Yet, despite his delusions of grandeur and his frustrated aspirations, a character like Almanzor still manages in an act of self-exaltation to restore two 21. David Masson, The Life of Milton, 7 vols. (London, 1859–1894), 6:633. See also Morris Freedman, “Dryden’s ‘Memorable Visit’ to Milton,” Huntington Library Quarterly 2 (1955): 99–108. 22. Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don Wolfe et al., 2:558.

Milton and Dryden

99

thrones, as well as the freedom of a king’s brother and wife.23 In contrast, Samson’s heroic actions involve a series of dramatic self-confrontations and counterperformances, represented in his exchanges with the Philistines Dalila and Harapha, and ultimately necessitating the destruction of the self and of the theater. From the start, Milton’s dramatic poem stubbornly resists supplying the visual effects that a stage play would have offered. The blind Samson utters in the opening verses: A little onward lend thy guiding hand To these dark steps, a little further on From yonder bank hath choice of Sun or shade, There am I wont to sit, when any chance Relieves me from my task of servile toyl. (SA, ll. 1–5)

Besides the fact that the reader is left to imagine Samson’s experience of restlessness and physical imprisonment, the identity of his addressee at this point in the poem also remains a mystery. In line 20 when Samson describes himself as being “alone,” we realize that the “guiding hand” to which he initially refers represents an absent physical (rather than spiritual) presence. By comparing this soliloquy (or dramatic monologue) to Tiresias’s appeal to Manto in Dryden and Nathaniel Lee’s adaptation of Oedipus, we recognize the differences between Samson Agonistes and Oedipus in terms of the texts’ engagement with their readers or audiences. Stage directions in Oedipus enable us to visualize the scene: “Enter Tiresias, leaning on a staff, and led by his Daughter Manto”: Tiresias. A little farther; yet a little farther, Thou wretched Daughter of a dark old man, Conduct my weary steps: and thou, who seest For me and for thy self, beware thou tread not With impious steps, upon dead corps.—Now stay:

23. Derek Hughes suggests that Dryden’s Of Heroique Playes (1672) characterizes Almanzor as a “flawed and self-deluding character,” though he acknowledges that critics are divided over the character’s heroism (Dryden’s Heroic Plays [London: Macmillan, 1981], 11, 81). While Dryden actually invites a critical response of the hero of his play, Almanzor is in the end subsumed within the conquering family (Works, 2:5.3.272–75) and victory over the Moors is accorded to him and Spain.

100

Elizabeth Sauer

Methinks I draw more open, vital air, Where are we? (Works, 13:1.1.192–98)24

Manto sees for her father while directing the audience’s gaze to various parts of the stage. Milton’s Samson, however, misjudges his situation, and his sense of hearing does not compensate for his lack of vision; in fact, sounds mislead him further about the identity of his first visitors: But who are these? for with joint pace I hear The tread of many feet steering this way; Perhaps my enemies who come to stare At my affliction. (SA, ll. 110–13)

The reader has, of course, already learned that the approaching figures are the members of the chorus, “friends and equals of his tribe” (SA, p. 551). Imagery of vision and of light and darkness is endemic to heroic drama. Plays ranging from The Siege of Rhodes to The Indian Emperour customarily compare the hero to the sun to distinguish him from other characters and highlight his luminating presence and dominion. And, of course, the sun was frequently employed as an emblem for the king. The epilogue to the Unfortunate Usurper thus exalts the king over his enemies: Those Meteors [Nevill, Lambert, Vane] must vanish, Charles our Sun Having in Englands zodiack begun His course.25

For Samson, the sun has set, giving way to darkness— amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day. (SA, ll. 80–82)

—a reflection of his inner condition. The extinction of Samson’s hopes and 24. Dryden and Lee, Oedipus: A Tragedy, as It Is Acted at His Royal Highness the Duke’s Theatre (London, 1679). Dryden and Lee’s adaptation of Oedipus was performed in 1678. 25. Unfortunate Usurper, sig. K4r.

Milton and Dryden

101

his loss of physical sight complement his diminished heroic status. Imagery of eclipses in Samson Agonistes is also noteworthy because Milton invokes the meaning of the Hebrew name Shimshon, which is shemesh, “sun,” thus heightening the irony and tragic nature of the opening scene. At the same time, however, blindness renders Samson immune to spectacle and theatrical illusion. Theatricality is represented in a variety of forms, though most obviously in the character Dalila. The extravagantly dressed temptress, described as “bedeckt, ornate, and gay” (SA, l. 712), becomes a cipher for a wide range of historical, mythological, and topical figures—all associated with opulence and exploitation. Her identity takes on new significance when Samson Agonistes is situated in relation to seventeenth-century theater culture. Dalila might, for example, be identified with the daughter of Ben Jonson’s Pecunia, infanta of the mines in The Staple of News, whose array is as costly “as furnishing a fleet” and who appears “like a galley, / Gilt i’the prow.” The stately ship of Tarsus to which Dalila is compared in Samson Agonistes recalls Old Testament symbols of pride (SA, ll. 714–15; Ps. 48:7), as well as the city on the river Cydnus where Cleopatra, “O’erpicturing” Venus, meets Antony in Shakespeare’s play and in Dryden’s adaptation discussed below.26 For the fallen and now blind Samson, Dalila is a reminder of his fatal attraction to dramaturgy, sensuality, and allure: Then swoll’n with pride into the snare I fell Of fair fallacious looks, venereal trains, Softn’d with pleasure and voluptuous life. (SA, ll. 532–34)

Dalila has sisters on the Restoration stage whose performances are as powerfully captivating as they are suspect. In Dryden’s Conquest of Granada—the first productions of which (December 1670 and January 1671) were concurrent with the printing of Samson Agonistes—Lyndaraxa is featured as Dalila’s counterpart. As the femme fatale, Lyndaraxa marches to the beat of the war drums, while strategizing about her next conquest: Beat faster, Drums, and mingle Deaths more thick. I’le to the Turrets of the Palace goe, 26. Jonson, The Staple of News, ed. Devra Rowland Kifer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 2.5.43–44; Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Barbara Everett (New York: Penguin, 1998), 2.2.192–93, 206; Dryden, All for Love: or, The World Well Lost: A Tragedy (London, 1678), 3.1.162.

102

Elizabeth Sauer

And add new fire to those that fight below. Thence, Hero-like, with Torches by my side, (Farr be the Omen, though,) my Love I’le guide. No; like his better Fortune I’le appear: With open Arms, loose Vayl, and flowing Hair, Just flying forward from my rowling Sphere. My smiles shall make Abdalla more then Man; Let him look up and perish if he can. (Works, vol. 11, pt. 1:3.1.260–69)

This battle cry in the Conquest of Granada may have provoked Richard Leigh’s critique of the play’s bombast and ostentation: An Heroick Poem never sounded so nobly, as when it was heightned with Shouts, and Clashing of Swords; and that Drums and Trumpets gain’d an absolute Dominion over the minds of the Audience. . . . Here an Acquaintance of the Authors interpos’d, and assur’d the Company . . . that if there was any thing unintelligible in his rants, t’was the effect of that horrour those Instruments of War with their astonishing noise had precipitated him into, which had so transported him, that he writ beyond himself.27

Though perhaps excessive, the grandiose speeches and lavish spectacles contributed to the play’s success. As the above-mentioned speech indicates, Dryden’s Lyndaraxa is the best representative of opulence and indulgence in the Conquest of Granada. Her unquenchable lust for power ignites the love of both Abdalla and Abdelmelech; ultimately, only Almanzor—who is nevertheless also tempted by her dramaturgy—can rival her display of passionate grandeur. In her final moments, Lyndaraxa repeats Almanzor’s boast, “Stand off; I have not leisure yet to dye,” when she declares to Abdelmelech: “Dye for us both; I have not leysure now”; “Tell her I am a Queen” (Works, vol. 11, pt. 1:1.1.233; pt. 2:15.3.254, 261a). Indeed, she sustains her performance until the end of the play when she savors the glory for which she longed: “I’me pleas’d to taste an Empyre ’ere I goe” (Works, vol. 11, pt. 2:5.3.265). Ferdinand announces that Lyndaraxa will be rewarded for her role in the conquest of Granada: “Fair Lyndaraxa, for the help she lent / Shall, under Tribute, have this Government” (Works, vol. 11, pt. 2:5.3.234–35). Similarly, Milton’s Dalila, who is herself double-formed like Dagon, the Philistine god, desires “double-fac’t” or “double-mouth’d” fame in recogni27. Leigh, The Censure of the Rota (Oxford, 1673), 3–4.

Milton and Dryden

103

tion of her part in securing the Philistines’ victory over Samson (SA, l. 971). Dalila’s duplicity characterizes the corrupt regime of which she is a product and of which Samson is now a prisoner. Paradoxically, Samson manages to divorce himself from her and dismiss her from the stage only when he becomes immune to her performances in his blind and weakened condition. In the encounter between Samson and Harapha—Samson’s other chief Philistine visitor—Milton further dissociates his protagonist from the heroes of Restoration drama, as well as those on the political stage. Unlike his Restoration counterparts, Samson will earn his title as champion(-agonistes) by acknowledging that his strength is not his own: “My trust is in the living God who gave me / At my Nativity this strength” (SA, ll. 1140–41). Assigned his part from Heaven (SA, l. 1217), Samson, as God’s champion, “defies [Harapha] thrice to single fight” (SA, l. 1222); the scene recalls Samson’s success at thrice resisting Dalila’s efforts to extort his “capital secret” from him (SA, ll. 392–94) by turning her “importunity” “to sport” (SA, ll. 396–97). The triple challenge also evokes (in a medieval and early modern context) the custom of challenging three times in judicial combats. This ritual was performed in coronation ceremonies, including that of Charles II, as Pepys related: “And three times the King-at-armes [Sir Edward Walker] went to the three open places on the scaffold and proclaimed that if any one could show any reason why Ch. Steward should not be King of England, that now he should come and speak.” As the regal ceremony proceeded, the king’s armored champion appeared on the stage, “[flung] down his gauntlet; and all this he doth three times in his going up towards the King’s table” (April 23, 1661; Diary, 2:84, 85). In challenging Harapha, Samson proposes to confront his foe “single and unarmed” (SA, l. 1111); he will sport only an “Oak’n staff” (SA, l. 1122), thus appropriating a symbol of kingship.28 Samson thereby aims to expose the emptiness of the pompous Harapha, the “Tongue-doughty Giant” and “vain Boaster,” and undermine a performance tainted with monarchical pride (SA, ll. 1181, 1227). Paradoxically, humility and self-abnegation constitute heroism in Samson Agonistes, as suggested by the chorus’s remarks on Samson’s encounter with Harapha as a display of “plain Heroic magnitude of mind / And celestial vigor arm’d” and of patience: “the exercise / Of Saints, the trial of thir fortitude” (SA, ll. 1279–80, 1287–88). Significantly, Samson’s final restoration in the poem is an act of (self-)destruction, not enthronement. The final episode is thus not shown but rather 28. See Pepys, King Charles Preserved: An Account of His Escape after the Battle of Worcester Dictated by the King Himself to Samuel Pepys (London: Rodale Press, 1956), 19.

104

Elizabeth Sauer

related by a messenger, who nevertheless invokes the language of theatrical performance and staging. The account of the “horrid spectacle” requires “No Preface,” the impatient Manoa decides (SA, ll. 1542, 1554). The messenger’s script sets the stage inside “a spacious Theater” (SA, l. 1605). Milton reconstructs this classical amphitheater from the house in Judg. 16:26–27. Nicholas Jose attributes a contemporary significance to the spectacle when he identifies the theater with Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre, which was built from 1664 to 1669 and was designed to represent the glory of the Augustan Roman Empire.29 In this theater, Samson is forced to take center stage amid the clamor and confusion of Philistine festivities (SA, ll. 1616–22). Samson’s sports are featured in the first act, which is followed by an intermission (SA, l. 1629). Cast as a jester or fool in the tragedy, Samson manages, nevertheless, to rewrite his enemies’ script in the second act and steal the show; he thus not only draws curtains on the Restoration theater but brings the house down as well. And here one cannot help but note that the court of Charles II made up much of the theater audience of 1660–1672. Still, this final act remains a site of competing interpretations about the motivation for Samson’s self-sacrifice. Manoa first raises the issue of “Selfviolence” in his inquiry about the events leading to the deaths of the Philistines and Samson (SA, l. 1584). Though the messenger declares that Samson committed the slaughter with his own hands, he responds to Manoa by identifying the cause “At once to destroy and be destroy’d” as “Inevitable” (SA, ll. 1588, 1586). Thereafter, however, the Nuntius complicates matters when he re-creates the interior drama and attempts to decipher Samson’s motives; he was “as one who pray’d, / Or some great matter in his mind revolv’d” (SA, ll. 1637–38). Nevertheless, Manoa insists in the end that retribution and redemption are of Samson’s own doing in accordance with divine will: Samson hath quit himself Like Samson, and heroicly hath finish’d A life Heroic. (SA, ll. 1709–11)

From a regenerationist perspective, Samson, in anticipation of Christ, has pulled down the Philistine structure and raised the temple of his body, phoenixlike. The interpretive process does not conclude with Manoa’s observation, even 29. Jose, Ideas of the Restoration, 156.

Milton and Dryden

105

though the Danites seize upon this response in hailing the martyr as God’s “faithful champion” (SA, l. 1751). The poem raises the possibility that both the chorus and Manoa “contradict Samson into a heroism he is perhaps not meant to enjoy,” as Joseph A. Wittreich points out. As demonstrated most recently by Dennis Kezar, Samson Agonistes resists the pull either toward a regenerationist Samson or toward a singularly skeptical or indeterminate reading of the hero’s art of dying.30 Moreover, the poem frustrates its readers’ efforts at interpreting Samson’s final performance, the meaning of which is reserved for a place and time much beyond the fifth act and beyond the conventions of heroic drama and even dramatic poetry.

“Beyond the Fifth Act”

Committed to a coherent idea of Milton’s literary career and poetic identity, Miltonists have conventionally mapped out the poet’s oeuvre in terms of his progress toward Samson Agonistes.31 This practice, coupled with the insistence on separating Milton from contemporary Restoration writers, has discouraged investigations of Samson Agonistes that venture “beyond [its] fifth act” (SA, p. 550). The final section of this essay will thus situate the poem in relation to the literary and theater culture of the 1660s and early ’70s, and offer an alternative reading of the impetus for Milton’s (and Samson’s) counterperformance. Approximately one month after the licensing of Samson Agonistes when the theaters were reopened, William Joyner’s Roman Empress: A Tragedy was acted at the king’s theater. Joyner’s play was one of the dramas sold at Herringman’s at the same time that the volume containing Samson Agonistes was available at Starkey’s. They are comparable in other ways: the prefaces of both, for example, signal the writers’ participation in the development of an English version of classical tragedy. They also have in common the use of blank verse— indeed, Restoration imitations of Milton’s blank verse are rare. They share as well a reliance on classical themes (including the interest in Oedipus men-

30. Wittreich, Interpreting “Samson Agonistes” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 120–21; Kezar, “Samson’s Death by Theater and Milton’s Art of Dying,” ELH 66 (summer 1999): 295–336. 31. As editors Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson observe, Milton “continues to enjoy the status of the most monumentally unified author in the canon” (preface to Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions [New York: Methuen, 1987], xii).

106

Elizabeth Sauer

tioned above in reference to Milton), an adherence to dramatic unity, and the use of Latinate diction, all leading us to speculate that Joyner had read Milton’s manuscript. Of course, the differences between the two are even more striking: in particular, the imperial Roman history in Joyner’s protoroyalist play contrasts with Milton’s emphasis on providence. The production of The Roman Empress is already one early example of Milton’s inability to control the reception and consumption of Samson Agonistes. The popularity of tragicomedy, which Milton’s preface acknowledges and to which publishers’ catalogs of this period testify, is another. The influence of Samson Agonistes on Aureng-Zebe is still another. Though unintended for the stage, Samson Agonistes was, despite Milton’s safeguarding maneuvers, hardly immune to appropriation itself. Transferring lines from Milton’s dramatic poem onto the stage, Dryden produced a heroic drama that rewrites Indian history and the historical character Aureng-Zebe to celebrate the end of civil war in India (and England).32 Aureng-Zebe is thus put to the service of defending not only the value of heroic drama but also divine right, political expediency, and a victorious future for James. In addition to alluding directly to Milton’s dramatic poem, Dryden, who read the text before or while composing Aureng-Zebe, would have been attracted to Milton’s classical simplicity of structure; the confrontation with human frailty; the representation of the tragic hero’s despair and his sentimentalization; the conflict between love and honor, idealism and realism; and the appeal to reason exhibited in certain soliloquies and in the use of argument.33 Dryden borrows directly from Milton’s arsenal of stock and antifeminist remarks for his scenes on gender relations and domestic politics. The yet unrepentant emperor in Aureng-Zebe, who confesses to Arimant the failure of his suit to Indamora, laments her constancy in a speech that, as noted by critics as early as Gerard Langbaine, is derived from Samson Agonistes:34 Unmov’d she stood, and deaf to all my prayers, As Seas and Winds to sinking Mariners. But Seas grow calm, and Winds are reconcil’d; 32. Dryden, Aureng-Zebe: A Tragedy, Acted at the Theatre Royal (London: 1675). On Dryden’s recasting of the historical figure Aureng-Zebe, see Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 67–77. 33. Edward Le Conte, Études Anglaises 11 (1958): 18–22, cited in William Frost, “AurengZebe in Context: Dryden, Shakespeare, Milton, and Racine,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 74 (1975): 32–35. 34. Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets, Etc. (Oxford, 1691), 308–9.

Milton and Dryden

107

Her Tyrant beauty never grows more mild Pray’rs, promises, and threats were all in vain. (Works, 12:1.1.266–70)

The verses recall Dalila’s frustration with Samson’s stubborn and steadfast refusal to yield to her: I see thou art implacable, more deaf To prayers, than winds and seas, yet winds to seas Are reconcil’d at length, and Sea to Shore: Thy anger unappeasable, still rages, Eternal tempest never to be calm’d. (SA, ll. 960–64)

Later, when Aureng-Zebe mistakenly charges Indamora with infidelity, he rehearses Samson’s tirade against womankind when he declares: Ah Sex, invented first to damn Mankind! Nature took care to dress you up for sin: Adorn’d, without; unfinish’d left, within. ................................ So much self-love in your composure’s mix’d, That love to others still remains unfix’d: Greatness, and Noise, and Show, are your delight; Yet wise men love you, in their own despight. (Works, 12:4.2.101–9)

In Samson Agonistes, the chorus laments: Is it for that such outward ornament Was lavish’t on thir Sex, that inward gifts Were left for haste unfinish’t . . . .......................... Or was too much of self-love mix’t, Of constancy no root infixt That either thy love nothing, or not long? (SA, ll. 1025–33)

Aureng-Zebe, Indamora, and the emperor are eventually reconciled in Dryden’s play; the romantic tradition, albeit strained, is one that Dryden sought to retain. The restoration of domestic harmony in the end is intended to complement political success as “love” and “honour,” the key words and main

108

Elizabeth Sauer

catchwords in the Conquest of Granada and Aureng-Zebe, emphasize. The emperor in recognizing Aureng-Zebe’s merit presents him with the “just rewards of Love and Honour”: “Receive the Mistris you so long have serv’d; / Receive the Crown your Loialty preserv’d” (Works, 12:5.1.671–73). Like the Conquest of Granada, Aureng-Zebe eventually reconciles heroic (masculine) energies with civil order. Samson Agonistes, by contrast, wastes no time in announcing its departure from (tragi)comedy and then spurning romantic heroic ideals when Samson divorces himself from Dalila and eventually ends Philistine performances and domination altogether. Two years later, in 1677, Dryden’s more popular All for Love betrayed the playwright’s continuing engagement with Samson Agonistes.35 At the beginning of All for Love, Antony, who once “raised the meteor of the world, / Hung in skies, and blazing as [he] travelled,” is “cast downward” by Caesar, as Samson is oppressed by the Philistines (Works, 13:1.1.205–6). And like Samson who is rendered “Unmanly, ignominious, infamous” by Dalila’s wiles, Antony is “alter’d from the Lord of half Mankind, / Unbent, unsinew’d, made a Womans Toy” (SA, l. 417; Works, 13:1.1.176 –77). Ventidius’s reference to Antony’s “drooping Spirits” is reminiscent of Samson’s drooping “genial spirits” (Works, 13:1.1.114; SA, l. 594). Both tragic heroes are melancholic, inwardly tormented, and distanced from their glorious past, as Samson confronts “what once I was, and what am now,” while Antony is the “blank of what he was” (SA, l. 22; Works, 13:1.1.173). As if to compensate for his fragmented identity, Antony becomes an actor who, like his namesake in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, constantly assumes different roles. In Shakespeare’s production of the tragedy, Antony is chided for his performances, taunted repeatedly by Cleopatra: Good now, play one scene Of excellent dissembling, and let it look Like perfect honor. ............... Look, prithee, Charmian, How this Herculean Roman does become The carriage of his chafe. (Works, 13:1.3.78–80, 82–84)

35. See also Anne Davidson Ferry, “‘The World Well Lost,’” in her Milton and the Miltonic Dryden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 178–222.

Milton and Dryden

109

In contrast, the actions of Dryden’s Antony, though self-conscious and subject to change, are not mocked. In act 1, scene 1—for which Dryden congratulates himself in the preface (Works, 13:19)—Ventidius commends Antony for his proposed return to arms by attributing to him the traditional qualities of a hero: Methinks you breath Another Soul: Your looks are more Divine; You speak a Heroe, and you move a God. (Works, 13:1.1.435–37)

The juxtaposition of “Soul” and “Arms” and then “hearts” and “armes” in Antony’s two subsequent speeches (Works, 13:1.1.438, 448) anticipates his later farewell to (military) arms, though the pun on “arms” is sustained throughout the play to reinforce the tension between private and public roles. After Antony is devastated by the news of Cleopatra’s supposed death, Ventidius attempts to stir him into action one last time: “Come, rouze yourself, and lets die warm together” (Works, 13:5.1.260). Like Samson, who is stirred by rousing motions of unspecified origin to carry out his counterperformance, Antony, “weary of [his] part,” dies on his own terms, thus enabling him to convey his soul “from Caesar’s reach” (Works, 13:5.1.285, 279). Following Antony’s swan song to Cleopatra, who is again in the picture, he expires with “one kiss—more worth / Than all I leave to Caesar” (Works, 13:5.1.398, 401–2). The tragedy concludes with the suicide of the world-weary tragic heroes whose acts of self-violence are ones of resistance and defiance, reminiscent of Samson’s. Although the Roman Antony and the Greek Samson certainly never share the stage, Antony’s alternative heroism has more in common with Samson’s counterperformance than with the actions of Dryden’s earlier tragic characters. This change in venue, which sets the stage for the sentimentalization of the hero, corresponds with Dryden’s abandonment of the dramatic convention that best characterized the Caroline play and that he so ardently defended in the Essay of Dramatick Poesie: rhyme. Announcing his departure from earlier modes of performance, Dryden explains in the preface to All for Love: “That I might perform more freely, I have dis-incumber’d my self from Rhyme. Not that I condemn my former way, but that this is more proper to my present purpose” (Works, 13:18). Dryden’s romance with the theater moves to the next stage. The final years of Milton and Dryden were played out in their different

110

Elizabeth Sauer

though intersecting struggles with the politics of print and performance. Both authors eventually and publicly renounced theatrical productions. Dryden repudiates “all those Dalilahs of the Theatre” in the dedication of The Spanish Fryar, and directs his attention instead to his readers: “But, as ’tis my Interest to please my Audience, so ’tis my Ambition to be read; that I am sure is the more lasting and the nobler Design: for the propriety of thoughts and words, which are the hidden beauties of a Play, are but confus’dly judg’d in the vehemence of Action: All things are there beheld, as in a hasty motion, where the objects onely glide before the Eye and disappear” (Works, 14:101, 102). Later, in the “Preface of the Translator, with a Parallel, of Poetry and Painting” in De Arte Graphica (1695), Dryden rehearses Lisideius’s (and Milton’s) earlier charges against tragicomedy: “[O]ur English Tragicomedy must be confess’d to be wholly Gothique, notwithstanding the Success which it has found upon our Theatre. . . . Mirth and Gravity destroy each other, and are no more to be allow’d for decent, than a gay Widow laughing in a mourning Habit” (Works, 20:70–71). Milton’s criticism in the preface to Samson Agonistes of the multigenre drama that combines “Comic stuff with Tragic sadness and gravity” echoes in Dryden’s lines (SA, p. 550). To put Samson Agonistes and Restoration drama on the stage together is ultimately to expose and redefine the fault lines in literary history. More than that, however, it is also to confront the competing and colliding ideologies, the various interpretive communities, and the fault lines that unsettle the fixed nature of any text and its received tradition. Finally, it means that readings of canonical works such as Samson Agonistes will be dramatically unsettled when the various practices of consumption that govern the reception of texts and inform their meaning are investigated.

Kate Narveson

Profession or Performance? Religion in Early Modern Literary Study

I, it is even I that have broken covenant with thee, I have beene wise to deceive my selfe; abusing my reason rather why to doe amisse, then how to amend. I have falsified my faith; I have riotously run after the vaine conceits, or rather deceits of sin. . . . O bottomlesse sea of misery and sorrow, wherein I have plunged my selfe! Alwaies sinking, and yet by the infinitenesse thereof, never at the bottome; which I am able neither to abide, having the fire-brands of all furies within mee; nor yet to avoid, being fettered therein with the cruell chaines of my own feare. O my soule . . . loath thy self . . . for thou canst neither loath nor torment a more cursed creature. Alas! how is my soule abandoned?

So wrote Sir John Hayward in The Sanctuarie of a troubled Soule, published in 1604 and running to thirteen editions by 1640. As we turn increasingly to religious texts to understand early modern subjectivity, we face the problem of how to approach this sort of statement. Is this a Calvinist attempt to make vivid the depravity of man through the scripturalist antithesis and parallelisms befitting a Protestant style? Or is it the expression of an emerging individualistic subjectivity fraught with the anxiety of existential isolation? Although approaches to religious texts became more varied during the 1990s, a divide remains between people for whom it matters whether John Donne was AngloCatholic or Calvinist—or avant-garde conformist or hypothetical universalist— and people for whom the real question is whether his religious behavior reveals an anxious negotiation with absolutism or a homoerotic Christ, that is, between those who look at religion as propositional belief and those for whom it is a cultural system imbricated in structures of power, gender, ritual, sexuality, and so forth. That such a fault line should open in the study of religious literature is predictable, since religion makes totalizing claims about the human—about ethics, anthropology, and politics as well as about salvation—and religions

111

112

Kate Narveson

manifest themselves both in cultural phenomena and in systems of ideas. It seems important to ask whether the fault line can be bridged or whether it reflects incompatible presuppositions. In this essay, I first look at some recent work on the seventeenth-century religious lyric, exploring characteristic limitations in each approach. I then model a possible bridge between the two approaches by offering a third way to understand Hayward’s project in writing the words quoted above. Modern critics have taken such meditations as selfexpressive and therefore as witnesses to Calvinist anxiety. Hayward’s work, though, participates in a broader reformulation of devotional disciplines that responded not to anxiety but to apathy. These disciplines sought to create new habits of godly affect, a project that took shape at the crossroads of Reformed soteriology and early modern assumptions about the nature of the passions. Hayward’s words, I will argue, can be read accurately only if one attends to their cultural function as a kind of self-structuring exercise, yet that cultural function is clear only if one attends to the way doctrinal belief informed the terms of self-understanding and, consequently, assumptions about the ways texts could affect selves.

The Fault Line

On one side of the current fault line, the heirs of Lewalski and Martz continue to discuss how texts are rooted in particular doctrinal systems. Perhaps the high-water mark of this discussion in the case of Herbert came in 1987 with a special volume of the George Herbert Journal dedicated to that question, while the debate over Donne’s confessional affiliation flourishes anew each spring at the Donne Society’s annual conference. Some Donne and Herbert scholars of a historical bent have turned their attention to intersections between belief and career—Jeanne Shami, Cristina Malcolmson, and Jeffrey Powers-Beck, among others—but theology has not been abandoned. Jeff Johnson has recently chosen to see as fundamental “the distinguishing features of Donne’s theology” and therefore to read “the historical/political circumstances in which he preached in relation to those theological foundations.” Johnson takes as his point of departure what he argues is Donne’s “fundamentally Trinitarian theology,” reading Donne’s politics and anthropology as ramifications of a logically coherent structure of ideas.1

1. Shami, ed., John Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon: A Parallel-Text Edition (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1996); Shami, “Anti-Catholicism in the Sermons of John

Profession or Performance?

113

Yet, debates about where Donne or Herbert falls on the religious spectrum have thus far proved irresolvable. One reason is that believers could assent to the same set of doctrinal statements yet have divergent senses of proper practice. Further, propositional belief is often secondary to communal attractions and cultural assumptions.2 To give a modern example of the limitations of propositional belief in shaping religious behavior, take the case of how one Lutheran church found itself divided over the disposal of leftover communion bread. Some members were horrified to find the leftover bread in the wastebasket. There is no Lutheran dogma on the leftover communion elements, and in the ensuing deliberations, some insisted that the minister should eat the leftover, some advocated scattering it on the ground, while others felt it was best to feed it to the birds. These positions are not grounded in doctrine but in senses of what is appropriate, informed as much by an environmentalism, in the case of the bird-feeder option, as by theological belief. If forced, members might be able to articulate various grounds for their practice, but the practice is part of a broader piety that precedes the second-order theological justification. Much the same sort of doctrinal indeterminacy about practice existed in the early Stuart church. Propositional statements of belief left room for a range of practices, as witnessed by debates over such matters as whether to observe feast days. Someone like Daniel Featley, a moderate Calvinist chaplain to Charles I, wishing to align himself with the central practices of the established church, could quote Richard Hooker on the holiness of feast days in Ancilla pietatis, his manual of prayer.3 However, the way Featley deploys Hooker’s words to ascribe to feasts the relative holiness of signs is far from the way they function in the Laudian discourse that ascribes to them inherent sacrality. The most coherent of doctrinal positions is partial, not comprehensive of what it means to be religious. To understand the full range of experience involved in the godDonne,” in The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History, 1600–1750, ed. Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2000), 136–66; Malcolmson, Heart Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Powers-Beck, Writing the Flesh: The Herbert Family Dialogue (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998); Johnson, The Theology of John Donne, Studies in Renaissance Literature 1 (Woodbridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1999), x. 2. Sociological studies find that conversion occurs not when a person becomes convinced of a certain doctrinal position but when a person’s connections to kin and friends exercise normative pressure toward joining that community’s practice. See, for instance, Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 15–21. 3. Featley, Ancilla pietatis; or, the handmaid to private devotion (London, 1626), 431– 32.

114

Kate Narveson

ly life, we must look at a number of levels beyond the doctrinal. We should consider religious behavior in such areas as household prayer, economic or political vocation, almsgiving, and the arts, and consider religious identity in terms of gender, sexuality, and the physiological or psychological construal of the will and the affects. To point up the problems with the notion that religion has its source in propositional belief is to acknowledge that religion involves cultural phenomena in which the sacred functions as a structuring principle. While initially dismissive of religion as ideology, new historicism began in the early nineties to produce a few voices who called for a more serious study of religious culture. Katharine Maus, for instance, pointed to the importance of religion in shaping Renaissance subjectivity, whereas Debora Shuger insisted that “religious belief is ‘about’ God and the soul as much as it is ‘about’ the sociopolitical order.”4 In this view, early modern culture was “religious” (informed by the structuring principle of the “divine”) as our culture is “secular” (lacking the structuring principle of the divine). However, this sense of religion can also be reductive, in at least two different ways. Debora Shuger points out one, arguing that the interest in “sacred forms and practices” to be observed in Stephen Greenblatt and others focuses on how the power of the sacred is appropriated by the secular. This approach, she observes, “conceptualizes the sacred as that which is drained, is emptied out, in order to provide modern culture with sufficient intellectual and symbolic capital to set up its own economy.” Such an approach does not account for early modern religion’s central cultural role. In the past few years, several studies have engaged religion as a cultural phenomenon with more sophistication, tracing what Shuger terms the “centripetal pull” that religious discourse exercised on other discourses, so that religion served as the “primary locus” for discussions of anthropology, jurisprudence, psychology, politics, and sexuality. However, while returning religion to a culturally central position, these studies can also perform a sort of reduction insofar as they tend in their conclusions to overgeneralize, a habit of thought that I suspect is connected to the use of anthropological rather than historical methods of analysis. As Greenblatt notes, for anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, differences between cultures are “superficial” compared to unchanging “inner necessities.” Greenblatt argues, though, that “the processes of definition and 4. Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 6.

Profession or Performance?

115

abstraction that enable us to establish such unchanging inner necessities often do away with exactly what would constitute the interest . . . of the intertextual connection” between historically separate cultural phenomena, that interest being the specificity and strangeness of the Other.5 I would add that not only is there some danger of flattening the difference between historically distinct cultures, but there is also a danger of flattening differences within a past culture. This overgeneralization takes different forms, and I will look at three sorts, in three of the best recent cultural studies of religious texts, Richard Rambuss’s Closet Devotions, Achsah Guibbory’s Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton, and Shuger’s own Renaissance Bible. Rambuss’s Closet Devotions shares Shuger’s intention to speak of religion as something in itself. Rambuss probes the extent to which the language of sexuality in devotional writing is not “merely metaphorical,” the extent to which such works “bespeak a devotion that is—and not just is like—an erotic experience.” He is careful to insist that he does not intend to offer the sort of discovery that “would unveil affective religiosity to have been more or less imperfectly sublimated sexuality all along.” Rather, he appeals to Bourdieu’s argument that experienced religion is not a state of mind but “a state of the body and its passions.”6 Although he argues that his aim is not to “reduce religion into sex,” Rambuss’s focus on demonstrating the sexually charged affect of devotional writing threatens instead to reduce religion to a basis in erotic affect, one particular state of the body. In the second chapter, for instance, surveying a range of relationships used to express the love between human and divine—conjugal devotion, friendship, communal brotherhood—Rambuss finds sexualized desire in all of them. I come away convinced that religious experience was indeed imagined and experienced erotically but wishing first for some acknowledgment that what Rambuss describes was one of a number of discourses and second for more attention to historical variation. How is the erotic registration of religious affect like or unlike the physiological registration, created by the use of tears or fasting to discipline the flesh?7 And what do we make of differing discourse tra5. Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 3; Greenblatt, “The Eating of the Soul,” Representations 48 (1994): 99. 6. Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 84, 95, 101. 7. See, for instance, William Innes, A Bundle of Myrrhe; or, Three Meditations of Teares (London, 1620), 97–108. Rambuss’s focus in part reflects his desire to show that Caroline Walker Bynum went too far in playing down the sexuality of medieval devotion, but his rhetoric is not that of establishing a more balanced view but that of uncovering the fundamental nature of religious affect.

116

Kate Narveson

ditions: does it matter that some writers, such as Francis Rous (prominently cited by Rambuss), embrace the discourse of “mystical marriage” and others do not? Further, did the erotic function differently in different types of piety and in different periods, as senses of physiology and psychology shifted across the seventeenth century? To give one instance of a historical shift that calls for examination, all of Rambuss’s examples of calls to pray alone in one’s prayer closet come from the second half of the century, and devotional works that stress the duty of “prayer closet devotion” do not start appearing until after the Restoration, and then appear with increasing frequency. What changed? In Achsah Guibbory’s work, religion is not generalized into one pervasive affect but into an opposition between Puritans and ceremonialists, dividing those who valued created forms as capable of bearing divine meaning, and those who rejected created forms as products of human will rather than the Holy Spirit. As Guibbory clearly shows, in the polemical context of the English civil wars, this opposition shaped debates about human as well as divine structures. To establish the opposition, however, Guibbory cites as representative Puritan writers from the more radical end, including William Prynne and the separatist William Ames. If this opposition is to be taken as fundamental, dividing all religious systems, then (setting aside how to articulate the distinctions between Protestant ceremonialists and Roman Catholics) any figure who does not fit easily into one camp or the other must be seen as someone who is conflicted, and thus Herbert, in Guibbory’s reading, is torn between Puritan and ceremonialist impulses. Again, I come away on the whole convinced by the study, but wondering if its basic terms are not finally too totalizing and therefore flattening of historical variety. Jerald Brauer denies that one can pinpoint any one central dimension of Puritan piety that explains its notable variations in belief and practice. He distinguishes four dimensions in the piety of English Puritans such that, depending on which predominated, Puritanism could have “widely diverse manifestations.” These dimensions include the legalistic or “nomistic,” the rationalistic, the mystical, and the evangelical, this last Brauer’s term for those centrally concerned with the application of the gospel to the heart and with the heart’s relationship to Christ, to the point where ceremonies were seen not as inherently idolatrous but as unimportant.8 In this typology, Herbert’s comfort with rural customs and interest in beautifying his church bespeak not a conflicted relationship to ceremony but a sense that such things

8. Brauer, “Types of Puritan Piety,” Church History 65 (1987): 39–58.

Profession or Performance?

117

are ultimately adiaphora, fine to attend to as long as one does not neglect or distort the central preoccupation, Christ’s regenerating presence in the heart and the transformation of the egocentric self. Herbert’s conflicted attitude toward language is that of most evangelicals: language is problematic insofar as the self always threatens to work and wind itself into the sense. The particular idol that the evangelical must destroy is the self, not the external accoutrements of worship, which are the targets primarily of legalistic and rationalistic types. Guibbory recognizes that the polarization she has set up is also a spectrum, since she notes the varying degrees to which the notion of the indwelling spirit could impel Puritans to radical action. Here again, it might pay to supplement an anthropological picture of religion that tends to look for basic underlying oppositions with greater historicization, using, for instance, Geoffrey Nuttall’s Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience, which analyzes the Puritan sense of the Spirit as it played out from conservative Presbyterians to the radical extremes. Yet, even as Nuttall uses the logic of this key doctrine to explain the impetus to radicalism, he also finds tensions within Puritanism between, for instance, reason and affect, individual conscience and social order, so that even the emphasis on the spirit is insufficient as a single defining trait. More recently, Anthony Milton has made a similar argument with regard to categorizing conformists in the early Stuart church, contending that we should avoid “starkly dualistic terms” and demonstrating that what one finds when mapping individual positions is a wide variety in combinations of belief, and a variety in the weight placed on particular beliefs.9 It will be clear by now that I like attention to historical variation. Therefore, my call to historicize may seem odd when I apply it to Debora Shuger’s Renaissance Bible, since Shuger draws on a wide range of early modern texts. Here again, my concern is with a tendency to overgeneralize insights and with an express choice to bracket theology as a subject of investigation. Shuger regards certain components of human experience (for example, sexuality and violence) as irreducible and then places religion among the cultural systems that provide the terms in which individuals understand those components. This distinction assumes that religion is not a form of experience so much as a set of premises and practices that performs the cultural function of explaining and 9. Peter Lake, introduction to The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (1947; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), by Geoffrey F. Nuttall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), xxii; Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4.

118

Kate Narveson

ordering those irreducible components of experience. Or, in Shuger’s terms, religion provides the myths that serve as master discourses that condition how early modern issues were engaged. Given this conception of religion, one reads religious texts to find out about gender, violence, desire, or whatever one takes to be fundamental to human experience. Shuger thus finds discussions of the Passion interesting for their preoccupation with the problem of blood sacrifice and its attendant discourse of comparative anthropology. Shuger states, “I am not particularly interested in theology per se. . . . The Renaissance retellings of the Passion fascinated me because (outside of dogmatic formulations) they seemed to draw into themselves a wildly problematic and complex range of issues. They are haunted by questions of selfhood, violence, gender, and history and provide the symbolic forms for such speculations.”10 Shuger’s work illuminates the way that religious topoi such as the Passion spurred believers to articulate the anthropological, psychological, and historical import of the topos. Nonetheless, this model of religion raises an important question: can one read religious literature and not be “particularly interested in theology per se” without running the risk of ignoring the varieties of religious experience in a given culture? Are not variations in dogmatic formulation related to and perhaps illuminating of variations in symbolic form? In her chapter on George Buchanan’s Jephthah, Shuger traces the play’s connections among sacrifice, tragedy, and the moral and aesthetic beauty of the daughter’s sacrificial act, and contrasts it with Theodore Beza’s dramatization of the sacrifice of Isaac, in which the focus is on Abraham’s absolute obedience in the face of a hidden God. The chapter is wonderful as philological study, source history, and—with its attention to the connection between theater and sacrifice—anthropology. Yet, Shuger concludes by generalizing from the plays of these two men in order to make claims about the difference between Erasmian humanism, eager to reconcile God’s ways to man’s through art, and Calvinism, determined to insist on a deus absconditus morally incomprehensible and ontologically distant. On the basis of Beza’s position, Shuger declares, “Reformed spirituality stressed inner regeneration and moral duty and therefore found . . . the [aestheticized] sacrificial economy [a] hollow, albeit dangerously seductive, consolation,” apparently replicating the arguments of Louis Martz and M. M. Ross about the antipoetic nature of Protestantism.11 10. Shuger, Renaissance Bible, 9. 11. Ibid., 163.

Profession or Performance?

119

This generalizing move flattens the nature of Calvinism. Beza represents a particular, nomistic type of Calvinist, but his was hardly the only or even the dominant piety. This is not to argue that different theological formulations within Calvinism should be taken at face value as dependable accounts of the full nature of religious experience, since theology may conceal and distort as much as it discloses. Nevertheless, theological formulations are attempts to articulate religious experience, and variations signal divergences in experience, distinguishing those who experience religion primarily, for instance, as a question of will and resolve, or passion and affect, or rectified reason, or communal solidarity.12 Setting aside “theology per se” allows Shuger to ignore alternatives not just to Bezan theology but to Bezan piety. One alternative piety to Shuger’s anxious masculinity embraces the possibility of participation in the spiritual economy initiated by Christ’s sacrifice by stressing communion with Christ through the transforming work of the Holy Spirit in the heart. This is the affective devotional perspective from which Article 11 of the Thirty-nine Articles is able to declare that the doctrine of predestination is most wholesome and full of comfort, and from which Richard Sibbes wrote The Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax, both marking a different dimension of Reformed response to God’s hidden decrees from Beza’s more forbidding “ethical rationalism.”13 In The Renaissance Bible, Shuger explicitly states that she will not look at Sibbes’s Passion narrative because he has soft edges and she is interested in hard edges. Jeanne Shami finds a similar interpretive filter in Shuger’s use of John Donne, demonstrating that Shuger tends to cite those texts that bespeak anxiety, violence, and repression.14 By setting aside debates about theological propositions, Shuger can also set aside the varieties of Calvinist religious experience that those propositions attempt to articulate. 12. One sociological model of religion finds five basic components: belief (absolute acceptance of basic truth claims); practice (including ritual and devotion); the experiential or affective; knowledge (information about doctrine, distinguished from belief because one may have knowledge without belief); and expression through action in the believer’s way of living in the world (see Rodney Stark and Charles Y. Glock, American Piety: The Nature of Religious Commitment [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970], 14–16). For some, the experiential component is central, while for others it hardly registers compared to the active, and for others compared to the knowledge. 13. On affective devotion in the early Stuart church, see, for instance, Gordon Rupp, “A Devotion of Rapture in English Puritanism,” in Reformation Conformity and Dissent: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Nuttall, ed. R. Buick Knox (London: Epworth Press, 1972), 115–31. 14. Shami, “Donne’s Sermons and the Absolutist Politics of Quotation,” in John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1995), 380–412.

120

Kate Narveson

Having said this, I want to stress that my concern about the sort of project that Shuger, Rambuss, and Guibbory have undertaken is not with the methodologies applied to particular texts, since each study has in its own way spoken to my concern about the limitations of studying religious texts through the lens of theology. I agree that religious discourse is also about human bodies, gendered and pleasured, political and physical. Religion, after all, claims to be about the totality of human experience. However, I am arguing that the variousness of its operations in a complex culture is not adequately captured when one generalizes from one piety or when one generalizes one affect to all experience. My concern, in other words, is not in the details of the way these works analyze particular texts and make particular connections, but with the tendency then to generalize that analysis to early modern religious culture as a whole.15 Moreover, my concern is not with the attempt to categorize and find patterns, as my admiration for Brauer’s typology should make clear, but with the tendency toward large claims that reduce a complex cultural phenomenon like religion to a purported essence (religion is felt on the body) or to binaries: humanist versus Calvinist, ceremonialist versus Puritan. The problem comes into sharper focus when studies such as Shuger’s and Rambuss’s are juxtaposed, since Shuger employs a Durkheimian model of religion as a master narrative, whereas Rambuss, drawing on Bourdieu, sees it as an affect registered on the body. No doubt both perspectives capture something true about religious culture, but thus far those conducting a cultural study of religion have not self-consciously explored, let alone agreed on, a relatively adequate understanding of the nature of religion. How would Rambuss and Shuger adjudicate between their divergent models, and how should the rest of us? No doubt the tendency to overgeneralize about the early modern self based on studies of a particular component of religious culture reflects our profession’s demand for claims about “Renaissance subjectivity,” but in the name of adequate historicity, we ought to resist. In reading texts from the distant past, we are seeking to do something more than reproduce the doctrinal debates exercising the early Stuart church, on the one hand, or fight current battles about the early modern subject, on the oth15. David Norbrook makes a similar complaint about Foucauldian and poststructuralist criticism that ignores distinctions among forms of political power on the basis that they are inevitably “bound up with outmoded humanist notions of self-determination and rationality.” He contends that “we do not necessarily gain in sophistication by ignoring such distinctions and analyzing Renaissance England as if it were Louis XIV’s France” (“The Monarchy of Wit and the Republic of Letters: Donne’s Politics,” in Soliciting Interpretation, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 5).

Profession or Performance?

121

er. How, then, can a study of religious literature informed by the generalizing anthropological categories of cultural studies also retain a sense that historically various pieties manifest distinctive forms of human experience interesting and worthy of study in their own right? One answer is that the analysis of religious texts requires a methodological pluralism that can attend to the component parts of the religio-cultural totality. Elizabeth Clarke has studied “godly motions” as experiences variously explained in terms of religion or rhetoric, and Cristina Malcolmson has explored the socioeconomic pressures operating on Herbert’s sense of godly vocation, while I am currently investigating the areas of overlap and tension between religious and physiological understandings of psychology and of the affections in particular. Like the three blind men who set out to describe an elephant, we’re feeling our way around different parts of the beast, and need to see the potential that our work may be complementary, even if we each are likely to retain a possessive conviction of the greater weight of our particular body part. Another answer brings us back to our fault line: religion as profession or performance, as a systematic account of the relation between human and divine couched as propositions about beliefs or as a mythos informing and scripting such matters as identity and the locus of power in nature or society. Can the two approaches be connected? Given the current dominance of the cultural studies model, the question for most critics of early modern religious discourse might be something like the following: even though theological formulations are not necessarily the most reliable accounts of the full range of ways that religion functions in culture, can they be useful, and how?

A Bridge

Richard Strier has argued that one cannot get to the phenomenology of religious experience except through attention to doctrine. One way to see what that claim might mean is to think about the ways in which theology functions within religious culture as a discourse in terms of which self-construal happens, much as modern psychotherapeutic discourse functions not only as description but also as a shaping force. In “A New Way to Be Mad,” bioethicist Carl Elliott sets out intriguing evidence that psychological pathology may be at least in part socially constructed.16 He looks at what seems to be an in16. Strier, “‘Humanizing’ Herbert,” Modern Philology 74 (1976): 78–88; Elliott, “New Way to Be Mad,” Atlantic Monthly (December 2000): 72–84.

122

Kate Narveson

creasing number of people who desire amputation, and speculates on the ways in which the pathology seems to be made possible by conditions of this historical moment. One condition is Internet-aided communication that articulates and widely circulates a discourse in terms of which people can formulate their condition as the desire for amputation. Another condition is increasingly normal surgical alteration of the body (from plastic surgery to gender reassignment) that joins with a psychotherapeutic discourse of self-actualization to allow people to distinguish their biologically given body from an imagined altered body that will fulfill a sense of “true” identity. These broader cultural conditions may operate on people without their full consciousness, but Elliott argues that to understand the desire to become an amputee, it is also important to listen to a person’s self-accounting. One of the interesting features of this self-accounting is that many of the people interviewed were mental health professionals who were articulate and self-reflexive. They were used to seeking larger frameworks and cultural dynamics to explain phenomena in their work, and they were able to apply those critical tools to their own psyches. Elliott found that these interviewees offered nuanced and complex accounts of their condition, admittedly within the terms of the psychotherapeutic discourse that he finds to have in part created the possibility for the conception of such a malady in the first place. This article, it seems to me, indicates one way in which to think of a role for theological discourse in a cultural study of religious texts: theological discourses provided believers with terms for often complex reflection on their experience and created the possibility for their particular conception of their experience. We should understand that discourse so that we can see why texts make particular connections or use particular language, or what rhetorical or therapeutic role a text may play, or which of the range of competing discourses the text employs. To suggest how this might be so, I will in the remainder of this article sketch some of the problems raised by references to religious affects in devotional writing, and point out some of the sorts of clarification that might come from knowing the discourse within which those texts operate. In the scores of collections of meditations and prayers that appeared during the explosion of devotional publication after about 1590, it is striking that although the texts elaborate at length and in detail on the believer’s sense of sin and longing for grace, rarely are there accounts of regenerative comfort and delight. The passage from Hayward’s Sanctuarie of a troubled Soule with which I began presents a typical self-excoriation. When Hayward cries, “O my soule . . . loath thy self . . . for thou canst neither loath nor torment a more cursed creature. Alas! how is my soule abandoned?” we seem to find the anx-

Profession or Performance?

123

iety, self-loathing, and sense of God’s distance that Shuger sees as typical of Calvinist piety. Even when believers turn from meditation on sin to prayers for grace, they continue to stress their wretched state, as in one of the prayers in Lewis Bayly’s popular Practise of Piety: “If thou, O Father, despisest mee for mine iniquities, as I have deserved; yet be mercifull unto me for the merits of thy Sonne. . . . What if thou seest nothing in me but misery, which might move anger and passion! Yet behold the merits of thy Sonne.”17 Does the prevalence of this sort of affect endorse Shuger’s contention that Calvinism was an “end myth” religion, no longer able to provide its Durkheimian function of relieving anxiety?18 Could this absence of expressions of comfort mean that godly pleasures were not experienced but rather were an eternally deferred carrot that kept believers disciplining their perverse hearts in the hope that they might one day feel possessed by divine love? Certainly, this rather grim view of reformed religious experience has been attached to John Donne, whose holy sonnets might suggest that his experience oscillated among fear, self-loathing, and unfulfilled desire. There are problems with this conclusion, however. First, it does not interrogate whether and in what sense we should see prayers and meditations as self-expression. The goal of devotion was conformity to an ideal of godliness rather than some sort of personal spiritual self-actualization, so that we need to determine the nature of the “self” being expressed. Second, it does not explore fully enough the role of meditation and prayer in their larger devotional context. Devotional discipline, based on Renaissance theories of the passions, did not share the modern sense that shaped affect was less authentic than spontaneous “motions,” and we need to be alert to the rhetorical, affect-shaping purpose of much devotional writing. I will consider each of these claims in turn. First, what sort of self does devotion express? The insistence, central to Reformed teaching, that faith is not merely propositional belief but a disposition of the heart raised the problem of defining and locating true godly affect. Luther declared that those who have faith will delight in the Lord, and their meditations, which he glossed as “deep thoughts,” will be on God day and night. Luther distinguished between superficial thoughts, which can be applied by conscious effort to a subject and will remain there only as long the effort is sustained, and deep thoughts, the natural, unforced pondering of a subject that is close to our hearts. As subse17. Hayward, The Sanctuarie of a troubled Soule (London, 1623), 6–7; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie (London, 1613), 1026. 18. Shuger, Renaissance Bible, 90.

124

Kate Narveson

quent Reformers developed this notion of true faith, it proved hard to pin down exactly what it meant experientially or phenomenologically to feel spiritual affects—love of God, delight, comfort. In medieval Roman Catholicism, the affective stakes were lower, since while all were commanded to love God, a strongly inward experience of the divine was generally expected only of mystics, who used intense disciplines to achieve full ecstatic union. Luther, however, taught that each ordinary believer would feel love for Christ in the heart’s root. In practice, believers were more likely to find within themselves inadequate affections. Every prayer manual warns of the problems of distraction by worldly preoccupations or deadness to spiritual affairs. Joseph Alliston, for instance, wrote of “that drines of hart, and that deadnes of affection, which is oftentimes in the best,” while Hayward lamented that man’s heart is “so sensible in the things of this world, and so dull in things pertaining to [God].”19 Nonetheless, it was harder for believers to find themselves caught up by godly thoughts and affections. Pastoral counselors therefore developed a discourse that explained the normal “dryness and deadness” of the heart and the more elusive nature of good affects. Luther’s contention that true faith will want to meditate on God day and night was qualified by means of Paul’s distinction between the new man and the old. Aided by the Holy Spirit, the regenerative heart will turn to God in love, but the passions of the “old” person, the carnal, natural, fallen disposition, still persist. “Corrupt nature” is a “treacherous enemie” that lurks within the godly bosom and hinders the believer from every “religious enterprise” unless the believer “offer violence, as it were, unto himselfe, and to his sinful nature, and labor to subdue corruption within him.”20 The godly feel themselves not only divided but even alienated from the natural (sinful) self. To foster the weak motions of the Holy Spirit within, they must “exercise” or “stir” their hearts, through meditation, which serves as a bellows to “kindle” and “blow up devotion.” The disposition that believers embrace as their “true” self, then, is something that must be activated and maintained through sustained devotional effort. Calvinist dependence on grace did not entail a passive devotional life, for if believers were passive in the matter of justification, they were to be active participants in the sanctification of their hearts and lives. True, a godly person 19. Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. Hilton C. Oswald, vol. 10 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1974), 13–18; Alliston, The Exercise of True Spiritual Devotion, Consisting of Divers Holy Meditations and Prayers (London, 1610), sig. A4v; Hayward, Sanctuarie, 4. 20. Alliston, Exercise of True Spiritual Devotion, 264.

Profession or Performance?

125

may find himself simply possessed by godly affects, as Paul Baynes describes: “Look then, if entring into your owne hearts, yee find that as much as hath been amisse, by despising Gods mercy and patience, . . . ye are greived that he have been so unkind and undutifull. . . . If ye find, that where it is to his glory ye love to confesse your unfaithfulnesse, and to condemne your selves . . . then rejoyce: for God hath given you repentance to eternall life.” Faith here is something one finds oneself experiencing as affectivity (grief, repentance). Baynes, though, sees this settled faith as something rare. He exhorts unsettled readers, “if your hearts have neglected this exercise of a broken spirit . . . [do not] harden your hearts, but prepare to meet [God]” through the practice of devotion, which will create the broken spirit needed for true prayer. Elnathan Parr explains the need for meditation as follows: “[A]s the musitian first tunes his Instrument, before he play upon it: so both the mind would be put in frame, and the matter forethought.” To put the mind in frame, Parr continues, the godly should meditate on God’s majesty, to inspire reverence; God’s mercy, “to breede confidence”; the excellence of forgiveness and salvation, to breed desire; and his own necessities and wants, “to make us fervent: for as tart sauces sharpen the stomack; so the due pondering and sense of our wants, whets off the dull bluntnesse of our affections, and sets an edge on them to prayer.” Putting the “mind in frame,” in other words, means activating the proper passions or affections. George Downame’s explanation of why meditation must precede prayer stresses this creation of affect: “We are to meditate on our own unworthinesse, that so we pray in humilitie; of the glorious majestie of God our heavenly Father, that we may call upon him in reverence; of the excellency, profit, necessitie of those blessings for which we either pray or give thanks, that so we may pray with fervencie and give thanks with alacrity.” Meditation here presents thoughts and the affect follows, shaped by the thought. Sustained effort in the continual maintenance of this godly frame of mind is represented as a fundamental part of what it means to achieve and possess a godly disposition.21 The role of meditation in shaping affect is less often recognized than the Calvinist call to discipline one’s ungodly affections. Susan James has demon21. Baynes, Holy Soliloquies; or, A Holy Helper in God’s Building (London, 1618), 10–12; Parr, Abba Father; or, A Plaine and Short Directions Concerning the Framing of Private Prayer (London, 1636), 9, 12; Downame, A Godly and Learned Treatise of Prayer (London, 1640), 143. In Joy in Tribulation (London, 1632), Phineas Fletcher teaches that as we exercise our bodies, “so, and much more our weaker Spirits . . . have much necessity of continuall comfort, as well to raise up our fainting soules, when they are staggering through unbeliefe; as to underprop and hold them fast, when they stand by faith” (2).

126

Kate Narveson

strated that the passions or affections occupied an ambiguous ground in seventeenth-century moral theory, since they were both in some sense beyond the individual’s control yet vital to right action understood as action undertaken out of a right disposition. In their resemblance to sensation, the passionsaffections are experienced as spontaneous inner events that happen to us. However, James shows that the passions were also seen to respond to ideas or outward objects, and as rhetorical theory recognized, not only could unruly passions be restrained or dissipated, but useful passions could be created and directed as well. Similarly in devotional discourse, godly affects are, on the one hand, something felt and, on the other, something to be created. Indeed, although Protestant prayer theory made room for what was felt as spontaneous affect, usually called godly motions, by offering the category of ejaculatory prayer, spontaneous motions on the whole were regarded with some suspicion. John Donne argues that “in sudden and unpremeditate prayer, I am not alwayes I. . . . Passions and affections sometimes . . . aliens me, withdraws me from my self, and then that prayer is not my prayer.”22 Here, too, the spontaneous is equated with the carnal self, alienating the devout person from his true regenerative self. This suspicion is found even among moderate Puritans such as Parr, who gives a central role to meditation as preparation for prayer. If, then, devotion is designed to create affect, should we therefore dismiss the feelings expressed in meditation as artificially induced or a false consciousness? For the early modern devotionalist, the structures of regenerative affect were consciously created and acknowledged as such, yet they were also regarded as the person’s true affections. Donne declares that “I am not alwayes I” when seized by spontaneous motions, not when inserting himself into considered prayer. Devotional theory called on the idea of habit to explain how fostered godly affects could be considered truly one’s own: Henry Mason warns that pleasures, for instance, may “so possesse the minde, and habituate (as it were) the soule of man with their relish” that he thinks only of them. Through godly exercises, however, believers will find “their attention more quick, their devotion more fiery, their prayers more fervent, their meditations more spiritual, and themselves, as it were, turned into other men.” Similarly, with regular meditation on divine truths, Richard Sibbes observes, “[t]he sacred light of God’s holy truth is habituated and incorporated into the 22. James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pt. 1; Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953– 1962), 9:219.

Profession or Performance?

127

conscience of God’s child.” This light becomes the “rule and square” by which “he frames al his thoughts, affections, and actions.”23 Through meditation on godly objects, believers reframe their customary affectivity and are “as it were, turned into other men.” The comparison between the way we now construe the affect of the person who wants to become an amputee and the way believers construed their created devotional fervor is instructive. If Elliott is right, the would-be amputees might never have experienced their desire precisely as such were it not for exposure to and participation in certain psychoanalytic and therapeutic discourses. The articulate among the would-be amputees concede the point and recognize that their condition may have arisen in its peculiar form because of the terms currently available to understand the self. Knowing the constructed and contingent nature of their condition does not, though, diminish its experiential reality for them. For all practical purposes, the truth of their experience is that they want to become amputees. Modern medicine sees this selfimage as a false consciousness; doctors do not provide amputations even for those who can articulate persuasively that they are cripples caught in a whole body. They do, though, carry out surgical gender reassignment for men who feel that they are women trapped in male bodies. In the latter case, our culture favors what is presented as the spontaneous experience of an authentic self. Therefore, would-be amputees adopt the language of “true self” provided by the culture of psychotherapy, and seek to play down the extent to which their desire is a cultural construct. Calvinists, though, favored the self whose created dispositions were the new reality. We might say, as with the would-be amputees, that although the believer’s created disposition may be experienced as reality, as a construct it is artificial, less than authentic. Nevertheless, the discourse employed by early modern Protestants did not equate artificial with inauthentic. Baynes, for instance, declares that “an affection is not to bee measured by the indeliberate passing motion of it; but according to the setled habite.” Godly affections may at first be “lesse in quantity,” but they are ultimately more definitive, because regenerative love, “though little, in comparison of selfe-love, . . . yet in time it shall overgrow, and kill this weed.”24 What one became fully habituated to became one’s true self. Given this sense of a self as plastic, its affects responsive to objects and ideas, 23. Mason, Christian Humiliation; or, A Treatise of Fasting (London, 1625), 33, 36; Sibbes, The Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 7 vols. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1862), 3:117. 24. Baynes, 69–70.

128

Kate Narveson

the role of devotional texts can be reconsidered. In order to accomplish a transformation of one’s habitual thoughts and affects, meditation needed to rouse the believer to repugnance of his or her sinful condition forcefully enough that it would overwhelm fallen, sinful desires. Devotional rhetoric is heated, designed to melt hard hearts. Meditations are replete with exclamations (“Oh, the deepenesse of Gods love! Oh the wonderfull disposition of heavenly grace!”), apostrophes (“O Lord, deny mee not the crummes of thy mercy,” “Dar’st thou, then O Caine, say, that thy sins are greater then may be forgiven?”), and repetition (“I, O Lord, I am the cause of these thy sorrowes”).25 Hyperbole is the reigning trope. Thus, when we find all rhetorical stops pulled out as a believer details the corruption of the heart and the deadness of the spirit, we should not take this to mean that believers felt an unhealthily intense self-loathing so much as that they were attempting to represent their shortcomings to their minds vividly enough that the idea would stir some affect of revulsion and remorse. Heightened rhetoric was the answer to the deadness the believer experienced daily. What is expressed in meditation and prayer is not direct experience but rather an intentionally exaggerated and vivid self-imagining along lines set out by the theological discourse of spiritual psychology, calculated to ignite and shape affective experience. Furthermore, it is not the primary role of meditation or prayer to voice the achievement of a right relationship with God. Within the economy of devotion that developed in Reformed churches, the role of meditation is to create a sense of sin and need. Meditation may describe the affections of the godly person, as in Alliston’s description of a “true Christian” who is “fulfilled with that spirituall delight, and heavenly joy and solace, which is unspeakable, and glorious,” but it does so in order to create a longing to enjoy such a disposition. Alliston concludes his meditation with a prayer to feel delight: “[L]et me alwaies rejoyce in thee and glorie in thy salvation.”26 It is not clear, from this perspective, that Donne’s holy sonnets, as meditations, or the Passion narra25. Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 1020–29. 26. Alliston, Exercise of True Spiritual Devotion, 222, 227. Prayer, in turn, had two purposes, petition and praise, with by far the lion’s share of manuals and prayer collections devoted to petition. Prayers typically expressed keen consciousness of sin, desire for forgiveness and respite from penitent grief, and longing for the experience of being sustained by grace. Prayer performs for God that right inward ordering of affects that meditation has created, an ordering in which the believer is painfully conscious of sin, and may be open to the Holy Spirit and to godly comfort or delight, but has not achieved them. See, for instance, Sir James Perrott, An Invitation to Prayer, and the Practice Thereof (London, 1624): “Petition, is an humble suit and seeking unto God, either for pardon or our sinnes, for supply of spiritual graces, or of temporal necessities. . . . Praise and Thanksgiving, is an ardent and harty acknowledgement . . . of God’s most glorious name, and mercie” (4–5).

Profession or Performance?

129

tives that Shuger examines represent the sum total of the writer’s devotional experience. Indeed, whether believers in fact received accesses of strength and love, or felt the sweet comfort that regeneration was supposed to bestow, is a question that we should not try to determine by reading genres that never intended to express those affects in the first place, any more than we should look for the full range of religious affect in doxologies and hymns of praise. Many of Herbert’s lyrics are prayers that express absence and longing, but others are hymns of praise, and it would be odd to take, for instance, “Longing” as expressing “Calvinist subjectivity” while ignoring “Easter” or “Church Music.” Further, understanding the devotional purpose of meditation and prayer warns us that the sense of inadequacy and need that those forms express was a created disposition, so that we should be careful not to take works intended to arouse strong feeling as direct expressions of some hypothetical “genuine” affectivity. Self-excoriation seems to have been as much a created affect (what some might call a “false consciousness”) as the comfort and delight provided by contemplation of salvation. If anything, reading devotional texts in light of their purpose and of Calvinist spiritual psychology allows us to see that devotional texts testify that apathy and complacency were the normal disposition in which the godly found themselves, and believers had to work to arouse feelings of sin and need. Devotion was imagined as something that ought to register on the body, but perhaps the longing for holy rape was as much a reflection of the fact that normally believers felt very little, and desired all the more to feel overwhelmingly possessed by spiritual affections. Whether the devotional lyrics discussed by Rambuss or the Passion narratives discussed by Shuger, devotional texts existed within a literary culture thoroughly informed by theological suppositions about psychology and the working of language on the heart. These texts were intended to do a particular sort of cultural work, and only by taking seriously what writers report about their inner structures and how the texts are to work on them can we see that expressions of anxiety or of holy passion might record a desired affect, an affect that the text is intended to produce, rather than a direct inscription of religious experience. It is evident that as literary scholars rather than historians of Christian thought, we should not read religious literature as confessional statement, isolating the dimension of propositional belief from the dimension of experience. However, I have sought to show through my brief discussion of devotion and affectivity that the experiential dimension cannot come fully into focus without some attention to the way theological discourses of the period provided the terms in which experience was understood. For this reason, I would argue, the fault line between methods that attend to theology and those that attend to culture not only can but must be bridged.

Jeffrey Johnson

John Donne and the Socinian Heresy

In spite of the severity, and so often the brutality, that characterized the divisiveness of European Christianity throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the historical evidence demonstrates that the vast majority of Catholics and Protestants were in accord with respect to the condemnation they leveled against the Socinian heresy. In fact, regardless of their sectarian allegiance to the mainstream confessions, the almost universal response by the Germans, Poles, Dutch, French, and English in challenging and refuting the antitrinitarian beliefs of the Socinians seems to indicate just how critical the religious thinkers of the period believed this heresy to be. The persecution of the Socinians reached a particular height in 1638 when Jesuits entered Rakow, Poland (where the Socinians known as the Polish Brethren had established themselves in the late sixteenth century). By the decree of the “Diet of Warsaw,” dated May 1, 1638, the Jesuits destroyed the academy and the printing press that the Socinians had established in Rakow, and they sent the teachers, ministers, and laypeople of the Polish Brethren into exile. The Socinians, and those aligned (and often misaligned) with them specifically for denying the Trinity, found the hostility directed toward them in England comparable to that on the Continent.1 One noteworthy instance of the rejection of Socinianism in England involves the 1609 Latin edition of the Racovian Catechism (the doctrinal confession of the Socinians that was printed in Rakow). This edition of the Catechism contained a dedication to King James. In a letter dated September 6, 1608, William Bruce (serving as an English agent in Danzig) reports to Robert Cecil, referring to this edition of the Catechism, “nowe I am bissie in recharchinge a booke prented and dedicated to our kinge his Majestie, much, as I thinke, against his Majesties reputatioune, 1. See Earl Monroe Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism: In Transylvania, England, and America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1945), which discusses James I’s sentencing of Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman to be burned as heretics (177–79).

130

Donne and the Socinian Heresy

131

and contraire to al religioune.” Whether the decision to dedicate the 1609 Catechism to James was intended as a propaganda ploy for introducing Socinian doctrine into England, as John McLachlan imagines, or as an attempt to gain toleration from the English sovereign, as George Williams speculates, the printing and distribution of the document did not evoke any immediate response.2 Nevertheless, a response did come; in April 1614 this edition of the Catechism, because of its heretical teachings, was burned by order of Parliament. While John Donne only directly mentions the Socinians three times in his extant sermons, each reference occurs in a text rich with historical and theological significance: in the first of his Prebend Sermons, in a funeral sermon for Sir William Cokayne, and in his two-part sermon on Gen. 1:26. In each instance Donne unequivocally condemns the Socinians as heretics and warns of their growth. While Donne’s condemnation of this sect reminds us of his own Trinity-centered theology, his reaction to the Socinians reached beyond a simplistic application of this doctrine. In particular, the Socinian position regarding the prominence of human reason in interpreting the Scriptures had profound implications for Donne’s own views regarding matters of interpretation. It is the fissures that open up between the competing sources of authority for determining faith and practice (namely, Scripture, human reason, and patristic tradition) that expose the controversies both between Protestants and Catholics and within Protestantism, as well as Donne’s own negotiation of those controversies. Thus, what was at stake for Donne, far more than the censuring of a given heretical sect, was the conviction of his own idealism that Church schisms could be rectified by carefully maintaining the doctrinal foundations regarding biblical interpretation. The doctrinal tenet most closely associated with Socinianism, and the one that resulted in individuals being labeled as “Socinian” (whether wholly accurate or not), is that of denying the Trinity. Such an association is not unfounded, for, in fact, in response to the question of what is conducive to salvation, the Racovian Catechism warns, “The principal thing is to guard against 2. Bruce quoted in George Huntston Williams, ed., The Polish Brethren, pt. 1 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980), 210 n 9; McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 35–36; Williams, The Polish Brethren, pt. 1, 207. Concerning the distribution of this text, Williams notes, “[I]t is possible, of course, that few copies of the original reached England, [and] that the one presumably designated as a presentation copy for James never reached him” (211 n 11).

132

Jeffrey Johnson

falling into the common error, wherein it is maintained, with palpable contradiction, that there is in God only ONE essence, but that he has three persons.”3 As an initial step in proving its antitrinitarian claim, the Catechism then uses a logical argument in defining the term essence: [T]he essence of God is one, not in kind but in number. Wherefore it cannot, in any way, contain a plurality of persons, since a person is nothing else than an individual intelligent essence. Wherever, then, there exist three numerical persons, there must necessarily, in like manner, be reckoned three individual essences; for in the same sense in which it is affirmed that there is one numerical essence, it must be held that there is also one numerical person. (3.1.33)

The Catechism reiterates the centrality of this doctrinal position when it adds that a belief in the Trinity “may not be considered as exposing to final condemnation a person of this character; nevertheless the salvation of that man is beyond doubt in great danger, . . . if following the influence of his erroneous opinion, he depart from those things without which no one can obtain salvation” (3.1.46–47).4 The Socinians did not rely only on logic, however, in their denial of the Trinity; they also grounded this doctrine in their interpretation of the Scriptures. In fact, the Catechism insists on the transparency of Scripture, noting that while some difficulties do appear, “nevertheless, those things which are necessary to salvation, as well as many others, are so plainly declared in different passages, that every one may understand them; especially if he be earnestly seeking after truth and piety, and implore divine assistance” (1.3.17). This clarity of the Scriptures, with respect to “those things which are necessary to salvation,” obviously applies to a denial of the Trinity. The antitrinitarianism of the Socinians in and of itself, however, does not seem to account completely for the severity of the attacks leveled against them. After all, as Klaus Scholder explains, “at no time did Socinianism represent a real force,” for “simply in numerical terms its adherents were a tiny little group 3. Thomas Rees, trans., Racovian Catechism (London: Longman, 1818), sec 3, chap. 1, p. 33. Section, chapter, and page numbers are hereinafter cited parenthetically. 4. The Catechism adds that a person is also “in great danger” if that person acknowledges that there is no Trinity, yet does not openly profess this denial, “particularly if, without any ostensible cause, or for some reason ill understood, or against his own conscience, he condemn those who maintain it; declare them unworthy of Christian fellowship, and even of the Christian name; and above all if he harass and persecute them” (3.1.46–47).

Donne and the Socinian Heresy

133

in comparison to the great confessions; their havens in Poland and Siebenbürgen were far from the centres of the European spirit, and politically they had no support.” So why all the fuss? Scholder’s rather compelling explanation is that “Socinian criticism was aimed less at the content of dogma than at its presuppositions,” that is, the denial of the Trinity “was made in the name of the two main authorities of the period, scripture and reason.” Further, “the significance of Socinianism,” Scholder contends, “lies in its attempt to allow both authorities, reason and scripture, to stand side by side without any restrictions.”5 On the one hand, the Socinians espoused the principle of sola scriptura; they insisted that the Christian religion is a revealed religion and that the Holy Scriptures alone are “sufficient for our salvation.” The Racovian Catechism poses the question, “what need is there of Traditions, which, by the Church of Rome, are pronounced to be necessary to salvation?” and then answers succinctly that “they are not necessary to salvation.” On the other hand, in the context of the sufficiency of the Scriptures, the Racovian Catechism raises the question, “Of what use then is right reason, if it be of any, in those matters which relate to salvation?” and then answers that “without it we could neither perceive with certainty the authority of the sacred writings, understand their contents, discriminate one thing from another, nor apply them to any practical purpose” (2.2.15). The delicate balance the Socinians sought between the authority of Scripture and the authority of reason depended, first, upon the clarity of the Scriptures concerning all things necessary to salvation and, second, upon their understanding of reason as the instrument for perceiving what the Scriptures so clearly reveal. As Scholder explains, “[R]eason does not conflict with the concept of sufficiency, but is rather the condition of its possibility: only through reason do we recognize the completeness of the statements about salvation.”6 Therefore, the basis for the Socinian refutation of the doctrine of the Trinity was that it is an affront both to reason and to the Scriptures; the doctrine contradicts the laws of logic, and it is not overtly formulated in either the Old or New Testaments. In each of his references to the Socinians in his Sermons, Donne emphasizes, first, that they are a growing, spreading pestilence and, second, that they are 5. Scholder, The Birth of Modern Critical Theology (London: SCM Press; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), 27, 28, 32. 6. Ibid., 37.

134

Jeffrey Johnson

heretics. Donne’s concern throughout the Sermons for overeager and misapplied uses of the terms heresy and, especially, heretic calls attention to his unequivocal labeling of the Socinians as clearly beyond the bounds of orthodoxy. Such a concern is revealed in the second of his two-part sermon on Gen. 1:26: “I would Saint Augustines charity might prevaile . . . not to cast the name of Heresie upon every problem; nor the name of Heretique, upon every inquirer of Truth,” and he then adds, “for I dare call an opinion heresie for the matter, a great while before I dare call the man that holds it an heretick: for that consists much in the manner.”7 (Such a statement seems to be Donne’s version of “hate the sin, love the sinner.”) Further, in his foundations sermon on Ps. 11:3, the first sermon he preached before the newly crowned King Charles (at St. James on April 3, 1625), Donne clarifies his position regarding heterodoxy, stating, “It is true, that all Heresie does concerne Foundations: there is no Heresie to bee called little: Great Heresies proceeded from things, in apparance, small at first, and seem’d to looke but towards small matters” (6:246). As a result, Donne’s insistence that the Socinians are heretics demonstrates his belief that their doctrinal errors create rifts that compromise the essentials of the faith. Donne’s first mention of the Socinians, chronologically, appears in the first of his Prebend Sermons, preached on May 8, 1625. This sermon establishes, in his choice to preach on verse 9 of Ps. 62, the essentials of the faith as Donne holds before his auditors the controlling metaphors of weighing and balancing. At the end of the lengthy exordium in this sermon, Donne introduces the church father Athanasius, whom he commends as an exemplary commentator on the Psalms and as a worthy defender of the Church against heresies, especially, as Donne argues, as one who “establishes the truth of Christs Person in both natures, which is indeed enough against all Heresies” (6:294). It is in this context that Donne names “those heretiques which grow so fast, in these our days, The Socinians, (who deny the Godhead of Christ)” and about whom he states, they are “more vexed with that Father, then with any other, and call him for Athanasius, Sathanasius” (6:294). What we expect from Donne when he mentions the Socinians is some type of condemnation regarding their antitrinitarianism; what he focuses on instead is the Socinian disavowal of Jesus’ divine nature, specifically by invoking patristic authority and example. The sig-

7. Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953 –1962), 9:76 –77. Volume and page numbers are hereinafter cited parenthetically.

Donne and the Socinian Heresy

135

nificant point here is that Donne attacks the Socinian position, with its elevated application of reason, in a manner that at face value appears rather Roman Catholic in its approach, namely, by invoking a particular church father in response to a question of Christology. The same doctrinal concern for the divinity of the Son is also seen in Donne’s second chronological mentioning of the Socinians. On December 12, 1626, Donne preached the funeral sermon for Sir William Cokayne at St. Paul’s. While the sermon does not comment directly on the alderman (and former Lord Mayor of London) in any personal way, the public occasion and location for the sermon provided Donne with yet another opportunity to espouse doctrinal foundations.8 For example, Donne commands the auditors at the funeral, “Regulate thy faith by the Rule, that is, the Word, and by Example, that is, Beleeve those things which the Saints of God have constantly and unanimely beleeved to be necessary to salvation: The Word is the Law, and the Rule, The Church is the Practice, and the Precedent that regulates thy faith” (7:263). Donne comes surprisingly close in this passage to placing tradition on the same authoritative plane as the Scriptures when he states that the example for regulating one’s faith is maintained by believing “those things which the Saints of God have constantly and unanimely beleeved to be necessary to salvation.” It is just this equation of tradition with the Scriptures in a ruling from the Council of Trent that Donne complains about so vehemently in other sermons. For example, in the second of his three sermons on 1 Cor. 15:29, Donne comments on the references to Purgatory found in the church fathers and the variety of meanings it has in their writings, concluding, “For from how many things, which passe through the Fathers, by way of opinion, and of discourse, are they in the Roman Church departed, onely upon that, That the Fathers said it, but said it not Dogmatically, but by way of discourse, or opinion” (7:178).9 On the question of regulating one’s faith, and therefore of au8. The only personal comment about Cokayne may be an indirect one. The sermon is built upon the dual contentions “That there is nothing in this world perfect; And then, That such as it is, there is nothing constant, nothing permanent” (7:259), which may allude to Cokayne’s noteworthy failures in the clothing trade and to his rather questionable political and economic maneuverings with King James. See Astrid Friis, Alderman Cockayne’s Project and the Cloth Trade (Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard; London: Oxford University Press, 1927). 9. The first decree from the Fourth Session of the Council of Trent (on the acceptance of the sacred books and apostolic traditions) reads in part: “The council clearly perceives that this truth and rule are contained in written books and in unwritten traditions which were received by the apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or else have come down to us, handed on as it were from the apostles themselves at the inspiration of the holy Spirit. Following the example of the orthodox fathers, the council accepts and venerates with a like feeling of piety and reverence all

136

Jeffrey Johnson

thority in matters of doctrine, Donne’s pairing, in his funeral sermon for Cokayne, of the Word and the Church contrasts with the Socinian pairing of the Word and reason. It is precisely these distinctions between competing sources of authority that open the fault lines in the theological (and consequently sectarian) controversies concerning biblical interpretation. Later in part 1 of the funeral sermon for Cokayne, Donne laments “the growth, and insinuation of that pestilent Heresie of Socinianisme,” and in particular their espousal of Christ as “a holy, a thrice-holy man, an unreproachable, an irreprehensible, an admirable, an incomparable man; . . . A man worthy to bee called God. . . . But yet hee was no God, say they, no Son of God; . . . no Redeemer, by way of equivalent satisfaction, say those Heretiques.” For Donne the issue is clear: “Hee that confesses not all Christ, confesses no Christ” (7:266). Donne seems to be well aware of the Socinian doctrines regarding the person and essence of Christ. The Racovian Catechism, in section 4 (“Of the Knowledge of Christ”), chapter 1 (“Of the Person of Christ”), first posits the question, “What are the things relating to [Jesus Christ’s] Person, which I ought to know?” and then answers, “This one particular alone,—that by nature he was truly a man; a mortal man while he lived on earth, but now immortal” (4.1.51). The Catechism goes on to assert that Christ is “the only begotten Son of God,” that he was “conceived of the Holy Spirit, and born of a virgin,” that he was “sanctified and sent into the world by the Father; that is, being in a most remarkable manner separated from all other men,” that he was “made to resemble, or, indeed, to equal God,” and that he is “not merely the only begotten Son of God, but also A God, on account of the divine power and authority which he displayed even while he was yet mortal” (4.1.52–55). Nevertheless, in response to the question, “But do you not acknowledge in Christ a divine, as well as a human nature or substance?” the Catechism proceeds with the telling distinction that “if by the terms divine nature or substance I am to understand the very essence of God, I do not acknowledge such a divine nature in Christ; for this were repugnant both to right reason and to the Holy Scriptures” (4.1.55). According to the Catechism, a the books of both the old and new Testament, since the one God is the author of both, as well as the traditions concerning both faith and conduct, as either directly spoken by Christ or dictated by the holy Spirit, which have been preserved in unbroken sequence in the catholic church” (Norman P. Tanner, S.J., ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. [London: Sheed and Ward; Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990], 2:663). All three of Donne’s sermons on 1 Cor. 15:29 demonstrate his objection to this ruling from Trent (Sermons of Donne, vol. 7, sermons 3, 6, 7).

Donne and the Socinian Heresy

137

belief in the divinity of Christ is repugnant to reason because “two substances endued with opposite and discordant properties, such as are God and man, cannot be ascribed to one and the same individual, much less be predicated the one of the other,” so that “you cannot call one and the same thing first fire, and then water, and afterwards say that the fire is water, and the water fire” (4.1.56). The first two of a long list of reasons enumerated in the Catechism concerning why this belief is repugnant to Scripture are, first, “because the Scriptures propose to us but one only God; whom I have already proved to be the Father of Christ” and, second, “because the same Scriptures assert, as I have already shown, that Jesus Christ is a man; which itself deprives him of the divine nature that would render him the supreme God” (4.1.57). For Donne, the question of the divinity of Jesus is one of biblical interpretation, and in the face of the Socinian position of the authority of reason in interpreting the Scriptures, Donne turns to the argument of tradition, that the rule of the Word is bolstered by the example of “those things which the Saints of God have constantly and unanimely beleeved to be necessary to salvation” (7:263). The Socinian position regarding the person of Christ insinuates the most widely known Socinian doctrine, the denial of the Trinity, which Donne addresses in his final reference to this sect in the first of his two-part sermon on Gen. 1:26 in April 1629.10 Early in part 1 of that text Donne asserts: Truly it is a sad Contemplation, to see Christians scratch and wound and teare one another, with the ignominious invectives, and uncharitable names of Heretique, and Schismatique, about Ceremoniall, and Problematicall, and indeed but Criticall verball controversies: and in the meane time, the foundation of all, the Trinity, undermined by those numerous, those multitudinous Anthills of Socinians, that overflow some parts of the Christian world, and multiply every where. (9:52–53)

In the light of Donne’s Trinity-centered theology, it is not surprising that he condemned the Socinians for their denial of the Trinity, which for Donne was as foundational a matter of faith as there is. What is surprising, however, is Donne’s insistence, both here and in the other two direct mentions of the Socinians, that this sect was “multitudinous.” If he genuinely believed them

10. This dual sermon is arguably the most important for understanding Donne’s Trinitycentered theology. For an extended reading of it, see my Theology of John Donne, Studies in Renaissance Literature 1 (Woodbridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 16–27.

138

Jeffrey Johnson

to be so numerous, if he in fact thought that they “overflow some parts of the Christian world,” then why did he refer to them directly on only three occasions? The dangers of the Socinian denials of the divinity of Christ and of the Trinity were, for Donne, greater than the simple overt expression of these doctrines. Donne’s concern for the underlying issue, the question of authority with respect to biblical interpretation, permeates the Sermons, especially the repeated instruction he affords his auditors concerning the proper roles of reason and tradition. Donne’s views on faith and reason have been well argued, especially by Terry Sherwood.11 While Donne espoused the efficaciousness of reason, he was unwilling to grant reason as prominent an authoritative role as the Socinians did. He saw reason as useful for confirming, although never in establishing, the truths revealed in the Scriptures and apprehended through faith. Reason and faith, in Donne’s thought, complement one another in the ways in which reason is able to grasp and apply those truths that reason could never arrive at without faith. In a Paul’s Cross sermon dated November 22, 1629, Donne addresses the dichotomous tension between reason and faith, stating of the Trinity that though we cannot so immediately prove that by Reason, nor so intirely, altogether, yet, by these steppes we can; first, that there is nothing in the doctrine of the Trinity against Reason; the doctrine of the Trinity implies no contradiction; It may be so; and then, that it is so, if we have the word of God, for it, Reason it selfe will conclude, that we have Reason on our side; And that we have the word of God for it, we proceed thus, that for this Book, which we call the Bible, which book delivers us the Doctrine of the Trinity, we have far better reasons, and stronger arguments to satisfie any naturall man. (9:114–15)

Donne seems here to be responding to the Socinian claim that a belief in the Trinity is repugnant both to reason and to the Scriptures. Knowledge of the Trinity, as Donne often clarified, is available only by means of revelation, and the key role in this movement beyond reason (and by means of revelation) is, according to Donne, performed by the Holy Spirit.12 Thus, for Donne the in11. See Sherwood, Fulfilling the Circle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), esp. 21–62. 12. Cf. Sermons of Donne, 9:244–46, where Donne argues, in part, “to know this distinction of Persons [in the godhead], That the Son is in the Father, I need the Scriptures, and I need

Donne and the Socinian Heresy

139

terpretation of Scripture rests in the authority of the godhead. Donne’s views on the role of the Holy Spirit in the interpretation of the Scriptures seem to stand in contrast to the Socinian position regarding the transparency of Scripture and the authoritative role of reason in biblical interpretation. Nevertheless, Donne regularly insisted, as a principle of biblical interpretation, that the preferred meaning of Scripture is the literal, which seems to imply a certain degree of transparency regarding the Scriptures.13 So the question here is not simply just how finely can these distinctions be sliced, but, more important, why was Donne doing so? In his analysis of the Socinians, Klaus Scholder asserts that “the extraordinary unrest that [the Socinians] caused must lead to the conclusion that here questions were being discussed which touched on the nerve of orthodoxy.”14 The questions at stake, both for Scholder and for Donne, center on the knotty problem of biblical interpretation, and with respect to this problem “the nerve of orthodoxy” is especially sensitive. At one end of the spectrum, Donne rejected the Roman Catholic position that provides that the writings of the church fathers equal authority with the Scriptures, and at the other end, he sought to mediate the subsequent problem raised by certain Protestant inclinations to elevate the authoritative role of reason once the authority of tradition has been undercut or removed. No wonder Donne never labeled himself as anything other than Christian; his theology really was neither Roman Catholic nor fully Protestant. His own idiosyncratic via media rested purposefully, though uneasily, on a tectonics in which even the slightest theological shift of the three plates of the Word, tradition, and reason registered the seismic effects of heresy and religious persecution. The especially delicate balance Donne sought was a measure not only of the breadth and subtlety of his theological reflection, but also of his frustration as an idealist who believed that the divisiveness of the Church could all be otherwise.

more then the Scriptures, I need this Pentecost, this coming, this illustration of the holy Ghost, to inspire a right understanding of these Scriptures into me. For, if this knowledge might be had without Scriptures, why should not the heathen beleeve the Trinity, as well as I, since they lack no naturall faculties which Christians have? And if the Scriptures themselves, without the operation of the holy Ghost, should bring this clearnesse, why should not the Jews and the Arians conform themselves to this doctrine of the Trinity, as well as I, since they accept those Scriptures, out of which I prove the Trinity to mine own conscience?” (9:245–46). See also Johnson, Theology of John Donne, 7–9, 28–32. 13. For a good example of Donne’s insistence on this principle, see the last of his three sermons on 1 Cor. 15:29 (Sermons, sermon 7, 7:190–214). 14. Scholder, Birth of Modern Critical Theology, 27.

P. G. Stanwood

Critical Directions in the Study of Early Modern Sermons

We have difficulty today in recognizing the supreme importance of sermons in early modern times, but they were once fundamental to the general culture and affected almost everyone, providing religious inspiration, theological analysis, political commentary, and—certainly not least—a great measure of entertainment. The excitement of hearing a good sermon had special force in James’s reign, for that theologically minded king would not miss the chance to hear one of his favorite preachers. He commonly took his preachers hunting with him, and would hear a sermon at eight in the morning, before eating and then setting off on the hunt. James was still thinking of Lancelot Andrewes’s sermon at court on Christmas Day 1609, when, early the next year, it was reported that “the King with much importunitie had the copie delivered him . . . before his going toward Roiston, and sayes he will lay yt still under his pillow.”1 Sermons were popular among all classes of people, not merely those at court, and the sermon was the preeminent literary genre in earlier seventeenthcentury England—certainly not the drama, and surely not poetry, whether lyric or epic. Preachers might be heard anywhere in the country, without charge or inconvenience, though the best or most ambitious of them hoped for an audience in London, and a few preachers, who were thought interesting or challenging enough, were chosen to preach at court or else at such popular and prestigious locations as St. Paul’s, or outside the cathedral, at Paul’s Cross. This was a theological age, and its principal expression the homiletic discourse. However, the sermon was not, as W. Fraser Mitchell long ago wrote, “inspired 1. John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 1:292, 295, quoted in Peter McCulloch, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 126.

140

Study of Early Modern Sermons

141

solely by the desire to commend religious truth to its hearers”; it was a carefully constructed, rhetorically polished work.2 In recalling Mitchell, who published his English Pulpit Oratory some seventy years ago, we come to the terms of this present discussion. Criticism of early modern sermons has a history that has affected their current study out of which we may hope to discover some direction for their future assessment. Like John Donne, in the second of his Prebend Sermons, about which I shall say more later, I should wish to shape my comments around “the whole compass of Time, Past, Present, and Future; and these three parts of Time, shall be at this time, the three parts of this Exercise.” Not surprisingly, the increased interest in Donne’s work, marked by Herbert J. C. Grierson’s edition of the poetry in 1912 and his anthology of the “metaphysical poets” ten years later, which elicited T. S. Eliot’s famous review (and his promotion of those poets who wrote before “a dissociation of sensibility set in”), inspired Mitchell to study the sermons not only of Donne but also of his age. His book is a model of its kind: a thoughtful historical study based upon the enormous task of reading many hundreds of sermons produced by numerous preachers, representing many different dispositions and theological outlooks.3 Mitchell’s learned study describes the rhetorical background of the sermon and its descent from classical oratory. Forensic and deliberative speech was a usual feature of education, amply demonstrated in the public declamations, not necessarily with sectarian aims, of the universities. To be sure, classical rhetoric had for quite some time been assimilated into the Church and continued to dominate its public utterances. Thus, the composition of sermons

2. Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson (1932; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 396. Mitchell’s study of the early modern period is still standard along with two indispensable works on the previous centuries: G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History of English Letters and of the English People, 2d ed. (1933; reprint, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961); and J. W. Blench, Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: A Study of English Sermons, 1450–c. 1600 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964). To these works may be added the excellent study by Sabine Volk-Birke, Chaucer and Medieval Preaching: Rhetoric for Listeners in Sermons and Poetry (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1991). 3. Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953–1962), 7:52. Volume and page numbers are hereinafter cited parenthetically. Cf. Grierson, ed., The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1912); and Grierson, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921). Eliot’s review, “The Metaphysical Poets” (also of 1921), is reprinted in his Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 241–50, esp. 247 for the well-known phrase.

142

P. G. Stanwood

was easily and generally understood as the making of an oration for religious ends, and the inheritance of classical epideictic oratory obviously affected most of the preaching of the seventeenth century. We know that there is much variety of doctrinal outlook, somewhat awkwardly described according to Mitchell’s taxonomy under the headings “Anglo-Catholic Preachers, including Donne” and “Other Anglicans” to the Restoration, including the so-called earlier Calvinists, along with Archbishop Ussher, Thomas Fuller, and Jeremy Taylor. Then there were the “NonAnglicans,” or the nonconformist, independent preachers, as well as the Cambridge Platonists and the latitudinarians. Finally, there were the Restoration preachers, of whom Robert South and Archbishop Tillotson were foremost. According to Mitchell, theological attitudes became steadily less rigid across the decades, and with the merging or softening of views came an important change from the witty style of Andrewes to the plain style of the late Restoration, from complexity of exposition and variety of theological beliefs in the early years of the century toward “Propriety, Perspicuity, Elegance, and Cadence” by its end.4 Prose style was obviously changing, and that alteration was well known—to travel the distance from Sir Thomas Browne to Jonathan Swift is a long way to go in a rather short time. The sermons of Andrewes and Donne similarly belonged to a world and culture that contrasted sharply with the age of Tillotson and Bishop Stillingfleet. Nevertheless, religious and political views were not necessarily less complex in this changed world, nor may “style” have been so simply defined across a spectrum leading from “witty” to “plain.” Robert South (1634–1716) was one of the most notable of Restoration preachers, and his sermons, though often highly wrought and witty in the way of Andrewes and his followers in the earlier part of the century, perhaps point toward the “new” style, somewhat akin to the ideal called for by Thomas Sprat in his account of the Royal Society—whose members had adopted “a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can.” “True Wit is a severe and a manly Thing,” South says in a sermon of 1660, called “The Scribe Instructed,” preached on the text from Matt. 13:52: “Then said He unto them, therefore every Scribe which is instructed unto the Kingdom of Heaven, is like unto a Man that is an Housholder, which bringeth out of his Treasure Things new and old.” He continues, “Wit in Divinity is noth-

4. Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory, 395.

Study of Early Modern Sermons

143

ing else, but Sacred Truths suitably expressed.” Irène Simon notes of South’s determination to clarify pulpit oratory that “fustian bombast, high-flown metaphors, scraps of Greek and Latin, and such ‘insignificant trifles’ are to be banished from pulpit oratory, as are indeed all ‘affected schemes or airy fancies,’ tropes and fine conceits, ‘numerous and well-turned periods,’ jests and witticisms, language borrowed from plays and romances, or starched similitudes.” Yet, South often proceeded to write in the fashion he condemned. Simon, the most recent and best critic of South and his contemporaries Isaac Barrow and John Tillotson, provides an extended commentary and careful edition of them in her Three Restoration Divines, a substantial though insufficiently known contribution to the study of sermon literature. However, like Mitchell, she is particularly concerned to demonstrate through homiletic literature the development of “the plain style,” although these preachers possessed a kind of rhetorical richness that had much in common with their predecessors of previous generations.5 My own wish is to reveal, particularly by referring to the so-called witty (and Anglican) divines, certain features of the rhetorical tradition that unite them. Early homiletic studies, while useful in calling attention to the range and variety of sermons, and the rather obvious fact that they respond to and illustrate changing, or at least different, prose styles, are too restrictive, for they tend toward anthologizing. One finds such collections in Paul Welsby’s Sermons and Society, John Chandos’s In God’s Name: Examples of Preaching in 5. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (1667; St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1958), 113; South, “The Scribe Instructed,” in Three Restoration Divines: Barrow, South, Tillotson, Selected Sermons, ed. Irène Simon, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège, fasc. 213 (Paris: Société d’Editions “Les Belles Lettres,” 1976), 2.1.246 (vol. 1, from which I also quote, appeared in 1967 as fasc. 181); Simon, Three Restoration Divines, 1:53. The traditional view of the development of the sermon style is stated in Richard Foster Jones, “The Attack on Pulpit Eloquence in the Restoration: An Episode in the Development of the Neo-Classical Standard for Prose,” in The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951), 111–42, which originally appeared in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology 31 (1932); and in Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), esp. 110 –15. Cf. Brian Vickers, “On the Practicalities of Renaissance Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric Revalued (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1982), 133–41, which gives a useful survey of the state of modern scholarship on rhetoric. For a discussion of developments in Germany during this period, see Urs Herzog, Geistliche Wohlredenheit: Die katholische Barockpredigt (Munich: Beck, 1991), esp. pt. D, “Die Predigt,” on rhetorical invention. One should also consult Peter Bayley, French Pulpit Oratory, 1598–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), esp. pt. 1.3, “Rhetoric in the Church.”

144

P. G. Stanwood

England from the Act of Supremacy to the Act of Uniformity, 1534–1662, or the tendentious Like Angels from a Cloud: The English Metaphysical Preachers, 1588–1645, a long and rambling book by Horton Davies that attempts to describe a supposed literary movement, but the label is inappropriate, and the sermon illustrations too brief and unsatisfactorily connected. Perhaps Millar MacLure’s Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1534–1642 was most successful in setting the course that has preoccupied many recent scholars of the early modern sermon, for he focused on the political and social issues that this important group of sermons revealed about their times.6 Current criticism of sermon literature is especially concerned with the relationship of the preacher to his audience or to his patron. Debora Shuger applies a kind of new historicism to the sermons and career of Hooker, Andrewes, and Donne. On Donne, for example, she discusses his “politicization of the divine image [that] leads to a spirituality based on awe and subjection. . . . The sermons insist on the analogy between God and king and furthermore locate the point of contact in power.”7 There is much in her sensitive study that encourages us to inquire more deeply into the culture from which these sermons emerge, and which they may have wished to address, but her formulations are often too confining. The recent discovery by Jeanne Shami of the manuscript of Donne’s Gunpowder Plot sermon of 1622 is a different but corroborative instance of political convenience or sensitivity to authority, for Donne appears to have changed certain words and phrases in his presentation copy for James, responding to conditions at court that prevented him from seeming to criti-

6. Welsby, Sermons and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), surveys, mainly through extracts, forty-five preachers from Hugh Latimer (d. 1555) to Herbert Hensley Henson (d. 1947). Chandos, In God’s Name (London: Hutchinson, 1971), gives fuller examples. Davies, Like Angels from a Cloud (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1986), provides much useful bibliography and easy commentary, with a number of illustrative selections. MacLure, Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1534–1642 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), studies with fine historical judgment the theological and cultural background to the Paul’s Cross sermons and includes A Register of Sermons Preached at Paul’s Cross, 1534–1642, which has been revised and augmented by Jackson Campbell Boswell and Peter Pauls, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Occasional Publications 6 (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989). See the useful introductory survey in Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough, eds., The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature, and History, 1600–1750 (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2000), 2–21. 7. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 168–69. Shuger’s chap. 5, “Absolutist Theology,” on Donne’s sermons, is reprinted in Ferrell and McCullough, English Sermon Revised, 115–36.

Study of Early Modern Sermons

145

cize the king. The discovery of this scribal copy of Donne’s sermon with his autograph corrections also gives some insight into his method of composition.8 In a similar though much larger way, P. J. Klemp reports in an important article his careful study of a scribal copy of Lancelot Andrewes’s Easter Sermon of 1620, in Trinity College, Cambridge (MS B. 14. 22).9 This manuscript contains scores of corrections, revisions, and interpolations in Andrewes’s own hand, and the manuscript reveals the scrupulous revision techniques of this distinguished preacher, which, while perhaps idiosyncratic, may have been typical as well of such near contemporaries as Donne, who shared many of the same theological sympathies and homiletic practices. At last, then, with such discoveries and studies as these, we are beginning to learn much more about the practical details of sermon composition and revision, and its relationship to the spoken as well as to the printed text. However, the most searching study of sermons of the period from the standpoint of audience and context is Peter McCullough’s Sermons at Court. He has patiently read or examined more than a thousand sermons (1,257 are conveniently summarized and calendared on a computer disk that accompanies his book), and he has been able to show how two monarchs—Elizabeth and James I—responded to certain preachers, and has even described the physical and architectural circumstances in which they listened to them. McCullough demonstrates that the attendance of the monarch at sermons offered an opportunity for royal display, Elizabeth particularly delighting in the opportunity for an opulent procession. Moreover, the royal chapels (Whitehall, Hampton Court, St. James’s, Greenwich, and Windsor) were constructed in such a way that the monarch might move along a public corridor to a private “closet,” an enclosed gallery over the west end. The royal gallery was thus high above the facing sets of stalls below, where the household officers and courtiers sat. The preacher spoke from a pulpit, probably movable and also at a height 8. See Shami, ed., John Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon: A Parallel-Text Edition (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1996). This scribal manuscript, with its few (mostly insignificant) corrections in Donne’s hand, offers an interesting though rather limited view of Donne at work. See also Shami’s related “Anti-Catholicism in the Sermons of John Donne,” in English Sermon Revised, ed. Ferrell and McCullough, 136–66; and her earlier survey of scholarship devoted to Donne’s sermons in “Reading Donne’s Sermons,” John Donne Journal 11 (1992): 1–20. 9. See Klemp, “‘Betwixt the Hammer and the Anvill’: Lancelot Andrewes’s Revision Techniques in the Manuscript of His 1620 Easter Sermon,” Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America 89:2 (1995): 149–82.

146

P. G. Stanwood

from which he could speak directly to the monarch—the monarch on occasion addressing the preacher with praise or disapproval. This arrangement of royal closet over the chapel was thus a declaration of hierarchy, with properly integrated parts, for “the chapels royal distilled perfectly the theory that religious and political, ecclesiastical and civil were not only joined, but inseparable.”10 Here, indeed, a hugely important political theater was being enacted. McCullough manages, in his splendidly and lavishly demonstrated argument, to contextualize, politicize, and “theorize” sermon literature. An expansion of McCullough’s interests might appropriately include more consideration of rhetorical motives or “strategies,” more about how various theological concerns were addressed, and more concern for the aesthetic value of many of these sermons, which were certainly meant to impress and sway their audiences through all available oratorical means. Indeed, the sermon must be more fully understood for the kind of discourse to which it originally belonged, for sermons were meant first to be heard, then published and read. Many sermons were great performances; they provided a kind of theater, and Donne and Andrewes were not the only able actors in this mode of dramatic spectacle. We should move beyond the investigation of such notable figures as Andrewes and Donne—by no means to ignore them—to study with at least the same care such remarkable figures as Richard Hooker, Henry King, William Laud, John Cosin, Henry Hammond, Jeremy Taylor, Mark Frank, Robert South, and Isaac Barrow. Let us include even John Tillotson in this company, for he believed that he was following and improving on his predecessors. The study of rhetorical tradition needs to be further explored, particularly in the “witty” sermons of the earlier part of the century, which affected the next generations, some of whose names appear in the roll just called. I have elsewhere discussed Donne’s borrowing from patristic sources, especially Tertullian, whereas others have demonstrated his deep indebtedness to Augustine, and Janel Mueller has given detailed commentary on his five Prebend Sermons—Potter and Simpson having provided almost no annotation in their complete, supposedly chronological edition of the sermons.11 Nonetheless, 10. McCullough, Sermons at Court, 40. 11. See my “Donne’s Art of Preaching and the Reconstruction of Tertullian,” John Donne Journal 15 (1996): 153–69. An especially useful discussion of Donne’s general response to Augustine is Mark Vessey, “John Donne (1572–1631) in the Company of Augustine: Patristic Culture and Literary Profession in the English Renaissance,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 39 (1993): 173–201; and Vessey, “Consulting the Fathers: Invention and Mediation in Donne’s Sermon on Psalm 51:7 (‘Purge Me with Hyssope’),” John Donne Journal 11 (1992): 99–110.

Study of Early Modern Sermons

147

having identified Donne’s influences and indebtednesses, have we learned enough about the construction and method of his sermons? How did his sermons become, at their best, coherent entities? Here is a new challenge for rhetorical analysis, posed by Carol V. Kaske, who employs a hermeneutic approach to The Faerie Queene, a method which may be profitably applied, she suggests, to the study of early modern sermons.12 Kaske holds that Spenser’s inconsistencies and contradictions were deliberate, carefully planned, properly adapted, and determined through his own reading of certain medieval and Renaissance rhetorical manuals available to him. These were often encyclopedic works, expansive biblical or religious commentaries, arranged like an alphabetical dictionary or concordance of symbols, words, or images. Such books, which traced their lineage to Augustine, Gregory, Cassiodorus, and others, include Nicolas of Lyra’s Biblia cum glossis ordinariis et interlinearibus (Venice, 1495), and many similar freestanding volumes, their contents offering distinctiones.13 Not only did Spenser make use of the Bible as portrayed by these distinctiones, but he also wrote with a concordance of his own poem in mind and expected readers to compile one, too. The marks of distinctiones are threefold: concordantial composition, variation of images, and analysis of a natural object. These terms, which help to describe the structure and fundamental coherence of The Faerie Queene, are equally useful in realizing the method of many sermon writers of the same period—and of years to come.14 Imagistic linking determined by distinctiones may offer a key into understanding and appreciating Andrewes’s curious, repetitive style, and also into Donne’s often highly wrought effects. Many examples come to mind in Andrewes’s sermons, which have too often been known only through their exUsing Donne, Sermons of John Donne, ed. Potter and Simpson, Mueller gives detailed commentary in Donne’s Prebend Sermons (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). 12. See Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). In her recent and provocative study, Milton and the Preaching Arts (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), Jameela Lares brings poetry and preaching together. She describes the rhetorical education of Milton and his age, with detailed descriptions of commonly used sermon manuals, such as Hyperius’s popular guide, Of Framing of Divine Sermons (1577). Lares argues that Milton reflects his homiletic knowledge in the final books of Paradise Lost and also in Paradise Regained. 13. See the important study by R. H. Rouse and M. A. Rouse, “Biblical Distinctions in the Thirteenth Century,” Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age 41 (1974): 27– 37, on the origin and continuity of biblical distinctiones. At first this was a specific genre, which became in time “generalized compendia of preaching materials of whatever sort” (37). 14. See Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics, esp. 27, 54–56.

148

P. G. Stanwood

cerpts. In his Easter sermon of 1611, on Ps. 85, Andrewes appears typically to play with his text: “The Stone which the Builders refused, the same Stone is become (or made) the Head of the Corner.” The text and the time meet together, for the stone that the builders refused is that stone described by Peter in Acts 4:10–11, that is, Christ, and the builders are Caiphas and the rest. But there is more. Andrewes ranges over many biblical instances of stones, buildings, angels, and heads. A stone is firm, it will endure; David’s footing is sure; and so also are Moses’ hands and Jacob’s head, but Christ himself is such a stone as no other: 1. In his Birth: Daniels stone, cut forth without hands, 2. In his Passion: Zacharies stone, graven and cut full of eyes, all over. 3. In his Resurrection: Esays stone laied in Sion . . . the stone of our faith . . . the stone of our Sacraments, the Water of our Baptism, and of our Spiritual drink. . . . A stone: first, for his nature, of the earth as stones are, out of Abrahams quarry (saith Esay [51:1] to shew his Humanity. And, out of [Greek] the very lowest part of the earth (saith the Apostle [Ephes. 4:9];) to shew his Humility. Indeed, nothing to subject to contempt, to be trodden on, to be spurned aside, as it. And such was his condition, Vermis, non homo, and Lapis, non homo. A worm, or a stone, and no man [Psalm 22:6].15

This passage seems to reflect the use of a concordance, or of a mind that could organize like one. The image of “stone” is also notably varied; it does not stay still. And Andrewes sees the fundamental stoniness of stone by analyzing its natural constitution even while he recognizes its metaphorical meaning. Stone retains its essential value so that it may portray the Resurrection: concordantially, variously, analytically. Examples abound; indeed, there is not one of the XCVI Sermons lacking in such instances of this compositional mode, or that does not in fact owe much of its construction to these three principles of distinctiones. In another Easter sermon, of 1620, on the text from John 20:11–17, the account of Mary Magdalene at Jesus’ sepulchre, Andrewes combs the Scriptures to discover garden imagery, sometimes used in contrary ways: “Mary is the name of a woman: Mary Magdalen, of a sinfull woman. That, to a woman first; it agreeth well, to make even with Eve; that, as by a woman came the first news of death; so, 15. Andrewes, XCVI Sermons, 5th ed. (London, 1661), 291. Page numbers are hereinafter cited parenthetically. Andrewes died in 1626, and the first edition of the sermons, edited by William Laud and John Buckeridge, appeared in 1629. His sermons were reprinted in The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, 5 vols. (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1861–1863).

Study of Early Modern Sermons

149

by a woman also might come the first notice of the Resurrection from the dead. And the place fits well: for, in a garden, they came, both” (354). Mary sees Jesus, but thinks that he is the gardener. And so, in Andrewes’s discourse, her whiteness, and that of the angels, becomes green, for Christ is a gardener who plants the fairest of gardens in Paradise and makes all our gardens green, and “sends us yearly the Spring, and all the herbs and flowers we then gather; and neither Paul with his planting, nor Apollo with his watering, could do any good without him” (358). With references to Jeremiah and Isaiah, Andrewes declares the role of the gardener is to make our souls well watered, to take out of them “noisome or unsavoury” weeds and replace them “with true roots and seeds of righteousness” (Jer. 31:11): Christ rising was indeed a Gardiner, and that a strange one, who made such an herb grow out of this ground this day, as the like was never seen before, a dead body, to shoot forth alive out of the grave. . . . Awake and sing (saith he) [that is, Isaiah, in chap. 26:19] ye that dwell for a time are as it were sowen in the dust, for his dew shall be as the dew of Herbs, and the earth shall shoot forth her dead. . . . So then: He appeared no other, then he was: A Gardiner. (358)

Andrewes draws together his references, delights in the imagery he finds in them, and turns Mary Magdalene into a quickener of spirits, one who revives us all from “a dead and drooping, to a lively and chearfull estate. The Gardiner had done his part, made her all green on the sudden” (360). The whole of this sermon depends upon the elaboration of gardens lost, dying, living, or reviving, in the four traditional levels of literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic interpretation. Andrewes elaborates his meaning, it would seem, through a concordantial knowledge over which he offers elaborate diagnosis and careful evaluation. This is no mere tugging at a metaphor or simple playing with words. Like Spenser, his fellow contemporary at Pembroke College, Cambridge, Andrewes learned to have an eye for the rhetorical parts of a much greater whole, and Donne, as we shall learn, continued the same tradition. We may, indeed, be close to recognizing the means whereby such a writer as Richard Hooker might develop so complex yet so unified a work as the Ecclesiastical Polity, a prospective study that I should wish to defer for another time. For now, I wish to refer to one further sermon of Andrewes, his Christmas sermon for 1616, on the text from Ps. 85:10–11: “Mercy and Truth shall meet: Righteousness and Peace shall kiss one another. Truth shall bud out of the earth; and Righteousness shall look down from Heaven.” The sermon, as

150

P. G. Stanwood

most of Andrewes’s homilies, bristles with scriptural passages and patristic allusions. The text lends itself well to the invention of a masquelike meeting, where each to each dance in a fashion that “betokeneth concorde.” See how they stand: Mercy leads to truth, and the knowledge of it; and truth to righteousness, and the practise of it; and righteousness to peace, and the wayes of it, Guides our feet (first) into the way of peace. And, such a way shall there alwayes be . . . a faire way agreed upon of all sides, questioned by none, in which, who so orders his steps aright, may see the salvation of our God, even the way here chalked out before us; To shew mercy, and speak truth; do righteousness, and follow peace. (58)

This meeting is representative of a “quaternion” in Christ: “His Essence, and His Person . . . His Flesh, and His Reasonable Soul.” This is a “cross meeting”; all four (or eight, by analogy) describe Christianity, but by synecdoche: Christianity is a meeting; and to this meeting, there go Pia dogmata, as well as, Bona opera; Righteousness, as well as Truth. Erre not this error then, to single any out, (as it were) in disgrace of the rest; Say not, one will serve the turn, what should we do with the rest of the four; Take not a figure, and make of it a plain speech: Seek not to be saved by Synecdoche. Each of these is a quarter of Christianity, you shall never while you live make it serve for the whole. (59)

With difficulty can one do little more than suggest through such examples the rhetorical integrity of this whole sermon, and its management of distinctiones. Andrewes’s sermons have unfortunately been known for too long principally from their excerpts, which have occasioned sometimes particular and detailed analysis. Instead, the sermons need to be celebrated more for the ingenuity and generosity of their entire structure. Donne’s sermons seem in general more direct, less elusive, easier to describe, and simpler to analyze. Nevertheless, most of his best effects, like Andrewes’s, require not only our careful attention to the details of language but also our capacity for perceiving the management of the entire text. We are not properly invited to take one figure, or to discover in any single passage the whole work—there is no salvation in synecdoche; for the entire discourse, regarded concordantially, with variation of images, designed toward the revelation of a particular theme (the three marks of distinctiones), forms the object of proper study. One example, chosen from Donne’s Second Prebend Sermon,

Study of Early Modern Sermons

151

will indicate the direction that might be pursued in future rhetorical study, not only of Donne but also of his contemporaries and of those who followed him. The second of Donne’s so-called Prebend Sermons, preached on January 29, 1626, is on the text from Ps. 63:7: “Because thou hast been my helpe, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoyce.” This text contrasts yet balances contraries: darkness and lamentation with brightness and exaltation, the past with the future, the angles of the square with the endless continuity of the circle, the burden of mortal afflictions with the easy weight of eternal glory, hearts of stone with hearts of flesh. Any one of these oppositions may lead Donne into an eloquent elaboration that possesses momentary completeness, as if local rhetorical flourishes sufficiently embody his full purpose. An early passage is typical of such a seeming diversion: It is a blessed Metaphore, that the Holy Ghost hath put into the mouth of the Apostle, Pondus Gloriae, That our afflictions are but light, because there is an exceeding, and an eternall waight of glory attending them. . . . There is not onely Pestis valde gravis, (the pestilence grows heavy upon the Land) but there is Musca valde gravis, God calls in but the fly, to vexe Egypt, and even the fly is a heavy burden unto them. It is not onely Iob that complains, That he was a burden to himselfe, but even Absaloms haire was a burden to him, till it was polled. It is not onely Ieremy that complains, Aggravit compedes, That God had made their fetters and their chains heavy to them, but the workmen in harvest complaine, That God had made a faire day heavy unto them, (We have borne the heat, and the burden of the day.) Sand is heavy, sayes Solomon; And how many suffer so? under a sand-hill of crosses, daily, hourely afflictions, that are heavy by their number, if not by their single waight? . . . How many, without any former preparatory crosse, or comminatory, or commonitory crosse, even in the midst of prosperity, and security, fall under some one stone, some grindstone, some mil-stone, some one insupportable crosse that ruines them? . . . And (God knowes) all is waight, and burden, and heavinesse, and oppression; And if there were not a waight of future glory to counterpoyse it, we should all sinke into nothing. (7:53–54)

Donne is remembering 2 Corinthians, Exodus, Job, 2 Samuel, Lamentations, Matthew, and Proverbs, as he worries over weights and burdens, with his characteristic wit (Absalom’s heavy hair indeed is a burden to him before it is pulled out). The passage is conceived as if from a concordance entry on burden, but it is only part of a larger analysis of affliction that grows from heaviness to glory: “The Almighty God himselfe, the Almighty God himselfe onely knowes the waight of this affliction, and except hee put in that pondus gloriae, that exceeding waight of an eternall glory, with his owne hand, into the other scale,

152

P. G. Stanwood

we are waighed downe, we are swallowed up, irreparably, irrevocably, irrecoverably, irremediably” (7:57). The antidote to such burdensomeness is joy—the rejoicing conveyed in the text itself—and the sermon turns in its details and in its large-scale structure from grief to joy. “Who does not triumph with joy, when hee considers what God hath done?” Donne asks with Augustine, for we learn to ascend to a holy joy and fly with metaphorical wings to God, in whose shadow is the power of flight. Now joy, flight, power dilate all stony hearts so that they may rise from their heaviness. Donne’s purpose throughout this sermon has been the elaboration through distinctiones of “a predominant melancholy” (or burden) overweighed by “the everlastingnesse of the joy” afforded through the blessedness of the next life whose entering and inchoation reside among us here. Joy becomes the key word and thematic center and conclusion of this sermon, but in terms—some of them contradictory—that become known not merely in particular figures of speech but also in the overall structural pattern of the work. Joy is no synecdoche, for one must read Donne’s sermon not for easy or obvious instances of wit, but for its rhetorical wholeness. Herein lies one direction that further study of these early modern sermons should try to pursue, a study that most obviously might be applied to the densely conceived work of Andrewes and to his copiously witty successors. Not all preachers exercise “true wit,” of course, and certain exclusions must operate. In his sermon “The Scribe Instructed,” South points his admonitions toward a variety of styles, which might be understood as corruptions of wit and “impertinent, and unpremeditated Enlargements,” falsely called “Motions and Breathings of the Spirit.” South is above all distressed by the practices especially of Presbyterians, independents, and enthusiasts, of those who without wisdom repair to some “trusty Concordance, which never fails them, and by the Help of that, they range six or seven Scriptures under each Head; which Scriptures they prosecute one by one; first amplifying and enlarging upon one, for some considerable Time, till they have spoiled it; and then that being done, they pass to another, which, in its Turn, suffers accordingly.”16 South is thinking particularly of John Owen (1616–1683), a dissenting and highly outspoken minister, but his animadversions might have applied equally well to others who did not know how to use a concordance intelligently or “wittily.” South would have excepted Mark Frank (1613–1664), however, one of the brightest figures of the period whose sermons brilliantly recall the wisdom of Andrewes and of Donne. 16. Simon, Three Restoration Divines, 2:247.

Study of Early Modern Sermons

153

Frank is little known today, though widely acclaimed in his own time. Like Andrewes, he was a Pembroke man, becoming master of the college in the Restoration. His LI Sermons . . . A Course . . . Beginning at Advent, and So Continued through the Festivals (which also included a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross in 1641) was published posthumously in 1672, but many of the sermons were probably composed long before the Restoration. Frank’s method of exposition is similar to Andrewes, and his texts become occasions for elaborate exegesis—though with little explicit reference to patristic authorities. Notable is his fourth sermon on Easter, on the text from Matt. 28:5– 6: “And the Angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus which was crucified. He is not here, for he is risen as he said, Come see the place where the Lord lay.” Frank plays fondly on the visit to the tomb, reminiscent of Andrewes: But it is not without reason that the Angel first appears to women, that they are honour’d here with the first news of a Resurrection. There’s a mystery in it. The woman was first deceiv’d by an Angel of darkness, ’twas therefore most convenient she should first be undeceived by an Angel of light. . . . And however we think of it, ’tis a good reward, to have an Angel set to keep us right, to tell us when we do amiss. Let me never want one, O Lord, to do so; Let him smite me friendly, and reprove me. There are even Balms, says the Psalmist, that will break ones head, Psal. clxi.6. and smooth ways we often stumble in; smoothing and anointing does not always cure us; too often betray us. To tell us always, O Sir, you are right, you do well, excellently well, is but a way to ruine us. Thou art the man is better far; you are out, He is not here; you seek wrong, when we do so, as necessary, as to tell us, we seek right, when so we do. Indeed, the women were right both for him they sought, and the way they sought him; but for the place, that they were amiss in. Even in many things we offend all, says St. James, Jam. iii.2. For there is no man that sinneth not, 2 Chron. vi.36. And ’tis our happiness when we are timely told it, that we go not wrong too long.17

Frank elaborates the conceit of searching and finding: We seek him where he is not to be found, amidst Graves and Sepulchres, whilst we are dead in trespasses and sins; or buried over head and ears in earth and earthly interests; or only in some sad distemper, when we are so weary of our selves that we wish for death; or only in dead Elements and Rites with17. Frank, LI Sermons (London, 1672), 382. His “Course of Sermons” was reprinted in The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1849), vols. 41–42.

154

P. G. Stanwood

out the life or spirit of devotion; or with that slightness and neglect as if we thought any thing good enough for him, or that he would be content with any clod of earth to lay his head on. . . . But these are the Mysteries of the Grave. He was not to be found, lastly, even in the Grave, without a Mystery.18

The text provides for Frank a means of gathering a thicket of references, and it offers as well the terms for variety and analysis, a mode of composition that reflects Andrewes’s indebtedness to the principles of distinctiones, as we have already seen in two of his Easter sermons, and in Donne’s “blessed Metaphore” of the joy that is fraught with heaviness. Mitchell was right to remind us that the preachers of this time were not merely inspired to commend religious truth or faith; many worked to perfect their rhetorical skills, and many surely responded also to the political and social pressures of the day. Yet their sermons were built on theological ground, and to understand them properly requires in us a readiness to examine their fundamental presuppositions and especially their rhetorical sophistication. Frank is characteristic of his contemporaries in being nearly ignored by recent commentators. For the more familiar sermons of Andrewes and Donne we do possess a number of studies that seek to locate their thoughts, but few seriously contemplate the great riches of their rhetorical strength and density. Jeffrey Johnson’s Theology of John Donne clarifies Donne’s underlying Trinitarianism and sacramentalism, but makes no broader claim. The best of recent work on the sermons of Andrewes is the eloquent and sympathetic study by Nicholas Lossky, who wishes to separate out the great theological concerns of Andrewes’s preaching and to show how they were ordered and developed. However, his work, like Johnson’s, treats not so much of rhetorical and homiletic issues as of theological themes. Even though Lossky claims to be writing only about the theology of Andrewes situated within the broad historical setting of his church, he does, nevertheless, tell us much about the structure and rhetorical invention of the sermons. His is a study that brings together the worlds, often divided and distinguished, of theology, rhetoric, history, and politics—an admirable method that deserves emulation and enlargement.19 18. Frank, LI Sermons, 387. 19. See Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory, 91–92, and esp. “Preaching as a Branch of Rhetoric,” 93–130; Johnson, Theology of John Donne, Studies in Renaissance Literature 1 (Woodbridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1999); and Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes: The Preacher (1555–1626), trans. Andrew Louth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), originally published as Lancelot Andrewes le prédicateur (1555–1626) aux sources de la théologie mystique de l’Eglise d’Angleterre (Paris: Les Editions

Study of Early Modern Sermons

155

While early modern sermons may be approached helpfully in a variety of ways, their essential purpose must never be missed: to instruct an audience in the problems of faith and in the puzzles of theology. Donne himself often commends such a course, as in his sermon for Trinity Sunday 1627. “This day ought we to celebrate,” he says, “the Ingenuity . . . the Assuidity . . . the Totality” of the Trinity (8:60). “Let thy mouth, let thy hand, let all the Organs of thy body, all the faculties of thy soule, concurre in the performance of this duty . . . , Ut Dicant, That they speak, utter, declare, publish the glory of God” (8:52). This bold sentiment is common in much of the best homiletic prose of the century. How can such issues of faith be best revealed? This is a question that may be partly answered by steadily uncovering and carefully reflecting upon rhetorical traditions with renewed energy—by recognizing, for example, the possibilities implicit in the recognition of distinctiones. Here is one challenge for a further direction in the study of the early modern sermon, which offers a promising means of extending our understanding of this extraordinarily rich genre. This kind of study supports our expanding sense of the political, theological, and cultural context of homiletic literature. Such study leads us toward recognizing how the preacher fashions his discourse and promotes its celebration.

du Cerf, 1986). An important thematic study of Donne’s sermons, which emphasizes his imagery of light, is Maria Salenius, The Dean and His God: John Donne’s Concept of the Divine (Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 1998).

Sharon Cadman Seelig

The Poets of the Renaissance or, The Illusions of My Youth

Once upon a time there was a period called the Renaissance, characterized by an awakening from ignorance of classical literary texts. During that time writers, under the influence of powerful texts such as Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, quite suddenly realized that human life was worthwhile; they stopped disregarding or suppressing the body and began to value the present life.1 They wrote love poems on the theme of carpe diem and, even in England, translating and adapting from Italian models, indulged in a fashion of writing sonnets to beloved mistresses. The sonnet, an inherently heterosexual form, conveys great power to a lady who exercises authority over the poet who idealizes her and pleads with her. One of these women was Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, whom A. L. Rowse later conveniently identified as Emilia Lanier.2 During this period there were no English women writers worth mentioning. That fact was passionately regretted by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own: Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.3 1. The Oration itself was, of course, the result of the author’s acquaintance with Ficino and his reading of Plato—and even of Hermes Trismegistus. 2. Lanier, The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, introduction by A. L. Rowse (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1979). Although the title was highly tendentious, Rowse performed a valuable service in placing these poems before the public. 3. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1929), 51. Despite

156

Poets of the Renaissance

157

When I was a student, many of these things were known to be true. In the course of my own undergraduate renaissance, I discovered English SeventeenthCentury Verse and Prose in the excellent two-volume anthology edited by Helen White, Ruth Wallerstein, and Ricardo Quintana (the original 1951 edition went through four printings and appeared in a second edition in 1971). The prefatory note states, “The purpose of this anthology is to make available to the student and the general reader a representative selection of the works of a limited number of major seventeenth-century English writers” and “to present the whole, or substantial portions, of a few works rather than fragments of a larger number.” The omission explicitly regretted by the editors is Milton, because “it would be difficult within the inevitable limitations of space to represent . . . [him] without sacrifice of material much less accessible and adequately represented.”4 The figures generously represented are those we would expect—Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Marvell, Vaughan, Traherne, Crashaw, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, and Cowley—but also Giles Fletcher, Phineas Fletcher, and George Wither, as well as prose by Andrewes, Bacon, Burton, Taylor, Hobbes, and Walton. There were no women poets or prose writers in this anthology. Some years later, looking for a single-volume text that included Traherne, I turned to Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry, edited by Alexander Witherspoon and Frank J. Warnke, issued in 1963 and based on volumes published in 1929 and 1946. This volume did include work by women: Katherine Philips’s poem “To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship,” all twenty-four lines of it, serves as the sole representative. Philips is identified as “the first Englishwoman to write poetry of real value.”5 The authors also included the charming lament by William Browne of Tavistock “On the Death of Marie, Countess of Pembroke” (1621), a figure who seemed chiefly to fill the interstices of others’ lives:

her strong generalization about the discouragement to which women writers were subject, Woolf does take note of the accomplishments of (as well as the obstacles faced by) Anne Finch, countess of Winchelsea; Margaret Cavendish; Dorothy Osborne; and Aphra Behn (61–68). 4. White, Wallerstein, and Quintana, eds., Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 1:v. 5. Witherspoon and Warnke, eds., Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946), 994; this was the enlarged version of Robert P. Tristram Coffin and Alexander Witherspoon, eds., A Book of Seventeenth-Century Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929). The “second edition, enlarged” of 1963 was further supplemented in 1983 with critical and bibliographic material, but the list of poets remained the same.

158

Sharon Cadman Seelig

Underneath this sable hearse Lies the subject of all verse: Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother; Death, ere thou has slain another, Fair, and learned, and good as she, Time shall throw a dart at thee.6

Since there had been no women writers of any significance, their omission was obviously not an issue; my own concern with breadth and diversity focused on the prose of the period, which I found in Herschel Baker’s Later Renaissance in England: Nondramatic Verse and Prose, 1600–1660, the successor to a volume on the sixteenth century published with Hyder Rollins in 1954. Besides a large selection of poets (including Greville, Chapman, Daniel, Drayton, Sylvester, Wotton, Sandys, Corbett, Edward Herbert, the Fletchers, Townshend, Drummond, Wither, William Browne, Henry King, Quarles, Habington, Randolph, Waller, Davenant, Cleveland, Cartwright, Cowley, and all the usual suspects), this volume included sections of prose under the headings “Philosophy and Speculation” (Bacon, Goodman-Hakewill, Burton, Browne, Hobbes, and Glanvill); “Religion and Politics”; “Books and Men” (Bacon to Clarendon); and a final section on “History and Historiography.”7 In 962 pages of a size type usually reserved for footnotes there were no women writers of poetry or prose. I believe that I first became aware that there were early women writers around 1976 when Elaine Beilin, then a colleague at Mount Holyoke College, began investigating them.8 It seemed rather a radical thing to be doing, even at a women’s college, perhaps especially at a women’s college, since we prided ourselves on dealing rigorously with the canonical texts, and on reading them in a gender-neutral fashion. Moreover, because the material Beilin dealt with was chiefly from a somewhat earlier period, her work did not seem to challenge mine directly: I was entranced by Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Burton, and Browne. Much has changed since then: the most recent incarnation of my seventeenth-century poetry course includes work by Lady Mary Wroth, Aemilia Lanyer, and Katherine Philips. I also teach a semester course in women writers that adds Mary Sidney, Elizabeth Cary, An Collins, and writers of letters, 6. Witherspoon and Warnke, Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry, 806, ll. 1–6. 7. Baker, Later Renaissance in England (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975). 8. Beilin (in a conversation of July 1, 2001) dates the beginning of her investigation to a discussion with Patricia Meyer Spacks, then teaching at Wellesley College.

Poets of the Renaissance

159

diaries, memoirs, and fiction (Arbella Stuart, Lady Anne Clifford, Lady Anne Halkett, Margaret Hoby, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn). Instead of using, as I first did when teaching this course, duplicated copies of materials prepared by the Brown Women Writers Project—itself an amazing and powerful source of material—I can order the handsomely edited volumes of individual writers put out by the University of Oxford Press (Lanyer and Stuart) or the University of California Press (Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam), or the groundbreaking Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, edited by Josephine Roberts, or the Penguin editions of Cavendish and Behn. I can also avail myself of Major Women Writers of Seventeenth-Century England, the title of which clearly indicates that there are far more good and interesting writers than the volume can accommodate, or the two-volume Routledge series on the female dramatists of the period, or its collection of poems. There are still frustrating omissions: Halkett’s remarkable autobiography, expertly edited by John Loftis and published in 1979, is out of print, as is the useful critical edition of the early diary of Clifford, just issued in 1995.9 On the other hand, a lively excerpt from Halkett’s memoir appears in volume 1 of that most canonical of all texts, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, along with selections from Wroth, Cary, Sidney, Lucy Hutchinson, and Anna Trapnel; even Martha Moulsworth and Rachel Speght have found their way into the seventh edition of the Norton. Collins, Anne Vaughan Lock, and Lady Anne Southwell have their own volumes in the Medieval and Renaissance Text Society series; Cavendish has her own society and website, and her dramatic works are available on video;

9. Susanne Woods, ed., The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Sara Jayne Steen, ed., The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, ed. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); Roberts, ed., Poems of Wroth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (London: Penguin, 1994); Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 1992); James Fitzmaurice, Josephine A. Roberts, Carol L. Barash, Eugene R. Cunnar, and Nancy Gutierrez, eds., Major Women Writers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds., Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (London: Routledge, 1996); Cerasano and Wynne-Davies, eds., Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama (London: Routledge, 1998); Wynne-Davies, ed., Women Poets of the Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1999). This list, recently augmented by Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson, eds., Early Modern Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), is obviously intended to be illustrative rather than complete. John Loftis, ed., The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Clifford, The Diary of Anne Clifford, 1616–1619: A Critical Edition, ed. Katherine O. Acheson (New York and London: Garland, 1995).

160

Sharon Cadman Seelig

and the recent fourth conference “Attending to Early Modern Women” attracted several hundred scholars from a variety of disciplines, including literature, history, art history, and music.10 In short, the study of the texts and lives of early modern women is one of the most important and fastest-growing areas of scholarship in our time. The change is breathtaking. However, rather than recounting the story of my literary life and discoveries or listing the texts from my current courses, I want to consider how these women writers disappeared so completely as to make us think they never existed, and to ask what difference it makes, in our reading and thinking, that so many texts by women authors now happily coexist with those by male authors. In fact, as we shall see, women writers may have been disappearing just about the time that Virginia Woolf declared that they had never existed or that, at best, “Anonymous” was a woman.11 One of the rare survivors of this oblivion was Katherine Philips, a writer who (witness her cameo appearance in the 1946 Coffin and Witherspoon anthology) never disappeared altogether and hence can serve as an instructive example of the fortunes of women writers more generally.12 Philips’s memory was preserved in George Saintsbury’s three-volume Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, which contains not just short excerpts but substantial texts of poets who are now hardly household names: volume 1 features Chamberlayne’s Pharonnida and England’s Jubilee; Benlowes’s Theophila; and the poems of Patrick Hannay and Katherine Philips. Saintsbury does full justice to Philips in terms of quantity, printing 121 of her poems, along with commendatory verses by the earl of Orrery, Cowley, and others. As he redresses this omission, Saints-

10. “Attending to Early Modern Women: Gender, Culture, and Change,” November 9–11, 2000, at the University of Maryland, had nearly three hundred registered participants. The next conference is scheduled for November 2003. 11. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 51. 12. Aphra Behn, Philips’s near contemporary, appears neither in Witherspoon and Warnke, Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry; George Saintsbury, Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905); nor in any of the other anthologies cited. In some cases Behn falls outside the period surveyed: Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600–1660, rev. ed. (1945; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), for example, undertakes “the earlier seventeenth century.” However, she is also missing from vol. 2 of White, Wallerstein, and Quintana, Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose, which surveys 1660–1700. One suspects that Behn’s personal reputation, as much as the quality of her verse, influenced these editorial decisions. As Dorothy Mermin notes, “Philips’s unblemished reputation offered singular encouragement to women writers, while Behn’s notoriety survived into the nineteenth century as both example and warning” (“Women Becoming Poets: Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch,” ELH 57 [1990]: 335).

Poets of the Renaissance

161

bury also indicates the terms in which he understands Philips: “Mrs. Philips as a poetess has been much more talked of than read, a state of things which it is one of the primary duties of editors to combat or cure; the references to her, from Dryden downwards, are more than sufficient vouchers for her reintroduction; and her intrinsic interest, though mild, is by no means insignificant.” For Saintsbury, Philips’s importance derives from her reputation and her position in English literary history, where she is part of a narrative of decay, of the falling off from the great tradition of Donne and Jonson that occurred in the later seventeenth century: “Part of the interest and value of Orinda’s poems for us lie in the way in which they exhibit the settling down of poetry to its more prosaic kinds and expressions about the period of the Restoration.”13 In bringing Philips before the public, Saintsbury also judges and places her: “‘The Parting of Lucasia, Rosania and Orinda at a fountain’ . . . is not contemptible: and the epitaph on her own infant son is not the worst of the school of Jonson. Nor will the reader who really cares for poetry fail to find other things in the Matchless Orinda which will please him; nor would she have been very sorry not to please the reader who does not so care.” For Saintsbury, as for the generation before him, Philips was a “poetess” who occasionally wrote something surprisingly good, an achievement measured by its notice by men— “of cadence ineffable, and such that Keats found it, and knew it.”14 What Philips lacks in achievement is compensated for by manners and selfpossession, altogether appropriate for a writer associated with indulgence in parlor (or salon) games, about which Saintsbury warns us: The greatest danger for a modern reader of Katherine Philips is of course the associations of the Précieuse School, with Rosania and Lucasia and their little harmless plays at being each a Sappho non doctior sed pudica (to vary the epigrammatist). But one fashion is very much like another; seldom much more absurd, almost always as well worth understanding. In England, as in France, there was undoubtedly a good deal of roughness and coarseness to be worn off and cleansed away, and Mrs. Philips and her friends, though Addison was to give their successors a little of his milder satire, were practically doing Addison’s work before he himself was born.15

In other words, Philips pursues an absurd style, but one partly explained by fashion, and although Saintsbury notes the unfairness of Addison’s conde13. Saintsbury, Minor Poets, 1:486, 487. 14. Ibid., 489, 488. 15. Ibid., 487.

162

Sharon Cadman Seelig

scension, he also condescends to these polite ladies whose cultural work anticipated the great arbiter of taste. There is an odd paradox in his designation of their games as “harmless” yet constituting a danger (of misunderstanding, he implies) for the modern reader. Indeed, just what the significance of Philips’s salon might be and what her poems of friendship to other women might mean have emerged as important questions in modern readings of her.16 It was in fact as one of a number of women poets that Katherine Philips persisted into the nineteenth century.17 Her work appeared in 1755 in the twovolume Poems by the Most Eminent Ladies of Great Britain and Ireland, which, besides eleven poems by Philips, included several by Aphra Behn, Anne Killigrew, Anne Finch, and Margaret Cavendish.18 In 1827 Alexander Dyce published four of Philips’s poems in Specimens of British Poetesses, and in 1848 George W. Bethune included five. In his preface Dyce makes it clear that he is correcting an omission: “Of the Selections which have been made from the chaos of our past Poetry, the majority has been confined almost entirely to the writings of men; and from the great Collections of the English Poets, where so many worthwhile compositions find a place, the productions of women have been carefully excluded.”19 For his pioneering efforts, Dyce does expect some recognition:

16. See, for example, the discussions by Harriette Andreadis, “The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632–1664,” Signs 15 (1989): 34–60; Arlene Stiebel, “Subversive Sexuality: Masking the Erotic in Poems by Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn,” in Renaissance Discourses of Desire, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 223–36; Susannah B. Mintz, “Katherine Philips and the Space of Friendship,” Restoration 22 (1998): 62–78; and Elizabeth Susan Wahl, “Female Intimacy and the Question of ‘Lesbian’ Identity: Rereading the Female Friendship Poems of Katherine Philips,” in Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 17. Paula Loscocco, “Manly Sweetness: Philips among the Neoclassicals,” Huntington Library Quarterly 56 (1993): 259–79, argues that Philips’s reputation declined in the eighteenth century as the result of changing tastes in poetry and attitudes toward gender, and notes in particular that the damning and satirical comments of Thomas Newcomb, in Bibliotheca (1712), came just two years after the last eighteenth-century edition of Philips’s Poems (273–75). 18. George Colman and Bonnell Thornton, eds., Poems by Eminent Ladies (1755; reprint, London: printed for T. Becket and T. Evans, 1773). Alexander Dyce, Specimens of British Poetesses (London: T. Rodd, 1825), v, takes note of this volume. For a history of these early editions, see the introduction by Marilyn Williamson to the facsimile edition of Frederic Rowton, ed., The Female Poets of Great Britain (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981). 19. Dyce, Specimens of British Poetesses, iii.

Poets of the Renaissance

163

[W]e feel an honest satisfaction in the reflection, that our tedious chase through the jungles of forgotten literature must procure to this undertaking the good will of our country-women. In the course of future centuries, new Anthologies will be formed, more interesting and more exquisite than our own, because the human mind, and, above all, the female mind, is making a rapid advance; but our work will never be deprived of the happy distinction of being one of the first that has been entirely consecrated to women.20

While feeling that he deserves a merit badge for bravery and gallantry, Dyce does print a substantial amount of early poetry: verses attributed to Anne Boleyn, Anne Askew, Queen Elizabeth, and Elizabeth Melvill; two choruses from Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam; a chorus from Mary Sidney’s Antonie; two songs by Lady Mary Wroth; and poems by Diana Primrose, Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Killigrew, and Aphra Behn. In The British Female Poets (1848), George W. Bethune echoed some of Dyce’s ideas, joining in the view that human nature, and in particular female nature (or intelligence), was improving: The manifestation of female talent is a striking characteristic of our age, and a very interesting proof of its moral advancement. Clever and even learned women had appeared in the course of the last century, and a few, “far between,” yet earlier; but they were, when at all successful as writers, rather petted by the gallantry of their contemporaries because of their gentler sex, than admitted to the high society of wits for their actual merits; nor did they, scarcely one excepted, deserve greater consideration. . . . Nothing shows the superiority of women in our day to those of past centuries, more than a comparison of their writings. For this reason, specimens will be given of their verse, from the earliest known Juliana Berners, down to the latest issues from the British press: and it will readily be seen how insignificant even “the matchless Orinda” is by the side of those least distinguished among her modern sisters.21

Women poets were read, then, as a special category, and interest in their work seems to have had as much to do with their “civilizing influence” as their supposed literary merits. That emphasis is evident also in The Female Poets of Great Britain, edited by Frederic Rowton, which also appeared in 1848. Rowton, much more positive about the abilities of women than Bethune, uses his 20. Ibid., iv–v. 21. Bethune, ed., The British Female Poets (New York: Hurst, [1848]), iii, v.

164

Sharon Cadman Seelig

preface to issue a ringing defense of the female sex (“The doctrine of women’s intellectual inferiority is one which I cannot think upon without an impatience bordering on indignation”), even as he offers a view of women very much in the Victorian mold: “To woman belongs the sway of INFLUENCE. Her province is to soften, round off, smooth down, the angularities of life and conduct: to act (gently, but unceasingly) upon the swift-beating heart of the world, soothing it into calmness when violent; mildly stimulating it into action when torpid; and refining, purifying and exalting its passions and aspirations when excited.”22 Rowton did print brief selections from many of the poets to whom we now give attention: Anne Askew, Queen Elizabeth, the countess of Pembroke, Elizabeth Melvill, Elizabeth Cary, Lady Mary Wroth, Diana Primrose, An Collins, Katherine Philips, Anne Killigrew, Aphra Behn, and Anne Finch, thus paving the way for Saintsbury to recall Philips’s sometime importance. So how was it that a hundred years after Rowton and Bethune there were no women poets worth mentioning, or at least worth anthologizing? It is evident from the texts I have cited that women writers were seen as members of an exclusive category and that particular claims were made for them as having a distinct point of view, or improving markedly in the past century, or civilizing social life, but they were not by and large included in anthologies more generally; rather, they appeared, in Dyce’s term, as “specimens.” So, when it came time to print the best, most universally acclaimed poetry, the particular category that these women represented simply vanished. Writing about the formation of the canon of American literature, Paul Lauter observes a similar phenomenon, which he associates with the professionalization of the teaching of literature and of the Modern Language Association. “In the 1920s,” Lauter notes, “processes were set in motion that virtually eliminated black, white female, and all working-class writers from the canon.” He argues that before that time, “dominantly male academic accounts of the American canon were far less weighty . . . [because] their authority was balanced . . . by that of other cultural institutions, from the vast network of women’s literary clubs to the magazines that spoke to primarily female audiences.”23 Noting the emphasis

22. Rowton, Female Poets (1848; reprint, Philadelphia: Henry C. Baird, 1853), l–li. 23. Lauter, “Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon: A Case Study from the Twenties,” in Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 23. As Lauter notes, Judith Fetterley, in her introduction to Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), “argues that the exclusion of nineteenth-century women writers from the literary canon began far earlier than the 1920s . . . during the nineteenth century itself” (18–19).

Poets of the Renaissance

165

of the new critics on certain kinds of “complexity, ambiguity, tension, [and] irony” in literature, Lauter continues: On the face of it there appears to be no reason why such a formalist aesthetic should narrow the canon in the ways I have indicated. But . . . that was in fact the result. . . . A second and closely related factor leading to a narrowed canon derives from the critical emphasis upon “masterpieces,” rather than “tendencies,” to use Van Wyck Brooks’s 1918 formulation. Focusing on the formal qualities of discrete works of art gradually eroded the earlier scholars’ concern for tendencies, for the social and cultural context within which all art is born. . . . Obviously, critics did not propose as a dictum that only white men could be “major” writers, but it was preeminently the works of white males like themselves that they selected. Further, the tide toward certain “masterpieces,” once it set in, could hardly be reversed except through the intervention of forces from outside the literary profession. For two generations or more, literary professionals, brought up under the influence of formalist criticism, knew little or nothing of the work of writers outside the hardening canon and thus had few alternative models—or standards—for determining noncanonical masterpieces, much less for understanding tendencies.24

Perhaps we should not be surprised then that Douglas Bush in his deeply influential English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, first published by Oxford in 1945 and revised in 1962, gives scant attention to the women writers of the period. In the opening chapter, “The Background of the Age,” he states: In the realm of letters the great patronesses, Lady Pembroke and Lady Bedford, had no worthy successors, but the number of female authors multiplied. Sidney’s sister had done her writing before 1600. His daughter, the Countess of Rutland, was a poet, Jonson told Drummond, “nothing inferior to her Father.” Sidney’s niece, Lady Wroth, published an Arcadian romance. Lady Falkland wrote a juvenile play or two, translations, and perhaps a history of Edward II. Elizabeth Countess of Kent may have contributed indirectly to the production of literature—at least to the nourishment of two men under her roof, Selden and Samuel Butler—through a popular cookery-book. We acknowledge, if we do not quite understand, the fame of the matchless Orinda, but we prefer to read the letters of Dorothy Osborne, who never dreamed that she would be the best-loved woman writer of the age.25 24. Lauter, “Race and Gender,” 34–35. 25. Bush, English Literature, 23.

166

Sharon Cadman Seelig

After mentioning several mothers’ advice books, he concludes, “And finally there appears the Duchess of Newcastle, voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.”26 Bush says that “the number of female authors multiplied,” and his account certainly suggests an increase in number rather than stature. While he mentions some writers altogether overlooked by others, his manner is decidedly offhand and his listing incomplete: Wroth, for example, is Sidney’s niece and the author of a romance, but apparently of no poems; Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland’s dramatic production, not worth numbering exactly, is mere juvenilia; the countess of Kent appears in a prescribed female role, feeding the hungry; Cavendish is simply eccentric; and the letters of a woman, Osborne, who concurs with these opinions are far more delightful than the poems of a woman, Philips, who created her own sphere of influence. Indeed, although the proper names of these women writers are, of course, more familiar to contemporary readers than they would have been in 1945 or 1962, Bush’s designation of them by their titles underscores his emphasis on their social roles or familial relationships rather than their qualities as authors. Bush concludes his survey of “Jonson, Donne, and Their Successors” with what he describes as “a respectful bow to two illustrious women”: the duchess of Newcastle, who “had, like Petulant, a pretty deal of an odd sort of a small wit and, like Petulant, she relied altogether on her parts,” and Katherine Philips, characterized chiefly by a “circle of admired and admiring literary friends” and by a “sincere portion of . . . fashionable Platonism.” Yet his final judgment is damning: “But we recognize Orinda’s individuality and her blameless renown more willingly than we read her verse.”27 If writers such as Philips disappeared under the category of “women writers,” as an oddity, a social category, a marginal group, they were to reappear a few decades later in the same guise, in a host of anthologies such as those by Ann Stanford, The Women Poets in English: An Anthology (1972), with poems from “Anonymous” and Marie de France to Mary Oliver; Louise Bernikow, The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–1950 (1974); and Cora Kaplan, Salt and Bitter and Good: Three Centuries of English and American Women Poets (1975), to mention only a few. These anthologies range from the simply informative to the more explicitly feminist, yet together they reshaped literary history.28 And they paved the way 26. Ibid., 24. 27. Ibid., 129. 28. Stanford, Women Poets (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972); Bernikow, World Split Open (New York: Random House, 1974); Kaplan, Salt and Bitter and Good (New York: Paddington

Poets of the Renaissance

167

for the far more detailed and scholarly attention to which I have referred above, for single editions of women writers, numerous anthologies, treatments of women’s lives, and work by cultural and literary historians and critics, for work so extensive that it must be encompassed in bibliographies rather than in citations of individual texts.29 So what difference does the reappearance of these writers make? First, most basically, there is the correction of a historical mistake: we now know that there were women poets and writers, in quite significant numbers, among the nobility and even among the working classes. The poetic landscape, inhabited in my early days only by notable male figures, is now a much more complicated affair. The relationships that counted, I now realize, were not only those among male poets or male poets and their patrons. Mary Sidney was not simply, as William Browne describes her, “Sidney’s sister and Pembroke’s mother,” or a literary patroness of other poets, or a translator because (chaste, silent, and obedient) she could not write for herself, but a poet of remarkable craft. Thirty-five years ago, when I read the poetry of George Herbert, I was astonished by the rich inventiveness of his stanza structures. When I read Mary Sidney decades later, I was even more astonished to see the extent to which this inventiveness is present in her work, in translations of the Psalms that skillfully adapt form to content. Lady Mary Wroth, described by Douglas Bush as the author of a (scandalous) romance, was the niece not only, I find, of Sir Philip Sidney, but also of the countess of Pembroke. Furthermore, Wroth was, of course, the author of a rich, intense sonnet sequence—not, I would argue, someone who used an uncongenial genre, a form unsuited to women, but a

Press, 1975). Bernikow notes: “Without context, and as it presently stands in mainline literary history, women have not existed, or they have existed only in relation to men (the wife of Robert Browning, the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the sister of Philip Sidney, the consort of Robert Graves), or they have existed as peculiar phenomena of one time and one place. It cannot be a bad thing to experience each woman poet individually, but it is an interesting and truthful enterprise to begin to think of them politically and in relation to one another” (9). 29. See, for example, Micheline White, “Recent Studies in Women Writers of Tudor England, 1485–1603,” English Literary Renaissance 30 (2000): 457–93, which covers the period “mid1993 to mid-1999”; Georgianna M. Ziegler, “Recent Studies in Women Writers of Tudor England, 1485–1603,” and Sara Jayne Steen, “Recent Studies in Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century, 1604–1674” (both 1990 to mid-1993), in English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994): 229–74. These supplement Elizabeth Hageman, “Recent Studies in Women Writers of Tudor England: 1. Women Writers, 1485–1674,” English Literary Renaissance 14 (1984): 409– 25; and Hageman, “Recent Studies in Women Writers of the English Seventeenth Century (1604–1674),” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 138–67. See also the extensive bibliography in Susanne Woods and Margaret P. Hannay, eds., Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (New York: Modern Language Association, 2000).

168

Sharon Cadman Seelig

writer who re-created an inner state (“When others hunt, my thoughts I have in chase”),30 one who had to redefine the nature of the sonnet every bit as much as Shakespeare, who found that his mistress was unideal and unfaithful, and the idealized object of his love of the wrong gender. Aemilia Lanyer, not to be confused with the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets, was the author of a significant body of poetry; she was, as Susanne Woods describes her, not only a woman poet but also a woman’s poet, someone who created a community of women in relation to whom she found her authority.31 And Katherine Philips was a writer we are still struggling to understand—as the creator of a salon, real or imaginary; as a précieuse, as a poet whose work emphasizes the importance of female friendships or erotic relationships. Moreover, far from being the first or only seventeenth-century woman writer worth study, she is accompanied by a host of others. Besides performing the work of discovery, recent work on women writers increasingly takes them seriously—and that means a great many things. I cite two quite different but telling examples: Germaine Greer argues that Helen Gardner dropped large numbers of women poets from The New Oxford Book of English Verse (1972), nearly all those included by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his edition of 1939, not because she was antifeminist but as “the honest exercise of a cultivated critical faculty. . . . What is obvious is that by including his twenty-five women, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was applying a double aesthetic standard almost as damaging in its insidious operation as the double moral standard.”32 For Greer, the belief of nineteenth-century editors that women writers were getting better was in fact a mark of their sentimentality and conventionality. While Greer argues that women writers were often influenced for the worse by the notice of male critics and readers, citing the effect on Katherine Philips of the earl of Orrery’s advice, Susanne Woods points to other kinds of relationships. In contrast to earlier apologetic or skeptical readings of Aemilia Lanyer, Woods in her illuminating account dares to believe that Lanyer may be 30. Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, in Poems of Wroth, ed. Roberts, poem 26. 31. Woods, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33. 32. Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection, and the Woman Poet (New York: Viking, 1995), xx–xxi. Greer asserts, “The more we know about the women who wrote poetry in English before 1900, the more we must realize that it is not a question of women poets having been ignored or obscured but of women’s poetry remaining unwritten because women were disabled and deflected by the great tradition itself, while a select band of arbitrarily chosen token women, all young, beautiful and virtuous, were rewarded for their failures. Second-rate, dishonest, fake poetry is worse than no poetry at all” (xxiii–xxiv).

Poets of the Renaissance

169

telling the truth—that she may have had the social contacts with Susan Bertie, dowager countess of Kent; Margaret Russell, countess of Cumberland; and Margaret’s daughter Anne Clifford, countess of Dorset, that she claims.33 Woods shows what happens when we consider Lanyer in relation to her contemporaries Jonson, Daniel, Shakespeare, and Donne: how her use of dedications (both their number and the attitude they express) may reflect the approach of Spenser, how her sense of equality and community with the figures she praises recalls Jonson, and how the spheres in which she moved (courtly) and her class (middle) relate to these poets. In short, rather than apologizing for Lanyer, doubting her, suggesting that she is merely marginal while the male figures to whom she is compared are central, Woods simply takes her as a poet among other poets. That this approach should be so revolutionary is remarkable, but revolutionary it is, and the effects are not yet calculated. My survey is obviously eclectic and far from complete. Nonetheless, it is worth pausing to reflect how much has changed in one area of the canon. The English Renaissance with its heroic male figures—Donne, Jonson, and Milton, canonized, new criticized, and history of idealized—has given way to a far more complicated web of relationships. When I think of the Renaissance sonnet, I no longer think simply of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Daniel, Drayton, and Donne, but also of Wroth. When I think of country house poems, I no longer think only of Jonson and his followers, but also of Lanyer. When I think of the cavaliers, I no longer think only of Lovelace, Waller, and Suckling, but also of Philips. And I even begin to wonder whether the School of Donne and the Sons of Ben are any less fictional than the salon of the Matchless Orinda and the web of relationships she creates. Moreover, our awareness of the continuities of the early modern period—as opposed to the break implied by the term Renaissance or the notion of the seventeenth century as being utterly transformed, if not actually ending, in 1660—contributes to a richer sense of the web of connections in this period, so that Philips, Behn, and Cavendish become easily and properly the concern of seventeenth-century scholars. Plainly, there is much more to be said—and that is just my point. The poetic landscape of early modern England is now indisputably of mixed gender, and it remains to be seen what we will discover there.

33. According to Greer, Philips sought the advice of Sir Charles Cotterell and Sir Edward Dering, but acceded against her better judgment to an emendation urged by Lord Orrery. She wrote to Cotterell: “I would fain have made use of your Correction, and thrown away the word ‘effort,’ but my Lord Orrery would absolutely have it continued, and so it is, to please his humour, though against my will, and judgment too” (ibid., 154). Woods, Lanyer, 7–15, 28–41.

Joan Faust

Donne on Love Sometimes the End Just Doesn’t Justify the Means

Geologically speaking, The American Heritage Dictionary defines fault as “A break in the continuity of a rock formation, caused by a shifting or dislodging of the earth’s crust, in which adjacent surfaces are differentially displaced parallel to the plane of fracture.” Metaphorically speaking, then, we can define a “fault line in the field” as an issue or event that demarcates two irreconcilable planes of thought, or the line along which these adjacent surfaces of opinion are “differentially displaced.” In seventeenth-century literary studies, John Donne’s perplexing and often contradictory stances toward carnal love have certainly elicited disagreements and controversies. But is the issue a fault line in the field or simply a surface demarcation of a deeper fault line? True, Donne’s attitude toward physical love has possibly generated more commentary than any other aspect of his work. Perhaps epitomized by the C. S. Lewis–Joan Bennett debate in the late 1930s on Donne’s qualities as a love poet, the question of the sincerity, opportunism, Petrarchism, cynicism, physicality, and spirituality of the poet’s works continues to fill volumes. Lewis, deeming Donne’s poetry “overrated” in the twentieth century, denigrates the physical bluntness of Donne’s love poetry. He argues that, at its lowest, Donne’s love poetry is “pornographic,” arousing the appetite it describes in its attempt “to affect not only the imagination but the nervous system of the reader” as well; at its highest, the love poetry is even “nastier” since it often draws “distinctions between spirit and flesh to the detriment of the latter” but then explains “why flesh is, after all, to be used.” Bennett defends Donne as one of the “great love poets” of the seventeenth century not because he paints “the charms of his mistress” but because he “analyzes the experience of being in love,” experiences that include “almost everything a man can feel about a 170

Donne on Love

171

woman, scorn, self-contempt, anguish, sensual delight, and the peace and security of mutual love.”1 Though helpful in clarifying points of difference in interpretation of Donne’s attitude toward love, the debate certainly resolved nothing, evidenced by continuing questions and exasperations over Donne’s often contradictory stances on physical consummation. Achsah Guibbory comments that Donne’s poetry “registers a disturbing, contrary sense that human sexual love is actually ‘profane,’ that it conflicts or competes with love of God.” She contrasts “libertine” poems such as “The Indifferent” and “Communitie,” which “reduce women to indifferent, interchangeable bodies, devaluing the experience of love as physical, trivial, and ultimately dispensable,” to poems such as “The Sunne Rising,” “The Canonization,” and “The Extasie,” poems that represent a quite different understanding of love: “These mutual love poems see a spiritual power in human love and confer a religious authority on the lovers.” Although Bennett rightly concludes that “the poems express views of love which could scarcely all have been held at the same time,” scholars continue their attempts to reconcile Donne’s contrary views into some comprehensible, perhaps even rational, scheme. The obvious choice is a chronological one, following Izaac Walton’s hagiographic suggestion of Donne’s metamorphosis from the courtly rake to revered dean of St. Paul’s. Along this line, many of the essays in Tom Hester’s collection John Donne’s “Desire of More” contend that Anne More, the one true love of Donne’s life, served as the turning point in his conceptualization of physical love. Christopher Ricks places the love poems into a matrix of desire and regret, stressing the use of puns on “Donne” and “More” in Donne’s poetry as evidence of the poet’s conflict between being “done” with physical consummation, experiencing postcoital guilt and depression, and attempting to prolong the desire for physical consummation, wanting “more.” Arthur Marotti presents Donne’s dazzling array of hyperbolic praise and cynical rejection of physical love as a demonstration of sprezzatura before a like-minded coterie audience. John Carey simply relegates Donne’s changing attitudes toward love as another of the poet’s changing attitudes toward most things, illustrating with Donne’s letter to Rowland Woodward: “Our selves” are “what we know not.” More ethereal reasons for Donne’s inconsistent attitude toward consummation have 1. Lewis, “Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century,” in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. William R. Keast (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 102, 103; Bennett, “The Love Poetry of John Donne: A Reply to Mr. C. S. Lewis,” in ibid., 131, 112, 131.

172

Joan Faust

been offered, too. Guibbory argues that Donne’s sometimes suspicion of sexual love “is rooted in a dualistic separation of body and soul that contrasts with the sacramentalization of flesh in the earlier Songs and Sonets,” while Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth agree that the fear of sexuality is “[a]t the very heart of Petrarchan and Platonic notions of love” and that “the need to redirect sexuality’s threatening energies into spirituality or to sublimate them into the contemplation of the divine animates most of the philosophical approaches to love in the seventeenth century.”2 I agree with Graham Roebuck that “Donne’s attitude toward women remains an enigma despite the quantity of scholarly attention directed at it”; however, the indisputable fact remains that Donne does express in many of his writings a disdain and even a fear of physical love. Not that Donne is alone in articulating postcoital regret—a look at similar poems by Ben Jonson, Sir John Suckling, Henry King, Abraham Cowley, John Milton, Aphra Behn, John Oldham, and John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, supports Summers and Pebworth’s argument that reactions against sexual satiety are “the dominant impulse of most of the love poetry and nearly all the love theory of the period.” Too often, though, these rejections of intimacy have been denigrated to footnotes on Renaissance trivia. Christopher Ricks justifiably chastises Marotti for his casual dismissal of “the familiar Donnean fantasy that love hurts or kills” in “Farewell to Love” and of Donne’s reference to “the (hardly serious) belief that orgasms shortened one’s life span” in “The First Anniversary”: “We kill ourselves, to propagate our kind.” Marotti and others have too easily dismissed this “flimsy folk belief that every orgasm costs a day of one’s life” or at least threatens health: a look back at ancient and medieval concepts of sexuality reveals that the “issue” of intercourse (pun intended) was indeed a serious and fearful one for the early modern age.3 Perhaps a political statement, pos2. Guibbory, “Fear of ‘Loving More’: Death and the Loss of Sacramental Love,” in John Donne’s “Desire of More”: The Subject of Anne More Donne in His Poetry, ed. M. Thomas Hester (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 204, 205; Bennett, “Love Poetry of Donne,” in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Keast, 115; Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Dr. Robert Sanderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956); Ricks, “Donne after Love,” in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 61; Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 170; Guibbory, “Fear of ‘Loving More,’” 221; Summers and Pebworth, introduction to Renaissance Discourses of Desire (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 2. 3. Roebuck, “‘Glimmering Lights’: Anne, Elizabeth, and the Poet’s Practice,” in Donne’s “Desire of More,” ed. Hester, 172. See Jonson, “Underwood LXXXVII” (1640); Suckling,

Donne on Love

173

sibly a rung on a Platonic ladder, sometimes even a locker-room joke, Donne’s obvious rejection of sexual intimacy in some poems can also be seen as a reaction to the clear and present physical danger intercourse posed for Donne and his contemporaries. Donne’s own writing, then, is not the main point of contention—the polarized attitudes toward Donne’s enigmatic use of physical love merely trace the edge of the real fault line in early modern studies: the often contradictory and ever unfolding history of sexuality. Physical pleasure has always elicited suspicion. Even Democritus (fifth century B.C.E.), who taught that all enjoyment of pleasure was the end naturally sought by man, held that all pleasures were not equally good. Pleasures of the senses were short-lived and agitating, and in the long run led only to pain, whereas the pleasures of the mind were painless, calm, and enduring. However, it is the specification of this vague “pain” caused by physical passion that rationalized and concretized the Greek uneasiness with physical passion and that affected attitudes toward sex down to the age of Donne, and even beyond. Earliest Greek theories located the origin of sperm in the brain; in fact, the Pythagorean Diogenes Laertes defined semen as a drop of the brain. Proof came from the Hippocratic writings, which described “Scythian eunuchism,” a disease that one could survive if veins located behind the ear were cut. The resulting flow of blood could cure or kill, but survivors experienced sterility after the operation, proving the link between the brain and the production of semen. Hippocrates describes this condition in “On Generation”: “Those on the other hand who have had an incision made by the ear, can indeed have intercourse and emit sperm, but the amount is small, weak and sterile. For the greater part of the sperm travels from the head past the ears into the spinal marrow: now when an incision has formed a scar, this passage becomes obstructed.” This theory of the brain-sperm link was related to too many fears of sexual excess to be ignored, and these beliefs were circulated by eminent scholars. Albert the Great relates a story reported to him by Master Clement of Bohemia, about a monk who died after having desired a beautiful lady seventy times before matins were rung. An autopsy revealed not only that his “40. Against Fruition [1]” and “Against Fruition [II]” (1646); King, “Paradox: That Fruition Destroyes Love” (1657); Cowley, “Against Fruition” (1668) and “The Mistress” (1668); Milton, “A Poem against Fruition on the Reading in Mountain’s Essay” (1688); Behn, “To Alexis in Answer to His Poem against Fruition” (1688); Oldham, “A Fragment of Petronius, Paraphras’d” (1683); and Rochester, “The Platonic Lady” (before 1680). Summers and Pebworth, introduction to Renaissance Discourses of Desire, 2; Ricks, “Donne after Love,” 35; Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin Books, 1971), l. 110 (line numbers are hereinafter cited parenthetically); Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet, 111–13, 239.

174

Joan Faust

brain “had been reduced to the size of a pomegranate,” but also that his eyes had been destroyed. Albert the Great concluded, “This is the sign that coitus drains, above all, the brain.”4 Other fears of excessive coitus stem from the connection between semen and blood. In Generation of Animals, Aristotle links semen to a “residue” material, the final form of food, and since blood was also a product of food, sperm in the Middle Ages was considered either blood, something like blood, or a product of blood. Thus, sexual excess presupposed a discharge of blood, a key point in Donne’s persuasion in “The Flea.” Albertus Magnus (1206?–1280) explains, “Thus a person who emits a lot of sperm grows pale and becomes weak, as if he had lost forty times that much blood.”5 How much Donne knew of early modern medical theories of the physical effects of intercourse is uncertain, but his general knowledge of medicine is evident. Walton’s verses in memory of Donne especially mention his medical knowledge and imply he once considered becoming a physician, and we do know that Donne’s stepfather, John Syminges, was a doctor and president of the Royal College of Physicians. When Donne was eleven, Syminges moved his family to a house adjoining St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, obviously fueling Donne’s interest in and knowledge of medicine. D. C. Allen notes that allusions in Donne’s works show that he was widely read in medical literature, especially for a layman, and obviously tried to keep himself abreast of current research.6 However, like Donne’s own writings on physical love, these early theories

4. Democritus, Fragments, in John of Stobi’s fifth-century C.E. Anthology, quoted in The Presocratic Philosophers, ed. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 424–25; Danielle Jacquart and Claude Tomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 53; Hippocrates, “On Generation,” in The Hippocratic Treatises: “On Generation,” “On the Nature of the Child,” “Diseases IV,” ed. Iain M. Lonie, vol. 2 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), 2:2; Albertus Magnus, Quaestiones super “De animalibus,” in Alberti Magni Opera Omnia, ed. Ephrem Filthaut (Münster: Monasterii Westfalorum in aedibus Aechendorff, 1955), lib. XII, quoted in Jacquart and Tomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, 55–56. 5. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. Peck (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1943), 725a, p. 81; Albertus Magnus, On Animals: A Medieval “Summa Zoologia,” trans. Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 2:417. 6. See Walton’s verses in H. J. C. Grierson, ed., The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 1:377; Baird D. Whitlock, “The Heredity and Childhood of John Donne,” Notes and Queries 6 (1959): 350–53; Allen, “John Donne’s Knowledge of Renaissance Medicine,” JEGP 42 (1943): 322–42.

Donne on Love

175

of intercourse often contradict and complicate more than clarify. Many authors regarded sexual release as a necessary excretory function, expelling certain superfluities from the body, and so regarded sexual abstinence as at least potentially unhealthy. Though ancient and medieval writers did acknowledge benefits of sexual release for males, they admitted women benefit most, since intercourse warms and strengthens their normally cold, moist temperament. A commentator of De secretis mulierum (Woman’s secrets), a short work widely read since the 1400s and wrongly attributed to Albertus Magnus, explains: “The more women have sexual intercourse, the stronger they become, because they are made hot from the motion that the man makes during coitus. Further, male sperm is hot because it is of the same nature as air and when it is received by the woman it warms her entire body, so women are strengthened by this heat. On the other hand, men who have sex frequently are weakened by this act because they become exceedingly dried out.”7 Some prescribe certain positions and times for beneficial intercourse: “It is worse in summer and autumn, but more tolerable in winter and spring, safer at night than in daytime; if it is not immediately followed by work and a sleepless night.” Often lay writers worried more about the physical dangers of sex than did medical commentators. As late as 1727, Daniel Defoe warned that excessive coitus would lead to “palsies and epilepsies, falling sickness, trembling at the joints, pale dejected aspects, leanness, and other distempers.” And some treatises avoid the question of physical effects altogether by admitting that sexual activity is inevitable: “Sleeping or Waking, the Spermatiks will do their Office.”8 Nonetheless, physical dangers of intercourse dominate these works, and Donne evidences knowledge of these risks. Some classically documented detri7. Helen Rodnite Lemay, ed. and trans., Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s “Secretis Mulierum” with Commentaries, SUNY Series in Medieval Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), chap. 9, comm. B, p. 127. For more on benefits for both men and women, see T. Cogan, The Haven of Health (1584), 247; Paul Delaney, “Constantinus Africanus’ De Coitu: A Translation,” Chaucer Review 4 (1969): 60; L. Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions (1576), 105; L. Lessius, Hygiasticon; or, The Right Course of Preserving Health unto Extream Old Age (Cambridge, 1634), 30; Hippocrates, “On Generation,” 1– 5; “On Intercourse,” in Collection of Surgical and Gynecological Texts (New York: New York Academy of Medicine, n.d.), f. 87vo; Platina, On Right Pleasure and Good Health: A Critical Edition and Translation of “De Honesta Volumptate et Valetudine,” 1465, trans. Mary Ella Milhan (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), 113; and W. Vaughan, Naturall and Artificial Directions for Health (1600), 40. 8. Cogan, The Haven of Health, 252; Platina, On Right Pleasure, 113; Defoe quoted in Jonathan Swift, Conjugal Lewdness; or, Matrimonial Whoredom (London, 1727), 91; B. Mandeville, A Modest Defense of the Public Stews (London, 1725), 17.

176

Joan Faust

mental effects include contractions, depression, tremblings, unpleasant odor, swelling of the stomach, headache, loss of eyesight, hearing piercing noises, and even difficulty in urinating. Since sperm was believed to be made from the essence of the healthy parts of the body, not only are bodily humors lost through coitus, but vital spirits also escape with the semen by way of the arteries, causing overall weakness (Shakespeare’s “th’expense of spirit” in “Sonnet 129,” l. 1). In fact, Albertus Magnus believed intercourse could be fatal, citing animals that indulge in intense sexual activity die more rapidly than others, the fate of Donne’s sparrow in “Metempsychosis: The Progress of the Soul”: “His blood, and spirit, pith, and marrow spends, / Ill steward of himself, himself in three years ends” (209 –10). Albertus Magnus also noted that eunuchs live longer than the noncelibate, a fact that he believed relates to the brain-sperm link: A person can copulate so much that nature does not have the seed to eject and emits blood instead. This is why eunuchs live longer than those who have not been castrated. When excessive sperm has been emitted, it especially weakens the brain and those members near it. Thus, Hippocrates suspected that the semen descends from the brain and he put forth still another proof for this. For those who have the veins running behind the ears cut into and cut through can no longer produce sperm. If these people emit anything during intercourse, it is a watery humor and is not effective with respect to reproduction.9

Constantine the African, Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, and Avicenna agree that those who engage in a great deal of intercourse die the quicker for it. In fact, sparrows have such a reputation for lust, Constantine the African features them in an aphrodisiac recipe: “[T]ake the brains of thirty male sparrows and steep them for a very long time in a glass pot; take an equal amount of the grease surrounding the kidneys of a freshly-killed billy-goat, dissolve it on the fire, add the brains and as much honey as needed, mix it in the dish and cook until it becomes hard; make it into pills like filberts and give one before intercourse.” Even Donne’s poor sparrow has a commiserating partner: in Women’s Secrets, Commentary A advises, “Thus women who have much sexual intercourse do not have their lives shortened as men do, and this is proved by the nature of the swallow who dies because he has sex too often.”10 9. Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, ed. and trans. Margaret Tallmadge May, 2 vols. (New York: Cornell University Press, 1968), 2:323; Albertus Magnus, On Animals, 2:1444. 10. Delaney, “Constantinus Africanus’ De Coitu,” 61; Lemay, Women’s Secrets, 147; Avicen-

Donne on Love

177

And if the brave soul did decide to risk all in pursuit of physical pleasures and did succeed physically unscathed, his progeny might suffer for his own excesses, for birth defects were often attributed to immoderate intercourse. Pseudo-Albertus Magnus contends that some monstrosities are caused “by an irregular form of coitus.” A commentator on these words notes, “Irregular and extremely violent coitus is to be avoided in order for the fetus to be produced in the proper manner, and to avoid having the seed be received in the wrong way in the womb.” The 1637 treatise The Expert Midwife judged that “monsters” were the punishment for a couple who had sexual relations at forbidden times, or who copulated with the “immoderate desire of lust.” Since the concept of the sins of the father being passed on to the son had obvious religious significance, even these physical and scientific theories led to moral judgment. The Swiss doctor I. Rueff ruled birth defects from immoderate copulation “just judgment [of God] in order to warn men”: “We hold then as accused the excessive search for pleasure, which is such that the human seed becomes too weak and imperfect, and as a necessary result the child born is also weak and imperfect.”11 Though Jesus himself said nothing about sex except what can be inferred from his references to divorce and remarriage (Matt. 5:31–32; Mark 10:11–12; Matt. 19:3–9), later church fathers condemned sex as sinful, led by Augustine (354–430 C.E.). Ironically, Augustine’s zealous attitude against physical pleasures was not Christian but from a rival sect, Manichaeanism. Followers of this sect, especially those reaching the highest or “Adept” stage, refused to eat flesh, drink wine, or have even marital intercourse. Though an adherent of the Manichaean faith for some eleven years before his conversion to Catholicism, Augustine never reached the highest “Adept” stage, partly because of his difficulties with sex. He remained a less advanced “Auditor,” living with a mistress, “feeling uncomfortable about his inability to control lustful desires.” This eventually led him to renounce Manichaeanism and accept Christianity, but though he rose in the Christian hierarchy, he kept many Manichaean ideas about sex. In fact, Vern L. Bullough believes that the degree of sexual repression among Christians was a direct response to this rival sect and Augustine’s own refortification of negative sexual attitudes.12

na, Canon, bk. 3, quoted in Jacquart and Tomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, 179; Delaney, “Constantinus Africanus’ De Coitu,” 64–65; Lemay, Women’s Secrets, 70. 11. Lemay, Women’s Secrets, 114; Com. A, 114; I. Rueff, The Expert Midwife (trans. 1637), 153; Rueff, De conceptu et generatione hominis (Frankfurt, 1587), col. 42r. 12. Vern L. Bullough, “Introduction: The Christian Inheritance,” in Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Prometheus Books,

178

Joan Faust

After his conversion to Catholicism, Augustine adopted a life of celibacy. This former keeper of a mistress now regarded sex as the greatest threat to spiritual freedom and proclaimed that, though coitus must be regarded as a good since it comes from God, every concrete act of intercourse is evil, with the result that every child, literally, could be said to have been conceived in the sin of its parents. Donne, whom Walton deemed “a second St. Austine,” reveals his disgust with this fact in both “The Second Anniversary” (“Think further on thy self, my soul, and think / How thou at first was made but in a sink” [157–58] and his sermon (“Between the excremental jelly that thy body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last, there is not so noisome, so putrid a thing in nature”). Augustine’s attitude was reinforced by St. Paul the Apostle (ca. 5–67 C.E.), whose conversion Walton also compares to Donne’s, and by St. Gregory of Nyssa (330–395 C.E.) and St. Jerome (ca. 347–419/20 C.E.). All three men believed sex prevented salvation and only unblemished celibacy could reach spiritual perfection. Of course, as Reay Tannahill admits, Augustine, Tertullian, Jerome, and St. Paul, outspoken advocates of celibacy, “were not bloodless natural ascetics, but men who led full lives (and full sex lives) before they converted to celibacy”; thus they, like Donne, had fully partaken in the lifestyle they now forbade others to experience.13 However, Donne, unlike these spiritual mentors, converted to Protestantism. Could this act prove Donne rejected their celebration of the celibate life? Not necessarily. Though the Protestant Reformation rejected the Catholic emphasis on chastity and instead prioritized the sacredness of family life, the bond of husband and wife was not to be a physically passionate one but should be entered into for rational (especially economic) reasons. Mary Beth Rose comments that in the Middle Ages, “Sexual love was considered out of the question as a basis for marriage,” and even in the Renaissance, Lawrence Stone agrees, “All passionate love-making was sinful, regardless of whether it took place inside or outside marriage.” In his advice to unmarried women, “On 1982), 1–2, 9. See also Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Sexual Attitudes: Myths and Realities (New York: Prometheus Books, 1995), 23. 13. Augustine, De Peccatorium meritis et remissione, in The Works of St. Augustine, trans. Marcus Dod, 5 vols. (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1885), vol. 4., cap. 57, pp. xxix; Walton, Lives, 47; Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953–1962), 3:105; Walton, Lives, 48, 53, 54; James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 82; Tannahill, Sex in History (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 141.

Donne on Love

179

Seeking a Spouse,” John Louis Vives warns, “Those who marry for love live in sorrow.” Thus, critics looking for a reason John Donne might express guilt or even disgust and rejection of intercourse in some of his poems and sermons can look to his marriage. The ill-advised elopement of Anne and John Donne certainly did bring with it sorrow as well as obvious sexual passion. Walton deems Donne’s marriage “the remarkable error of his life,” though Maureen Sabine and Ilona Bell speculate that Anne was an equally passionate partner in the relationship. Bell speculates they became lovers as long as two summers before their marriage, while Sabine cites Donne’s written apology to Anne’s father after the marriage, admitting they “adventured equally” in the rash marriage. However, as Christopher Ricks reminds us, “Sex can be, in its quiet and incremental way, murderous,” referring to Donne’s “killing” his wife by giving her a baby every year until her death at age thirty-three, just after the stillbirth of their twelfth child. “We kill ourselves, to propagate our kind” from “The First Anniversary” (110) becomes rather prophetic, while Donne’s later comments in sermons seem similar to those warnings from Augustine, Jerome, and Paul, who also condemned the sin in which they previously had reveled: in one sermon, Donne proclaims, “There is a chastity in Marriage: But the chastity of virginity, is the proper, and principal chastity,” while in another, “Marriage and Chastity consist well together.” In a marriage sermon, Donne warns the bridegroom not to be tempted “to love a Wife like a Mistresse,” and in a later sermon he admits, “A Man may be a drunkard at home, with his own wine, and never goe out to Taverns; A man may be an adulterer in his wives bosome, though he seek not strange women.”14 It is also telling that Donne includes, as one of the horrible curses he inflicts upon the “wretched finder” (91) of “Elegy 11: The Bracelet,” “love and marriage / Afflict thee” (108–9). Just as classical theories of the physical dangers of intercourse led to moral judgment, the early Church used medical and scientific theories to reinforce 14. Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 15; Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500– 1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 499; Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 171; Walton, Lives, 60; Bell, “‘Under ye Rage of a Hott Sonn & yr Eyes’: John Donne’s Love Letters to Ann More,” in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 35; Sabine, “No Marriage in Heaven: John Donne, Anne Donne, and the Kingdom Come,” in Donne’s “Desire of More,” ed. Hester, 229; Ricks, “Donne after Love,” 57; Donne, Sermons of Donne, 3:68, 131, 2:345, 5:120.

180

Joan Faust

its own moral condemnation of sex. Perhaps the most effective medical support of moral condemnation of sex was the concept of venereal disease as God’s punishment for corporal excess. At the end of the fifteenth century, a new and more virulent strain of syphilis appeared and spread rapidly throughout Europe, attested by diaries, literature, and the outpouring of sermons, legislation, and apocalyptic predictions at the time. Writers identified the disease as “the scourge of God for a society that had not lived up to the ideals of Christianity,” and sex became a literal and concrete path to death.15 Donne supports this view in his concluding comments in Biathanatos, though he directs his comments more at physicians than at the disease itself: Since therefore because death hath a litle bitternesse, but Medicinall, and a litle allay, but to make it of more vse, they would vtterly recline, and auert our Nature from it (as Paracelsus says, of that foule contagious disease which then had invaded Mankind in a few places, and since ouerflowes in all, That for punishment of generall Licentiousnesse, God first inflicted that Disease, and when the Disease would not reduce vs, he sent a second worse affliction, which was ignorant, and torturing Phisitians). So I may say of this Case, That in punishment of Adams sinne, God cast vpon vs an infectious death, and since hath sent vs a worse plague, of Men, which accompany it with so much horror and affrightment, that it can scarse be made whollsome and agreeable to vs.16

Donne’s references to the “torturing” aspect of medical treatments for venereal disease here and in “The First Anniversary”—“With new diseases on ourselves we war, / And with new physic, a worse engine far” (159–60)— should not be interpreted metaphorically. Christopher Ricks justly questions Marotti’s comments on these lines that Donne “jokingly refer[s] to ‘new diseases’ (like syphilis) and the dangerous ‘new phisicke’ (160) practiced by Paracelsan doctors,” for there was little humorous about the fear of venereal disease, a fear that most assuredly contributed to the rejection of intimacy in the early modern period.17 Juan de Vigo devotes two chapters of his 1514 medical text, Surgical Prac-

15. Guido Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex, and Renaissance Civil Morality,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 19. 16. Donne, Biathanatos, ed. Ernest W. Sullivan II (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1984), 145. 17. Ricks, “Donne after Love,” 56; Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet, 239.

Donne on Love

181

tice, to the dreaded disease, vividly describing the order and intensity of symptoms: To begin with, pustulae appear on the male and female genitals; they are of a livid, black or whitish colour, and are surrounded by an unduration. . . . Shortly after the first lesions have healed, hard pustulae, sometimes protuberant and sometimes verruca-like, break out over almost the entire body. The patient experiences intense pains in his limbs and joints. A year or more later, purulent tumours appear, along with bone-like callosities, which are so painful at night that they make the sufferer scream. This is almost always followed by the destruction of the bones, and the limbs affected remain permanently twisted or stunted.18

And Donne’s “new physic” does prove to be a “worse engine far” in dealing with the syphilis epidemic in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Gaspar Torellae’s account of his treatment of patients in 1497 included “purges, blood-lettings, sudations [sweatings], resinous frictions, pills of celandine and aloe.” For more extreme cases, Torellae recommended washing the infected area “with soft soap, or apply to it a cock or pigeon plucked and flayed alive or else a live frog cut in two.” Claude Quétel explains that this demanding remedy was reproduced with variations from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries: “Take a chicken or pigeon and immediately cut it down the middle, push the ulcerated penis into the warm flesh and keep it there for as long as the flesh exercises its calorific action.”19 Thus, it was believed that vital warmth of the animal’s bloody flesh would help to disperse or even consume the poison that had entered the penis. However, the treatments of choice, truly “worse engines far,” were mercury or gaiac, or a combination of both, treatments that were not really improved upon until 1910. Mercury-based ointments were used as frictions or mixed as plasters. Quétel describes a typical mercury treatment for syphilis: Patients were given frictions one or more times each day and shut up in a steamroom in which a very high temperature was constantly maintained. The

18. De Vigo, Practica copiosa in arte chirugica . . . (Rome, 1514), translated as Surgical Practice, quoted in Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis, trans. Judith Braddock and Brian Pike (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 26. 19. Torellae, Tractus cum consiliis [contra] Pudendagram, seu morbum Gallicum (Rome, 1497); Quétel, History of Syphilis, 282 n 36, quoting Gruner, Aphrodisiacus sive de lue venereal (1728).

182

Joan Faust

treatment lasted between twenty and thirty days. The patient following this regimen would begin to weaken. His mouth and throat would become ulcerated, and swell prodigiously. His gums would tumefy and his teeth would loosen and drop out. A revolting saliva would stream continually from his mouth. Many sufferers preferred death to this barbarous procedure, which cured barely one in a hundred.20

Of course, doctors did offer relief from some of these side effects: in 1497, Coradinus Gilino suggested applying a red-hot iron to the skull of the patient to act on the brain, the organ controlling the pituitary, in order to lessen the flow of saliva from mercury treatment, truly a “worse engine far.” Thus, as Ricks contends, Donne is not joking in his reference to “new diseases” but treats the subject of venereal disease “with grim horror.”21 After all, could one wish another a worse fate than to curse, “Lust-bred diseases rot thee; and dwell with thee / Itchy desire and no ability” (“Elegy 11: The Bracelet,” 103–4)? Did medieval and Renaissance medical and moral scare tactics work on John Donne? Evidence in his poetry of attempts to thwart his libido indicates that they did and also indicates that he knew some of the suggested “remedies of love.” To counteract this physical and mental disorder of obsessive love, doctors suggested therapies such as those in Ovid’s Cures for Love: to distract oneself from the lover with other activities like commerce or hunting and to substitute feelings of revulsion by calling on a woman before she performed her toilet, deliberately gazing at her soiled sheets, or even performing the sexual act with other women first to dampen lust.22 Donne acknowledges the distraction technique in several poems. In “The Blossom,” the speaker boasts to his “poor heart” that twenty days spent away from his harsh mistress with “friends, whose love and means present / Various content” will find him “fresher, and more fat, by being with men” than if he had remained with his mistress and his obsessed heart (21–22, 35). He advises the “Jet Ring Sent” to remain on his finger: “Be justly proud, and gladly safe, that thou dost dwell with me, / She that, oh, broke her faith, would soon break thee” (11–12). Perhaps more striking is Donne’s use of Ovid’s second remedy for love: substituting feelings of revulsion. Labeled by Marotti as “the aesthetics of disgust,” Donne’s nauseating and disgusting defilement of women in poems such 20. Quétel, History of Syphilis, 6, 29–32. 21. Gilino, De morbo quem gallicum muncupant (1497), quoted in ibid., 31–32; Ricks, “Donne after Love,” 56. 22. Ovid, Cures for Love: The Erotic Poems, ed. and trans. Peter Green (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1982), ll. 315–635.

Donne on Love

183

as “The Anagram” and “The Comparison” are viewed by Achsah Guibbory as evidence of a “persistent misogyny, indeed a revulsion at the female body.” However, these “aesthetics of disgust” provide Donne’s speakers with an antidote to the moral, mental, and physical dangers of sexual love. After all, who can even think of risky physical passion faced with “Rank sweaty froth . . . / Like spermatic issue of ripe menstruous boils” on a mistress’s brow, “like that scum . . . / From parboiled shoes, and boots,” with “warts” and “weals” hanging upon her skin (“Elegy 8: The Comparison,” 7–8, 9, 11, 14)? Would not the image of “a worm sucking an envenomed sore” cure a distracted lover from endangering his body and soul (44)? Though “The Comparison” seeks to praise the speaker’s mistress, the reader is left with loathsomeness, not compliment. And in other poems favoring his mistress, Donne’s speaker introduces nauseating images. He asks his mistress to envision her jealous husband, “swoll’n with poison,” his skin covered “with a sere-bark,” “Ready with loathsome vomiting to spew / His soul out of one hell, into a new” (“Elegy 1: Jealousy,” 3, 4, 7–8). “Elegy 2: The Anagram” wittily praises a friend’s mistress, but of course presents a distorted collage of a woman, not an image of beauty. Even though we journey with Donne’s speaker on his erotic “Love’s Progress” in “Elegy 18,” we are still left with the final image of, of all things, an enema (“He that doth not, his error is as great, / As who by clyster gave the stomach meat” [95–96]). These examples support Christopher Ricks’s contention that Donne’s poem endings destroy his poem as postcoital triste destroys the pleasure of sex: “The poems, after love, imagine hating their own flesh, and they turn their revulsion upon the body of the poem, their own flesh.”23 Nevertheless, this nauseating revulsion is also a necessary and effective remedy for the dangers of love. And finally, like any “disease,” an overactive libido could be and was treated medicinally, and Donne evidences some knowledge of the cure. Ovid suggests rue (“it sharpens the eyesight”) and lots of wine, while Dioscorides (first century C.E.) agrees rue “extinguisheth geniture.” Rue is the only anaphrodisiac mentioned in the extant portion of The Regimen of Health of Salerno, the best-known medieval medical text. It recommends a drink made with sage, rue, and roses that “will vehemently lessen your love” and adds, “The rue acts as an aphrodisiac with women and as an anti-aphrodisiac with men.” The eleventh-century monk Constantine the African offered “cooling” recipes of 23. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet, 49; Guibbory, “‘Oh, let mee not serve so’: The Politics of Love in Donne’s Elegies,” in Critical Essays on John Donne, ed. Arthur Marotti (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), 18; Ricks, “Donne after Love,” 51.

184

Joan Faust

lentils prepared with lettuce seed, while the tenth-century Leechbook of Bald, the most important piece of medical literature to have survived from the Saxon period, recommends that if a man be too lustful, “boil water agrimony in foreign ale, let him drink it at night fasting.” Two “medicinal” remedies for lust in Donne’s poetry have been glossed and reglossed, yet remain disputed. The concluding thought in “Love’s Alchemy” has long been regarded as yet another of Donne’s misogynistic comments: “Hope not for mind in women; at their best / Sweetness and wit, they are but mummy, possessed” (23–24). A. J. Smith cites the OED definition of mummy: “a medicinal preparation of the substance of mummies; hence, an unctuous liquid or gum used medicinally,” and “the jocular use, dead flesh.”24 In light of traditional remedies for love, I can certainly see a case for either definition. The first makes women themselves the medicinal cure for lovesickness: following Ovidian recommendations for having intercourse to cure heroic love, the suffering lover uses his beloved to dampen his lust, making her the real antidote for passion; she becomes his “mummy, possessed.” In the second definition of mummy, the poem ends echoing Ovid’s recommendation to substitute feelings of revulsion to counteract passion, imaging the desired woman as dead flesh, no matter how much “sweetness and wit” she might possess. Unless the lover was really attracted by necrophilia, this foreshadowing of postcoital regret would do the trick. However, Donne’s use of the term wormseed in “Farewell to Love” has been interpreted as the more obvious example of a medicinal antidote for lust. The disillusioned speaker in this poem ends his resolution to renounce things “which had endamaged” him, like love, with the lines, “If all fail, / ’Tis but applying worm-seed to the tail” (34, 39–40). Glossed as “a powerful anaphrodisiac” since John Hayward’s edition in 1936, the interpretation certainly fits the cynical mood of the speaker, supports medieval and Renaissance uses of love remedies, and carries on Donne’s reputation for misogyny. However, Noralyn Masselink’s careful research into the meaning of the term wormseed as a type of laxative dispels for me any direct link between the term and a medicinal anaphrodisiac, other than, as she explains, a possible side effect of the 24. Ovid, Cures for Love, ll. 801, 805–6; R. Gunther, The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides (New York: Hafner, 1959), 286; P. Parente, The Regimen of Health by the Medical School of Salerno (New York: Vantage Press, 1967), 69; Delaney, “Constantinus Africanus’ De Coitu,” 63; Oswald Cockayne, ed., The Leechbook of Bald: Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, 3 vols. (London: Ralls Series, 1864–1866), lxx; Stanley Rubin, Medieval English Medicine (London and Vancouver: David and Charles Newton Abbot, 1974), 55; Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. Smith, 384.

Donne on Love

185

herb’s purgative properties, since “having taken a potent laxative, one would presumably be indisposed and thus not entertain amorous thoughts.” I do support Masselink’s suggested metaphorical interpretation that the purgative is placed where it must do its job (on “the tail,” since tail in Latin is penis) in order to purge the “worms” of lust eating away at the lover’s entrails.25 Thus, the herb indirectly serves as an anaphrodisiac. In light of Ovid’s remedies for love, though, the term also serves to introduce an image of disgust, as Donne uses worms as maggots bred from the decaying carcass of the world in “The First Anniversary” (389–90) and similarly in “The Second Anniversary”: “The world is but a carcase; thou art fed / By it, but as a worm, that carcase bred” (55–56), or like Marvell’s “then worms shall try / That long-preserved virginity” in “To His Coy Mistress” (27–28). So whether taken as a laxative or a loathsome image, wormseed drives the poem to its bitter end. Donne’s “tail” seems like a good place to end this diatribe on the physical dangers of love in early modern thought. Unquestionably, Donne does not indicate obsession with the fears of intercourse, evidenced by his many expressions of mutual, satisfying, and even spiritually elevating love. Most commentators agree with Guibbory that Donne, in poems such as “The Sunne Rising,” “The Good-morrow,” and “The Canonization,” expresses “a very different understanding of love”: “committed, exclusive, and as permanent as possible in a mutable, contingent world.” Yet, even these celebrations of the transcendence of sexual love, viewed in light of early modern medical, spiritual, and physical apprehensions of carnality, can also evidence Donne’s fear of physical intimacy. In “The Ecstacy,” Donne’s speaker celebrates the fact that their intergrafted hands “was all the means to make [them] one,” while their only propagation was as yet “pictures in [their] eyes” (11). Similarly, “The Canonization” presents physical love not as a passionate personal experience but, in William Shullenberger’s words, “as a Spectator Sport” in which “the eye becomes the organ of reproduction.” With his frequent use of thirdparty observers and images of reflections of the lovers in eyes, windows, and tears, Shullenberger argues, Donne “suggests the tenuousness and fragility and brevity of this visual world, ephemeral as a tear, eclipsed with a blink or a loss of attention, and vulnerable to the intervening gaze of others.”26

25. Donne, John Donne: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. John Haywood (New York: Random House, 1937), 767; Masselink, “Wormseed Revisited: Glossing Line Forty of Donne’s ‘Farewell to Love,’” ELN 30:2 (December 1992): 12–13. 26. Guibbory, “Fear of ‘Loving More,’” 205; Shullenberger, “Love as a Spectator Sport in John Donne’s Poetry,” in Renaissance Discourses of Desire, ed. Summers and Pebworth, 54.

186

Joan Faust

Though usually interpreted as ethereal, Donne’s focus on the eyes in these and other poems also directly connects to ancient and medieval beliefs in the physical dangers of sex. Aristotle asserts that “of all the regions in the head the eyes are the most seminal, as is proved by the fact that this is the only region which unmistakably changes its appearance during sexual intercourse, and those who overfrequently indulge in it have noticeably sunken eyes.” PseudoAlbertus Magnus agrees that, for those overindulging in sexual activity, the visual world truly is tenuous and fragile, since both emission of seed and menses weaken the cerebrum so also weaken the eyes: “Indeed a mark appears in the eyes of those who have a great deal of sexual intercourse.” This so-called menstrual eye can even infect others, because this eye infects the air, then this air infects the adjacent air, and the infection continues to travel until it reaches the looking glass or the eye of another person. In Causae et curae, Hildegard of Bingen (midtwelfth century) warns that those who discharge their seed risk blindness. She even gives a recipe for those erring men and women with eye trouble. The numerous references, then, of reflection and twisted eye beams only reiterate that, for Donne, physical intimacy may be risky.27 The fact that not only Donne’s obviously cynical rejections of love but also his proclamations of true commitment can evidence apprehension of carnal love presents a challenge to Donne scholars. However, these disagreements and controversies concerning Donne’s attitude toward love can only be refined and redefined in the context of the history of sexuality. Echoes of classical and early modern medical, ecclesiastical, and philosophical apprehensions of physical consummation in Donne’s writings are too strong to ignore, and they help trace a major fault line in the field, not only of literary studies but of early modern thought in general. For John Donne, as for many of his contemporaries, sometimes the end just doesn’t justify the means. 27. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 747a, pp. 247, 249; Lemay, Women’s Secrets, 48; Hildegard of Bingen, Causae et curae [Liber compositae medicinae], ed. Paul Kaiser, Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1903), bk. 2, pp. 139– 40; bk. 4, pp. 192–94.

Cristina Malcolmson

“The Explication of Whiteness and Blackness” Skin Color and the Physics of Color in the Works of Robert Boyle and Margaret Cavendish

During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, studies of the physics of color were frequently conjoined with speculations about skin color.1 This conjunction was motivated in part by a skeptical rejection of Aristotelian science and the rise of experiment as the basic methodology of the Royal Society. However, these accounts also appeared at the same time that British colonization and the slave trade developed, and experimental science as an institution constructed its distinction between “trustworthy” and “untrustworthy” witnesses. Eventually, this institution would produce the nineteenth-century notion of biologically differentiated “races.” I suspect that the “scientific outlook” of the Royal Society included a new kind of racialized thinking that contributed 1. I have many to thank for their help on this article. My first debt is to the 1998–1999 seminar at Bates College “Women and Scientific Literacy,” particularly Rebecca Herzig and Bonnie Shulman. The seminar made this essay possible. I also thank the Wesleyan Renaissance Colloquium, especially Natasha Korda, and the useful comments received there. The question session and the readers for the conference “Faultlines in the Field” significantly improved the essay. Anna Battigelli, Lillian Nayder, and William Pope.L provided crucial advice. I thank the president and board of the Royal Society of London for permission to quote from the Boyle Papers, and I am also grateful to Dr. Stephen Clucas and Harriet Knight of Birkbeck College, University of London, for their advice on the subject. Finally, I thank my colleagues Christina Brinkley, Elizabeth Eames, and Leslie Hill, who have encouraged me to recognize the links between early modern England, Africa, and slavery in the Americas. As far as I can tell, no one has previously discussed this odd conjunction between studies of the physics of color and speculations about skin color. Kim Hall does note Robert Boyle’s chapter on skin color in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 94–95. Margo Hendricks pointed out to me the links between Margaret Cavendish and Boyle, and suggested that, in this material, color differences mystify power differences (private communication, conference of the Shakespeare Association of America, April 1999).

187

188

Cristina Malcolmson

to nineteenth-century polygeny, the theory of different human species.2 In this paper, I will explore the interest in skin color among members of the Royal Society, particularly Robert Boyle, and consider the relationship between early science and the development of colonialism. The simultaneous consideration of skin color and the physics of color has received no attention until now because early modernists have not paid adequate attention to the ways in which our period, including its science and religion, contributed to nineteenth-century constructions of “race,” and the consequent racism of Western Europe. Although much important work has been done, scholars still disagree about the extent to which racialized thinking had emerged before nineteenth-century biological definitions.3 Some early criticism dismissed race as an anachronistic term, and claimed that literary representations of difference between Europeans and people of other cultures were primarily theological, mythical, or a form of exoticism.4 Historians of 2. See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 22–79, for an analysis of early science as an institution. I am grateful to Rebecca Herzig for bringing this book to my attention. Sandra Harding considers the effects of European science on colonized peoples in Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), esp. 39–72. On the shift from monogenism (the theory that all humans share one origin) to polygenism, see Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982), 1–19; and Stephen Jay Gould, “American Polygeny and Craniometry before Darwin: Blacks and Indians as Separate, Inferior Species,” in The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 84–115. 3. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Russell and Russell, 1944), believes that racism was the result of slavery; Winthrop Jordan argues that color prejudice began long before, when the English entered West Africa in the 1550s (White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 [Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968], 6, 12). Jordan’s book has been invaluable for my research on this topic, although he does not discuss Boyle’s passage. See Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1 (London: Verso Books, 1994), 1–24, for a useful summary of the debate. Margaret T. Hodgson, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 213–15, assumes that “monogenism” rules out racialism. Richard Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 197–242, argues that religion, law, and language rather than biology marked earlier European responses to different ethnic groups. 4. See G. K. Hunter, “Elizabethans and Foreigners” and “Othello and Colour Prejudice,” in Dramatic Identities and Cultural Traditions: Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978), 3–30, 31–59; Peter Mark, Africans in European Eyes: The Portrayal of Black Africans in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century Europe (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1974); Mark, “European Perceptions of Black Africans in the Renaissance,” in Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory, ed. Ezio Bassani and William B. Fagg (New York: Cen-

“The Explication of Whiteness and Blackness”

189

colonialism disagree about whether racism emerged as a result of slavery and capitalism, or existed in some form before.5 Anthropologists and historians who study the early modern period from the point of view of American studies claim that savagery is the precursor to the concept of race, since the English associated savagery with the Irish and, later, with other peoples.6 Some critics, though, argue that the attempt to recover what alternate concepts influenced the English at the time involves erasing the issue to such an extent that the culture is inaccurately approached as “race-neutral.”7 These critics contend that racialized discourse emerged in the early modern period, and that such discourse had material effects. Nevertheless, little has been done to trace the links between seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century science. Such a study needs to take into account the relationship among Protestantism, the new science, the slave trade, and the socioeconomic formations that ensured their coordination. In this essay, I will argue that Boyle moved science toward racialization by giving skin color a new prominence as an object of study and experiment. I juxtapose the works of Robert Boyle and Margaret Cavendish to suggest that studies of race and science in the early modern period lead inevitably to a study of gender, because white European women, like people of other ethnicities, were relentlessly excluded from the institution of science as trustworthy witnesses, yet continually selected as appropriate objects of study. The efforts within the new science to explain the birth process according to a mechanistic philosophy made it likely that women would be primarily equated with the “machine” of the reproductive body.8 We will see that, in Boyle’s

ter for African Art, 1988), 21–31; and Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972). 5. See Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; Jordan, White over Black; Allen, Invention of the White Race; and Robert Miles, Racism (London: Routledge, 1989). 6. See Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a World View (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 41–71; Ronald Takaki, In a Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 21–50. 7. Hall, Things of Darkness, 261, makes this argument and uses this term. See also Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. the introduction; Hendricks, “Civility, Barbarism, and Aphra Behn’s Widow Ranter,” 225–39; and Margaret Ferguson, “Juggling the Categories of Race, Class, and Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” 211–12. Also useful is Peter Erickson, “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance,” Criticism 35 (1993): 499–527. 8. See Caroline Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), 149–63; Joseph Needham, A History of Embryology (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1959), 109–14; Richard Wilson, “Observations on English

190

Cristina Malcolmson

chapter on skin color, women are situated as the primary site for the introduction and passage of color characteristics. Nevertheless, it is a fallacy to suggest that sexism against European women at the time was equivalent to the injustices of slavery, or that the experience of sexism equipped European women to see through racialized ideologies. Cavendish’s exclusion from the schools and the Royal Society because she was a woman energized her questioning of accepted methods. Because of the fascination with reproduction and the fetus in the Royal Society, a childless female intellectual would have been a uniquely problematic guest. However, Cavendish’s own position as a European Christian determined that her analysis of Eurocentrism would be limited, and that she, like the Royal Society, would justify the imperialism necessary to the development of England as the leading slave-trading nation. Robert Boyle examines both optics and skin color in Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) in part because of his skeptical rejection of Aristotelian science and traditional beliefs.9 Boyle’s treatise is largely made up of experiments with light, spectrums, and chemicals in order to counter Aristotle’s view that color is inherent in the object. But Experiment XI, titled “The Blackness of the Skin, and Hair of Negroes,” is not an experiment in the modern sense, but rather a gathering of information to refute traditional “Notions” or myths of black skin. It is not clear why Boyle included this chapter amid experiments with mercury and prisms; it surprises us, but Boyle may have actually believed that skin color is a subject for physics, as Sir Thomas Browne did in 1646. Or he may have wanted to call attention to his method of exBodies: Licensing Maternity in Shakespeare’s Late Plays,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 121–50, esp. 125–27; and Rachel Trubowitz, “Crossed-Dressed Women and Natural Mothers: ‘Boundary Panic’ in Hic Mulier,” in Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700, ed. Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki (New York: Palgrave, 2002), forthcoming. 9. Boyle, Experiments and Considerations, 161. Page numbers are hereinafter cited parenthetically. Experiment XI (151–67) is one of fifteen in “Experiments in Consort, Touching Whiteness and Blackness,” which is in turn part of “Of the Nature of Whiteness and Blackness,” pt. 2 of Boyle’s work. Pt. 1 reviews the prevailing views on color and gives Boyle’s own; pt. 3 provides experiments on a variety of colors. The treatise is significant not only for its theory about white and black discussed later in this essay but also for its many experiments in chemistry and with prisms. The treatise was crucial to Newton’s discoveries. See the introduction by Marie Boas Hall in the facsimile of the 1664 edition (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1964), vii– xxvi. See also the new edition of Boyle’s work in The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, vol. 4 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), 4:xi–xvi, 3–184. For Aristotle’s account of colors, see the introduction to The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton, ed. Alan E. Shapiro, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2–4.

“The Explication of Whiteness and Blackness”

191

periment, the gathering of “matters of fact,” as far more important than the results of particular experiments. Boyle uses his skepticism to dismiss the accepted theories that blackness stems from the heat of the sun as a kind of sunburn, or that it is the result of the biblical curse of Cham. He finally offers instead the hypothesis that black skin is inherited through what he calls “some peculiar and seminal impression,” or, according to one of his major sources, Thomas Browne in “Of the Blackness of Negroes,” “the generation and sperm of Negroes.”10 Boyle lists several arguments that refute traditional beliefs: the heat of the sun could not cause blackness because people in the same latitude have different complexions, African children turn black without exposure to the sun, transplanted black Africans do not lose their color, and peoples on two sides of the same river have different kinds of complexion. So with the theory of the curse: Boyle considers that the Bible does not identify the cursed Cham with black skin, that Africans consider whiteness—not blackness—a curse, and that standards of beauty are relative. Boyle also cites details that support the theory of inherited qualities: interracial sex produces a “distinct sort of men”; relations between Portuguese men and Ethiopian women can result in one white and one black twin; and transplanted white people may become sunburned, but never as dark as Africans can be. Boyle organizes the chapter according to the method that historians of science Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer have identified as characteristic of the Royal Society, through a collection of “matters of fact” rather than governing theories.11 For Boyle, theories interfere with the proper assessment of knowledge, and lead the mind into argument rather than competent observation. Experiment XI, 17 pages long, in fact repeats the organizing principle of the entire treatise on colors, 422 pages long. Boyle remarks on his purpose in Experiment XI “to satisfie myself in matters of fact . . . it being my Present Work to deliver rather matters Historical than Theoryes,” and, as he puts it in the preface to the work as a whole, “That the professed Design of this Treatise is 10. Browne, Pseudodoxia, bk. 6, chaps. 10–12, in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1912), 380. Browne was also engaged in experiments on generation and embryology; see Needham, A History of Embryology, 131–33. Jordan shows how conventional much of Browne’s and Boyle’s commentaries are, although not the linking with physics or Boyle’s connection of the issue with experiment (White over Black, 1–43). 11. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 22–24, 69, 77–78. For an opposing view on “matters of fact,” see Rose-Mary Sargent, “Scientific Experiment and Legal Expertise: The Way of Experience in Seventeenth-Century England,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20 (1989): 19–45.

192

Cristina Malcolmson

to deliver things rather Historical than Dogmatical” (152, sig. A2). As Shapin and Schaffer point out, though, these “matters of fact” obscure the role of human agency in the making of an item of knowledge. In Experiment XI, these “facts” are presented by Boyle as “mirrors of nature,” not knowledge produced by self-interested Europeans. Boyle’s sources include European ambassadors, travelers, “good Authors,” doctors in Brazil, Englishmen in the Congo and Angola, and slave owners in the West Indies. One of Boyle’s motives for collecting these “Observations” soon becomes clear: he intends to show that all groups of people, no matter how diverse, came from the same source, Adam and Eve. “That a Race of Negroes might be begun, though none of the Sons of Adam for many Precedent Generations were of that Complexion” (166).12 Here we see Boyle’s own governing theories emerge, despite his skepticism, including his faith in the one creation of God, and his devotion to biblical history. Although these views are positive because they result in a belief in one mankind, one species, rather than the nineteenth-century scientific claim of different races, it is also clear that Boyle assumes that Adam and Eve were originally white. This primal whiteness can turn black, Boyle suggests, just as black people can give birth to whites (or albinos, a category unknown to Boyle). These changes can enter through the imagination, according to Boyle. He tells a story of a woman staring at red pebbles in St. Winifred’s Well who gave birth to a child “whose White skin was Copiously speckl’d with spots of the Colour and Bigness of those Stones.” Just as certain groups acquire different features, “upon what account soever they came to be settled in the first Individual persons, from whom they are Propagated to Posterity,” so the Chinese have “little feet,” and “most Nations of Negroes” have “Blobber-Lips and Flat-Noses” (162–63).13 Boyle’s theory of one human species may be preferable to nineteenth-century notions of biologically distinct “races,” but the assumptions implicit in his narrative of “facts” include the implication that European Christians have inherited from Adam and Eve not only their color but also a physical and cultural superiori12. On monogenism, see n. 3, and esp. Hodgson, Early Anthropology, 207–53. See also Browne, Pseudodoxia, 377; and Jordan, White over Black, 12–13, 248. 13. See also Browne, Pseudodoxia, 375–76; and Jordan, White over Black, 249–52. The theory that the mother’s imagination influenced the fetus was associated with Hippocrates and Paracelsus; it is surprising to find it in the work of Boyle, who is primarily identified with mechanistic philosophy and its dualism between mind and body. See Needham, A History of Embryology, 80; Merchant, Death of Nature, 161; and Clara Pinto-Correia, The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 128–32. Thanks to Stephen Clucas for his help on this issue.

“The Explication of Whiteness and Blackness”

193

ty associated with their biblical religion. Other groups are presented to some extent as having degenerated from this original source, as having undergone what he calls a “Discolouring” (152). Following from this white superiority is the validation of Europeans as scientific witnesses, and nonwhite peoples as bodies for experiment.14 His account of Gulielmus Piso’s dissection of “many Negroes” in Brazil and a physician’s similar work in England constructs whiteness as normal and black skin as peculiar, since “their Blackness went no deeper than the very outward Skin . . . the undermost Skin or Cutis appear’d just as White as that of Europaean Bodyes” (164). It is also significant that only the dissection of black Africans, not white Europeans, is mentioned, as if only blackness needed explanation. Boyle’s interest in skin color ensured that the scientific experiments in the colonies would include dissections of black bodies as well as experiments on living Africans in order to discover “the cause of Blackness,” a celebrated investigative goal that continued for at least one hundred years. Two years after the 1664 publication of Boyle’s work on color, he developed and published “General Heads for a Natural History of a Country,” questions sent out with English merchant sailors traveling along the new trade routes to Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean and with Englishmen in the American colonies. These questions solicited information on the natural world, as well as on the “Stature, shape, Colour, Features . . . Complexions, Hair” of the inhabitants. “Inhabitants” are conceived of as only male, since questions about women are distinguished by, and limited almost entirely to, issues about childbirth.15 By 1686 the museum of the Royal Society in London included “the entire SKIN of a Moor.” The skin from head to foot had been preserved by tanning, and, in the catalog, it is put in opposition to “A Male Humane Foetus,” whose skin is “white and smooth.” To be a male human is to be white; to be a Moor is to be notable because of one’s skin. Women exhibited are also assumed to be white, but primarily associated with the reproductive womb.16 Between 1690 and 1765 the publications of the Royal Society, The Philosophical Transactions, include observations on or experiments practiced on black Africans in America by Englishmen trying to determine the effect of the change of climate on 14. See Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 39; Harding, Is Science Multicultural? 48–50; and Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the AirPump, 55–60. 15. Boyle, “General Heads,” in Works of Boyle, ed. Hunter and Davis, 5:186–89. 16. Nehemiah Grew, Musaeum Regalis Societatis; or, A Catalogue and Description of the Natural and Artificial Rarities Belonging to the Royal Society and Preserved at Gresham Colledge (London: Thomas Malthus, 1686), 3–8. Thanks to Harriet Knight for this reference.

194

Cristina Malcolmson

skin color. Albinos with black African parents continued to be a subject of fascination, as if they were evidence for Boyle’s theory that black could turn into white, and therefore white could turn into black.17 Boyle’s letters, notebooks, and papers record numerous stories sent to him from various locations in response to his interest in skin color. One reported that “the queen of France is brought to bed of a daughter of eight months, which hath the Shape of a Moor, and somewhat of that complexion; whence that the king is so enraged, that he hath banished all the Moors, dwarfs, and monkies, from his court, the queen having a little Moor about her that seems to have so tainted her imagination, as to give such a colour and such features, that resemble him.” Again, women are the dangerous sites for the passage of color characteristics, whether through the imagination or sexuality, and these features are seen as a “taint” polluting European whiteness and royalty.18 Another report to Boyle by a traveler to Brazil focuses on the power of the sun to affect the color of flowers, fabrics, and finally humans, as the traveler or the secretary records that “White People” became “basanner” in that climate, a word that refers to sheepskin tanned in bark and turned to leather.19 Finally, in 1743, Dr. John Mitchell of Virginia submitted a fifty-page study of “the Causes of the different colours of People in different Climates” and, particularly, “that strange Phaenomenon in Nature, the Cause of the Colour of Negroes,” in which he argued that Newton’s work on colors could provide the answer.20 Philosophers were interested in theories about color in the early modern period in part because of the role that optics played in the history of skepticism. Nevertheless, that skepticism was rarely used to question Western European values. Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi were engaged in responding to a radical skepticism that called into question the ability of the senses to report accurately on the external world. Marin Mersenne and Gassendi developed what Richard Popkin has called a “constructive or miti-

17. See Royal Society, The Philosophical Transactions, 19:781–82 (1696), 51:175–78 (1759), 55:45–53 (1765); and Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970). 18. Henry Oldenberg, letter to Boyle, November 19, 1664, in Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch, vol. 5 (London: A. Miller, 1794), 324. 19. Robert Boyle Papers, Royal Society, London, 27:113. 20. Mitchell, “Essay upon Different Colours of People” (1744), in The Philosophical Transactions (by the Royal Society) 43 (1744–1745): 102–50. Jordan discusses Mitchell in White over Black, 245–48. Mitchell suggests that the Academy of Bordeaux may have been offering a prize for the solution to this problem in 1745 (102). If so, such investigations were widespread and extended beyond English scientists.

“The Explication of Whiteness and Blackness”

195

gated skepticism.” For Popkin, this constructive skepticism was the beginning of what he calls “the scientific outlook.”21 This outlook led to the work of Isaac Newton, who settled many of the debates by arguing that colors are not modifications of light created by deflecting bodies, but that “light itself is a Heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible Rays.”22 Newton demonstrated what many had been hinting at, as Robert Boyle puts it, that “Colour is so far from being an inherent quality of the object in the sense that is wont to be declared by the schools . . . that, if we consider the matter more attentively, we shall see cause to suspect, if not conclude, that . . . light itself produces the sensation of color” (11). Color is not in the object, but in light and in the eye of the beholder. Such a discovery might indeed lead one to distrust not only sense reports, but conventional accounts about nonwhite peoples as well. Since the scientific evidence on color is so counterintuitive, it could lead one to examine other cherished cultural assumptions, such as the distinction between “Christian” and “Infidel” so important to Boyle. In fact, Boyle does use his new theories about color as a basis for questioning the myths about skin color traditionally accepted by his society. It is important to note, however, that the skepticism in the accounts of skin color by Browne and Boyle never goes too far: although their comments assert with pleasure that in “Black Nations . . . they paint the Devil white,” thus turning European bias on its head, they never ultimately question the superiority of European Christian values, although such a position was available to them in the famous cultural relativism of the skeptic Michel Montaigne (160).23 This suggests that the “scientific outlook” that Popkin praises led not only to the discoveries of Newton, but also to the Eurocentrism of the Royal Society. 21. Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 99, 129. See also Richard Tuck, “Optics and Sceptics: The Philosophical Foundations of Hobbes’ Political Thought,” in Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 235– 63. On Hobbes and the Cavendish circle, see Anna Battigelli, “Political Thought/Political Action: Margaret Cavendish’s Hobbesian Dilemma,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998). Thanks to Jean-Vincent Blanchard for pointing out to me the importance of skepticism for Boyle and Cavendish. 22. Newton quoted in A. I. Sabra, Theories of Light from Descartes to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 240. On theories of color, see Shapiro, ed. Optical Papers, 1–10; and Sabra, Theories of Light. 23. See Jordan, White over Black, 9–10. For Popkin on Montaigne, see History of Skepticism, 42–65, esp. 50.

196

Cristina Malcolmson

Boyle’s claim that skin color is an inherited quality, and that white was the original human color, is matched by another contradictory implication, not explicitly voiced, that skin color should properly be considered under the auspices of a contrast between white and black, a contrast made even more polar when linked with scientific accounts of the physics of white and black. Boyle’s treatise is in fact most important in the history of optics since it affirms accurately that objects are seen as white because they reflect all light, and objects are seen as black because they absorb all light (xiv–xv). However, this scientific definition of the contrary nature of the two colors has specific ideological implications for beliefs about skin color. Skin color never achieves the stark opposition possible to the black and white of physics (white people are never actually white).24 In addition, the passage collapses all cultural differences into one, since the varieties of skin color that Boyle mentions—including tawny, olive colored, darkish brown—are considered finally only in terms of a contrast between white and black. The chapter on skin color is included in a section called “Experiments in Consort, Touching Whiteness and Blackness,” and Boyle tells us that he included this section on white and black amid a work on the variety of colors because the “Whiteness and Blackness ought to be call’d, as they commonly are, the two Extreme Colours,” because “by reason of their mutual Opposition [they are] the Least hardly explicable,” and because of “those two Qualities being Contrary enough to Illustrate each other” (120, 94, 116). So Boyle’s account moves his readers to imagine all cultural difference in terms of black Africans and white Europeans, who are perhaps part of one race, but nevertheless by implication “Contrary,” “Extreme” in difference, “by reason of their mutual Opposition.” In 1663, a year before Boyle’s treatise on colors was published, England officially entered the slave trade, and Robert Boyle was a central participant. That year, the king granted to the Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa a charter that for the first time mentioned buying “Negroes” in Africa for the purpose of selling them to West Indian plantation owners. At that time, Boyle was serving on the Council for Foreign Plantations, as he had from 1660. In addition, he was for many years the director of the East India Company, which had traded in Africa until 1660. In 1662 he was named governor of “the Company for the propagation of the Gospel in New England and the parts adjacent in America.” Much of his engagement in plantation settlements must have seemed natural to him, as he had been born on a Protestant plantation 24. I am indebted to William Pope.L for his comments on this paper, particularly on how whiteness operates to place itself at the center of all important relationships.

“The Explication of Whiteness and Blackness”

197

in Ireland and had inherited property in Ireland from his father, who himself had been a planter and a spokesperson for Protestant imperial aims in Ireland from 1602 to 1643.25 There is some debate within Boyle studies about whether his interest in trade and wealth, either for himself or for the nation, was as important to him as the conversion of American Indians, East Indians, African slaves, and Irish Catholics to Protestantism. Nonetheless, this debate does not acknowledge that Protestant activism had from the outset mixed religion and enterprise, and that foreign settlements brought closer into view the final Protestant goal of establishing the religion worldwide.26 In Experiment XI, Boyle imagines that the remarkable variety of peoples that he was engaged with as an English official originally came from one source, thus justifying the purpose of bring25. See Charles M. Andrews, “The Acts of Trade,” chap. 9 in The Cambridge History of the British Empire, 1:268–99, esp. 268–70; J. R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), 144–49; and Nicholas Canny, The Upstart Earl: A Study of the Social and Mental World of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, 1566–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 6–8, 128 ff. On Boyle’s role in the East India Company and “in the spread of Christianity,” see Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Hon. Robert Boyle.” R. E. W. Maddison gives the full name of the “Corporation” in The Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle (London: Taylor and Francis, 1969), 260. Between 1646 and 1664, the sugar crop became primary in the West Indies, and the “triangular trade” began: English textiles to Africa, African slaves to the West Indies, sugar to England. The trade was supported by permission granted to the Spanish to purchase slaves from the British in the Caribbean. Between 1672 and 1687, the Royal Africa Company transported five thousand black Africans a year, and England came to dominate the slave trade. See Eveline C. Martin, “The English Slave Trade and the African Settlements,” chap. 15 in The Cambridge History of the British Empire, ed. J. Holland Rose, A. P. Newton, and E. A Benians (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 1:437–59, esp. 440–42; Peter Fryer, “The Triangular Trade,” in Black People in the British Empire: An Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 1988), 5–16; and P. E. H. Hair and Robin Law, “The English in Western Africa to 1700,” in The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny, vol. 1 of The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 241–63. Hair and Law, however, misrepresent Winthrop Jordan’s purpose and argument (249 n. 26). 26. Michael Hunter contests J. R. Jacob’s claim that Boyle pursued the interrelated goals of science, trade, and empire by arguing that Boyle believed “private interests” conflicted with the “public good,” but Hunter ignores the extent to which “the public good” was associated for Protestants with developing trade and empire (Jacob, Robert Boyle, 133–59; Hunter, ed., Robert Boyle by Himself and His Friends [London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997], lxviii–lxx). See my book Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5–6, 179–204, for an account of how contempt for “private interest” was linked with imperial aims. For other critiques of Jacob’s book and Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump, see Hunter, Robert Boyle Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), including Malcolm Ostler, “Virtue, Providence, and Political Neutralism: Boyle and Interregnum Politics,” 19–36. Surprisingly, none of these scholars address Boyle’s Experiment XI.

198

Cristina Malcolmson

ing them all back together into one worldwide religion. He also sets himself apart from all of these groups through the “mutual Opposition” between white and black. It is interesting to note that, while representatives of the Royal Society in the mainland American colonies were pursuing Boyle’s studies on skin color through their own experiments, the colonists were in the process of emphasizing the color contrast between white and black in order to divide English indentured servants from African slaves, undermine the possibility of a united rebellion, and ensure that miscegenation was minimal.27 Anxiety about miscegenation is in fact a strong undercurrent in the evidence provided by Boyle that skin color is inherited. His scientific purpose is to demonstrate that mankind is one species, that white can turn into black, and vice versa. Nevertheless, his examples voice a different fear: that the line between infidel and Christian is fundamental yet almost impossible to enforce. He records the testimony of a white slave owner in the West Indies who told that the children of his slaves were first born a “reddish-color” but soon became black (164). Beneath this “scientific” observation is the slave owner’s concern over the potential mulatto status of these children, since mulattoes were accorded more rights than Africans in the West Indies.28 Boyle includes the stories of Andrew Battel about Portuguese men in Luanga near the Congo who first thought they were fathers to children of “Negroe-women,” since these infants were born with light skin, but when the infants eventually turned black, the Portuguese “greatly grieve[d]” over this “proof” that the child was “the Son or Daughter of a Negroe.” A Jesuit in South America baptized children born “much of the same Colour with European Babes,” but found out within a week that they had taken on the dark skin of their parents. The Jesuit’s purpose was Boyle’s own, “the Laudable Design of Converting Infidels to Christianity,” but the dilemma of interracial sex made it impossible to tell when a black African woman had given birth to an infidel or a Christian, whether the child was enslaved or free (164–65). Although tradition and Boyle’s purposes dictated that the distinction between Christian and infidel take precedence over color categories, these examples show how consistently color was used at this time to divide European and non-European.29 Just as 27. The mainland as opposed to the Caribbean colonies made no distinction between “Negro” and “mulatto,” and gave the latter no special privileges. See Winthrop Jordan, “American Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definition of Mulattoes in the British Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly 19 (1962): 182–200; Donald L. Horowitz, “Color Differentiation in the American Systems of Slavery,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3:3 (winter 1973): 509–51; and Allen, Invention of the White Race, 17. 28. See Horowitz, “Color Differentiation,” 511; and Jordan, White over Black, 248–49. 29. On the greater emphasis on religion, law, and language rather then pigmentation during

“The Explication of Whiteness and Blackness”

199

Boyle’s theory of inherited qualities focuses attention on the “production of the mixtures of different people,” so his examples give telling proof of the grief suffered by Europeans who cannot dependably enforce the crucial difference between white and black that their cultural and economic position is beginning to require. In 1666 Margaret Cavendish published Observations upon Experimental Philosophy with a companion piece, The Blazing World.30 This fictional account describes a woman abducted from her home and taken to a “new world” where she becomes empress, wife of the emperor. One of Cavendish’s purposes in combining the two works is to suggest that there is a fine line between truth and fiction, especially in the findings of experimental philosophers such as Robert Boyle.31 Thus, she parodies his coordination of the physics of color with skin color in the following passage: Their priests and governors were princes of the imperial blood, and made eunuchs for that purpose; and as for the ordinary sort of men in that part of the world where the Emperor resided, they were of several complexions; not white, black, tawny, olive or ash-coloured; but some appeared of an azure, some of a deep purple, some of a grass-green, some of a scarlet, some of an orange-colour, etc. Which colours and complexions, whether they were made by the bare reflection of light, without the assistance of small particles, or by the help of well-ranged and ordered atoms; or by a continual agitation of little globules; or by some pressing and reacting motion, I am not able to determine. (133)

the medieval period and later, see Hodgson, Early Anthropology, 213–15; and Bartlett, Making of Europe, 197–242. Jordan argues that “the opening of West Africa and the development of Negro slavery” made color a more urgent issue for the English (White over Black, 6, 12). For useful commentary, see Daryl W. Palmer, “Merchants and Miscegenation,” in Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, ed. Joyce Green MacDonald (Madison: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1997), 36–37, 62–63. 30. Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy: To which Is Added, the Description of a New Blazing World and Other Writings (London, 1666). I quote in this essay from the modern edition The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (London: Penguin Books, 1992), which excludes the Observations. While enormously grateful for this edition, I urge the publication of the original joint text, since the present edition substantiates all the prejudices against science that literature instructors traditionally hold and that Cavendish did not share. It also makes the analysis of The Blazing World much more difficult, since the links with the Observations are not clarified in the modern edition. However, see Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. Eileen O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 31. See Cavendish, “To the Reader,” in Blazing World, 123–24. Page numbers are hereinafter cited parenthetically.

200

Cristina Malcolmson

In this passage, Cavendish suggests the absurdity of conflating the possible varieties of skin color with the prism-produced colors of the spectrum so celebrated in Boyle’s experiments. She satirizes as well the range of theories of color available at the time: from the atomists (the small particles), Descartes (the little globules), and Hobbes (the pressing and reacting motion) (187–88).32 She turns Boyle’s fascination with miscegenation and “the mixtures of different peoples” back on himself and his fellow scientists: The rest of the inhabitants of that world were men of several different sorts, shapes, figures, dispositions, and humours. . . . [S]ome were bear-men, some worm-men, some fish- or mear-men, otherwise called syrens; some bird-men, some fly-men, some ant-men, some geese-men, some spider-men, some licemen . . . and of these several sorts of men, each followed such a profession as was most proper for the nature of their species, which the Empress encouraged them in, especially those that had applied themselves to the study of several arts and sciences. . . . [T]he bear-men were to be her experimental philosophers, the bird-men her astronomers, the fly-, worm-, and fish-men her natural philosophers, the ape-men her chemists, the satyrs her Galenic physicians, the fox-men her politicians, the spider- and lice-men her mathematicians. (133–34)33

In this remarkable passage, Cavendish uses the utopian genre not only to evoke the curiosities of the New World, but also to imply that English scientists are specimens even more curious than the New World populations they like to study. The hybrid nature of these scientists comically undermines their credibility as it takes revenge on the male-centered institutions that excluded Cavendish from intellectual and scientific discourse. In The Blazing World, Cavendish predicts the agenda of her famous visit to the Royal Society a year later when she describes the lice-men performing an experiment with an air pump for the empress. Her satire is strong: “Then came the lice-men, and endeavored to measure all things to a hair’s breadth, and weigh them to an atom; but their weights would seldom agree, especially in the weighing of the air, which they found a task impossible to be done; at which the Empress began to be displeased, and told them, that there was nei32. On atomism, see Robert Hugh Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). On Descartes, see Boyle, Experiments and Considerations, 85; and Shapiro, Optical Papers, 7–8. On Hobbes, see “Of Light, Heat, and of Colours,” in Elements of Philosophy Concerning Body (London: Leybourn, 1656), pt. 4, chap. xxvii. 33. Thanks to Lillian Nayder for her comments on this paper, and for pointing out to me Cavendish’s use of the half-breed to satirize Boyle, as well as the grotesqueness of the imagery.

“The Explication of Whiteness and Blackness”

201

ther truth nor justice in their profession, and so dissolved their society” (159– 60).34 The Royal Society’s record of the duchess’s visit the next year, on May 30, 1667, is not satiric and more matter-of-fact: The duchess of Newcastle coming in, the experiments appointed for her entertainment were made: First, that of weighing the air, which was done with a glass receiver of the capacity of nine gallons and three pints: which being exhausted, and put into a scale, and then opened, and the air let in, weighed thereupon one ounce and seventy-one carats more than it did when exhausted. Mr. BOYLE suggested afterwards, that a gage might be employed to know how much air was left, which was ordered to be done. Next were made several experiments of mixing colors. . . . After the duchess was withdrawn, Mr. HOOKE was put in mind of the experiment of measuring the earth in St. James park, to be tried there on the Monday morning following.35

Although the minutes of the previous meeting of the Royal Society, on May 23, suggest quite strongly that the members of the society had agreed that Cavendish would not enter the record in any way that mattered, particularly as a scientific thinker, Anna Battigelli has recently shown that the events on May 30 were carefully orchestrated to defend the experimental method of Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke against the charges leveled at them in Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy published the year before.36 One of the experiments, weighing the air, depended upon the famous air pump, which both Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes had criticized as symptomatic of the Royal Society’s emphasis on experiment rather than deductive reasoning, a debate analyzed by Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. What critics have not noticed is that, for Cavendish’s visit, Boyle mounted his defense also in terms of her attack on his work Experiments and Considerations Touching 34. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 225–82, point out that the scientists associated with the Royal Society found it difficult to reproduce the findings of air pumps. 35. Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, vol. 2 (London, 1746), 177– 78. 36. In the society’s record of the discussion of plans for Cavendish’s visit, this note is made, “It being moved again, that such instances, as are to be inserted in the History of the Society, might be resolved upon, it was ordered, that it should be left to the president and DR. WILKINS to agree upon such, as they think fit for that purpose” (ibid., 175–76). See Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish, 110–13; and Boyle, Experiments, table of contents, 26.

202

Cristina Malcolmson

Colours. As he proceeded with his “several experiments mixing colors,” he may have been specifically concerned to defend his authority against Cavendish’s charge that his experiments were just as fanciful as her works of fiction, particularly his experiment on “The Blackness of the Skin, and Hair of Negroes.” Indeed, members of the Royal Society may have put the word out that Boyle would be defending his work on color during Cavendish’s visit: one attendant on May 30 was Samuel Pepys, who read Boyle’s 1664 work on color between the period of April 28 and June 2, 1667, just preceding and just after Cavendish’s visit.37 We have no evidence that Boyle read The Blazing World; if he did, Cavendish’s pointed satire of his purposes may have hit home, particularly the description of the lice-men weighing the air, and in part determined the day’s events during her visit. Nevertheless, Cavendish’s representation of scientists as half-breeds—half-human–half-animal or, as in the case of the lice-men, halfhuman–half-insect—includes its own sense of the grotesque outcome of mixing cherished categories. Certainly, Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle, expresses her contempt for, and perhaps as well her own class superiority over, the professionals in the Royal Society.38 However, because these hybrid figures represent not only English scientists but also inhabitants of a new world, the imagery includes a fear that the association of the English with nonEuropeans is a linking with the bestial. Cavendish does not insist on a difference between white and black, but she does rescue Christian hierarchy from the mixture of colors she permits. The main point of the passage is in fact that diversity should submit to unified imperial power: Next, [the empress] asked, why they preferred the monarchical form of government before any other? They answered, that as it was natural for one body to have but one head, so it was also natural for a politic body to have but one governor; and that a commonwealth, which had many governors was like a monster with many heads: besides, said they, monarchy is a divine form of government, and agrees most with our religion; for as there is but one God, whom we all unanimously worship and adore with one faith, so we are resolved to have but one Emperor, to whom we all submit with one obedience. (134)

Here the monstrous reappears not as lice-men but as the cultural relativism 37. Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1974), 8:188, 236, 247. 38. Thanks to Michael Armstrong Roche for this point.

“The Explication of Whiteness and Blackness”

203

that a strong form of skepticism would demand. Cavendish rejects such relativism not only for the royalist government of England, but for overseas exploration as well, now firmly controlled under the auspices of one emperor and “one God.” As with Boyle, so for Cavendish, religious oneness becomes a justification for worldwide rule. The belief in one God from whom all diverse peoples flow does not ensure equality but licenses “the imperial race,” the English, to colonize and enslave. Although optics could give rise to skeptics, it was finally used to underwrite empire.

William Shullenberger

Milton’s Lady and Lady Milton Chastity, Prophecy, and Gender in A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle

It seems that whenever one ventures to comment on Milton, one risks treading on, and opening up, a fault line in the field of English Renaissance studies. This became startlingly evident to me at a recent conference, where I had read a paper on the poetics of the Lady’s Echo Song in Milton’s A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle. The moderator of the panel took me to task for implying that Milton developed progressive attitudes toward women’s roles and women’s speech that were anachronistically at odds with seventeenth-century English Protestant conceptions of gender roles and relations in general, and with the evidence of Milton’s misogyny in particular. I had not intended for the paper to be so provocative, in part because I had naively assumed that the gender wars of the 1970s and 1980s over Milton and women were behind us. Instead, I rediscovered that Milton—or that complex of text and history that we agree to designate “Milton”—continues to be a contested site, a fault line in the field, on this topic and many others. The following essay enters more directly into these controversies by considering Milton’s imaginative gender crossing in his creation of, and identification with, the heroic Lady of his Maske. It is my contention that chastity in the Maske is the gender crossroad where Milton discovers his prophetic voice, and that this voice, as articulated by the Lady, activates and authorizes, rather than appropriates and suppresses, a public speaking site for liberatory female speech. The essay thus engages at least three unsettled and unsettling questions in contemporary Milton studies: the question of whether the radicalism of Milton the English revolutionary is already evident in his early poetry, the question of the meaning of chastity for Milton’s poetry and poetics, and the question of Milton’s politics and theology of gender.1 1. Relevant critical texts that engage these questions will be cited in the course of the essay.

204

Milton’s Lady and Lady Milton

205

At the climax of her refutation of Comus’s libertine blandishments, the Lady makes it clear that she will not walk his walk or talk his talk: Thou hast nor Ear nor Soul to apprehend The sublime notion and high mystery That must be utter’d to unfold the sage And serious doctrine of Virginity, And thou art worthy that thou shouldst not know More happiness than this thy present lot. ................................ Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinc’t; Yet should I try, the uncontrolled worth Of this pure cause would kindle my rapt spirits To such a flame of sacred vehemence, That dumb things would be mov’d to sympathize, And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and shake, Till all thy magic structures rear’d so high, Were shatter’d into heaps o’er thy false head.2

The Lady is Milton’s first fully developed hero of faith. Her profession of virginity is a declaration of independence, an early proclamation of the source of the Christian liberty that Milton committed his life to defining and defending. Milton’s addition of this passage for the 1637 publication of the Maske makes explicit the dramatization of his own calling in the words and acts of the Lady. A rite of passage from childhood into womanhood for the Lady, the Maske is also Milton’s initiation of himself into maturity as a prophetic poet. Critics have noticed that the Lady’s profession of virginity is one of Milton’s most fervent expressions of his personal “chastity cult.” Although this phrase vividly indexes the particular and central place of chastity in Milton’s ethics My fundamental agreement with critics who have delineated the reformist and radical implications of the early poetry, and of the Maske in particular, will be evident. For critical attention to ambivalences and contradictions in Milton’s early radicalism, see David Loewenstein, “‘Fair Offspring Nurs’t in Princely Lore’: On the Question of Milton’s Early Radicalism,” Milton Studies 28 (1992): 37–48; and Annabel Patterson, “‘Forc’d Fingers’: Milton’s Early Poems and Ideological Constraint,” in “The Muses Commonweale”: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), 96–113. 2. Milton, John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), ll. 784–89, 792–99. Line or page numbers, as applicable, are hereinafter cited parenthetically, with Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes designated PL, PR, and SA, respectively.

206

William Shullenberger

and poetics, the term cult, connoting eccentric and extremist variations on religious doctrine or practice, or the obsession-compulsion of neurotic private ritual, quietly implicates Milton in aesthetic pathology. Christopher Kendrick notes that the Maske powerfully centralizes a series of correlative virtues into the singular sexual virtue of chastity, which “makes the stuff of chastity into the very form of virtue. From being one of many, chastity becomes the thing itself.” William Kerrigan diagnoses a kind of erotic and imaginative paralysis issuing from the impact of Milton’s peculiar convictions on the shaping of the Maske: “[A]t the center of the entertainment chastity narrows to virgin chastity, a state of the soul evolving from, and unable to detach itself from, a precondition of the body.”3 Chastity, in these diagnoses, is the self-disciplinary secret to the unique centripetal force of Milton’s imagination, but it is purchased at the cost of a wider range of humanizing virtues. Milton’s own claim, in the Maske and in the other key documents that articulate the doctrine, is that virginal chastity is the source of visionary power, lively in the making of heroic character, heroic poems, and heroic cultures. I want to revisit some of these other moments of self-disclosure in order to consider the logic of his position, and consider its implications for Milton’s projective identification with the Lady. Most crucial to the interpretation of the doctrine in the Maske are the Latin Sixth Elegy, which precedes the Maske by several years, and a key autobiographical passage from An Apology for Smectymnuus, which revisits the plot of the Maske several years after its initial publication. In the 1629 Sixth Elegy, the Latin companion piece to the “Nativity Ode,” Milton discloses to his friend Charles Diodati the austere regimen of temperance, chastity, and blameless conduct required of the vatic poet whose “secret heart and very lips breathe Jove” (78) in poems of epic scope and divine aspiration: But he who wars would tell, and heaven under Jove mature, And pious heroes, leaders half-divine, 3. Kendrick, “Milton and Sexuality: A Symptomatic Reading of Comus,” in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York and London: Methuen, 1988), 43, 62–63; Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 26. John Leonard clears the way for my essay with his closely argued exegetical refutation of the claim, first proposed by James Holly Hanford, and still influencing critics such as Kendrick and Kerrigan, that Milton staked his early poetry on a vow of celibacy (“Milton’s View of Celibacy: A Reconsideration of the Evidence,” in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. Paul G. Stanwood [Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995], 188–201).

Milton’s Lady and Lady Milton

207

And now the sacred consults of high gods would sing, And now the howling regions deep of the fierce dog, Let him the sparse rule of the Samian sage Observe; let herbs supply his harmless fare; Let brilliant water in his beech-wood bowl stand near; And let him draw his sober cups from the pure font. To this is joined a chaste youth, free from sin, Manners austere, and blameless hands unstained, As when you, augur, in holy vestments bright, From lustral waters rise to face the offended gods. (55–67; my translation)

Milton then cites a series of legendary poets and prophets whose visionary insight was the divine reward for such chaste asceticism: Tiresias, Linus, Calchas, Orpheus, and Homer. As the implied climax of this series of sacred bards, Milton concludes his verse letter by announcing his own recent poetic breakthrough in the celebratory ode: But if you would know what I do now, at least If you think it fit to know if I do anything, We sing the king who bears our peace, the seed of heaven, The blessed ages promised in the sacred books, God’s wailing, and his stabling beneath a humble roof, Who with his Father dwells in heaven supreme; The star-bearing sky, hosts warbling in the ethereal sphere, And gods expelled at once from their own fanes. These gifts have we raised up for Christ’s nativity, Gifts which the dawn’s first light on me bestowed. These strains await you as well, on native pipes composed, And of their worth, when I recite them, you will judge. (79–90; my translation)

This birth announcement demonstrates the providential efficacy of Milton’s regimen of chastity. His account of the history-transforming event of the Word made flesh coincides with Milton’s declaration of his own incarnation as a poet and prophet, who can, like Isaiah, “join [his] voice unto the Angel Choir, / From out his secret Altar touched with hallow’d fire” (“Nativity Ode,” 27– 28; cf. Isa. 6:6).4 Diodati, Milton’s soul mate, is a trustworthy correspondent, 4. For development of the incarnation theme in the language and imagery of the “Nativity Ode,” see my “Doctrine as Deep Structure in Milton’s Early Poetry,” in A Fine Tuning: Studies of the Religious Poetry of Herbert and Milton, ed. Mary A. Maleski (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989), 187–203.

208

William Shullenberger

and so the poet reveals to him what his prophetic persona, the Lady, will withhold from Comus, her untrustworthy adversary in the Maske: the “sage / And serious doctrine of Virginity,” and the “sublime notion and high mystery” of religious truth that it makes apprehensible (785–86, 784). During the heat and strife of the English Revolution’s pamphlet wars, the beleaguered poet includes in his autobiographical self-defense of 1642 an account of the earlier maturing of his convictions. In this section of An Apology for Smectymnuus, Milton’s account of chastity’s role in cultivating a poetic character committed to ethical and political reformation explicitly recalls the plot and the “abstracted sublimities” of his Maske: if I should tell ye what I learnt of chastity and love (I mean that which is truly so, whose charming cup is only virtue, which she bears in her hand to those who are worthy—the rest are cheated with a thick intoxicating potion which a certain sorceress, the abuser of love’s name, carries about) and how the first and chiefest office of love begins and ends in the soul, producing those happy twins of her divine generation, knowledge and virtue—with such abstracted sublimities as these, it might be worth your listening, readers, as I may one day hope to have ye in a still time, when there shall be no chiding; . . . But having had the doctrine of holy scripture unfolding those chaste and high mysteries with timeliest care infused, that “the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body,” thus also I argued to myself: that if unchastity in a woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be such a scandal and dishonor, then certainly in a man, who is both the image and glory of God, it must, though commonly not so thought, be much more deflowering and dishonorable; in that he sins both against his own body, which is the perfecter sex, and his own glory, which is in the woman, and that which is worst, against the image and glory of God, which is in himself. Nor did I slumber over that place expressing such high rewards of ever accompanying the Lamb with those celestial songs to others inapprehensible, but not to those who were not defiled with women, which doubtless means fornication; for marriage must not be called a defilement. (694–95)

Eight years after the performance of the Maske at Ludlow, and five years after its publication with the peroration on Virginity added to the Lady’s speech, Milton reads the drama of his own maturing convictions through the ordeal he has inscribed for the Lady. Having provided the rising poet the mythological screen for the projection and testing of his ideals, the Maske now provides the embattled polemicist a template for autobiography. The allegorical first sentence retraces both the ordeal and the outcome of the Lady’s temptation as a protoype of the poet’s own life of strenuous trial: the cup of sensual plea-

Milton’s Lady and Lady Milton

209

sure proffered by the Circe-figure, a parody and perversion of true love, and the promise of the “divine generation” of twins by the virtuous soul in love with God above all: “knowledge and virtue” in the pamphlet “Youth and Joy” (1010) in the Maske. An Apology further explicates what the discreet Lady has withheld from Comus about the “chaste and high mysteries” of a bodily life dedicated to God’s service. Milton indexes several scriptural reference points in which such mysteries can be contemplated: Now the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God both raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not! . . . But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. (1 Cor. 6:13–17; emphasis mine) But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. . . . For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. (1 Cor. 11:3, 7; emphasis mine) Then I looked, and behold, a Lamb standing on Mount Zion, and with Him one hundred and forty-four thousand, having His Father’s name written on their foreheads. And I heard a voice from heaven, like the voice of many waters, and like the voice of loud thunder. And I heard the sound of harpists playing their harps. And they sang as it were a new song before the throne, before the four living creatures, and the elders; and no one could hear that song except the hundred and forty-four thousand who were redeemed from the earth. These are the ones who were not defiled with women, for they are virgins. These are the ones who follow the Lamb wherever He goes. These were redeemed from among men, being firstfruits to God and to the Lamb. And in their mouth was found no guile, for they are without fault before the throne of God. (Rev. 14:1–5; emphasis mine)

These citations indicate that Milton’s “chastity cult” is less a unique private obsession than an effort at biblical exegesis whose aim is a Reformed theology of the body. This emerging theology of the body provides the foundation for a social theology as well, in that chastity is an exercise in relationship, with both God and others. Milton’s citation of Scripture in An Apology problematizes the conceptualization of chastity as a “female” virtue, by suggesting that it is a harder but all

210

William Shullenberger

the more necessary discipline for a man. Yet, in personifying chaste love as feminine, he also problematizes the traditional gender hierarchy of male superiority. Paradoxically, in order to honor “the image and glory of God, which is in himself” through the exercise of chastity, a man needs to model himself upon the feminine: “a chaste man is feminine, or identifies with the feminine in so far as he is chaste.”5 This identification complicates the apparently unexamined statement of male superiority in Milton’s claim that the man’s body “is the perfecter sex.” The parsing and distribution of glory in the passage invest identity and integrity in mutual relationship rather than in masculine autonomy. If the man must look to the woman to recognize his own glory, and look in himself for evidence of the image and glory of God, his identity discovers itself intersubjectively, in triangulation and mutuality. Identification with the woman reveals his own glory to him. His bodily “perfection” is thus complete not in the gaze of narcissistic self-regard, but in the body’s chaste participation in marital partnership. This dissolve between genders in An Apology looks back to the personal paradox that activates the Maske. In representing his own commitment to chastity, and to the poetry that it authorizes, Milton has chosen—or we might say the dynamic of chastity requires him— to represent himself as a Lady. In turn, it endows the Lady with a rhetorical strength and systematically principled ethic conventionally associated with virtuous manhood. The passage from An Apology also blurs the differentiation between virginity and chastity in a way that revisits the Maske’s dramatic interinanimation of the terms. Like the two genders, chastity and virginity are distinct yet indissoluble, completing and organizing one another as virtues. The organizing term that motivates the whole passage, indeed the whole self-defense of An Apology, is chastity. The allusion to the fit audience, though few, who hears the unexpressive nuptial song of the Lamb invokes the order of self-dedicated virgins of John’s Apocalypse, who alone would have ears to hear the divine music. Yet, Milton insists on a more generalized reading that would include the chastely married among the celestial audience, “for marriage must not be called a defilement.” In a revision of the literal word of Scripture that anticipates the hermeneutic strategies of his soon-to-be-written divorce pamphlets of the early 1640s, Milton claims that John surely envisioned the chastely married among his company of virgins. Milton thus plays here a logical trump that reverses the conventional relation between categories: instead of virgins being

5. Kendrick, “Milton and Sexuality,” 63.

Milton’s Lady and Lady Milton

211

accounted a subset of the larger set of the chaste, the chaste are included as a subset of John’s eschatological set of virgins. Chastity is accounted a kind of virginity, although perhaps only from the anagogical perspective of the end time. Chastity translates not just the spirit but also the bodily integrity of virginity into marital relations.6 Finally, in the context of An Apology’s larger purpose of public self-defense, Milton’s explication of the centrality of chastity in his personal life indicates its centrality to his political efforts and convictions: “He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem, that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honorablest things—not pretending to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy” (694). The personal and the poetic are inevitably political for Milton. “Chastity is the alternative trope, borrowed from Spenser, by which Milton wishes to represent the essence of the poetical character, his own psychological constitution substituting in his prose for a description of poetic structure.”7 Chastity is not a fugitive and cloistered virtue of elevated selfregard, but the ethical structure of public and poetic character, the beginning of action on behalf of justice and the interests of love. As Milton’s persona, the Lady thus promises and prefigures the political commitments to the cause of true Reformation that he was to make more explicit in Lycidas and the prose pamphlets of the 1640s, and to which he would offer up his life service in the revolutionary and interregnum period. Some recent studies of the mystique of virginity in Milton, and in this text in particular, have released the concept from the various negatives that either endorsed Comus’s opinion that the Lady is an insufferable prude or else determined that virginity is a patriarchal device to reinforce female subjection to the economics of patriarchal kinship systems. Richard Halpern recognizes the drive toward liberation inherent in the Lady’s claims, although by associating them with potential maenadism, he misconstrues the Lady’s position in the Dionysian plot structure of the Maske. Christopher Kendrick notices also the rad6. John Leonard cites Calvin’s Institutes 4.12.28 to indicate that this category reversal has precedents in Reformation doctrine: “species secunda virginitatis, est matrimonii casta dilectio (‘the second kind of virginity is the chaste love of marriage’)” ( John Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. Leonard [New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998], 680). Mary Laughlin Fawcett notes Milton’s reference to this same passage from the Institutes in her “‘Such Noise as I Can Make’: Chastity and Speech in Othello and Comus,” Renaissance Drama, n.s., 16 (1985): 164. 7. John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 77.

212

William Shullenberger

ical autonomy implicit in the Lady’s claims.8 John Rogers situates her speech in the political and theological symbolism of emerging revolutionary discourse. In his account, female virginity provided a symbolic model for the specifically seventeenth century image of the autonomous liberal self: she contained a physical guarantee of her privacy in the very existence of her hymen. . . . [The maintenance of virginity] could also be imagined, far more radically, as an actual historical precipitant for a spiritual, even political revolution. The new affirmation of the value of celibacy came to participate . . . in the millenarian optimism charging the revolutionary aspirations of the midcentury radicals.9

Rogers’s documentation of the midcentury politicization of the figure of virginity makes of the Lady’s speech a kind of revolutionary clarion call. His reading is consistent with the prophetic force and latent biblical sources of the Lady’s images. The Lady speaks ominously in subjunctives of the power that would be released by her disclosure of a mystery too sublime for Comus to hear and apprehend: Yet should I try, the uncontrolled worth Of this pure cause would kindle my rapt spirits To such a flame of sacred vehemence, That dumb things would be mov’d to sympathize, And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and shake, Till all thy magic structures rear’d so high, Were shatter’d into heaps o’er thy false head. (793–99; emphasis mine)

8. Preceding and standing behind these recent historically and culturally specific reconsiderations of chastity and virginity is Angus Fletcher’s nuanced reflection in The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton’s “Comus” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 209–26. Halpern, “Puritanism and Maenadism in A Mask,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 88–105. Kendrick observes, “Milton symbolically attacks the political love-theology of the Caroline masque and reforms it in light of the quite different libidinal politics of a left-leaning Protestantism,” although he proceeds to critique the Lady’s “stridency and silence” as “symptoms of contradiction and overdetermination” inherent in the historical moment of emerging English capitalism (“Milton and Sexuality,” 47, 66–67). 9. Rogers, “The Enclosure of Virginity: The Poetics of Sexual Abstinence in the English Revolution,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 238–39.

Milton’s Lady and Lady Milton

213

Insofar as Comus represents the predatory self-indulgences and fantasies of the Stuart court aristocracy and the mystifications of Laudian High Churchmanship, the Lady’s threat here anticipates rather than precipitates a social revolution.10 The Lady seems constrained by neither gender anxiety nor the anxiety of influence, for she confidently and implicitly claims as her imaginative and political precursors archetypal male figures from the classical and, more important, biblical traditions. In her access to a “sacred vehemence” to which the very earth and its creatures would be responsive, she seems to allude to Orpheus here, as several critics have noticed: “The Lady represents herself, under the aspect of her virginity, as a new Orpheus.”11 The Lady’s association with Orpheus, like her association with the endangered Pentheus of Euripides’ Bacchae, deepens the condition of her vulnerability, as it renders her doubly subject to the volatile energies and bloodthirsty disposition of Comus’s bacchic horde of revelers. Yet, the natural sympathies awakened by Orpheus were pastoral and elegiac in tone. By awakening trees and rocks to sympathetic responsiveness to human loss, he invents the poetry of earth and the pathetic fallacy as a major key of that poetics. He is associated with the building of cultures rather than with the shattering of them. The Lady shows her mastery of Orphic pastoralism in her exquisite and powerful Echo Song (230–43), but the higher mood of her discourse with Comus, its thinning out of sensuous imagery in pronouncing the pure poetry of abstract doctrine, and its zealous promise of iconoclastic leveling, seems more attuned to the hard-edged, uncompromising outbursts of biblical prophecy that Milton studied and adapted to his calling, as liberatory evidences and examples of the worldtransforming power of inspired poetry. Biblical prophecy was, like the Lady’s 10. Milton’s critique of the Stuart aristocracy’s social and religious extravagances and injustices is treated in Maryann Cale McGuire, Milton’s Puritan Masque (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983); Cedric C. Brown, John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 235–85. Readings of the Maske’s caustic exposure of Laudian liturgy and polity are developed by Andrew Hubbell, “Comus: Milton’s Re-formation of the Masque,” in Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1994), 193–205; and Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 157–72. 11. Kendrick, “Milton and Sexuality,” 55. Michael Lieb observes of the Lady that “she is, in fact, the female counterpart of the archetypal poet” (Milton and the Culture of Violence [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994], 106).

214

William Shullenberger

withheld cause, a poetry of fire, “a flame of sacred vehemence,” the Word of God active in and upon history, challenging, uprooting, and remaking the arrangements of worldly power (795).12 It nourished Puritan sermonizing and sustained the millenial activism of the revolutionary period in England. The Lady’s turn to a prophetic strain suggests that her poetic disposition may be more thoroughly and specifically christological than it is vaguely Orphic in its authority and its promises. At the height of his power, Orpheus did not claim to utter “strains that might create a soul / Under the ribs of Death,” as the Attendant Spirit testifies to the power of the Lady’s song (561–62); this is the sort of feat accomplished by Jesus in the healing of Jairus’s daughter (Luke 8:40–56) and the summoning of Lazarus from his tomb (John 11:17– 44). Orpheus is, of course, in his earth-summoning and death-challenging lyrics, and in his sacrificial death, a pagan type of Christ, but ultimately, as Michael Lieb has argued, an insufficient and ungenerative one.13 The virginal Jesus, who comes in the name of the Father, and speaks in the name of the Father, seems a more suitable sponsor and model for the virginal poetics of the Lady than the tragically married, subsequently misogynist Orpheus. As expressive Word, wisdom, and effectual might of the Father (PL, 3.170), Christ is the incarnate manifestation of the Father’s power. His life exemplifies without blemish the Pauline principle that “the body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body” (1 Cor. 6:13). He is the figure with whom the Lady implicitly identifies, on the occasion of her own chaste self-recognition and self-disclosure as prophetic poet, who comes in the name of the Father and speaks for him. Several motifs in the Lady’s prophecy offer veiled parallels to gospel narratives of the acts and words of Jesus in his anticipation of and preparation for the eschaton. First, she reserves her word for those who have ears to hear. Comus, with neither “Ear nor Soul to apprehend” (784), is like those hearers of Jesus whose lack of faith prevents their comprehension of his parables: “And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable. And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them” (Mark 4:9–12). The Lady’s declaration that 12. Abraham Heschel, The Prophets, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 3–27. William Kerrigan reads the prophetic style and trajectory of Milton’s career in The Prophetic Milton (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974). 13. Lieb, Culture of Violence, 52.

Milton’s Lady and Lady Milton

215

“dumb things would be mov’d to sympathize” by her sacred vehemence evokes Jesus’ response to the Pharisees upon his entrance into Jerusalem, that if his disciples were to hold their peace, “the stones would immediately cry out” (796; Luke 19:40). The anticipated destruction of Comus’s “magic structures” prefigures a key iconoclastic moment in Milton’s poetry, Samson’s mighty destruction of the temple of Dagon (798; SA, 1605–59). This cataclysm prefigures, in its turn, Jesus’ prophecy of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem: “And as some spake of the temple, how it was adorned with goodly stones and gifts, he said, ‘As for these things which ye behold, the days will come, in the which there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down’” (Luke 21:5–6). If, in the religious and political context of the Maske, Comus with his glass of sensual enchantment is a type of Laudian or Catholic high priest offering a parodic Eucharist,14 the Lady’s scriptural allusions set the ruin of his palace in a typological framework with other doomed sanctuaries of heresy, superstition, corruption, and idolatry. The Lady’s image of the brute earth shaking continues to develop a parallel with Jesus’ prophetic utterance, in this case the prophecy of earthquakes that Jesus anticipates as part of the turmoil of the last days (Luke 21:11). It also suggests the seismic aftermath of Jesus’ own death as rendered in Matthew’s gospel: “Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose” (Matt. 27:50 – 53). With this set of allusions, the Lady associates the eschatological power of her poetic reserves, invested in her declaration of virginity, not just with the prophetic scriptural tradition in general, nor with the broad career of Jesus as the fulfillment of that prophecy, but also with the climax of his own prophetic and rabbinical career in the Passion narratives. The medieval discipline of the imitation of Christ was traditionally private, devotional, and selfemptying, an exercise in the cultivation of passional quietism. But Reformation piety of the sort exercised by the Lady is public and activist in its orientation, and it cultivates an image of Christ who exemplifies and sanctions the practice of an ethically disciplined this-worldliness. The Lady’s implicit rhetorical associations are with Jesus the prophetic preacher and exemplar of virtue, a figure whose heroic social engagement appealed more to Milton’s Christian ethical activism than did the sacramental atonement of the God-man of sor-

14. See Hubbell, “Comus: Milton’s Re-formation,” 196–97.

216

William Shullenberger

rows on the cross. Nevertheless, the Lady’s dramatic agon and prophetic allusions align her with the narrative of Jesus’ confrontations with established authority, his arrest, interrogation, persecution, and death. The narrative of the Passion is the gospel sequence in which Jesus paradoxically reveals himself to be the Son of God through quiet endurance, exemplifying “the better fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom” (PL, 9.31–32). Milton will prefigure this ultimate triumph of discipline and submission in the temptation sequence of Paradise Regained, a typological anticipation of the Passion. John Shawcross notes the parallelism between the Lady’s ordeal and the gospel ordeal that is the subject of Milton’s brief epic: “[T]he masque is an elaboration of the temptation in the wilderness (see Matthew 4:1–11 and Luke 4:1–13) in mortal terms.”15 In Paradise Regained, Jesus endures Satan’s endless and ultimately tedious harassment with a moral rigor and prophetic contempt that sound a note of severity much like the Lady’s: I never lik’d thy talk, thy offers less, Now both abhor, since thou hast dar’d to utter The abominable terms, impious condition; But I endure the time, till which expir’d, Thou hast permission on me. (PR, 4.171–75)

These character parallels work reciprocally in the Milton canon. They reveal the Lady herself as a prototype of the heroic Son of God of the epics. They retrospectively authorize the Lady’s profession of prophetic authority, and provide a specifically biblical typological framework in which to consider the Lady’s ritual ordeal. As Jesus was bound, tormented, and relentlessly questioned, responding to his inquisitors only with enigmatic riddles and silence, the Lady raises a defense beyond Comus’s capacity to comprehend, even though she is captive and subject to analogous harassment: Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind With all thy charms, although this corporal rind Thou has immanacl’d, while Heav’n sees good. (663–65)

15. Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and the World (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 50–51.

Milton’s Lady and Lady Milton

217

“While Heav’n sees good” matches the Lady’s recognition of divine oversight to Jesus’ “I endure the time, till which expir’d, / Thou hast permission on me” (PR, 174–75). As Jesus understands that his Passion, and the wilderness training for it, are divinely ordained, so Milton’s Lady acknowledges and trusts that this ordeal is ultimately staged by a providential author rather than by Comus, and performed for a higher audience even than the Ludlow celebrants, a heavenly spectator and Task-Master (sonnet 7, l. 14) who sees, even in advance of its temporal fulfilling, the immense goodness brought forth from the challenge of evil. However, this liberatory political and spiritual reading of the Lady’s position is at odds with treatments of Milton’s identification with the Lady that construe the doctrine of virginity in the Maske as a symptom rather than a strength. In such accounts, the Lady’s expression of the courage of Milton’s convictions is ultimately self-contradictory and disabling. William Kerrigan reads Milton’s identification with the Lady and his commitment to the cult and the poetics of chastity as a kind of oedipal compromise. Kerrigan reasons that Milton symbolically unmans himself in the hope that his gesture will extract a paternal concession to his wish to write poetry. In effect, he concedes to the father the power of disposition of the mother and identifies with the mother: “The doctrine proclaimed in Comus repeats as a choice the trauma of oedipal submission, prolonging his latency well into manhood. . . . Reenacting the genesis of the superego, the virtue of maternal love disappears from the text of Comus, replaced by the form of its sterile and unblemished opposite. Virginity is the response to a mother’s love that, suspending his maleness, makes a lady of a son.” Furthermore, according to Kerrigan, Milton’s oedipal paralysis immobilizes his persona, the Lady, in a self-limiting reflex of anal fixation: an acknowledgment of the incompleteness and impossibility of the declaration of independence uttered by the Lady. Katharine Eisaman Maus situates Milton’s identification with the Lady in her broader treatment of male Renaissance poets’ fascination with the female body’s unreadable interiority as a powerful metaphor for “the particular privileges and paradoxes of Renaissance subjectivity.” In Maus’s subtle reading, the Maske reaches paralysis when it exposes its inability to resolve the problem of the body’s relation to the soul. Milton’s disposition toward monism contradicts his identification with the Lady, “for if mind and body are inseparable, then it is a sheer impossibility for a male poet imaginatively to occupy a position physically designated as female, even while retaining the intellectual qualities associated with masculinity.” It follows that, although “[Milton] wants to preserve virginity—the unpenetrated body—as emblematic of uncorruptible poetic creativity and the wellspring of virtue, . . . he is, realistically, aware that real bodies are indeed pen-

218

William Shullenberger

etrable, suffering not only rape but disease, death, and decay.” Michael Lieb similarly finds the Lady’s stance of impassioned chastity ultimately an illusory and insufficient fantasy, a naive idealization of chastity’s strength that the mature tragic poet of Paradise Lost would lament as insufficient to the deadly challenge of a fallen world.16 Provocative as they are, such readings at once take Milton too seriously and not seriously enough. Their sophisticated analytic skepticism fails fully to account for an imaginative mobility on Milton’s part that knowingly plays games with notions of stable gender identity. Yet, it also fails to acknowledge Milton’s Puritan commitment to the world-reforming prospects created by the exercise of a chastity that transcends and transforms gender. In chastity, if we can adapt a line from Saint Paul, there is neither male nor female, for all are one in chastity (Gal. 3:28). Chastity is a crossroad for gender transformation and for the empowerment that can follow from it, because chastity cancels conventional binarities of gender in social expression. In chastity’s nonmarital stage, the celibate condition forecloses genital self-expression, explicit or implicit, in ordinary social relations. Chaste men and chaste women do not identify themselves with the typical marks and practices of standard gender identification; they have more in common with one another than in difference from one another. In chastity’s other stage, companionate marriage, the two become one flesh (Gen. 2:24): in the self-giving of marital love, chastity cancels gender difference in the act of erotic union. The necessarily chaste transaction between historical author and textual character is also a potential imaginative moment of binding and bonding that cancels gender difference. Flaubert reputedly declared, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”17 No less remarkably, Milton implies, “I and the Lady are one.” We ought to be continually startled and unsettled that the reputed patriarchal bogeyman of English literature should make his first sustained dramatization of his poetic commitment in the figure of a young woman.18 We would do better to read his gender 16. Kerrigan, Sacred Complex, 50–51; Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 191, 207–8; Lieb, Culture of Violence, 110– 11. 17. René Descharmes, cited by Albert Thibaudet, “Madame Bovary,” trans. Paul de Man, in Madame Bovary, by Flaubert, ed. and trans. de Man (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1965), 371. See also, in the same volume, Jean-Paul Sartre’s suggestive analysis of Flaubert’s identification with Emma Bovary, “Flaubert and Madame Bovary: Outline of a New Method,” trans. Hazel Barnes, 302–8. 18. The locus classicus for modern polemics on Milton’s purported misogyny remains Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the

Milton’s Lady and Lady Milton

219

crossing by way of chastity not as the disclosure of a symptom but as the discovery of a strength. In a ritual drama whose central theme is metamorphosis, or translation, this is in certain respects the most remarkable and most crucial.19 Milton’s identification with his Lady is a transcendental trump on the joke of his college nickname, “the Lady of Christ’s.” John Shawcross suggests that the teasing title marked several “feminine” features of the young Milton’s public personality: his delicacy in appearance, his fastidious avoidance of and objection to sexual activity, his commitment to study, and his aversion to conventional forms of male romantic and athletic self-assertion.20 Milton himself jokes about the nickname in his Sixth Prolusion, but sexually reverses its implications in the metaphysical comedy he sketches, by declaring himself Ens, Substance itself, progenitor of all the accidents in the Aristotelian ontology: But how is it that I have so suddenly been made a Father? May the gods protect me! What is the wonder that beats anything in Pliny’s books? Have I done violence to some snake and suffered the fate of Tiresias? Or has some Thessalian witch anointed me with magic salve? Or like old Caenius, have I been violated by some god and bought my male sex as the price of my dishonor, so that in this sudden way I have been changed from a woman to a man? For from some of you I have recently been getting the title of Lady. And why do I seem to them to be so little of a man? Is there no respect for Priscian? Do these grammaticasters attribute the marks of the masculine to the feminine gender? It is because I have never been able to swallow mighty potations like the all-round athletes; or doubtless because my hand has not been hardened by holding the plough; or because I never sprawled on my back in the midday sun like a seven-year ox-driver; or perhaps because I have never showed myself to be a man in the way that those debauchees do. How I wish that their asininity could be shed as easily as my femininity! . . . And now in my role as a father, I turn to my sons, of whom I see a respectable number, and see that the clever rogues acknowledge me as their father by a sly nod. Do you ask for their names. . . . I should like my sons to bear the names of the predicaments to show in this way that they are nobly born and live like free men; and I shall see to it that all of them are advanced to some degree before I die. (620–21) Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Gilbert and Gubar draw the activating phrase for their critique, “Milton’s bogey,” from Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1989), 114. 19. The theme of translation is the subject of my “Tragedy in Translation: The Lady’s Echo Song in Comus,” forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance. 20. Shawcross, John Milton, 40.

220

William Shullenberger

This mythopoetic tour de force displays Milton’s comic ease with gender bending. He correlates sexual identity not with biological endowment or cultural construction, but with the accidental and fluid nature of grammatical gender: “Do these grammaticasters attribute the marks of the masculine to the feminine gender?” He contrasts his own gendered shape shifting, associated with chastity, “culture, urbanity, or refinement” (620), to the typecast virile masculinity of his undergraduate taunters, rigidly entrenched in crude and mindless displays of lower-class debauchery: “How I wish that their asininity could be shed as easily as my femininity!” Finally, he implies that his own imaginative transcendance of the accidentals of gender category gives him creative priority and potency, as Ens, Substance, father of the “predicaments.” With undergraduate bravado, Milton thus claims “masculine” potency by a witty embrace and inversion of the nickname “Lady.” The Maske makes no such inversion explicit, because it is ever present: Milton’s own mask in the Maske is the Lady, who, in speaking fully for herself, speaks fully for him as well. The tone of the Maske and the Lady’s central position in it indicate a more serious and more subtle kind of gender play, which associates the virtues appropriate to Ladyship with power. It is not that Milton finds himself impossibly and self-revealingly trapped in a female position, nor that the Lady finds her potential female subjectivity colonized by a male voice. If this female identification is, as Kerrigan claims, a gesture of submission or self-limitation on Milton’s part, it seems strange that it should yield christological and eschatological claims of poetic power. If this female identification is, as some feminist critics imply, a male ventriloquism that characteristically dispossesses women of the power to speak for themselves, it seems strange that it should yield a female hero who uses the fictional space of the Maske to articulate her selfhood, and to resist a masculinist determination of her destiny with a liberatory power of speech all her own.21 21. Feminist readings are rightly fascinated by the speechlessness and passivity of the Lady after her debate with Comus and the intervention by the Attendant Spirit and her brothers. They tend to agree that Milton’s intention in the final movements of the Maske is to put his spunky Lady back on the leash of feminine silence and submission, and hand the leash back to her father. See, for instance, Fawcett’s argument that the problem of female vocality in Othello and Comus is resolved when “in both works the chastity-speech theme is appropriated by the male artist” (“‘Such Noise,’” 163). Mary Loeffelholz’s study of Milton’s indebtedness to Shakespeare, Spenser, and Ovid for the female characters who underwrite his myth reads this intertextual practice as a literary instance of the cultural exchange of women. Thus, “The exchange of female types or characters between and within literary texts authored by men is one mode of the appropriation of women’s represented (pro)creativity that mediates, for Milton, his relation to nature, to his precursors, and to politics at large. . . . The Lady is ‘restored’ to her proper al-

Milton’s Lady and Lady Milton

221

If we read against the grain of Freudian and feminist accounts of this identification, and follow through on its mythic and rhetorical associations, we can see that this cross-gendered identification made possible by chastity is a moment of disguised empowerment. The Lady discovers and exercises for herself, in the course of her ritual ordeal, the full prophetic Word of the Father. Paradoxically, she displays the power of this Word by withholding it: in her encomium to virginity, she hints to Comus what power the Word would have over him if she were to speak it (see 779–99). The indefinite figure of what might be said thus authorizes and creates the performative force of what is said. Comus himself acknowledges the prophetic power of the Word withheld when he testifies, I feel that I do fear Her words set off by some superior power; And though not mortal, yet a cold shudd’ring dew Dips me all o’er, as when the wrath of Jove Speaks thunder, and the chains of Erebus To some of Saturn’s crew. (800–805)

It is the Word not spoken, a transcendental and implied Logos that corresponds to and undergirds the reserve of the Lady’s virginal self-presence, that generates the strength of her explicit verbal armor. At the same time, the Lady also flourishes a daunting erotic charisma in the force of her chaste carriage, which Elder Brother admiringly and suggestively invokes in a mythographic icon: What was that snaky-headed Gorgon shield That wise Minerva wore, unconquer’d Virgin, Wherewith she freez’d her foes to congeal’d stone, But rigid looks of Chaste austerity lusive mode at the masque’s end: the silent presence of her allusive body, restored, after ‘Listen and save,’ to a place in which she can be silent and safe, her father’s house” (“Two Masques of Ceres and Proserpine: Comus and The Tempest,” in Re-Membering Milton, ed. Nyquist and Ferguson, 33–34). Although, surprisingly, Elizabeth Harvey gives only passing attention to Milton, she develops an argument that bears upon him and the Lady. She demonstrates that “transvestite ventriloquism” (the construction of female personae by male writers) “is an appropriation of the feminine voice, and . . . it reflects and contributes to a larger cultural silencing of women” (Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts [London and New York: Routledge, 1992], 12).

222

William Shullenberger

And noble grace that dash’t brute violence With sudden adoration and blank awe? (447–52)

“Rigid looks of Chaste austerity” indicates the double power of chastity over the predatory eye. The archetypal virgin, Minerva-Athena, goddess of wisdom and militant chastity, petrifies her foes both with her looking and with how she looks. She can stare down and see through the potential voyeur, even as she presents a body image impenetrable by violence of thought or action. Her petrifying power results from her appropriation of and merger with her opposite, the ghastly figure of Medusa, a complex figure of the dread associated with female sexuality. The image of Medusa’s head bears the same paralyzing relation to the look of Minerva’s virgin beauty that the implied Word of virginity bears to the Lady’s spoken words. If the Lady’s speech indicates her access to the symbolizing power associated with the authority of the Father, her look evidences her assocation with female mysteries of the imagined Mother, which Julia Kristeva calls the chora, sublimated and serviceable to the interests of chastity.22 The terror of the Lady’s look, like the terror of her speech, depends upon its implication of a power deferred, and all the more powerful in its ghostly imminence. Would not Milton, by whom and for whom the Lady speaks, claim the same accession to a doubly engendered power? Indeed, to make a girl the prophetic spokesperson in a court masque is a gesture so unconventional, so against the grain of both genre and gender, as to disarm suspicion.23 Chaste, silent, 22. My description of the Lady’s access to the Word of the Father is informed by Jacques Lacan’s account of language in the formation of the subject (The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden [New York: Dell, 1968], esp. 9–29, 55–61). Kristeva calls the mysterious maternal site of sexual dread “a strange space that I shall name, after Plato (Timaeus, 48–53), a chora, a receptacle” (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, 1982], 13–14). This section of the essay abbreviates a discussion from a companion essay, “Girl Power: The Profession of Virginity in A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle,” included in a forthcoming volume, Reading Milton Writing Gender, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin. 23. This is not to claim that women were marginal figures in Stuart court masques. Both Anne of Denmark and Henrietta Maria commissioned and performed in masques, and major female power players of the court joined them. On the political implications of Anne’s patronage, see especially Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). However, women’s patronage and visible prominence in masques rather than interrogating or subverting the royalist and patriarchal premises of the genre reinforced them. The court masque was designed to mythologize Stuart absolutist ideology; even the most ostensible mystifications and celebrations of female power, such as Jonson’s Masque of Queens,

Milton’s Lady and Lady Milton

223

and obedient, the youthful female subject of Stuart England is one position from which a serious oedipal or revolutionary challenge appears most unlikely to be waged. For Milton, the sexual persona of the Lady proffers a kind of imaginative mobility analogous to that of Shakespeare’s cross-dressing romantic heroines, Rosalind and Viola. As they gain freedom and mobility by means of male costuming and the verbal and dramatic improvisation it supports, so does Milton from the adoption of a female persona. The mask of the Lady relieves him from the crisis of patriarchal debts and expectations incumbent upon a son, anxieties of the sort that surface in his efforts to persuade his father of the value of his dedication to poetry in “Ad Patrem”: Pleased may you be, best Father, by this song; Slight is its thought, I know, for I have not yet learned What recompense suffices for those gifts unearned For which my best would not be recompense in kind: Your charities excel the reverence I own In words that stammer fruitlessly from lips of stone. (6–11; my translation)24

The mask of the Lady also distances him from the contaminations of masculine conventionality parodied in the Sixth Prolusion, and from positions of erotic aggression typically played out by male figures in the Ovidian substructure of the Maske. The Lady’s virginal affiliation with Minerva-Athena seems further to circumvent suspicion of the Maske’s subversions of gender hierarchies. Athena seems literally and completely a daddy’s girl, a brainchild bursting from the ritually defer to the king as the source of true virtue and energy in the social and natural worlds. The absolutist premises of these extravaganzas were further reinforced by the class stratifications of the dramatis personae: speaking and singing parts were conventionally assigned to professional actors, while the noble masquers personified ideal forms of virtue and heroic character in silent ritual gestures and dance. See Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975). On the scandal precipitated when women of the Caroline court assumed speaking and singing roles in masques, see Suzanne Gossett, “‘Man-maid, Begone!’: Women in Masques,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 96–113. 24. “Ad Patrem” has been suggestively linked, thematically and chronologically, to the Maske by several editors and critics. See the review of chronology in Milton, The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 148. I do not have the scholarly familiarity with texts and dates to venture a strong opinion on the dating of “Ad Patrem.” My point, that Milton’s female persona in the Maske provides an imaginative release from oedipal anxieties, does not depend upon a chronological or motivational correlation between the two poems.

224

William Shullenberger

forehead of Zeus. In The Eumenides, Athena claims to speak for the Father in all things: No mother gave me birth. I honor the male, in all things but marriage. Yes, with all my heart I am my father’s child.25

If we read Perseus’s decapitation of Medusa as an allegory of mastery over feminine sexuality, or, following Sigmund Freud, a mythological figuration of the moment of castration of the Mother, Athena’s oversight of the project seems to reinforce her independence from, and antagonism to, the feminine.26 Yet, as an intellectual androgyne who professes militant chastity, Athena in action asserts a kind of autogenetic freedom, dependent upon and derived from neither mother nor father. She honors the male in all things, except one thing that reinforces male control over the female in traditional patriarchal societies: marriage. In the Renaissance humanist allegorization of the virgin goddess, the condition she sponsors, virginal self-presence, becomes a being for God only and for God in the self. In the Protestant dispensation, virginity is a figure for the soul’s independence of all worldly claims: “Milton is attempting to preserve the virginity of the concept of faith against any contamination from works, even loving ones. . . . [C]hastity is a pervasive metaphor for faith among the Reformers.”27 Milton’s virgin persona, the Lady, opens up poetry for him as the expression of faith’s mobile and radical freedom. Hélène Cixous, in a different type of liberatory polemic, calls gender crossing of the sort Milton practices in the Maske “vatic bisexuality . . . which doesn’t annul differences but stirs them up, pursues them, increases their number”: “this is, each one’s location in self (répérage en soi) of the presence— variously manifest and insistent according to each person, male or female—of both sexes, nonexclusion either of the difference or of one sex, and, from this

25. Aeschylus, The Eumenides, in The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking Press, 1975), ll. 751–53. 26. Freud, “The Medusa’s Head,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, trans. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 212–13. 27. Georgia Christopher, Milton and the Science of the Saints (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 38. See also Guibbory: “Milton’s Lady becomes representative not just of the abstract ideals of Faith or Chastity but of the individual godly Christian and the godly church, as she faces seduction and finally the threat of violence. . . . [S]exual chastity was in puritan discourse a figure for spiritual purity, which had to be maintained in the threat of a polluting carnal idolatry” (Ceremony and Community, 166).

Milton’s Lady and Lady Milton

225

‘self-permission,’ multiplication of the effects of the inscription of desire, over all parts of my body and the other body.”28 With her boundary-blurring advocacy of an erotic scripture that subverts the binary oppositions and hierarchies of patriarchy and offers a multiplication of sites of bodily pleasure, Cixous might be expected to find her prophet in Comus rather than in “the Lady of Christ’s,” or the Lady whom he projects in the Maske. Comus, however, for all his gorgeous imagery and all his nudging and winking, is a conventional masculinist when it comes right down to it. His gaudy offertories, as the Lady discerns, are designed not to expand but to exploit female desire, and to restrict and materialize the horizons of the body’s pleasure. Sabrina enters the poem to release the Lady from the threat of those constraints into the open field of erotic delight invoked by the quite different rhetoric of Cixous. With her drops “of precious cure,” Sabrina touches the Lady’s breast, her fingertips, her lips; then she frees her from the “marble venom’d seat / Smear’d with gums of glutinous heat,” releasing, awakening, and sanctifying her physically and emotionally (916–17). Breast, fingers, lips, pelvis: Sabrina releases the bound energy of the Lady’s erogenous zones for an active life of chaste desire. Since desire is reborn with the teleological impetus of charity here, the Lady’s bodily freedom is a spiritual awakening as well, a dawning awareness “through the porch and inlet of each sense” that the body, properly respected and tempered, may turn “by degrees to the soul’s essence / Till all be made immortal” (839, 462–63). The Lady’s regenerate body is the true form of Milton’s Maske. The dance and poetry of the Maske’s final movements, including the gorgeous, feminized pastoral eschatology of the Hesperian Gardens that the Attendant Spirit evokes in his epilogue (976–1011), celebrate the redeemed senses as portals of discovery of the sublime. The translated Lady becomes the bodily emblem and exemplar of this ordered and sanctified erotic plenitude, and the implicit center of its moral and creative energies. She is not silenced, because the Maske speaks so copiously and eloquently for her and from her. The Lady’s triumphant intuition of desire’s promise and destination, and Milton’s uncanny identification with her interests, suggests that chastity, rightly construed as a condition of erotic concentration and enlarged anticipation, is, remarkably enough, a Puritan way of intimating Cixous’s “vatic bisexuality.” Milton’s imaginative identification with his Lady enacts a wish like 28. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 341.

226

William Shullenberger

Cixous’s for imaginative and bodily autonomy, and for what William Blake calls “the lineaments of Gratified Desire.”29 Milton shares this wish through and with the imagined Lady who is, like Zeus’s Athena, his brainchild. The retrospective glow of this visionary gender crossing illumines in its turn the passage of Alice Egerton, whose ritual actions and expressions in the Maske performance of 1634 come to make full sense only in light of the declaration of independence composed by Milton for her character after the event of her impersonation of him. 29. Blake, “The Question Answer’d,” in Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 180.

Notes on Contributors

Robert C. Evans has taught at Auburn University at Montgomery since 1982. He has recently been named Distinguished Teaching Professor. He is the author of numerous essays and of books on Ben Jonson, Martha Moulsworth, Frank O’Connor, Brian Friel, Kate Chopin, Ambrose Bierce, short fiction, and other topics. His work, including his most recent book, Ben Jonson’s Major Plays, reflects his interest in critical pluralism. Joan Faust is Assistant Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University. She has published on Donne, Jonson, Castiglione, Milton, and Dante. She is presently working on the liminal aspects of seventeenth-century patronage literature.

has been Professor of English at Bentley College for twenty-four years. He is author of John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility, which was published by Indiana University Press in 1995, and is working on other biographical studies. He has also been associated with the Donne Variorum, serving as a contributing editor of The Anniversaries and the Epicedes and Obsequies and as an assistant textual editor of The Elegies.

Dennis Flynn

is Assistant Professor of English at California State University– Northridge. He has published articles on Spenser and Tasso, and is at work on a book titled “The Epic Supernatural: Divine Action in Renaissance Heroic Poetry.” He is the recipient of the Isabel MacCaffery Prize of the International Spenser Society.

Tobias Gregory

is Professor of English and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Houston–Victoria. He has published articles on Donne, Marvell, Cleveland, and Traherne. Dan Jaeckle

is Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. He is author of The Theology of John Donne and has published articles on Donne, Crashaw, Herbert, and Vaughan. In addition to serving as a contributing editor to the Donne Variorum, he is coeditor of Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric.

Jeffrey Johnson

227

228

Notes on Contributors

is Associate Professor of English at Bates College. She is the author of Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic, editor of Longman Critical Readers: Renaissance Poetry, and coeditor, with Mihoko Suzuki, of Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700.

Cristina Malcolmson

Catherine Gimelli Martin teaches at the University of Memphis, where she also directs the English Honors Program and Literature Concentration. She has recently published The Ruins of Allegory: “Paradise Lost” and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention, which received the Milton Society’s James Holly Hanford Award in 1999. She is currently completing a book-length study titled “Proteus Unbound: The Poetics of the Baconian Revolution.” Kate Narveson is Assistant Professor of English at Luther College. She has pub-

lished on Donne, Herbert, Lucy Hutchinson, and early Stuart devotional genres. She has completed a book manuscript on devotional disciplines and the construction of identity and community. Her current project is a study of the relations between Calvinist and physiological views of the body and self in the manuscripts of Lady Grace Mildmay. Ted-Larry Pebworth is

William E. Stirton Professor in the Humanities and Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. He is author of Owen Felltham; coauthor of Ben Jonson Revised; coeditor of The Poems of Owen Felltham and Selected Poems of Ben Jonson; and coeditor of collections of essays on a variety of Renaissance and seventeenth-century figures and topics. A senior textual editor and member of the advisory board of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, he has served as president of the John Donne Society of America. Elizabeth Sauer, Professor of English at Brock University, Canada, is author of Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton’s Epics. She is coeditor, with Balachandra Rajan, of Milton and the Imperial Vision, which won the Milton Society of America’s Irene Samuel Memorial Award. With Janet Lungstum, she is coeditor of Agonistics: Arenas of Creative Contest. She is currently completing a book on seventeenth-century textual communities.

is Professor of English at Smith College. She is author of Generating Texts: The Progeny of Seventeenth-Century Prose and The Shadow of Eternity: Belief and Structure in Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne, as well as of essays on Shakespeare, Milton, and other seventeenth-century writers. She is currently working on a study of self-representation in texts by early modern women writers.

Sharon Cadman Seelig

Notes on Contributors

229

William Shullenberger teaches English and African literature at Sarah Lawrence College. From 1992 to 1994 he was a Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. In addition to essays on Milton and other seventeenth-century writers, he has published on Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson, and Derek Walcott, as well as a book coauthored with Bonnie Shullenberger, Africa Time: Two Scholars’ Seasons in Uganda. P. G. Stanwood, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of British Columbia, has published widely on Renaissance and later English literature. Among his editions are the posthumous books of Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying. He has also coedited John Donne and the Theology of Language. He is the author of a book-length study of Izaak Walton and The Sempiternal Season: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Devotional Literature. A past president of the John Donne Society of America, he is currently president of the International Association of University Professors of English.

is William E. Stirton Professor in the Humanities and Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. He has published widely on both Renaissance and twentieth-century literature. He is coeditor of collections of essays on a wide variety of Renaissance and seventeenth-century literary topics and figures and author of book-length studies of Marlowe, Jonson, Isherwood, Forster, and twentieth-century English and American gay fiction. A past president of the John Donne Society, he is also General Editor of www.glbtq.com, an on-line encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture.

Claude J. Summers

This page intentionally left blank

Index

This index is to all primary authors and their works and to authors of secondary works that are the subjects of discussion. Lengthy titles are abbreviated, and anonymous works are alphabetized by title. Addison, Joseph, 161 Adorno, Theodor, 23–24, 28–29, 31, 33, 35 Aeschylus, 97, 224; Eumenides, 224 Allen, D. C., 174 Alliston, Joseph, 124, 128; Exercise of True Spiritual Devotion, 124, 128 Althusser, Louis, 23 Ames, William, 116 Andreae, Johann, 44; Christianopolis, 44 Andrewes, Lancelot, 140, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147–50, 152, 154, 157; XCVI Sermons, 148 – 50 Archer, John Michael, 39–40 Ariosto, Ludivico, 81, 91 Aristotle, 43, 97, 174, 186 Askew, Anne, 163, 164 Augustine, 146, 147, 152, 177–78 Avicenna, 176 Bacon, Sir Francis, 1, 22–49, 157, 158; Advancement of Learning, 30, 35; Essays, 35; Great Instauration, 33 – 34; “In Praise of Knowledge,” 31– 32, 39; New Atlantis, 1, 4, 22–49; Novum Organum, 26, 32–33; Sylva Sylvarum, 66 Baker, Herschel, 158 Bakhtin, Mikhal, 2, 5, 62–72 Bald, R. C., 4, 52–60 Barrow, Isaac, 143, 146 Bayly, Lewis, 123, 128; Practise of Piety, 123, 128 Baynes, Paul, 125, 127; Holy Soliloquies, 125, 127 Behn, Aphra, 93, 157, 159, 162, 163, 164, 169, 172 Bell, Ilona, 61, 179

Benlowes, Edward, 160; Theophila, 160 Bennett, Joan, 170–71 Bernikow, Louise, 166 Bethune, George, 162, 163, 164 Beza, Theodore, 118–19 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 76; Prince Arthur, 76 Blake, William, 226 Boleyn, Anne, 163 Booth, Wayne, 10, 13, 14 Boyle, Robert, 8, 187–203; Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours, 8, 190–203; “General Heads for a Natural History of a Country,” 193 Boyle, Roger, earl of Orrery, 91, 92, 94, 160, 168; Black Prince, 92, 94; Generall, 91; Mustapha, 92, 94; Tryphon, 92 Bradstreet, Anne, 163 Brahe, Tycho, 45–46 Brauer, Jerald, 116 Browne, Sir Thomas, 142, 158, 191, 195; Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 191, 195 Browne, William, of Tavistock, 157–58, 167; “On the Death of Marie, Countess of Pembroke,” 157–58 Buchanan, George, 118; Jephthah, 118 Bullough, Vern L., 177 Bunyan, John, 95; Pilgrim’s Progress, 95 Burton, Robert, 44, 157, 158; Anatomy of Melancholy, 44 Bush, Douglas, 165–66, 167 Butler, Samuel, 30; Hudibras, 30 Calvin, John, 1, 6, 77–78, 79, 111–29; Institutes, 77–78 Campanella, Tommaso, 44; City of the Sun, 44

231

232

Index

Carew, Thomas, 157 Carey, John, 60, 171–72 Cartwright, William, 94, 158 Cary, Elizabeth, 158, 159, 163, 164, 165–66; Tragedy of Mariam, 159, 163 Caryll, John, 92, 94; English Princess, 92 Cassiodorus, 147 Cavendish, Margaret, duchess of Newcastle, 8, 157, 159, 162, 163, 166, 169, 187–203; Blazing World, 8, 199–203; Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 8, 199–203 Chamberlayne, William, 160; England’s Jubilee, 160; Pharonnida, 160 Chandos, John, 143–44 Chapman, George, 158 Charles I, 97; Eikon Basilica, 97 Christopher, Georgia, 80 Cicero, 97 Cixous, Hélène, 224–26 Clarke, Elizabeth, 121 Cleveland, John, 158 Clifford, Lady Anne, 159, 169 Coffin, Robert P. Tristram, 157, 160 Collins, An, 158, 159, 164 Comenius, John, 29 Constantine the African, 176, 183–84 Corbett, Richard, 158 Cosin, John, 146 Cowley, Abraham, 30, 76, 157, 158, 160, 172; Davideis, 76 Crane, Ronald, 10 Crashaw, Richard, 157 Daniel, Samuel, 158, 169 Danielson, Dennis, 75 Davenant, Sir William, 91, 92, 94, 100, 158; Siege of Rhodes, 91, 92, 94, 100 Davies, Horton, 144 Dee, John, 30 Defoe, Daniel, 175 DeMan, Paul, 13 Democritus, 173 Descartes, René, 194, 200 Dioscorides, 183 Donne, John, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 16, 50–61, 67, 111, 112–13, 119, 123, 126, 128–29,

130–39, 141, 142, 144–45, 146–47, 149, 150–52, 154, 155, 157, 158, 161, 169, 170–86; “Anagram,” 183; Biathanatos, 180; “Blossom,” 182; “Bracelet,” 179, 182; “Canonization,” 171, 185; “Communitie,” 171; “Comparison,” 183; Essayes in Divinity, 58; “Extasie,” 171, 185; “Farewell to Love,” 172, 184–85; “First Anniversary,” 172, 179, 180, 185; “Flea,” 174; “Good-morrow,” 185; Holy Sonnets, 123, 128–29; “Indifferent,” 171; “Jealousy,” 183; “Jet Ring Sent,” 182; Latin Epigrams, 59; “Love’s Alchemy,” 184; “Love’s Progress,” 183; “Metempsychosis,” 176; Pseudo-Martyr, 57, 58; Satyres, 58; “Second Anniversary,” 178, 185; Sermons, 126, 130–39, 141, 142, 144–45, 146–47, 150–52, 154, 155, 178, 179; Songs and Sonets, 172; “Sunne Rising,” 171, 185 Downame, George, 125; Treatise of Prayer, 125 Drayton, Michael, 158, 169 Drummond, William, 158 Dryden, John, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95–96, 97–100, 101–2, 106–10; All for Love, 101, 108–9; Aureng-Zebe, 92, 96, 98, 106–8; Conquest of Granada, 91, 92, 95, 98–99, 101–2, 108; De Arte Graphica, 110; Defence of the Epilogue, 95–96; Essay of Dramatick Poesie, 97– 98, 109; Indian Emperor, 92, 100; Indian Queen, 92; Oedipus, 99–100; Of Heroique Playes, 91; Spanish Fryar, 96, 110; Tyrannic Love, 92 Dyce, Alexander, 162–63, 164 Eliot, T. S., 74, 141 Elizabeth I, 163, 164 Elliott, Carl, 121–22, 127 Empson, William, 5, 73–87 Etherege, Sir George, 93, 94 Euripides, 97 Expert Midwife, 177 Featley, Daniel, 113; Ancilla pietatis, 113 Ficino, Marcilio, 156

Index

233

Finch, Anne, countess of Winchelsea, 157, 162, 164 Fish, Stanley, 13, 74, 80, 81, 82–85, 86, 87 Fletcher, Giles, 157, 158 Fletcher, John, 95 Fletcher, Phineas, 125, 157, 158; Joy in Tribulation, 125 Fludd, John, 30 Foucault, Michel, 4, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 36–38, 43, 46 Fowler, Alastair, 75–76 Frank, Mark, 146, 152–54; LI Sermons, 153 – 54 Freud, Sigmund, 23, 224 Frye, Northrop, 80–81 Fuller, Thomas, 142

Hester, M. Thomas, 171 Hildegard of Bingen, 186 Hill, Christopher, 22 Hippocrates, 173 Hirsch, E. D., 13 Hobbes, Thomas, 157, 194, 201 Hoby, Margaret, 159 Hooke, Robert, 201 Hooker, Richard, 113, 144, 146, 149; Ecclesiastical Polity, 149 Horkheimer, Max, 23–24, 28–29, 31, 33, 35 Howard, Edward, 94 Howard, James, 93; English Mounsieur, 93 Howard, Robert, 94 Hutchinson, Lucy, 159 Hyde, Edward, earl of Clarendon, 158

Gardner, Helen, 168 Gassendi, Pierre, 194 Gilino, Coradinus, 182 Glanvill, Joseph, 158 Goodman, Godfrey, 158 Greenblatt, Stephen, 22–23, 29, 32, 114– 15 Greer, Germaine, 168 Gregory, 147 Greville, Fulke, 158 Grierson, Herbert J. C., 142 Guibbory, Achsah, 115, 116, 117, 120, 171, 172, 183, 185

Innes, William, 115; Bundle of Myrrhe, 115

Habington, William, 158 Hakewill, George, 158 Halkett, Lady Anne, 159 Halpern, Richard, 211 Hammond, Henry, 146 Hannay, Patrick, 160 Hayward, John, 184 Hayward, Sir John, 111, 112, 122–23, 124; Sanctuarie of a troubled Soule, 111, 112, 122–23, 124 Herbert, Lord Edward of Cherbury, 158 Herbert, George, 112–13, 116–17, 121, 129, 157, 158, 167; “Church Music,” 129; “Easter,” 129; “Longing,” 129 Hermes Trismegistus, 156 Herrick, Robert, 157

James, Susan, 125–26 Jameson, Fredric, 13, 14, 42–43 Jessopp, Augustus, 58–60 Johnson, Jeffrey, 112, 154 Jones, Richard Foster, 25, 26 Jonson, Ben, 4, 8, 15, 17–20, 95–96, 101, 157, 158, 161, 169, 172; Epicoene, 15; Staple of News, 101; “To My Reader,” 4, 17–20 Joyner, William, 92, 94, 95, 105–6; Roman Empress, 92, 95, 105–6 Kaplan, Cora, 166 Kaske, Carol V., 147 Kelley, Maurice, 78–79 Kendrick, Christopher, 206, 211–12 Kepler, Johannes, 46 Kerrigan, William, 206, 217, 220 Killigrew, Anne, 162, 163, 164 King, Henry, 146, 158, 172 Kirkman, Francis, 96; Nicomede, 96 Klemp, P. J., 145 Kristeva, Julia, 220 Laertes, Diogenes, 173 Lanyer, Aemilia, 156, 158, 159, 168–69 Laud, William, 146

234

Index

Lauter, Paul, 164–65 Leavis, F. R., 74 Lee, Nathaniel, 99–100; Oedipus, 99–100 Leechbook of Bald, 184 Leigh, Richard, 102; Censure of the Rota, 102 Levao, Ronald, 26–28 Lewalski, Barbara K., 112 Lewis, C. S., 75, 170 Lieb, Michael, 214, 218 Liu, Alan, 27, 28 Lock, Anne Vaughan, 159 Lossky, Nicholas, 154 Lovelace, Richard, 157, 169 Luther, Martin, 79, 123–24 Lyotard, Jean-François, 23 MacLure, Millar, 144 Magnus, Albertus, 173–74, 175, 176, 177, 186 Malcolmson, Cristina, 112, 121 Markley, Robert, 25–26 Marotti, Arthur, 171, 172, 180, 182 Martz, Louis, 112, 118 Marvell, Andrew, 1, 62–72, 157, 185; “Damon the Mower,” 69; “Mower against Gardens,” 1, 5, 62–72; “Mower’s Song,” 70; “To His Coy Mistress,” 185; “Upon Appleton House,” 69 Marx, Karl, 23 Mason, Henry, 126–27; Christian Humiliation, 126–27 Masselink, Noralyn, 184–85 Massinger, Philip, 93–94; Bondman, 94 Maus, Katharine, 114, 217 Mayne, Jasper, 59 McCullough, Peter, 145–46 Melvill, Elizabeth, 163, 164 Mersenne, Marin, 194 Milton, Anthony, 117 Milton, John, 1, 2, 5–6, 8–9, 73–87, 88–110, 157, 169, 172, 204–26; “Ad Patrem,” 223; Apology for Smectymnuus, 206, 208, 209–11; Areopagitica, 79; De Doctrina Christiana, 76–79, 86; Eikonoklastes, 97; Lycidas, 211; Maske, 9, 204–26; “Nativity Ode,” 206, 207; Of True Religion, 79; Paradise Lost, 73–

87, 95, 97–98, 218; Paradise Regained, 89–90, 95, 216, 217; Samson Agonistes, 1, 5–6, 88–110; Sixth Elegy, 206–7; Sixth Prolusion, 219, 220, 223; Sonnet 7, 217 Mitchell, John, 194; “Essay upon Different Colours of People,” 194 Mitchell, W. Fraser, 140–42, 143, 154 Montaigne, Michel de, 195 More, Thomas, 36, 38, 40; Utopia, 36, 38, 40 Moulsworth, Martha, 159 Mueller, Janel, 146 Newton, Isaac, 195 Nicolas of Lyra, 147; Biblia cum glossis, 147 Noakes, Susan, 5, 82 Nuttall, Geoffrey, 117 Oldham, John, 172 Orgel, Stephen, 27 Osborne, Dorothy, 157, 165, 166 Ovid, 182, 183, 184, 185, 223; Cures for Love, 182, 183, 184, 185 Owen, John, 152 Parr, Elnathan, 125, 126; Abba Father, 125, 126 Pebworth, Ted-Larry, 172 Pepys, Samuel, 93–95, 103, 202; Diary, 93–95, 103; King Charles Preserved, 103 Perrott, Sir James, 128; Invitation to Prayer, 128 Philips, Katherine, 157, 160–62, 163, 164, 166, 168, 169; “Parting of Lucasia,” 161; “To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship,” 157 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 156; Oration on the Dignity of Man, 156 Piso, Gulielmus, 193 Plato, 38, 46, 156; Republic, 38, 46 Plattes, Gabriel, 44; Macaria, 44 Plutarch, 97 Popkin, Richard, 194–95 Popper, Karl, 4, 50–52 Porter, Thomas, 91–92; Villain, 91–92

Index

Powers-Beck, Jeffrey, 112 Primrose, Diana, 163, 164 Prynne, William, 116 Quarles, Francis, 158 Quétel, Claude, 181–82 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 168 Quintana, Ricardo, 157 Racovian Catechism, 130–33, 136–37 Rambuss, Richard, 115–16, 120, 129 Randolph, Thomas, 70–71, 158; “Upon Love Refus’d for Conscience Sake,” 70– 71 Regimen of Health of Salerno, 183 Ricks, Christopher, 171, 172, 179, 180, 183 Roberts, Gerard, 94; Impudency and Ranterism rebvked, 94 Roebuck, Graham, 172 Rollins, Hyder, 158 Rooney, Ellen, 11–12, 13–16, 21 Rose, Mary Beth, 178 Ross, M. M., 118 Rossi, Paolo, 26 Rous, Francis, 116 Rowse, A. L., 156 Rowton, Frederic, 163–64 Sabine, Maureen, 179 Saintsbury, George, 160–62, 164 Sandys, George, 158 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 43 Schaffer, Simon, 188, 192, 201 Sellin, Paul, 60–61 Shadwell, Thomas, 30, 93, 94; Virtuoso, 30 Shakespeare, William, 16, 86, 92, 94, 95, 101, 108, 156, 168, 169, 176, 223; Antony and Cleopatra, 101, 108; As You Like It, 223; Hamlet, 92, 94; Macbeth, 92; Sonnets, 168, 176; Twelfth Night, 223 Shami, Jeanne, 112, 119, 144–45 Shapin, Steven, 188, 192, 201 Shawcross, John T., 216, 219 Shuger, Debora, 114, 115, 117–19, 120, 123, 129, 144

235

Shullenberger, William, 185 Sibbes, Richard, 119, 126–27; Bruised Reed, 119 Sidney, Mary, countess of Pembroke, 159, 163, 164, 165, 167; Antonie, 163 Sidney, Sir Philip, 165, 166, 167 Simon, Irène, 143 Smith, A. J., 184 Sophocles, 97 South, Robert, 142–43, 146, 152; “Scribe Instructed,” 142–43, 152 Southwell, Lady Anne, 159 Speed, John, 94; Historie of Great Britaine, 94 Speght, Rachel, 159 Spenser, Edmund, 147, 149, 169; Faerie Queene, 147 Sprat, Thomas, 30, 142–43; History of the Royal Society, 30, 142–43 Stanford, Ann, 166 Stapylton, Robert, 93; Slighted Maid, 93 Stillingfleet, Edward, 142 Stillman, Robert, 42–44 Stone, Lawrence, 178 Strier, Richard, 121 Stuart, Arbella, 159 Suckling, Sir John, 157, 169, 172 Summers, Claude J., 172 Swift, Jonathan, 142 Sylvester, Joshua, 158 Taylor, Jeremy, 142, 146, 157 Tertullian, 146 Tillotson, John, 142, 143, 146 Tillyard, E. M. W., 75 Torellae, Gaspar, 181 Townshend, Aurelian, 158 Traherne, Thomas, 157 Trapnel, Anna, 159 Tuke, Sir Samuel, 94 Unfortunate Usurper, 91, 100 Ussher, James, archbishop, 142 Vaughan, Henry, 157 Vigo, Juan de, 180–81 Villiers, George, duke of Buckingham, 92–93; Rehearsal, 92–93

236

Index

Virgil, 83; Aeneid, 83 Vives, John Louis, 179 Waller, Edmund, 158, 169 Wallerstein, Ruth, 157 Walton, Izaak, 51, 53–55, 57–58, 59, 157, 171, 174, 178, 179; Life of Donne, 53–55, 57–58 Warnke, Frank J., 157 Welsby, Paul, 143 White, Helen, 157 Whitney, Charles, 40–42 Wilkins, John, 29, 30

Williams, Raymond, 23 Wilmot, John, earl of Rochester, 172 Winters, Yvor, 74 Wither, George, 157, 158 Witherspoon, Alexander, 157, 160 Women’s Secrets, 175, 176 Woods, Susanne, 168–69 Woolf, Virginia, 156–57, 160 Wotton, Sir Henry, 158 Wroth, Lady Mary, 158, 159, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167–68, 169 Wycherley, William, 93