The Cambridge Companion To English Literature PDF

This volume offers an account of English literary culture in one of its most
volatile and politically engaged moments. From the work of Milton and
Marvell in the 1650s and 1660s through the brilliant careers of Dryden,
Rochester and Behn, Locke and Astell, Swift and Defoe, Pope and Montagu,
the pressures and extremes of social, political, and sexual experience are
everywhere reflected in literary texts: in the daring lyrics and intricate political
allegories of this age, in the vitriol and bristling topicality of its satires as well
as in the imaginative flight of its mock-epics, fictions, and heroic verse. The
volume's chronologies and select bibliographies will guide the reader through
texts and events, while the fourteen essays commissioned for this Companion
will allow us to read the period anew.
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006

THE CAMBRIDGE
COMPANION TO
ENGLISH
LITERATURE
165 o-1740

CAMBRIDGE COMPANIONS TO LITERATURE
The Cambridge Companion to Old English The Cambridge Companion to Faulkner

Literature edited by Philip M. Weinstein
edited by Malcolm Godden and The Cambridge Companion to Thoreau
Michael Lapidge edited by Joel Myerson
The Cambridge Companion to Dante The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton
edited by Rachel Jacoff edited by Millicent Bell
The Cambridge Chaucer Companion The Cambridge Companion to Realism and
edited by Piero Boitani and Jill Mann Naturalism
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval edited by Donald Pizer
English Theatre The Cambridge Companion to Twain
edited by Richard Beadle edited by Forrest G. Robinson
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare The Cambridge Companion to Whitman
Studies edited by Ezra Greenspan
edited by Stanley Wells
The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway
The Cambridge Companion to English edited by Scott Donaldson
Renaissance Drama
edited by A. R. Braunmuller and The Cambridge Companion to the
Michael Hattaway Eighteenth-Century Novel
edited by John Richetti
The Cambridge Companion to English
Poetry, Donne to Marvell The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen
edited by Thomas N. Corns edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet
McMaster
The Cambridge Companion to Milton
edited by Dennis Danielson The Cambridge Companion to Samuel
Johnson
The Cambridge Companion to British edited by Gregory Clingham
Romanticism
edited by Stuart Curran The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde
edited by Peter Raby
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce
edited by Derek Attridge The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee
Williams
The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen edited by Matthew C. Roudane
edited by James McFarlane
The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller
The Cambridge Companion to Brecht edited by Christopher Bigsby
edited by Peter Thomason and Glendyr Sacks
The Cambridge Companion to the Modern
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edited by John Pilling edited by Timothy Unwin
The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot The Cambridge Companion to the Classic
edited by A. David Moody Russian Novel
The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance edited by Malcolm V. Jones and
Humanism Robin Feuer Miller
edited by Jill Kraye The Cambridge Companion to English
The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad Literature, 1650-1740
edited by J. H. Stape edited by Steven N. Zwicker

THE CAMBRIDGE
COMPANIONTO
ENGLISH
LITERATURE
1650-1740
EDITED BY
STEVEN N. ZWICKER
Washington University, St. Louis
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo
Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/0521563798
© Cambridge University Press 1998
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1998

Reprinted 1999, 2000, 2004
A catalogue recordfor this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
The Cambridge companion to English Literature, 1650-1740, / edited by Steven N. Zwicker

p. cm. — (Cambridge companions to literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 56379 8 (hardback). - ISBN 0 521 56488 3 (paperback)
1. English literature - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism.
2. English literature - 18th century - History and criticism.
I. Zwicker, Steven N. II. Series.
PR437.C36 1998
820.9'004-dc21 98-30165
CIP
ISBN-10 0-521-56379-8 hardback

ISBN-10 0-521-56488-3 paperback
Transferred to digital printing 2005

CONTENTS
List of illustrations page ix

List of contributors x
Preface xi
Chronologies xiv
Part i : Contexts and modes
1 England 1 6 4 9 - 1 7 5 0 : differences contained? 3

JOHN SPURR
2 Satire, l a m p o o n , libel, slander 33

MICHAEL SEIDEL
3 Gender, literature, and gendering literature in the Restoration 58

MARGARET A. DOODY
4 Theatrical culture 1: politics and theatre 82

JESSICA MUNNS
5 Theatrical culture 2: theatre and music 104

JAMES A. WINN
6 Lyric forms 120

JOSHUA SCODEL
7 Classical texts: translations and transformations 143

PAUL HAMMOND

LIST OF CONTENTS
Part 2: Writers
8 "This Islands watchful Centinel": anti-Catholicism and proto-Whiggery

in Milton and Marvell 165
CEDRIC C. BROWN
9 John Dry den 185

STEVEN N. ZWICKER
10 John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester 204

ROS BALLASTER
11 The authorial ciphers of Aphra Behn 225

MARGARET FERGUSON
12 Swift, Defoe, and narrative forms 250

JOHN MULLAN
13 Mary Astell and John Locke 276

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
14 Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the literature of

social comment 307
DONNA LANDRY
Index 330

ILLUSTRATIONS
2.1 Contrivance, from Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726), page 54

Book 3, chapter 5.
4.1. Dorset Garden Theatre c. 1671, design attributed to Sir 85
Christopher Wren.
4.2 A scene from Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco (1673). 86
4.3 London playbill, 1725. 98
4.4 The Queen's Theatre, the Haymarket (1707). 100
Figs. 4.1-4.4 are reproduced from the collections of the Theatre Museum by
courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

CONTRIBUTORS
ROS BALLASTER, Mansfield College, Oxford

CEDRIC c. BROWN, University of Reading
MARGARET A. DOODY, Vanderbilt University, Nashville
MARGARET FERGUSON, Columbia University, New York
PAUL HAMMOND, University of Leeds
DONNA LANDRY, Wayne State University, Detroit
JOHN MULLAN, University College, London
JESSICA MUNNS, University of New Orleans
JOSHUA SCODEL, University of Chicago
MICHAEL SEIDEL, Columbia University, New York
PATRICIA SPRINGBORG, University of Sydney
JOHN SPURR, University of Wales, Swansea
JAMES A. WINN, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
STEVEN N.ZWICKER, Washington University, St. Louis

PREFACE
The aim of this volume is to introduce students to English literary culture in

one of its most volatile and politically engaged moments. The literature
created between the years of Republican ferment in the 1650s and the
coalescence of a Georgian state in the early eighteenth century reflects the
instability and partisanship of rebellious and factious times. But literature
in these years was more than a mirror of the age. Literary texts were central
to the celebration of civic persons and institutions, to polemic and party
formation, to the shaping of public opinion, indeed to the creation of
political consciousness itself.
From the efforts of Marvell and Milton to forge a Republican idiom in
the 1650s to the brilliant careers of Dryden, Rochester, and Behn, of Locke
and Astell, of Swift and Defoe, and of Pope and Montagu, the world of
letters was enmeshed with policy and faction. Writers created their texts
and fashioned their careers amidst recurrent political crisis and intrigue.
Poetry and theatre were encouraged by powerful aristocrats, but political
grandees also bullied and intimidated writers in a world marked by libel
and slander. Dryden's elegies on Anne Killigrew and Henry Purcell are
delicate constructs, Congreve's drama reveals a subtle theatrical culture,
Swift's allegories and Lord Hervey's memoirs, Pope's verse epistles and
Montagu's letters orchestrate an incomparable range of satirical registers.
But we should be mindful, even as we read their work, that theirs was an
age distinguished less by fragility and refinement than by obscenity and
brutality, by the hectoring of the press and the anger of parliamentary
debate, and by the fierce competitive edge of poetry no less than partisan-
ship.
Political and social theory were the province of strong intellects -
Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, Mary
Astell, and Bernard Mandeville - but political programs were often effected
by thugs, urban crowds, and political gangs. The extremes of social and
political experience are everywhere reflected in the aesthetic of this

PREFACE
literature: in its daring lyrics and intricate political allegories, in the vitriol
and bristling topicality of its satires as well as the imaginative flight of its
mock-epics, fictions, and heroic verse.
The literature written between the years of the Cromwellian Protectorate
and the coalescence of the Georgian state makes high demands on our
knowledge of historical particulars, but its topicality should not obscure
the reach of literary imagination, the inventiveness of literary design, or the
generic resourcefulness of an age that created theatre rivaling the Eliza-
bethan stage, opera that went beyond the extravagance of the early Stuart
masque, political theory unmatched in analytical maturity - and always a
capacity for irony that quickens the most familiar literary forms. Pastoral
and georgic were deepened by Milton and Marvell; such modes as allegory,
romance, and travel narrative were transformed into that modern epic
form, the novel; while women writers, emboldened by the upheavals that
challenged hierarchies and overturned the social order in the 1650s, wrote
beyond the earlier confines of devotion and lyric. From what might seem a
paradoxical space - opened after 1660 by court culture and Tory, indeed
patriarchal, ideology - Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, and Delarivier Manley
embarked on bold careers in theatrical writing, philosophy, and the novel.
They not only imitated and admired men's writing, they also mocked and
challenged their male peers.
Indeed, mockery, scandal, and envy drove much of the satire we associate
with this world; but Marvell's Last Instructions, Swift's Modest Proposal,
and Pope's Dunciad continue to engage us by their moral authority and
their verbal mastery. Pastoral and epic were inverted and mocked to
brilliant effect, but in these same years Virgil, Juvenal, Horace, and Homer
were rendered classics not of translation but of a self-conscious national
literature. Dryden's Virgil and Pope's Horace are texts central to English
literary culture, and it is partly in homage to their evocative power that the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries have often been thought of
as an Augustan age. This was a time that embraced strong cultural
experimentation but also enduring meditations on antiquity.
Once glossed over as an age of court corruption and social comedy, a
mere pause in the progress of English liberty and English letters, the years
between the Cromwellian Protectorate and the coalescence of the Georgian
state are now valued for their political sophistication, their philosophical -
even spiritual - strengths, and their daring experiments with social and
sexual identities. Indeed, it is the pervasive sense of irony and contingency
in this age, its subtleties and ambiguities, and its inflections of gender that
remind critics and scholars of nothing so much as our own time. To disclose
the role of gender in this world is also to demonstrate how critical were
Xll

PREFACE
definitions of masculinity and femininity to conceptions of style, to the

discourse of sociability and sentiment, and to the languages of politics and
state.
The discourse of sociability was also articulated through the press, by
commerce, and in the reconfiguration of public spaces. The press had
become more than a vehicle for inflaming partisan tempers, it was central
to the cultivation of manners and the institution of fashion. The daily
newspaper and the weekly journal, clubs and coffee houses, the library, the
spa, and the public park all participated in the refashioning of self and
society. And a financial revolution that began as a way of funding William
Ill's wars to contain France resulted in an expanded domestic economy, in
the swelling of professions, the creation of empire, the importation of
luxury, and the profusion of that commodity called taste. How different
taste and empire must have seemed from the world of Ranters and
Muggletonians, but even as we calculate the distance between eighteenth-
century civility and the projects of spiritual reform and political innovation
of the 1650s, we should remember that the Republican past was deeply
implicated in the aspirations and aesthetics, even the anxieties, of Georgian
England.
The essays in this volume extend an invitation to read the major texts, to
think about the central intellectual practices, and to imagine the relations
among the books, people, and politics of Restoration and early eighteenth-
century England. These essays introduce the critical perspectives that shape
our current work in literary criticism and cultural history even as they
remind us of the aesthetic theories and literary practices of Augustan
England, a world in which social relations and the life of the state were
inextricably bound to the imagination of writers.

CHRONOLOGIES
EVENTS AND TEXTS

1642 Last Christmas entertainment at court (6 January); beginning
of the Civil Wars (22 August); closing of the London theatres
(2 September)
Browne, Religio Medici; Hobbes, De Give (in Paris)
1644 Milton, Areopagitica
164 5 Milton, Poems
1648 Filmer, Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy;
Herrick, Hesperides and Nobles Numbers
1649 Execution of Charles 1(30 January); An Act for abolishing
the kingly office in England (17 March); Commonwealth
proclaimed (19 May)
Charles I, Eikon Basilike; Lovelace, Lucasta; Ogilby, Works
of Virgil; Milton, Eikonoklastes
1650 Davenant, Preface to Gondibert; Vaughan, Silex Scintillans
1651 Hobbes, Leviathan; Marvell writes Upon Appleton House
1653 Protectorate established (16 December)
Cavendish, Poems and Fancies; Walton, Gompleat Angler
1655 Cavendish, The Philosophical and Physical Opinions, The
Worlds Olio
1658 Death of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England
(3 September)
1659 Collapse of the Protectorate
Baxter, Holy Commonwealth; Davenant, Siege of Rhodes
xiv

CHRONOLOGIES
1660 Charles Stuart enters London on his thirtieth birthday

(29 May); Pepys begins his Diary, (1 January); first meeting
of the Royal Society (28 November)
1661 Coronation of Charles II (23 April)
1662 Royal Society chartered
1663 Butler first publishes Hudibras
1664 The printer Twyn executed for sedition
Dryden and Howard, The Indian Queen; Evelyn, Sylva;
Philips, Poems
1665 Second Anglo-Dutch War formally proclaimed (4 March);
Great Plague (April to December)
Hooke, Micrographia
1666 Great Fire of London (2 September)
1667 Peace Treaty of Breda concluding Anglo-Dutch War (21 July)
Dryden, Annus Mirabilis; Marvell, Last Instructions; Milton,
Paradise Lost; Sprat, History of the Royal Society
1668 Dryden appointed Poet Laureate
Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy; Etherege, She Would
If She Could
1671 Buckingham, The Rehearsal; Dryden, The Conquest of
Granada; Milton, Paradise Regained. . .To which is added
Samson Agonistes
1672 Declaration of Indulgence proffering religious freedoms
1675 Founding of Royal Observatory at Greenwich
Dryden, Aureng-Zebe; Rochester, Satyr Against Mankind;
Wycherley, The Country Wife
1676 Charles II signs Secret Treaty with Louis XIV (16 February)
Etherege, The Man of Mode; Wycherley, The Plain-Dealer
1677 Behn, The Rover
1678 Oates and Tonge give evidence of a Popish Plot to kill
Charles II and crown the Duke of York, Charles's Roman
Catholic brother
Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress
1680 Second Bill of Exclusion, aimed at preventing the succession
xv

CHRONOLOGIES
of James, Duke of York to the throne, defeated in the Lords

(15 November)
Burnet, The Life and Death of the Earl of Rochester, Filmer,
Patriarchal Rochester, Poems
1681 Shaftesbury acquitted on charges of treason (24 November)
Blow, Venus and Adonis (dating not certain); Dryden,
Absalom and Achitophel (17 November); Marvell,
Miscellaneous Poems; Oldham, Satires upon the Jesuits
1682 Dryden, Religio Laid; Otway, Venice Preserved
1683 Russell and Sydney executed for treason
1685 Death of Charles II (6 February); coronation of James II
(23 April); Duke of Monmouth executed after raising arms
in rebellion against James II (15 July)
Killigrew, Poems
1687 James issues a Declaration of Indulgence (4 April)
Dryden, The Hind and the Panther; Halifax, Letter to a
Dissenter; Newton, Principia Mathematica
1688 Birth of James Francis Edward Stuart, son of James II and
Mary of Modena (10 June); William of Orange lands at
Torbay (5 November); James II flees to France (24 December)
1689 The crown is offered to William of Orange and Mary
(13 February); Toleration Act (24 May); Battle of the Boyne
(1 July)
Dryden, Don Sebastian; Locke, A Letter Concerning
Toleration; Purcell and Tate, Dido and Aeneas (performed)
1690 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Essay Concerning
Human Understanding
1691 Purcell and Dryden, King Arthur
1693 Congreve, The Double Dealer; Rymer, A Short View of
Tragedy
1694 Bank of England established; death of Queen Mary
(28 December)
Astell, A Serious Proposal to Ladies; Dryden, Love
Triumphant
1695 Congreve, Love for Love; Locke, The Reasonableness of
Christianity; Southerne, Oroonoko

CHRONOLOGIES
1696 Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious; Vanbrugh, The Relapse

1697 Treaty of Ryswick concluding Nine Years War
(10 September)
Blackmore, Prince Arthur; Collier, Short View of the English
Stage; Defoe, An Essay Upon Projects; Dryden, The Works
of Virgil
1698 Sidney, Discourses; Milton, Prose Works, ed. Toland
1700 Astell, Some Reflections Upon Marriage; Congreve, The Way
of the World; Defoe, The Pacificator; Dryden, Fables
1701 Act of Settlement establishing the Hanoverian succession
(12 June)
Defoe, The True-Born Englishman; Dennis, Advancement of
Modern Poetry
1702 Death of William III (8 March); coronation of Queen Anne
(23 April)
Clarendon, History of the Great Rebellion; Defoe, Shortest
Way with Dissenters; The Daily Courant begins publication
and runs until 1735
1703 Chudleigh, Poems on Several Occasions
1704 Battle of Blenheim (2 August)
Newton, Optics; Swift, Tale of a Tub, Battle of the Books
1705 Steele, The Tender Husband
1706 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer
1707 Proclamation of Union with Scotland (1 May)
1709 The Copyright Act; Act for the Encouragement of Learning
Berkeley, New Theory of Vision; Steele, The Tatler begins
and runs until 1711
1710 Sacheverill Trial (27 February-23 March)
1711 Handel, Rinaldo; Pope, Essay on Criticism; The Spectator;
Shaftesbury, Characteristics
1713 Treaty of Utrecht (31 March)
Addison, Cato; Berkeley, Three Dialogues ofHylas and
Philonous; Pope, Windsor-Forest
1714 Death of Queen Anne (1 August); coronation of George I
(20 October)

CHRONOLOGIES
Gay, Shepherd's Week; Mandeville, Fable of the Bees; Pope,

Rape of the Lock
1715 Jacobite rising
1716 The Septennial Act extending the life of parliaments to seven
years (26 April)
Montagu, Town Eclogues, Court Poems
1719 Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
1720 South Sea investment scheme (bubble) collapses
(1 September-14 October)
1722 Defoe, Moll Flanders; Steele, The Conscious Lovers
1723 Waltham Black Act creating fifty new capital offences
including poaching hares and fish (27 May)
1724 Burnet, History of My Own Time; Handel, Giulio Cesare;
Oldmixon, Critical History of England
1725 Pope's edition, The Works of Shakespeare
1726 Swift, Gulliver's Travels
1727 Death of George I (11 June); coronation of George II
(11 October)
1728 Gay, Beggar's Opera
1729 Pope, Dunciad Variorum; Swift, Modest Proposal
1730 Thomson, The Seasons
1731 Gentleman's Magazine; Lillo, The London Merchant
1732 Bentley, ed. Paradise Lost; Fielding, Covent Garden
Tragedy; Hogarth, A Harlot's Progress; Mandeville, Origin
of Honour
1733 Bolingbroke, Dissertation Upon Parties; Hogarth, A Rake's
Progress; Wortley Montagu and Lord Hervey, Verses
Addressed to the Imitator of Horace
1737 Stage Licensing Act (24 June)
1738 Wesley's'conversion'
Bolingbroke, Patriot King; Johnson, London
1740 War of Austrian Succession
Richardson, Pamela
XVlll

CHRONOLOGIES
1741 Fielding, Shamela; Handel, Messiah; Hume, Essays, Moral

and Political
1742 Walpole resigns as Prime Minister (11 February)
Fielding, Joseph Andrews
1744 Formal declaration of war with France
1745 Death of Walpole (18 March); landing of the Young
Pretender in Scotland (23 July)
Hogarth, Marriage-a-la-Mode; Edward Young, Night
Thoughts
1747 Richardson, Clarissa
1749 Fielding, Tom Jones; Johnson, Vanity of Human Wishes;
Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
1751 Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
1752 Adoption of the Gregorian (New Style) calendar
1753 The Jewish Naturalization Bill (passed 22 May; royal assent
7 June; repealed 20 December); founding of the British
Museum
1
755 Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language
1758 Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
1760 Death of George II (25 October); coronation of George III
(22 September 1761)
Sterne, Tristram Shandy
1763 Wortley Montagu, Letters Written During her Travels
(published posthumously)
1765 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
1766 Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
1768 Founding of the Royal Academy
1771 First edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica
1776 American Declaration of Independence

CHRONOLOGIES
CONTEMPORARY LIVES
Thomas Hobbes 1588-1679

Izaak Walton 1593-1683
Oliver Cromwell 1599-1658
Charles I 1600-1649
Edmund Waller 1606-1687
Sir William Davenant 1606-1668
John Milton 1608-1674
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon 1609-1674
Gerrard Winstanley 1609-1676
Queen Henrietta Maria 1610-1669
James Harrington 1611-1677
Samuel Butler 1612-1680
Thomas Killigrew 1612-1683
Richard Baxter 1615-1691
Sir John Denham 1615-1669
Sir Roger L'Estrange 1616-1704
Abraham Cowley 1618-1667
Sir Peter Lely 1618-1680
John Evelyn 1620-1706
Lucy Hutchinson 1620-?
Andrew Marvell 1621-1678
Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery 1621-1679
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury 1621-1683
Henry Vaughan 1622-1695
Algernon Sidney 1622-1683
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle 1623-1673
John Aubrey 1626-1697
Sir Robert Howard 1626-1698
Robert Boyle 1627-1691
John Bunyan 1628-1688
William Temple 1628-1699
George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham 1628-1687
Charles II 1630-1685

CHRONOLOGIES
John Tillotson 163o-1694

John Dryden 1631 -1700
John Locke 163 2-1704
Katherine Philips 163 2-1664
Anthony a Wood 163 2-169 5
Sir Christopher Wren 1632-1723
James II 1633-1701
George Savile, Marquis of Halifax 1633-1695
Samuel Pepys 1633-1703
George Etherege 1634-1691
Robert Hooke 163 5 -1703
Thomas Betterton i635(?)-i7io
Thomas Sprat 1635-1713
Queen Catherine of Braganza 163 8-1706
Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset 163 8-1703
Sir Charles Sedley 1639-1701
Aphra Behn 1640-1689
Thomas Rymer 1641-1713
William Wycherley 1641-1716
Thomas Shadwell 164 2-169 2
Sir Isaac Newton 1642-1727
Gilbert Burnet 1643-1715
Sir Godfrey Kneller 1646-1723
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester 1647-1680
James Scott, Duke of Monmouth 1649-1685
William III 1650-1702
Jeremy Collier 1650-1726
John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough 1650-1722
Jane Barker 1652-1726
Thomas Otway 1652-1685
Sir Richard Blackmore 1652-1729
Nahum Tate 1652-1715
John Oldham 1655-1683
Mary, Lady Chudleigh 1656-1710
Jacob Tonson
XXI

CHRONOLOGIES
Edmond Halley 1656-1742

John Dennis 1657-1734
Queen Mary of Modena 1658-1718
Henry Purcell 1658-1695
Thomas Southerne 1659-1746
Daniel Defoe 1660-1731
George I 1660-1727
Anne Killigrew 1660-168 5
Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford 1661-1724
Nicholas Hawksmoor 1661-173 6
Richard Bentley 1662-174 2
Queen Mary II 1662-1694
Matthew Prior 1664-1721
Sir John Vanbrugh 1664-1726
Queen Anne 1665-1714
Mary Astell 1666-1731
Jonathan Swift 1667-174 5
William Congreve 1670-1729
Bernard Mandeville 1670-173 3
Delarivier Manley 1670-1724
John Toland 1670-1722
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3 rd Earl of Shaftesbury 1671-1713
Joseph Addison 1672-1719
Richard Steele 1672-1729
Nicholas Rowe 1672-1718
Isaac Watts 1674-174 8
Robert Walpole, Earl of Oxford 1676-1745
George Farquhar 1678-1707
Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke 1678-1751
George II 1683-1760
Edward Young 1683-1765
John Gay 1685-1732
George Berkeley 1685-1753
George Frederick Handel 1685-1759
Alexander Pope 1688-1744
xxn

CHRONOLOGIES
James Stuart, the Old Pretender 1688-1766

Samuel Richardson 1689-1761
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 1689-1762
George Lillo 1693-1739
Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield 1694-1773
John, Lord Hervey 169 6-174 3
William Hogarth 1697-1764
James Thomson 1700-1748
John Wesley 1703 -1791
Henry Fielding 1707-1754
Samuel Johnson 1709-1784
David Hume 1711-1776
Laurence Sterne 1713-1768
Lancelot "Capability" Brown 1716-1783
Thomas Gray 1716-1771
David Garrick 1717-1779
Horace Walpole 1717-1797
Tobias Smollett 1721-1771
Christopher Smart 1722-1771
Adam Smith 1723-1790
Sir Joshua Reynolds 1723-1792
Thomas Gainsborough 1727-1788
John Wilkes 1727-1797
Oliver Goldsmith 1728-1774
Edmund Burke 1729-1797
Thomas Percy 1729-1811
William Cowper 1731-1800
Charles Churchill 1731-1764
James Macpherson 1736-1796
Edward Gibbon 173 7-1794
Thomas Paine 1737-1809
George III 1738-1820
James Boswell 1740-179 5

JOHN SPURR
England 1649-1750: differences

contained?
The century between the Civil War and the reign of George II saw the
transformation of English political, social, and religious life. The scale of
these changes may become apparent if we put our late twentieth-century
selves into the picture for a moment. We would surely find mid seven-
teenth-century England strange and alien, violent, authoritarian, credulous,
poverty-stricken; confident that virtue and responsibility were inherited by
gentlemen and monarchs; cowering in the face of a hostile environment
and universe; absorbed in a religious fundamentalism which included hair-
raising beliefs about salvation, other denominations, and the cosmic
purpose of history. Mid eighteenth-century England, on the other hand,
although not "modern," would be full of familiar sights and institutions.
For all its inexplicable addiction to the periwig, this was a world comfort-
ingly like our own in many ways: with newspapers and tea-tables, concerts
and public parks, insurance policies and sales taxes, a post office and
bureaucrats; a world which held a place for "the ladies," "the consumer,"
"the citizen," and "the middle class." This society of shopkeepers and
professional people valued diversity and regarded competition and social
mobility as natural, yet it also respected politeness and restraint and feared
"enthusiasm." Even to compare the England of Charles I and George II in
this way is to reinforce the common perception that England progressed
from chaos to stability, from traumatized victim of "intestine" civil wars to
a self-confident trading and maritime power. Certainly Hanoverian
England seemed a stable society: the political system weathered storms;
trade boomed and the wealth it generated led to the sophisticated urban life
whose architectural expression is still visible in the squares and terraces of
cities like Bath, Cheltenham, Bristol, Edinburgh, and York. England was on
the way to becoming Great Britain - a Union was achieved with Scotland
in 1707 - and Great Britain was well on her way to imperial grandeur. In
the seventeenth century England had been a weak and peripheral European
state, but after 1688 she became a leading actor on the continental stage

JOHN SPURR
and eventually, in 1713, rewrote the European balance of power. Sheltered

by the wooden walls of her navy, confident in the prowess of her generals
and armies, Britain was by the 1750s fighting France and Spain on four
continents and on the high seas.
But success and refinement are not the whole story. Again and again we
are brought up with a jolt when we encounter the animosities and bigotry,
the bizarre beliefs and casual cruelties just beneath the surface of
Augustan life. No century should be glibly summarized, but for all its
glitter and its advance toward civility, this was also an ugly, violent age.
Ugly in its systematic brutality toward the poor and the criminal - the
eighteenth century saw a huge increase in the penalties for offenses against
property - and ugly in its political uses of terror - from the executions
during the Popish Plot to the massacre at Glencoe and the campaign after
Culloden. The masses were easily stirred to violence against those who
seemed alien - whether it was Catholics or Nonconformists, the Irish or
the Jews, or evangelicals like John Wesley. In their portraits of Britain in
the 173os and 1740s, William Hogarth, John Gay, and Alexander Pope
have left powerful images of a corrupt and vicious society.1 Perhaps this is
the dark underbelly of any age, and more historically significant are the
deep political and religious animosities which ran through English life
during this period. Every town and every city, almost every parish, was
divided. The strife of Dissenter against churchman, Protestant against
Catholic, and Whig against Tory suggests that English enmities ran deep.
It is true, of course, that the English people had never been as one, but the
sixteenth-century Reformation and its repercussions, followed by the crisis
of Stuart kingship in the 1630s, engendered antagonisms which the
ensuing civil war and military rule could only deepen and embitter. After
the restoration of the monarchy each subsequent decade seemed to bring
another confrontation or crisis which was incorporated into a complicated
legacy of hatreds, confirming the old in their feuds and poisoning the next
generation.
Augustan England seems then to have been divided, ill at ease with itself,
and yet successful and stable. And it is this paradox which fascinates
historians and sets them hunting for the process by which England tamed
sectarian hatreds. How were these differences contained so that political
and social life could continue? A variety of answers have been offered to
this question by historians taking a variety of approaches. In 1967 J. H.
Plumb traced the growth of political stability in England between 1675 a n d
1725; he defined this stability as government by a single party, the control
of the legislature by the executive and the creation of a sense of common
identity in those who wielded social, economic, and political power, in

England 1649-1750: differences contained?
other words, the system of Sir Robert Walpole, the dominant minister of
the 1720s and 1730s. The possibility of stability, and the raw materials of
stability (such as jobs in the gift of the government), had all existed from
the 1670s, according to Plumb; it was just that the political nous was
lacking, a deficit supplied by the genius of Walpole. Plumb implies that the
political instability of the later Stuart period had much the same causes as
the political stability of Walpole's era: the contest for seats in parliament,
for government sinecures, for spoils, was behind "the rage of party," but
once these spoils were all dispensed by one consummate politician, they
would contribute toward cohesion and political inertia. This picture was
elaborated by Geoffrey Holmes, who took a wider social view and argued
that the new professions were vehicles of social mobility. The expansion in
the numbers of lawyers, doctors, teachers, clergymen, naval and army
officers, and civil servants, and just as importantly the increase in their
social status, meant that those excluded from political life could find
avenues for advancement and outlets for their energies.2 Jonathan Clark,
on the other hand, plays down the pace of social and economic change, and
indeed challenges the economic reductionism of accounts which suggest
that political power inevitably flowed toward a new middle class. He
stresses instead the persistence of pre-industrial forms and mentalities, a
slavish loyalty to monarchy and the Church of England, a deeply aristo-
cratic society and political system, and the retention of a confessional state,
in which office and power were restricted to conforming Anglicans, until
the 1830s. The main threats to the stability of this ancien regime were
dynastic rivalry until the defeat of Jacobite hopes in the Forty-five and
thereafter religious heterodoxy. In response, many historians have reas-
serted that eighteenth-century men and women recognized elements of
aristocratic government in the British system, but saw theirs as "a commer-
cial society" and themselves in Blackstone's phrase as "a polite and
commercial people."3
Among the many changes afoot in Augustan England two trends
deserve special attention. One is the growth of the state. What under
Charles I had been a classic multiple monarchy - a collection of territories
united by nothing more than the person of their ruler - was becoming a
state. Kingship would never be the same after 1649, and much of the next
century was devoted to finding ways to curb a king and to weld two
kingdoms and several provinces into a single Great Britain. The emergent
state rested on sound finance: the royal debt was replaced by a national
debt based on the state's credit not the king's; local government by
amateurs was reinforced by a professional bureaucracy; and the state's
fiscal demands soared. Entwined with the rising state was the emerging

JOHN SPURR
"public sphere." This term is shorthand for the world of newspapers,

pamphlets, coffee-houses, and political and social clubs, in which the
nation's affairs were discussed and public opinion was formed. The
development of the state and the public sphere were accompanied by the
growth of trade, science, and technology, the waning of religious zeal, the
rise of reason and politeness, and the legitimation of political "party."
And together they contributed to the formation of practices and institu-
tions which made it possible for the English to live with their undeniable
cultural, religious, and political diversity. Differences were managed:
while contest was allowed in some arenas, partisanship was rigorously
excluded from other areas of life. In practice, the same institution or
process could embody both principles: "by a curious paradox that same
transformation of the professions which was so vital a force for social
change in England became almost by the same token, a powerful
tranquillising and stabilising agent as well.'4 The same can be said of the
many associations which came into being in our period. This was a great
age of joining and belonging: from leisure activities such as subscription
concerts, musical societies, choirs, and bell-ringing, to discussion clubs
and coffee-houses, from setting up almshouses and hospitals to building
bridges and policing the community, men of property and good will came
together because that was simply the most effective way of getting things
done. Contradictory impulses were often at work simultaneously. Reli-
gious and political partisanship led to strife in existing institutions of
church and local government; new clubs and societies, cultural and
philanthropic bodies, were then created either as alternative institutions or
as neutral meeting grounds.5
And what is true of the professions and voluntary associations, of polite
society and political parties, is also true of works of the literary imagina-
tion. It is no function of this essay to survey the literary achievements of
Augustan England, but it is impossible to disentangle literature and its
makers from political and social life, or indeed the imagination from
politics. It is not simply that so much of the literature was topical, partisan,
and satirical. Nor that these writers were so deeply engaged - as politicians
themselves, as self-appointed spokesmen of the age, or as Grub Street hacks
making a profession of journalism and pamphleteering. It is rather that
Augustan literature provided the language in which politics was conducted,
it supplied the metaphors of monarchy and the discourses of civility and
commerce: it did much to constitute the public sphere. And, naturally, it is
implicated too in the paradoxical process of change and stability: it
manages to thrive on ideological difference and yet simultaneously contain
animosities.

Revolution to revolution, 1649-1689

Shortly after Charles Ps execution on 30 January 1649, the office of king
was abolished. While the new republic was ostensibly governed by a
parliament, power lay with the New Model Army and its leader Oliver
Cromwell. The New Model represented the "good old cause," and its
complex, often contradictory, agenda of religious liberty, social reform, and
messianic expectations, but it was out of step with the overwhelming
majority of the country, and especially those who held property and
influence. This was Cromwell's quandary: on the one hand, he was
personally committed to the godly; on the other, settlement could only
come from placating the gentry. Under Lord Protector Cromwell - as he
became in 1653 - policy see-sawed between godly reform and traditional
political institutions. Radicals often felt betrayed and conservatives were
wary. But the general trend of the 1650s was toward ever more tried and
trusted constitutional forms. Monarchy was a flawed system, especially if
the monarch was, like Charles I, unable to temper his own concerns and
accommodate the different currents of public feeling. But no better system,
none which could contain and manage all these differences, was on offer.
This point was rubbed home in the chaotic months after Cromwell's death
in 1658. The godly cause disintegrated, and army units vied with each
other and with civilian politicians, until with military backing an elected
Convention met in April 1660. It was the Convention, from which ex-
royalists had been excluded, that voted for the restoration of Charles II. On
29 May, his birthday, Charles arrived in London.
Charles was aware of his wide political debts and took care to
conciliate wherever possible - reprisals were small-scale and many ex-
Cromwellians found royal favor at the center and in the provinces.
Religious policy, however, was at odds with the conciliatory political
settlement. The restoration of the Church of England with most of its pre-
1640 powers intact disappointed those who had been led to expect a
wider national church and it denied the "liberty to tender consciences"
which Charles had explicitly promised. Moreover the settlement created a
new category, Dissent, which was an uneasy combination of all the
dissident religious groups, ranging from the conservative Presbyterians to
the sectarian Quakers and Baptists. The distinction between churchman
and Dissenter was to spread like a stain, inevitably coloring all of
Restoration life. The settlement confirmed a sense that Anglicanism was a
sure sign of loyalty and political trustworthiness and that Dissent was
synonymous with king-killing puritanism. This was underlined by a series
of laws of the 1660s, known misleadingly as the "Clarendon Code" after

JOHN SPURR
Lord Chancellor Clarendon, which persecuted Dissenters and restricted

office-holding to communicant members of the Church of England. These
measures failed to create a one-party state but succeeded in keeping the
memories and issues of the 1640s and 1650s simmering away.
The first precarious decade of the restored monarchy was punctuated by
risings and plots, plague and fire, and naval defeats, and culminated in
Charles's attempt to solve his diplomatic, religious, and financial problems
at a single audacious stroke in 1672. Charles declared war on the Dutch in
alliance with Louis XIV of France; he issued a Declaration of Indulgence
which suspended all the penalties against Protestant Dissenters; and he
announced a suspension of the repayments on his debts. Unfortunately, the
quick victory needed to clinch this bold bid eluded Charles. Parliament was
recalled and the king was castigated for his arbitrary setting aside of the
religion and church "as established by law." In no uncertain terms Charles
was told that he had no power to suspend parliamentary statutes or to
dispense individuals from the provisions of statutes. More opposition was
probably generated by the declaration's unconstitutional character than by
its attempt to improve the position of non-Anglicans. Grudgingly parlia-
ment offered war funds, but extorted in return a Test Act which was
designed to exclude Roman Catholics from public office. In 1673 Members
of Parliament gave voice to the emerging "Country" opposition which
helped to give a new shape to politics. A drift toward a more arbitrary style
of government was perceived in Charles's close links with France and in the
attempts of the Earl of Danby, the king's chief minister from about 1675, to
"manage" parliament through a system of placemen and bribery and in the
interests of "the old Cavaliers and the Church party." The preference
shown toward "the Church party" was suspect in itself. Many of the
English believed that the bishops of the church were unnecessarily intol-
erant toward the Dissenters, and, even worse, that they encouraged Charles
and his brother in grandiose ambitions of absolutist government. As
Andrew Marvell put it in 1677, "there has now for diverse Years a Design
been carried on, to change the lawful government of England into an
Absolute Tyranny, and to Convert the Established Protestant Religion into
down-right Popery."6 The growing realization that Charles might not
produce a legitimate heir, and the fact that James, Duke of York, a
professed Catholic married to an Italian Catholic princess since 1673 w a s
next in line to the throne, did much to fuel anxiety about the growth of
popery and arbitrary government.
Then in the autumn and winter of 1678 the nation and parliament were
convulsed, first by Titus Oates's fanciful revelations of a Popish Plot,
involving the murder of the king, the burning of London, and the massacre

of 100,000 Protestants, and then by the genuine disclosure of Danby's

secret negotiations with France. The hysteria of political life over the next
three years was, and still is, shocking; it can be explained in part by such
factors as deep-rooted anti-popery, the coincidental expiry of press censor-
ship, three general elections, and the deliberate politicization of the masses
and of office-holding; but much of the story can only be explained by fear
and rumor, denunciation and counter-allegation, and the sheer pressure of
events. By the spring of 1679, with a second Test Act on the statute book
and the trials of plotters underway, the central political issue was no longer
the investigation of the plot, but the parliamentary exclusion of the Duke
of York from the succession to the throne. Interference in the rights of royal
succession was an explosive issue - it implied constitutional innovation,
even rebellion, and it could by extension undermine all inherited property
rights. The exclusionists claimed to be defending Protestantism, but to
many they seemed to be promoting Dissent. Voters and MPs faced a choice
of two evils, each of which was stigmatized by a pejorative nickname: those
who supported the monarchy and the rights of James to succeed were
dubbed "Tories" after Irish Catholic brigands of that name, and the
exclusionists were slandered as "Whigs," a colloquial Scottish term for
Presbyterian rebels.7 As so often in this era, extremism bred extremism.
Although the attempts of the Tory propagandists to turn the tables on their
opponents by creating an alternative "Whig plot" were never successful,
they certainly managed to tar the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Whig leader, his
allies, and his witnesses with sedition, republicanism, and Dissent. The
years after 1681 saw a "Tory revenge," an attempt to drive Whigs from
public life and the century's worst wave of persecution of Dissenters.
In 1685 James II succeeded to the throne with the blessing of the Church
of England, a well-disposed parliament, and some loyal and competent
ministers (including Clarendon's sons). He also came to the throne with the
overriding ambition to restore Roman Catholicism to England and to
repeal the Tests. Historians tend to see him as the victim of an idee fixe
rather than as an absolutist, but contemporaries can be excused if they
found these distinctions more difficult to draw. James saw off the foolhardy
rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth, Charles IPs bastard, and the victory
confirmed the king in his belief that God was on his side and that he was
justified in increasing the army. James soon realized that his Tory suppor-
ters would not cooperate in the demolition of the Anglican political
monopoly and he turned instead to an alliance of all those groups hitherto
excluded - Catholics, Dissenters of many hues, including Quakers, and
former Cromwellians, Parliamentarians, and Whigs. James displayed his
authority by violating the Test Act, having the courts rubber-stamp his

JOHN SPURR
dispensing power, and in April 1687 exerting his suspending power in a

Declaration of Indulgence which effectively granted religious toleration.
His comprehensive attack on the Tory hold over government also included
a purge of JPs and the militia, the intrusion of Catholics into the
universities, the ejection of the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, and
the trial of seven bishops for their part in the clergy's refusal to read the
reissued Indulgence from the parish pulpits.
Across the North Sea, the Dutch prince William of Orange, James's son-
in-law, was watching English affairs anxiously, and by the spring of 1688
was actively preparing to intervene in England. William prepared his ground
carefully, ensuring both backing from James's opponents and the benign
attitude of Tories. He deliberately courted bipartisan support - identifying
himself with Tory causes, claiming to want only a free parliament and to
protect the rights of his wife, James's daughter Mary, after the birth of a male
heir to James in June. On 5 November William and his troops landed at
Torbay in Devon. Through several tense weeks, William's and James's
armies maneuvered while the real battle was fought out in print: James lost
his propaganda war, he lost his generals - John Churchill changed sides -
and he lost confidence, paralyzed by indecision and nosebleeds: after one
botched attempt atflight,James left for France on 23 December.
The Glorious Revolution was a moment of political unity in late
December and January. It was bipartisan action, and although the Whigs
later misappropriated the credit, this was not a Whig revolution. In
1688-89 t n e general line was that God had intervened, that divine
providence had altered the course of the succession. God had raised up the
Prince of Orange like another Moses or David "to Deliver his People from
the most Pitiful State and Condition."8 On 28 January 1689 the Conven-
tion Parliament resolved that James had abdicated and the throne was
vacant. The evasive language was deliberate. It threw the responsibility
onto James and made no reference to any deposition. Like so much else
about the Revolution, this resolution was to be reinterpreted in years to
come as if James had been deposed for breaking an original contract
between ruler and people. Such a Whig rereading of the Revolution, with
all it implied about the nature of English monarchy, and all that it owed to
the post-1688 popularity of John Locke's political philosophy, was only
possible because of the huge changes brought about under William III.
The last of the Stuarts, 1689-1714

The opportunity to redefine the constitution was missed in 1660; the role of
parliament, the precise limits of the royal prerogative, and the location of

sovereignty were left undecided. Politically, Charles took the path of

expedience and placated his erstwhile enemies rather than his long-
suffering friends. He then spent twenty-five years squirming under his self-
imposed restraints and trying to wriggle out of his dependence upon
parliament; it is a measure of his and his brother's partial success in freeing
themselves - in, for instance, keeping a standing army without parliamen-
tary sanction, or suspending and dispensing with the operation of various
laws - that the Convention Parliament of 1689 devoted itself to the task of
tying William to various conditions "more strictly . . . than other princes
had been before."9 The resulting Declaration of Rights may have been "an
implied contract" between William and his new subjects. That was
certainly what radical Whigs in the Convention Parliament intended. The
declaration spells out James IPs misdeeds, asserts the nation's ancient
liberties, declares William and Mary king and queen, and sets forth the
immediate succession. But William did not promise to respect these liberties
before he was crowned - they were simply read to him and his queen at a
curious ceremony in the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall. Later, the declara-
tion became a statute, the Bill of Rights, with the additional proviso that
the monarch cannot be, nor be married to, a Roman Catholic. The royal
assent may have been assumed to be a promise to respect these rights: yet
the act had no provisions to ensure that these pious and rather airy
principles were enforced.10
Many would also see the religious settlement of 1662 as a missed
opportunity, but the "Toleration Act" of 1689 was at best a partial remedy
for religious division. It extended no right of toleration, it simply "in-
dulged" or exempted Protestant Dissenters from the penalties of a long list
of statutes, all of which remained in force. Even to qualify for these
exemptions, Nonconformists had to register and take a series of oaths. The
country's estimated 60,000 Roman Catholics, of course, gained nothing
from the Act. The civil disabilities borne by non-Anglicans such as exclu-
sion from all public office and from the universities remained in place; and
in 1711 and 1714 Tory parliaments enacted serious limitations on the
toleration enjoyed by Protestant Dissenters. Nor can the Toleration Act of
1689 be said to have been popular. Many moderate Nonconformists had
aspired to reunion with the Church of England. But moves for a reunion or
"comprehension" failed, and so the Toleration Act applied to perhaps four
times more Protestants than had originally been intended: in 1715-18 it
was estimated that there were 338,000 Dissenters out of a national
population of 5.4 million.
Another direct consequence of the Revolution of 1688-89 was England's
involvement in the front line of major European wars for eighteen of the
11

JOHN SPURR
next twenty-three years. William of Orange had intervened in England

because he needed to bring her into his war against Louis XIV, but once he
had gained the English throne William was also forced to defend it against
Stuart forces in Scotland and Ireland. William spent summer after summer
- sixty-two months of his reign in total - campaigning abroad. The Nine
Years War (1689-97) saw William bogged down in the Netherlands,
staving off French advances, and rarely achieving any outright victory. So
wasteful of men and money was this monotonous war that it convinced
many at home of the virtues of a "blue water" strategy, a naval war against
French trade, shipping, and colonies.
This unprecedented warfare was not cheap; the war of 1689-97 c o s t
£5.5 million a year, the war of 1702-12, £8.5 million. And parliament in
1689 had deliberately kept William short of money. "If you settle such a
revenue as that the king should have no need of a Parliament," said Paul
Foley, Speaker of the House, "I think we do not do our duty to them that
sent us hither."11 William's ordinary revenue was less than £1 million a
year, whereas James had £1.5 million. So parliament had to finance the
war. The resulting Land Tax was fixed by an assessment of rental value and
rated at two shillings in the pound in peace time and four shillings in
wartime. Although accuracy of assessment varied, for most of William's
and Anne's reigns the Land Tax was a 20 percent income tax on those who
lived off rents: this is taxation on a twentieth-century scale. It represented
40 percent of the government's revenues and brought in £2 million each
year. The efficiency of this tax helped to underpin the evolving public
credit. The government was raising huge sums, some of them directly
against parliamentary revenues such as the Land Tax, others against more
long-term income, and others simply on public credit or, in other words, on
confidence in the government's ability and intention to repay. That con-
fidence was based not only on the fiscal system, but also on the Bank of
England, which was established in 1694. The government borrowed from
the Bank and from concerns such as the East India Companies and the
South Sea Company, which was set up in 1711 as a device to convert the £9
million owed to government creditors into their stock in an independent
financial enterprise. Investors who rushed to buy stocks in all of these
institutions were generally rewarded with good returns on their money.
In 1689 William admitted that "whilst there was a war he should want a
parliament.'12 In the long term, parliament's regular sessions and fiscal
powers led to a new constitutional importance, but in the short term,
parliament still needed day-to-day political management. After a flirtation
with a mixed ministry of Tories and Whigs, William threw in his lot with a
group of Whig aristocrats, Lords Somers, Halifax, Wharton, Oxford, and

England i649-1750: differences contained?
Sunderland, known as the Junto. The opposition sniped from the back-
benches at the Land Tax, the Bank, the influence of William's Dutch
favorites, and led by Paul Foley and Edward Harley they scored some
significant victories. In 1698 William was forced to accept a peace-time
army of 7,000 English-born troops, rather than the 20,000 he wanted. In
1701 the Act of Settlement, which laid down the succession of the
Hanoverians should Princess Anne die without children, included a great
catalog of protest at William's perversion of the constitution. The Act
imposed a series of statutory limitations on the monarch, who henceforth
had to be a conforming Anglican; it stipulated that parliamentary consent
was necessary for foreign wars; and it freed the judiciary from royal
interference. The Act of Settlement was perhaps the most notable of the
constitutional victories achieved over the crown during William's reign.
Queen Anne's reign coincided with England's second great bout against
Louis XIV. While the Duke of Marlborough defeated the French, his ally
the Earl of Godolphin took care of the home front. The two men served
Anne as pragmatic political managers, working with politicians across the
spectrum. However, their commitment to punitive peace terms became an
obstacle to peace, and so by 1708 they had given way to Somers and
Wharton, the great Whig ministers of the 1690s. War or peace became the
great issue, not just in politics, but in social terms too. Contemporaries
perceived English society as divided between the rival "monied" and
"landed interests." Henry St. John claimed in 1709 that "the whole
burden" of twenty years of war had fallen on "the landed interest," men
who had "neither served in the fleets nor armies, not meddled in the public
funds and management of treasure." Meanwhile the new monied interest
had arisen on the back of "a sort of property which was not known twenty
years ago." The monied interest was thought to "ruin those that have only
land to depend on, to enrich Dutch, Jews, French and other foreigners,
scoundrel stock-jobbers and tally-jobbers, who have been sucking our
vitals for many years."13 In part these interests were literary constructs: the
landed interest gained a voice in Jonathan Swift's Examiner (1710-11), or
less flatteringly in the figure of Sir Roger de Coverley, the archetypal squire
who crossed swords with the merchant Sir Andrew Freeport in the pages of
The Spectator and Tatler.14 But in general the perception of social change
was justified. Before 1688 the English were undertaxed and possibly under-
governed by an amateur bureaucracy of gentlemen landowners; by the
1690s they paid a swingeing Land Tax, supported a huge National Debt,
and found professional administrators interfering ceaselessly in their
affairs. A society based on the ownership of land was giving way to a more
complex society which included new professional and administrative
13

JOHN SPURR
classes, and the powerful "monied interest" that had no intention of giving
up commerce and investment for a life of rural ease as convention had
demanded.
The tensions naturally found political expression. The Tories were the
party of the landed interest, constantly criticizing the Whigs for the war
and their pandering to the whims of financiers, foreigners, and Dissenters.
The Tory cry of "the church in danger" was particularly effective in
mobilizing support: it rang from the lips of the rioters who in 1710
demonstrated their approval of Dr. Henry Sacheverell's vitriolic attacks on
the Glorious Revolution by destroying Dissenters' chapels. The slogan
seemed to find support too among the electorate, for the Tories generally
succeeded at the polls whenever they invoked the dangers to the Church of
England or the issue of foreign policy, just as the Whigs profited from their
trump card, "the Protestant succession in danger." In 1710 the Tories
captured power and offered a coherent vision of a paternalistic society and
government which would retreat from deficit finance, foreign entangle-
ments, and protection of dissident Protestants. Unfortunately their leader-
ship did not match their platform: Harley and St. John (or the Earl of
Oxford and Viscount Bolingbroke as they became) were personal rivals.
And the Hanoverian succession issue loomed ominously: this was a
problem for the Earl of Oxford, who had alienated Hanover by making a
peace in 1713 which left Britain's allies in the lurch; and it exposed the
variety of Tory attitudes to the succession - some Tories dreamt of a Stuart
restoration, and a few, to whom Bolingbroke gave leadership, toyed with
Jacobitism, the cause of James II and, after James's death in 1701, of his
son, the so-called James III, the Pretender to the British throne. In the last
months of Queen Anne, the Tory ministry was falling apart.
The Hanoverians, 1715-1745

God "has now saved us by a train of wonders," rejoiced the Whig bishop
Gilbert Burnet on the accession of George I. "We were, God knows, upon
the point of at least confusions, if not of utter ruin, and are now delivered
and rendered as safe as any human constitution can be."15 George himself-
fifty-four years old, unable to speak English, honest but dull, preoccupied
with the affairs of Hanover and of his dreary entourage - was hardly a
wonder. The new king had made it plain that he had little time for Tories: a
Whiggish ministry was formed under Earl Stanhope; Bolingbroke fled to
the Pretender in France; and in the summer of 1715 the Highlands of
Scotland rebelled in expectation of the Pretender and of a reciprocal
English Jacobite rebellion. The Pretender arrived late, and the English

rising not at all: the Fifteen was undermined by lack of unity and leader-
ship. But the abortive rebellion led to the blanket proscription of the Tories
from political life. The Whig ministry embarked upon a purge "down to
the meanest" office-holder: in Middlesex alone, for instance, sixty-eight
Tory JPs were dismissed. The way was being prepared for single-party
government. In May 1716 the Septennial Act prolonged the existing Whig
parliament for another four years and extended the maximum life of future
parliaments to seven years; anti-Dissenter legislation was repealed; and an
attempt was made to ensure a permanent Whig majority in the House of
Lords. Like so many politicians before him, both Whig and Tory, Stanhope
was attempting to ensure the permanence of his own party's grasp on
power. It was in fact a junior minister and one-time dissident, Sir Robert
Walpole, who came nearest to turning this dream into a reality.
The financial and political scandal caused by the boom and subsequent
crash in the value of South Sea Company stock in 1720 destroyed
Stanhope's ministry and gave Walpole his chance. He restored public credit,
salvaged something for the stock-holders, and screened his ministerial
colleagues from the worst of the accusations. Having established his
ascendancy in the Commons, Walpole went on to enhance his standing
with the king by exposing Bishop Atterbury's Jacobite plot in 1722. With
similar adroitness, Walpole attached himself to the new king when George
II succeeded his father in 1727. The late 1720s and early 1730s saw
Walpole at his zenith, commanding majorities in the Commons, dominating
the ministry, and secure at court - functioning, many believe, as the first
Prime Minister. Walpole had no secret: he boasted that he was "no saint, no
spartan, no reformer." He did not lead moral crusades: as Paul Langford
observes, "Walpole stood for many things, fiscal economy, political pru-
dence in defence of the Protestant succession, pragmatic wisdom in hand-
ling religious controversies, robust but unadventurous self-interest in
dealing with foreign powers. Men of the world and political experience
admired him."16 Walpole's domination, the "robinocracy," was based on
hard work and on force of personality: he was able to retain the confidence
of both George I and George II and to convince them of the need to keep
the Tories in the political outer darkness; he remained a member of the
House of Commons so that he could overawe the backbenches. Of course,
he was ensured of a solid phalanx of administration votes; the "corps" of
government supporters comprised men in the pay of the crown or those
returned for the many pocket boroughs controlled by the Dukes of New-
castle, Devonshire, and Argyll. But another explanation for his success was
the absence of effective opposition.
There was little parliamentary opposition since those MPs not bought off
15

JOHN SPURR
were mainly Tory backbenchers stigmatized as Jacobites. Although the

Tories were organized, they could hope for nothing from George I. Mean-
while, however, there was a growing list of Walpole's cast-off allies and
friends, men like William Pulteney and Charles Townshend, who might be
able to marshal more anti-government votes in parliament. Such opponents
could make common cause with the extra-parliamentary opposition, now
led by Bolingbroke, who had returned from exile, been pardoned, but
barred from the House of Lords. He turned instead to the press and used
his journal The Craftsman to mount his campaign against "the great man,"
Walpole, and his betrayal of all that 1688 had stood for. Bolingbroke and
the "patriot" opposition decried the official corruption and the prevalence
of "party"; they demanded the reduction of the standing army, a cutback in
the number of placemen, the lifting of press restrictions, reduction of the
national debt, and the revival of the Triennial Act. Direct comparisons
were made between Walpole and earlier tyrants such as Sejanus and
Cardinal Wolsey; Swift, Gay, and Pope enjoyed drawing parallels between
the public robber Walpole and the notorious thief Jonathan Wild; the
Beggar's Opera compared Westminster with Newgate Gaol; and when Gay
got into trouble for his criticism, Swift ironically reminded him that "in this
most refined Age, the Virtues of a Prime Minister are no more to be
suspected than the Chastity of Caesar's Wife."17
Walpole suffered his first serious blow in 1733 when he proposed an
unpopular excise tax. Business interests were hostile and the mob took to
the streets chanting "no slavery, no excise, no wooden shoes." Losing
support in the Commons, Walpole allowed the measure to drop, but then
turned on his tormentors with such ferocity that Pulteney advised Boling-
broke to return to exile. Henceforth Walpole was on the defensive. He faced
an increasingly talented array of enemies, including former friends like the
Duke of Argyll, John Carteret, and Bishop Gibson, and by 1737 Frederick,
Prince of Wales, had defected and taken up Bolingbroke's mantle. Protest
greeted Walpole's agreement with Spain in 1739, which seemed to sacrifice
British commercial and imperial ambitions to Hanoverian interests. When
he was eventually forced into a war with Spain, Walpole so mismanaged it
that he was defeated seven times in the lobbies in two months. In 1742 Sir
Robert bowed out of office. George II continued to draw his ministers and
majorities from the old corps of Whigs through the long years of the Pelham
brothers' ascendancy, but in 1760 George III came to the throne, detesting
the old corps and intent on annihilating the name of party. George III
repudiated the very notions upon which Walpole and his heirs had based
their oligarchy: the utter unacceptability of the Tories and the consequent
necessity of one-party rule. The political pack-ice was at last breaking up.
16

Politics and party

The English are monarchists. Even at the height of the puritan revolution
doctrinaire republicans were few in number. The early modern political
nation believed in responsible, even balanced, monarchy and expected
monarchs to respect the law, liberties, and property of their subjects.
English laws "are our ancient title to our lives, liberties, and estates; and
without which this world were a wilderness."18 The ill-defined liberties
protected by the law were essentially negative: the English propertied class
saw itself as free from the encroachments of both the crown and those
without property. Unfortunately Charles I and his two sons gave the
English a distinct feeling that their law, liberties, and property were under
threat. Although it is often asked whether the Stuarts aspired to an
absolute monarchy on the model of that of their French Bourbon cousins,
this is a misjudged question. Stuart intentions, or indeed abilities, were far
less pertinent than the interpretation their subjects placed on their actions.
The revolution of 1688 was essentially defensive. All who made the
revolution, Whig or Tory, were convinced that the English enjoyed their
liberty and property "as a right inherent in themselves, and never
transferred, alienated or conveyed to any king."19 In other words, the
revolution was a reassertion that their rights were inalienable personal
property, not the gift of a ruler. The people were supposed to have a
"property" in their laws - laws, after all, made for the public good - and
in their religion, and neither of these properties could be touched by a
king acting without parliament. There is no doubt that the revolution
located sovereignty in "the king-in-parliament," that is, in laws made by
parliament and king together. The reality was plain to anyone who
compared Henry Vffl's or Edward VI's ability to impose a religion on
their subjects with the fate of James II or the stipulation in 1701 that the
monarch be an Anglican. In 1689 parliament became the guarantor of
English rights. "We have had such violation of our liberties in the last
reigns, that the Prince of Orange cannot take it ill, if we make conditions
to secure ourselves for our future," asserted one MP in 1689.20 But the
constitutional conditions were nebulous and needed constant reassertion.
Parliament's real power grew through the more gradual process of
political and procedural maturation.
Despite, or perhaps because of, its successes in the 1640s, parliament did
not see itself as part of the government of the country after 1660. John
Miller has argued that parliament was emphatically not seizing the
initiative during the 1660s and 1670s - which simply makes the develop-
ments after 1678 all the more novel.21 The pressure for the statutory
17

JOHN SPURR
exclusion of James from the throne certainly was a seizing of the constitu-
tional initiative; and after 1688, the European wars virtually guaranteed
the permanence of parliament. For all the large number of placemen in the
parliaments of the 1690s, repeated "tacks" of contentious issues to money
bills ensured that the parliamentary opposition got its own way. And for all
its overt flattery, there is the ring of truth in Walpole's admission to
parliament in 1739 that he had lived long enough to know that his safety
lay in the approbation of the House.
The growing political weight of parliament is largely explained by its
purpose. Parliament was there to do the monarch's business and Augustan
monarchs had plenty to put before it. The political pieties of the age were
that parliament should be harmonious, that MPs came together to serve the
common good and should be independent of both the government and the
electorate; hence the detestation of "managers" or "undertakers,"
"faction," "party," or "formed oppositions," and either "placemen" or
"instructions" to MPs from their constituents. But the realities were very
different. Monarchs needed subsidies voted, alliances supported, and
policies approved by parliament, and it was a prime duty of ministers such
as Clarendon or Danby or Walpole to make sure this happened. But no
single individual could deliver a majority for every proposal in both the
Lords and Commons, especially as parliaments sat more often, were more
frequently elected, and their taxes were more vital to the crown. In broad
terms, monarchs increasingly saw that majorities could be delivered by
several different political managers in several different combinations; the
trick was to balance the managers' principles and pride in an effective
cabinet council, and whenever possible to leave the monarch a degree of
freedom of maneuver. The managers, some of them superlative in these
dark arts, others mercurial figures of overweening ambition, were often
rather distant from the supposed principle of "party" and prepared to work
with men of any or all political persuasions: as one of the greatest of them,
the Earl of Sunderland, summed it up, "what matter who serves his
Majesty, so long as his Majesty is served."22
To the devotees of party, of course, it mattered intensely who served his
majesty because careers, patronage, principles, and even policies depended
upon it. Party was a deeply contentious issue, in part because it is a general
notion rather than a concrete institution. Party referred not only to a group
of individuals acting in concert; it was also a factious self-interested activity
in the eyes of contemporaries. Party, it has been said, was like sin,
universally condemned and widely indulged.23 The taint of party was so
feared that although they often discerned it in others, most people saw
themselves as defending the constitution, promoting the common good, or
18

advancing the cause of improvement. In parliament, the advent of party

was vital to the legitimation of opposition. The modern notion that the
executive needs to be kept in check by official and constant organs of
opposition was not so obvious to the monarchical cast of mind. As late as
1757 it was a common view that "a form'd general Opposition" was one of
"the most wicked combinations that men can enter into - worse and more
corrupt than any administration."24 Opposition, partisan opposition, con-
flicted with deep-rooted notions of duty, loyalty, law, and providence, it
conflicted indeed with the posture of the main opposition group, the
"Country" or "Country party."
The ideology of the Country was ostensibly a non-ideology. The Country
had no principles nor programs beyond restraining the government: its
most profound instinct was that that government governs best which
governs least. Responsible government is prudent, low-taxing, and re-
spectful of existing private, local, or parliamentary privileges. This was the
view of landowners who saw their lands as entitling, even obliging, them to
participate in local government and central decision-making. The Country
wanted frequent parliaments full of independent men, and purged of
placemen, so that they could properly scrutinize the executive; small armies
and, better still, blue water policies; and an end to foreign entanglements.
Country ideology could be seen as a set of immediate opposition slogans or
as an instinctive substratum of the Tory party, but it also grew out of a
notion of political virtue.
The Country outlook with its deferential, conservative values overlapped
with a tradition of opposition which owed much to the republican
Commonwealthmen of the 1650s. This tradition's central premise was that
civic virtue was constantly in danger of corruption, that luxury or the
human instinct to consume was a vice which politicians repeatedly
exploited to deprive free people of their liberty. The moral health of the
polity depended on a class of men possessing sufficient property to be able
to play an independent part in government. What was dangerous was the
growth of a class whose wealth flowed from investment in the government
and upon whom the government was dependent for war funds. Such views
were shared by a number of political leaders and political analysts who can
be classified as Whigs of one kind or another; but by the time of Walpole
the same ideas were being employed byfigureslike Swift, Bolingbroke, and
Pope, who have to be seen as Tories. One helpful characterization of these
disparate figures is that they spoke the political language of virtue rather
than that of rights; in other words, they stressed the danger that voters,
MPs, and parliament might become corrupt and abdicate their political
responsibilities, whereas rights theorists laid more emphasis on the threat
19

JOHN SPURR
posed to individuals' rights by overmighty rulers or governments with

standing armies and intrusive officials.
The Whig and Tory parties, however, were very different beasts from the
Country; they represented "another level of political consciousness."25
Whigs and Tories were competing for power and they stood for programs.
If one party was in power, then for all the anti-party rhetoric the other was
obliged to oppose the government. These were not modern political parties,
but they often look like them. Whig and Tory positions first crystallized in
the Exclusion Crisis. The Whigs were more of a coalition than a united
party: some were moved by fear of James, others by a desire to help
Nonconformists, yet others were part of the London radical tradition
derived from the Levellers of the 1640s. In parliament the Exclusionist vote
was precarious; by 1680 the backbenchers, whose fear of popery had led
them at first to join in the Whig attack on Charles and James, began to
identify the rabble-rousing methods and extreme rhetoric of the Whigs as a
greater threat to their ordered world. MPs of this kind began to be
convinced by the Tory cry that "1641 was here again." It was the
controlling conservatism of these squires which ensured the failure of
Exclusion as a parliamentary demand. The Exclusion battle helped give the
Tories a sharper definition. The Tory position was based on real principles,
the indefeasible divine right of monarchy, and non-residence. In Charles's
last years, the Tories encouraged, and often invited, vigorous royal inter-
ference in provincial government. The Commissions of the Peace were
purged of all their opponents; and town charters were revised to give the
Tories the electoral advantage. This was to give hostages to fortune: James
II, and later George I, turned these weapons against the Tories themselves.
For most of the 1680s, the existence of Whig and Tory parties can be
attributed to mutual hostility and fear. Once the parties had cohered and
men began to assume or be attributed the labels of Whig and Tory, once
political and local offices began to be distributed according to party
allegiance, a process of self-perpetuation had begun.
The Glorious Revolution, like the French Revolution, threw up enough
dust to obscure its antecedents; and like 1789, it became a cause in itself:
attitudes toward the Revolution and the settlement became the touchstones
by which Whigs and Tories were identified. After 1689 the Whigs and
Tories were clearly distinguished by their views on the Revolution and on
the related issues of the succession, the defense of the Church of England,
the conduct of "King William's war," and the abjuration of James II and his
descendants. In particular, these clear party lines gave rise to party voting
and discipline; thus it can be shown from division lists in Queen Anne's
parliaments that the vast majority of MPs voted consistently on party
20

issues. But the characters of the Whig and Tory parties were changing. The
Whigs were becoming a party of government, an aristocratic, Court-
inclined, set of managers; the sort of politicians who were deeply involved
in the institutions and financing behind the wars: in short, the sort of men
who propped up Walpole and his administration. The Tories were more
ambiguous: many retained a residual loyalty to James II, the rightful king,
and his heirs even while recognizing William as the de facto king; in
parliament Tories accepted the leadership of Edward Harley and supported
the Country protests against placemen and standing armies - it is often
claimed that the 1690s saw the Tories being educated in the ways of party
and opposition. Doubt over their loyalty to William was always a weak
spot for the Tories. The Junto Whigs took advantage of the 1696 assassina-
tion plot against William to subscribe an Association affirming that
William was "rightful and lawful king," and when 100 MPs and 26 Lords
refused to sign they were tarred as Jacobites. Under James's daughter
Queen Anne, the Tories seemed a coherent party, campaigning on "the
church in danger" slogan, legislating against Occasional Conformity and
dissenting academies, and lobbying for office and place: this was decidedly
not Country party behavior.
Hanoverian party politics manage to be very clear cut and quite baffling.
Since Tories had no chance of office, the labels of Whig and Tory could be
almost meaningless, to the point that anyone who voted with the govern-
ment after 1714 tended to be classified as a Whig. This convinces many
scholars that Whig-Tory divisions had in reality given way to a Court-
Country split. One view is that both parties had Court and Country wings
under Anne, but after 1714 the Tories were solely a Country party. It then
became the task of Court Whigs to prevent the Country wings of the Tory
and Whig parties from forming an alliance, which was done by smearing
the Tories as Jacobites. Yet, "despite such impediments, by 1760 Court and
Country had effectively replaced tory and whig."26 On the other hand, it is
still worth asking what Hanoverian Whigs and Tories actually believed in.
The Whigs had very little connection with the pro-Dissent, liberal princi-
ples of their predecessors: they were in cahoots with the Church of England
and her bishops, and in 1711 had even backed the Occasional Conformity
Bill to gain dissident Tory help against the peace policy; they were no
friends to wide electorates, frequent elections, or even freedom of expres-
sion. Although the Tories still bore the stigma of Jacobitism, there was an
organized Tory party in the constituencies and at Westminster led by astute
politicians such as Sir John Cotton and Sir William Wyndham.27 Yet it is
doubtful whether they could realistically expect to be taken into govern-
ment; Walpole had spent too long persuading himself and his royal masters
21

JOHN SPURR
of their untrustworthiness; and most Tories were vociferous in their

support of the Church of England and their criticism of a Hanoverian bias
to British foreign policy, neither of which endeared them to suspicious
monarchs.
It was inevitable that the advent of political parties also saw a widening
of political activity in society. Nothing helped to politicize the nation like
the frequent and bitterly fought elections of the period: the three elections
in 1679 and 1680 were a dress rehearsal for the eleven general elections
held between 1689 and 1713 (that is, on average, one every two years). The
electorate was probably 4.6 percent of the population in 1715 - which was
the largest electorate before 1832 - but some seats were "popular" or open,
with a wide franchise, while others were closed boroughs in the pocket of
some magnate. Geoffrey Holmes concludes that the elections of this period
tended to exaggerate, but not misrepresent, the will of the people.28 If that
is so, then the country was Tory on most issues, and the only Whig
majorities were gained in 1708 and 1715 at the time of invasion scares. Of
course, the electorate, like the franchise, was only hazily defined; at some
stage, those who could vote merged with those who, despite being
unenfranchised, formed the wider audience for politics. Memories were
still fresh of the unprecedented political debate and activity of the 1640s
and 1650s which had formed attitudes and expectations that were not to be
denied. From 1695 until the Walpole years the press was free of govern-
ment control, and those disseminators of news, rumor, and propaganda,
the newspapers, periodicals, clubs, and coffee-houses, flourished. Both men
and women became fiercely partisan: when the upper-class Ann Clavering
was told by an acquaintance that her extreme Whig views would repel
suitors, she retorted, "O madam . . . you mistake that matter. I despise all
Tories, and were their estates never so large; and yet don't despair, for I am
sure the Whigs like me better for being true to my party."29
The capital was an important forum for popular politics. During the
Exclusion Crisis the London crowds were managed and manipulated by
sophisticated propaganda.30 The popular Whig platform asserted that
parliament was the best defense of English liberties, and indeed the best
defense of the king, against the threat of popery. This message was slanted
toward the Nonconformists by the insinuation that the intolerant Church
of England aided and abetted the growth of popery and arbitrary govern-
ment. Meanwhile the Tory crowd was told that the Nonconformists and
Whigs were to blame for dividing the Protestant cause and thus leaving the
nation vulnerable to the common enemy of popery. After 1688 the Whig
politicians of London shifted their ground, just as they did in parliamentary
politics, and the London Tories came to represent the cause of "liberty" in
22

city politics.31 This Tory populism aimed at giving the freemen of the city a
greater say in the election of aldermen and it drew much of its strength
from the small traders and manufacturers who were being left behind in the
Whig boom.
Popular politics of this sort was organized around clubs, meetings, and
processions, and so it was not that surprising when these activities spilled
over into disorder and riot. Yet this disorder never seems to have contained
a real threat of rebellion or revolution. It is doubtful whether radical Whigs
could have launched a rising in London after the Exclusion Crisis. Holmes
thinks that the Sacheverell rioters of 1710 were "respectable," with clearly
specified and ideologically informed aims (i.e., tearing down Nonconfor-
mist meeting houses): the Whig and Tory mobs, the Church and Jacobite
mobs, even the "No Excise" crowds, all seem to have been mouthing the
slogans of their social superiors, rather than any distinctive grievances of
their own. Politicians and parliament were also prepared to give way to
opinion "without doors," as happened in the Excise Crisis, over war fever
in 1739, or the Jew Bill. The only rebellion of our period (excluding the
invasions of 1688, 1715, and 1745) was Monmouth's rising of 1685, which
drew upon the strength of the good old cause in the West Country. This
puritan legacy was probably the reservoir of English political radicalism:
former Cromwellians, ex-soldiers and sectaries, artisans and Nonconfor-
mists formed a shadowy underground which bred many abortive plots
during the 1660s and 1670s. However, their potential leaders, men like
Algernon Sidney or Edmund Ludlow, were in exile: it was the Popish Plot
and Exclusion Crisis which brought these radicals once again to the fore in
alliance with Shaftesbury and the Whigs. The ideology of this radical Whig
party was complex: here there are hints of Leveller ideas, there evidence of
die-hard republicanism; the radicals were convinced that Charles was
subverting parliament and that civil rights were in jeopardy; but the most
significant and pervasive strand of their thought was their hatred of
religious intolerance and persecution. This mentality has been recently
brought to life in Richard Ashcraft's study of John Locke's Two Treatises;
here Locke's work appears as firmly democratic and as a clear justification
for rebellion after the failure of Exclusion, and as a rationale behind the
Whig plot to assassinate Charles II and his brother at Rye House in 1683.
Ashcraft's Locke is firmly placed within the radical camp. Yet the Locke of
the eighteenth century was a far more moderate figure: the fate of Locke,
his later reputation, may stand as an example of the fate of English
radicalism. The radical tradition was recuperated, it was claimed by the
Whig aristocrats and oligarchs, and turned into one more prop of the social
order. But it could equally be said that radical opposition had lost its
23

JOHN SPURR
purpose now that opposition was becoming institutionalized as party

politics. The structure of English politics was partisan and people were
beginning to see that this had benefits as well as costs. "In all free
governments there ever were and will be parties," observed Edward
Spellman in 1743; "parties are not only the effect, but the support of
liberty."32
State and society

One measure of the strength of a state is the coercive force at its disposal.
The naked power of military might, from Cromwell's bashaws to Louis
XIV's dragoons, from James IPs Catholic Irish troops to George IPs
Hessian mercenaries, was something with which people were familiar, and
something which they feared. James II had built a formidable army by
1688, but his 20,000 men were as nothing compared to the huge armies
under William and Anne: 70,000 men were in English pay in 1694 and
over 100,000 a decade later. But these troops were paid by parliament and
they were on the continent: the furore over William's attempt to maintain a
standing army in peace time after the 1697 Peace of Ryswick illustrates
that the nation had no time for royal armies at home.
Despite appearances the Augustan state was not a military state. It was
principally a bureaucratic and tax-raising machine. By the 1720s, it
employed 12,000 permanent administrators and had become the largest
employer, borrower, and spender in the economy. The process probably
began in the 1640s when parliament imposed an excise tax and a monthly
assessment. Charles IPs government took over the collection of its own
taxes, while the Treasury established oversight of income and expenditure
and organized efficient repayment of loans. The Land Tax sustained the
government's credit during the wars against Louis XIV, but after 1714 its
values dwindled in comparison with the excise, which by the 1720s was
worth more to the government than all its other revenues put together. For
all the importance of the Land Tax, in general terms this period saw a
decisive switch from direct taxation of land and landed wealth to indirect
taxation on consumption. Customs were paid on imported raw materials
and basic foodstuffs; excise tax was payable on a range of domestically
produced goods such as beer, spirits, cider, malt, hops, salt, leather, soap,
candles, paper, and starch. Working people were now taxed on the
necessities of life and the taxation was enforced by professional employees
of the crown.
From the perspective of its predecessors the post-1640 state was intrusive
and heavy-handed; but by comparison with other Western European states,
2-4

the Augustan state was a ramshackle anomaly with some notable weak-
nesses. For instance, in 1660 crown and gentry recognized their need of one
another; and in return for parliamentary support, the gentry were allowed
a free hand in the shires. Thus the bargain at the very foundation of the
restored monarchy made ideas of establishing a centralized administrative
machine irrelevant. Eighteenth-century governmental policies, and the
increasingly uniform, professional, and accountable government of the
parishes and towns of Britain, were a result of JPs, constables, aldermen,
and their communities making common cause with the state. When it came
to the taxes which underpinned the war effort, we are reminded that the
state was implementing and harnessing the energy of the propertied classes,
those who thought a war was necessary, just, or even beneficial: "warfare
on the English model was a triumph for an enterprising and acquisitive
society, not an authoritarian state."33 Although the increase in government
tax receipts in this period has often been assumed to reflect economic
growth, it now seems that the rise was due to increased taxation. The
economy was certainly growing - at 0.69 percent per annum in real terms
between 1700 and 1760 - but the spectacular increases were a nineteenth-
century phenomenon. The most significant developments of the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were rising agricultural produc-
tivity, an increase in the number of people living in towns, and an increase
in the number of people engaged in non-agricultural production. By 1750
less than 50 percent of the population was working in agriculture. The rest
were engaged in industry, commerce, services, or the professions.
As we have already seen, these economic and social changes had created
new forms of property and new elites, which had a more intimate relation-
ship with the government and the state than the landed gentry. The monied
interest would have been unpopular in any context, as yuppies exploiting
the mysteries of high finance, where money miraculously makes money,
and the deeply suspicious stocks, shares, and securities allow speculators to
accumulate without having contributed. But they were doubly damned
because of their involvement with the government and with the war which
the landed gentry believed they were subsidizing. The professions, too,
were often associated with the state, which created all the opportunities for
pen-pushers, tax-collectors, and career soldiers. These changes represented
a tremendous growth in the leisured classes and of those with a little extra
time and money to spend on themselves, whether it was by consulting a
doctor, visiting Bath, or simply going shopping. In brief, life was improving
for all. From about 1680, population, economic resources, and employ-
ment seem to have maintained a happy balance. Money wages were rising
and prices of consumable goods remained steady and some, particularly
2.5

JOHN SPURR
luxuries, fell. English working people now ate wheat bread, rather than rye
bread, and could afford and obtain small self-indulgences such as ribbons,
laces, mirrors, toys, combs, and the like: a skilled worker in eighteenth-
century London had the financial means to buy not only cheap print -
ballads and chapbooks - but even substantial novels selling at six shillings
a copy. Thanks to the growth of Britain's sea-borne trade, exotic luxuries
such as fruit, coffee, tea, sugar, fabrics, and tobacco were arriving from the
East and from the plantations of the New World. The stocks of provincial
shopkeepers are testimony to the spread of gracious living, sophistication,
and luxury to the country towns of Augustan England.
In what Peter Borsay dubs an "urban renaissance" the towns of England
and Wales changed their style, ambience, even their functions, in this
period. In short they became centers for leisure, civility, and consumption.
Instead of being simply markets or industrial centers, towns became
meeting places for the gentry and those who aspired to that status, for
professionals, and for those who had made their money and now wished to
enjoy it. Some of these towns such as Bath or Tunbridge Wells, made a
speciality of leisure and became resorts, while others amalgamated func-
tions. Whether the measure is the number of coffee-houses, daily and
provincial newspapers, libraries or horse-race meetings, there is no denying
the explosion of places to go and things to do and see in Augustan England.
Towns became centers of polite living because there existed a leisured class,
a majority of whom were female, who had the time to devote to tea-
drinking, dancing, and cards, and the wealth to invest in the various
purpose-built Assembly rooms and concert halls, parks, and civic amen-
ities. And this leisured class deliberately chose to devote itself to civility as a
means of creating a tolerant and tolerable, civilized and stable society.
A civil society
Civility is not just a product of superfluous wealth and leisure; it is created
and sustained by cultural means, by practices which we might label as
discursive or ideological. This is apparent, for instance, in the way in which
Augustan England constructed notions of human nature. In this self-
conscious "age of reason," human psychology was read against its irra-
tional antithesis, "fanaticism" or "enthusiasm." Several different contem-
porary discourses - medical, scientific, religious, cultural, literary, and
political - converged, and "in stressing the connection between enthusiasm,
passions and melancholy, a clear psychological norm was offered as the
basis for the social order: the sober, reasonable and self-controlled
person."34 Such human beings deserved freedom of intellectual inquiry and
26

the right to believe and worship as they wished. The rational individual
was also a benevolent and sympathetic being, a "man of feeling" or a
"woman of sentiment" by the mid eighteenth century. For each of these
readings of human nature, there were others which were suppressed or
denied: that a human being might be inspired by the Holy Spirit, for
instance; or that egotism is the well-spring of human motivation; or that
female appetites might be safely met. And there were real human beings
whose lives and aspirations refused to fit the model: Dissenters, Quakers,
and Catholics; free-thinkers whose rational inquiry led to deism or atheism;
readers of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville; women like Aphra
Behn or Mary Astell. So to argue that Augustan discourse privileges one set
of assumptions about human nature is not to suggest that others were not
present or unacknowledged. It is simply to propose that these assumptions
were most conducive to the creation of a civilized and civilizing public
sphere.
The point can be advanced by considering the power of conversation as a
cultural trope of civility. In an Essay on Conversation Henry Fielding
expands on "the art of good breeding," by which "I mean the art of
pleasing, or contributing as much as possible to the ease and happiness of
those with whom you converse."35 This was a commonplace of the conduct
books which taught "good breeding," but it was intended to do more than
simply oil the wheels of social intercourse. Given the variety of religions
amongst us, wrote John Constable, and the propensity of human beings to
defend their religion with passion, they are a dangerous topic for discus-
sion. "How to manage them right in Conversation, is the present Point. . .
Commonly they are so handled, that one would almost hate to have them
brought into Conversation. They are apt to end in Disgusts, if not in
quarrels."36 Note the underlying assumption that conversations among
reasonable individuals should not be disrupted by contention, that religious
differences need to be managed. We are close to a new social rule, that
civilized, civil people keep politics and religion out of the conversation. The
Spalding Society established in Lincolnshire in 1710 proudly announced
that "we deal in all the arts and sciences, and exclude nothing from our
conversation but politics, which would throw all into confusion and
disorder."37
The civility of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century life is
properly regarded as a key to the management of difference. Civility was an
ideal, a vision of how the elite should conduct themselves, and it was put
into practice in drawing rooms and assemblies, in political clubs and on
boards and committees. Civility transformed an older vision of civic virtue
as independence, frugality, and martial vigor into sociability, urbanity, and

JOHN SPURR
politeness. The philosopher, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, has been seen as
crucial to this ideological transformation, and he defined precisely how
liberty was linked to "politeness" and how both required social interaction:
"All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our
corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision."38 Shaftesbury's
diffuse essays were translated into a more approachable idiom by Joseph
Addison and Sir Richard Steele, whose Spectator was aimed at readers "in
Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea Tables and in Coffee Houses." Whether or
not they were creating a bourgeois readership, they were certainly playing
to a metropolitan and urban audience and turning their back on the court
and its literary circles. It is even possible to see how literary discourses
meshed with others in forming and informing tastes and aspirations.
Dudley Ryder, a Dissenter and law student, "resolved to be very conversant
with Mr Locke's works" to learn the secret of "that clear, close way of
talking." He read the Spectator for the same purpose and was very taken
with Archbishop Tillotson's prose style. Other diarists suggest a similar
catholicity of influence. A Sussex shopkeeper, Thomas Turner, was another
admirer of Tillotson, read John Milton through the lens of the Spectator,
and also noted down "moral considerations" from the Universal Maga-
zine.39 There was a remarkable eclecticism in the cultural influences which
were shaping the citizens of Hanoverian Britain. Essayists, dramatists, and
novelists, as well as scientists, preachers, philosophers, and journalists,
contributed to the construction of a civility based on tolerance, conversa-
tion, and intellectual commerce. The political role of literature was
changing. The poets had toiled to transform the restored monarch Charles
II into Augustus, but the spell was wearing even thinner by the eighteenth
century, and when Pope addressed George II as Augustus in the 1730s this
was no more than sarcasm.40 The poets joined other writers in turning their
attention away from princes and toward their fellow citizens, away from
the celebration of heroism and majesty and toward the promotion of
civility and sensibility.
The English could not resolve their political and religious differences
between 1649 and 1750 - in fact they multiplied them. Yet simultaneously
they were able to accommodate these differences, to prevent them from
erupting as destructively as they had in the 1640s. The acceptance and
limitation of party politics, the diversion of energy into accumulating
wealth and enjoying leisure, and the formulation of cultural expectations
about what it is to be rational and civilized and how social interactions
should be conducted, all contributed to this containment, which was in
itself one of the most striking achievements of the Augustan Age.
28

NOTES
1 On this theme see Ian Gilmour, Riots, Risings and Revolution - Governance
and Violence in Eighteenth-century England (London, 1992).
2 J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675-1725 (London,
1967); G. Holmes, Augustan England - Professions, State and Society
1680-1730 (London, 1982).
3 J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and
Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985); J. Innes,
"Jonathan Clark, Social History and England's 'Ancien Regime,'" Past and
Present, 115 (1987), p. 181; P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People:
England 1727-1783 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 690-91.
4 Holmes, Augustan England, p. 18.
5 See Jonathan Barry, "Bourgeois Collectivism? Urban Association and the
Middling Sort," in J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People -
Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550-1800 (London, 1994); see also
P. Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689-1798 (Oxford,
1991).
6 [Andrew Marvell], An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary
Government (1677), p. 3.
7 See R. Willman, "The Origins of 'Whig' and 'Tory' in English Political
Language," The Historical Journal, 17 (1974).
8 Edmund Bohun, Three Charges Delivered at the General Quarter Sessions,
Holden at Ipswich, for the County of Suffolk, In the Years, 1691, 1692 (1693),
p. 9.
9 The Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, ed. A. Browning (Glasgow, 1936; 2nd edn.
1991), p. 546.
10 The new Coronation Oath was at least an unequivocal promise to govern
"according to the statutes in Parliament agreed on, and the laws and customs of
the same" and to maintain "the protestant reformed religion established by law."
11 Quoted in J. Miller, The Glorious Revolution (London, 1983), p. 42.
12 H. Horwitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics in the Reign of William III
(Manchester, 1977), p. 94.
13 G. Holmes and W. A. Speck (eds.), The Divided Society: Party Conflict in
England 1694-1716 (London, 1967), p. 135; W. A. Speck, "Conflict in
Society," in G. Holmes (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution, 1689-1714
(London, 1969), p. 137.
14 A helpful introduction to this theme is W. A. Speck, Society and Literature in
England 1700-1760 (Dublin, 1983).
15 Holmes and Speck (eds.), Divided Society, p. 113.
16 Langford, Polite and Commercial People, pp. 723-24.
17 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and other Satires (London, 1975), p. 242.
18 H. Nenner, "Liberty, Law and Property: The Constitution in Retrospect from
1689," in J. R. Jones (ed.), Liberty Secured?: Britain Before and After 1688
(Stanford, 1992), p. 97.
19 Ibid., p. 89.
20 William Garroway quoted in J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and
the English State, 1688-1789 (London, 1989), p. 114.
29

JOHN SPURR
21 J. Miller, "Charles II and his Parliaments," Transactions of the Royal Historical

Society, xxxn (London, 1982).
22 See G. Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (London, 1966; rev. edn.
1987), p. 189 and chapter 6.
23 E. L. Ellis, "William III and the Politicians," in Holmes (ed.), Britain after the
Glorious Revolution, p. 119; also see Speck's comments in J. Cannon (ed.), The
Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (London, 1981), p. 62.
24 Philip, second Earl Hardwicke, quoted in J. B. Owen, The Eighteenth Century
1714-1815 (London, 1974), p. 109.
25 F. O'Gorman quoted in D. Hayton, "The 'Country' Interest and the Party
System 1689-C.1720," in C. Jones (ed.), Party and Management in Parliament
1660-1784 (Leicester, 1984), p. 65.
26 W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England 1-714-1760 (London, 1977), p. 7.
27 See L. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-60 (Cambridge,
1982).
28 G. Holmes, The Electorate and the National Will in the First Age of Party
(Lancaster, 1976).
29 Quoted in Holmes and Speck (eds.), Divided Society, p. 87.
30 See T. Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and
Politics from the Revolution until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987).
31 See G. S. De Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age
of Party, 1688-1715 (Oxford, 1985).
32 Quoted in J. R. Jones, "The Revolution in Context," in Jones (ed.), Liberty
Secured?, p. 36.
3 3 Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 697.
34 M. Heyd, "The Reaction to Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth-century: Towards an
Integrative Approach," The Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981), p. 279.
35 Quoted in P. Rogers, The Augustan Vision (1974), p. 51.
36 [John Constable], The Conversation of a Gentleman (1738), pp. 218-19.
37 Langford, Public Life, p. 72.
38 L. E. Klein, "Liberty, Manners and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-century
England," The Historical journal, 32 (1989), p. 602.
39 The Diary of Dudley Ryder 1715-1716, ed. W. R. Matthews (London, 1939),
p. 155; The Diary of Thomas Turner 1754-1765, ed. D. Vaisey (Oxford,
1985), PP. 3,4-
40 See Pope's "First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace" (1737).
FURTHER READING
Ashcraft, Richard, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's "Two Treatises of Govern-
ment^ (Princeton, 1986).
Black, Jeremy (ed.), Britain in the Age of Walpole (London, 1984).
Borsay, Peter, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial
Town 1660-1770 (Oxford, 1981).
Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1789
(London, 1989).
Cannon, John (ed.), The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England
(London, 1981).
30

Clark, J. C. D., English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political
Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985).
Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (Yale, 1992).
Dickinson, H. T., Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-century
Britain (London, 1977).
Dickson, P. G. M., The Financial Revolution in England 1688-1756: A Study in the
Development of Public Credit (London, 1967).
Downie, J. A., Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the
Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge, 1979).
Earle, Peter, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Social and Family
Life in London, 1660-1730 (London, 1989).
Gilmour, Ian, Riots, Risings and Revolution: Governance and Violence in Eight-
eenth-century England (London, 1992).
Glassey, L. K. J. (ed.), The Reigns of Charles II and James VII and II (London,
1997)-
Gregg, Edward, Queen Anne (London, 1980).
Harris, Tim, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics
from the Revolution until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987).
Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society 1660-1715
(London, 1993).
Haydon, Colin, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-century England - A Political and
Social Study (Manchester, 1993).
Hill, Brian, The Growth of Parliamentary Parties, 1689-1751 (London, 1970).
Holmes, Geoffrey, Augustan England - Professions, State and Society 1680-1730
(London, 1982).
British Politics in the Age of Anne (London, 1966; rev. edn. 1987).
(ed.), Britain After the Glorious Revolution, 1689-1714 (London, 1969).
Holmes, Geoffrey and Speck, William (eds.), The Divided Society: Party Conflict in
England 1694-1716 (London, 1967).
Horwitz, H., Parliament, Policy and Politics in the Reign of William HI (Manche-
ster, 1977).
Hutton, Ronald, Charles the Second - King of England, Scotland, and Ireland
(Oxford, 1989).
Jenkins, G. H., The Foundations of Modern Wales 1641-1780 (Oxford, 1987).
Jones, Clyve, and Holmes, Geoffrey (eds.), Britain in the First Age of Party
1680-1750 (London, 1987).
Jones, D. W., War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough
(Oxford, 1988).
Jones, James, Country and Court: England 1658-1714 (London, 1978).
(ed.), Liberty Secured?: Britain Before and After 1688 (Stanford, 1992).
Kenyon, John, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689-1710 (Cambridge,
1977).
Klein, Lawrence E., Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and
Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1991).
Langford, Paul, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1717-1783 (Oxford,
1989).
Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689-1798 (Oxford, 1991).
Miller, John, Charles II (London, 1991).

JOHN SPURR
James II-A Study in Kingship (London, 1978).

Popery and Politics in England 1660-1688 (Cambridge, 1973).
Plumb, J. H., The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675-1725 (London,
1967).
Pocock, John, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and
History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985).
Rogers, Nicholas, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt
(Oxford, 1990).
Schwoerer, Lois, The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Baltimore, 1981).
Seaward, Paul, The Restoration 1660-1688 (London, 1991).
Speck, William, Reluctant Revolutionaries - Englishmen and the Revolution of
1688 (Oxford, 1988).
Stability and Strife: England 1714-1760 (London, 1977).
Walsh, John, Haydon, Colin M., and Taylor, Stephen (eds.), The Church of England
C.1689-C.1833. From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993).
Watts, Michael R., The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution
(Oxford, 1978).
Wilson, Kathleen, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in
England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, 1996).
32

MICHAEL SEIDEL
Satire, lampoon, libel, slander
According to Samuel Johnson's great eighteenth-century Dictionary, satire

is a censorious poem, properly distinguished by the generality of its
reflections but all too often confused with a lesser form, lampoon,
distinguished by the particularity of its reflections. Libel is an actionable
defamation, but the term was often used synonymously with lampoon.
Slander is libel with a casual or callous disregard for truth.
In the Restoration and early eighteenth century, satire, libel, lampoon, and
slander were inextricably mixed, whether the specific forms they took were
poetic, dramatic, narrative, or expository. But when commentators wished
to separate good vilification from bad the distinction was one of style.
"Loose-writ" libels were never as effective as "shining satire," according to
John Dry den and the Earl of Mulgrave in their joint effort, "An Essay Upon
Satire" (1679). Perhaps "shining" does not take us very far conceptually in
distinguishing satire from libel, lampoon, or slander as an embodiment of
the literary spirit of opposition, but Dry den and Mulgrave have in mind the
way effective satire always combines abuse with wit and imagination.
To say that a satiric work's expressive power is witty or imaginatively
oppositional does not necessarily make the particular animus of that work
any easier to define. Whereas certain attitudes and gestures of verbal
opposition mark satire - tirade, derision, disdain, mockery, belittlement,
sarcasm, irony - it is far from clear exactly what a subject must do to make
him, her, or it qualify as a protagonist in a satiric action. Tragedy invites
viewers to identify the key flaws in a character's nature that rationalize a
reversal of fortune; in comedy audiences identify strains among lovers,
families, generations, classes that temporarily unsettle the social order; and
in epic readers quickly mark the national and the heroic. But in satire the
object of an action is identified primarily by the stance taken against it. The
satirist depicts things as absurd, disreputable, or hypocritical because he
deems them so. "Indignation," as the Restoration satirist John Oldham
puts it, "can create a muse."
33

MICHAEL SEIDEL
Perhaps the best way to define what satire does is to recognize when it
stops. Like pain, satire is either extensive or local, constant or intermittent,
extreme or mild, sharp or dull, present or absent. There is a telling example
in John Dryden's brilliant political poem, Absalom and Achitophel, when,
after a scathing indictment of the first Earl of Shaftesbury (Achitophel) for
everything from scandalous political ambitions to defective procreation - a
son "Got, while his Soul did huddled Notions try; / And born a shapeless
Lump, like Anarchy" - Dryden pauses in his satiric attack and praises
Shaftesbury for his role years before as a judge in Israel's (read England's)
courts.
The Statesman we abhor, but praise the Judge.

In Israels Courts ne'r sat an Abbethdin
With more discerning Eyes, or hands more clean:
Unbrib'd, unsought, the Wretched to redress;
Swift of Dispatch, and easie of Access.
Oh, had he been content to serve the Crown,
With vertues only proper to the Gown . . . (lines 187-93)
Dryden's aim is not necessarily to separate the deficient Shaftesbury from

the sympathetic one, but to accommodate the actions of the statesman to
the satirist's particular biases and prejudices. The very moment Dryden's
attack abates - or because it abates - Shaftesbury emerges as human,
measured, just, ethical. That is, Shaftesbury emerges from the world of
opposition the satirist has created for him. Dryden was aware, at least in
theory, that satire depends as much on the satirist's perspective as on the
victim's nature: "In the character of an hero, as well as in an inferior figure,
there is a better or worse likeness to be taken: the better is panegyric, if it
be not false, and the worse is libel."1 Bias extends to the very depths of
language, satirical or polemical, and Dryden makes that point as well. He
writes in His Majesties Declaration Defended (1681) of his outrage that
enemies of King Charles manipulate phrases to blacken the reputation of
the monarch's supporters for their supposed Catholic leanings: ''Popish and
Arbitrary, are words that sound high amongst the multitude; and all men
are branded by those names, who are not for setting up Fanaticism and a
Common-wealth." 2 Of course, Dryden plays the same game. Are we
supposed to think that "Popish" is a foul and calumnious charge against
the king, and "Fanaticism" a perfectly neutral word for Protestant dissent?
Opposition is all about the spin of language, and the rhetoric of satire
produces its victims as much as identifies them.
Jonathan Swift comes to the same shrewd understanding when he
comments in A Tale of A Tub that satiric opposition is always tactical:
34

"Thus, in the Choice of a Devil, it hath been the usual Method of

Mankind, to single out some Being, either in Act, or in Vision, which was
in most Antipathy to the God they had framed."3 Swift's remark gets to the
core of satire and its antipathetic essence, but from a very contrived
vantage point. Tactical opposition is so much a part of the satirist's art that
classical Roman verse satire included a restraining figure, an adversarius, to
counter the satirist's expected - and sometimes even irrationally presented
- bias against his subjects. An adversarius appears as a moderating device
in the most famous Restoration adaptation of Roman satire, John Wilmot's
(the Earl of Rochester's) Satire Against Reason and Mankind, when the
satirist allows himself to be interrupted by a figure of civic authority who
cannot believe the assault on reason is so relentless: "What Rage ferments
in your degen'rate Mind, / To make you rail at Reason and Mankind?"
(lines 58-59). The rage the satirist feels is part of the satiric rhetoric of the
poem, and its writer, Rochester, inserts a stabilizing voice in the middle of
the action to try to calm his satiric self down.
In an even more interesting variation of this rhetorical trope, Alexander
Pope writes a satiric epistle to his physician, Dr. John Arbuthnot, and
produces Arbuthnot himself in the role of restrainer or adversarius. While
the satirist Pope is on a barely controlled riff against a figure named Sporus
(representing the hated Lord Hervey), Arbuthnot tries to inject a note of
moderation, or, at least, reason: "Satire or Sense alas! can Sporus feel? /
Who breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?" (lines 307-08). Pope takes the
point with the marker, "Yet," but his subsequent rant reveals satire as a
kind of intractable revenger's history, a mode less interested in making
things right than in getting even with those who, from the satirist's
perspective, made them wrong: "Yet let me flap this Bug with gilded wings,
/ This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings" (lines 309-10).
For the satirist, everything is personal. Even what seems commonplace or
conventional - civic programs, political faction, aesthetic theory - takes on
the most personal dimensions for Dryden or Swift or Pope. Dryden
identifies faction with civil disorder that could all too easily displace him
from the position he occupies in the government he favors, the court of the
reigning king, Charles II. Swift fears faction because of a conviction that
even the faction he is in - the moderate Tory Anglican establishment - will
find a way to displace him. Pope reviles faction because as a Catholic in a
land of Protestants he thought it folly to call attention to affiliations -
whatever they might be - that could call the wrong kind of attention to
him.
The same personal dimension exists for other commonplace satiric
subjects, say, greed or lust. Greed looks to Dryden like rivalry, to Swift like
35

MICHAEL SEIDEL
exclusion, to Pope like ostentation. Lust looks to Dryden like disorder, to

Swift like madness, to Pope like folly. Satire always exists on a line of bias,
and the more variegated, ingenious, and complex the nature of its presenta-
tion, the broader the invitation to readers to absorb satire's argument to
their own biases and prejudices.
The bottom of the sublime

Prior to the Restoration and early eighteenth century in England, satire was
a confused genre, not so much because confusing things happened in its
spaces - though they did - but because no one was certain as to the origins
of satire's abusive spirit. For a good while it was simply thought that the
word satire derived from the Greek satyr or goat man of mythology who
appeared in the satyr play interludes of Greek dramatic spectacles for the
purpose of abusing prominent Athenians. The etymology was specious, but
even long after scholars dispensed with it, satirists themselves kept the
connection alive because they thought the rude, obscene, offensive satyrs
represented the vehemence and brusqueness of their own craft. Satyrs, after
all, emerged from nature to confront the local citizenry of Athens. Powerful
creatures came to the civilized city to make fun of its citizens. Isn't that
what satirists do?
Proponents for satire in the more urbane, the more self-consciously
"modern" world of Restoration England argued that satire did much more.
In the very midst of the deeply contentious world of Restoration life and
politics, Dryden defended his own satiric efforts from the indignity of
rudeness and barbarity to which satire had been reduced in previous eras.
He claimed that satire could be - and his always were - a sub-category of
heroic poetry.
The elevation of satire in the Restoration and early eighteenth century
from its ruder origins assumed, of course, a Roman model for the kind of
classical satire that really mattered to highly civilized states. Indeed, the
etymology of satire was accurately presented as Latin satura lanx, meaning
well-filled dish and signifying a medley or farrago of public literary styles.
The satirist played the role of public poet, master of the feast, or civic host.
Dryden argued with substantial energy and force (not to mention length) in
his Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) that
satire was an honored genre among the Romans, inviting the satirist to
express a great range of attitudes and views, both negative and positive. In
the hands of a writer such as Juvenal, satire could even be powerfully
sublime in its themes, something Dryden emulated in his own heroic and
panegyric works when he observed that "Satire will have room, where e're
36

I write" ("Epistle to Godfrey Kneller"). Swift later sensed something of this

when he made fun of the pretensions of Dryden and other satirists in A
Tale of A Tub for aspiring to reach the "bottom of the Sublime," at once a
spatial joke and a very good description of the generic territory occupied by
satire in the Restoration and early eighteenth century.
Dryden tried to make satire into an art so sublime that its local victims
remained oblivious to the wounds it inflicted. He wrote of his own portrait
of the Duke of Buckingham in Absalom and Achitophel: "a Man is secretly
wounded, and though he be not sensible himself, yet the malicious World
will find it for him: Yet there is still a vast difference betwixt the slovenly
Butchering of a Man, and the fineness of a stroak that separates the Head
from the Body, and leaves it standing in its place." 4 Here are a few of
Dryden's fine strokes directed at Buckingham's neck:
A man so various, that he seem'd to be

Not one, but Mankinds epitome.
Stiff in Opinions, always in the wrong;
Was every thing by starts, and nothing long:
But, in the course of the revolving Moon,
Was Chymist, Fidler, States-man, and Buffoon, (lines 545-50)
The victim of satire is most effectively presented when least able to

comprehend exactly what has happened to him. In the Discourse, Dryden
takes the matter a step further. He points out that his favorite satirist,
Juvenal, interpreted Roman law as requiring the poet to name none but the
already dead. Such a reading of the law, reinforced by the ancient injunc-
tion from Roman legal tradition against evil utterance, comes close to the
metaphoric center of satiric action. When the satirist has dispatched his
victim properly - that is with wit and finality - that victim already belongs
among the dead whether or not he breathes in the world he thinks he still
inhabits.
A particularly rich and complex instance of a satirist at work in this vein
comes a few years later with Jonathan Swift's attack on astrology in the
Bicker staff Papers (1708). Swift's Bickerstaff actually predicts the death of
a rival astrologer named Partridge. When that astrologer protests he still
lives, Bickerstaff pretends that an obvious imposter walks the streets as an
"uninformed Carcass" masquerading as Partridge. Uninformed is without
shape and without knowledge, and carcass is dead substance. The satiric
image is even further complicated - and Swift is well aware of it - by the
fact that Partridge had actually died many years before, though his name
still appears on Partridge's Almanac. Partridge is made available for a fate
37

MICHAEL SEIDEL
perpetually in store for him, "like the General who was forced to kill his
enemies twice over, whom a Necromancer had raised to life."5
For Swift, as for Dryden, wit is the murder weapon of choice in satire, a
weapon that, at least on the face of it, disguises the messiness of satiric
activity. Lack of wit is enough to cancel the effectiveness of satire. Dryden
makes that point addressing his traditional political enemies in the pref-
atory remarks to The Medal; they fail at satire not because they fail at
abuse but because they fail at wit: "Raile at me abundantly; and, not to
break a Custome, doe it without wit . . ." 6 As he puts it of his enemies, in
the Discourse, "I complain not of their Lampoons and Libels, though I
have been the Publick Mark for many years. I am vindictive enough to have
repell'd force by force, if I cou'd imagine that any of them had ever reach'd
me; but they either shot at Rovers, and therefore miss'd, or their Powder
was so weak, that I might safely stand them, at the nearest distance" (p. 8).
For Dryden, very simply put, "There can be no pleasantry where there is no
Wit" (p. 60).
Attack is something the satirist does; wit is something the audience
understands. Dryden adds something very important to the spirit of satiric
opposition. He allows the satirist - through the literary manipulation of
style and tone - to make accomplices of his readers. Attack can even arrive
in a package marked as praise, if readers are sensitive to all the ironies that
language can provide. In Mac Flecknoe, a poem addressed to a rival poet,
Tom Shadwell, Dryden praises a genius he does not value. The result is a
special kind of abuse leavened by an almost calming wit that approximates
the listlessness of failed poetry.
Thy Genius calls thee not to purchase fame

In keen Iambicks, but mild Anagram:
Leave writing Plays, and chuse for thy command
Some peacefull Province in Acrostick Land. (lines 203-06)
An even more pointed example is Pope's imitation of an Horatian satiric

epistle to the Roman emperor Augustus. In his Epistle to Augustus (1737),
Pope changes the object of mock praise to King George II of England. He
begins by noting the foreign king's prowess in foreign "arms," but the
discerning reader - then as now - recognizes that Pope means George's
ardor for his German mistress and not his lust for foreign combat. The
satire here resides in the potential for misdirection, a witty pattern that
Pope builds throughout the poem: "How shall the Muse, from such a
Monarch, steal / An hour, and not defraud the Publick Weal?" (lines 5-6).
The ironic answer is that any time stolen to praise George II is a felony.
Pope even damns the poetic marketplace for the very enterprise that
38

supposedly directs the effort at hand, "when straining with too weak a
wing, / We needs will write Epistles to the King" (lines 368-69). Of course
the satirist produces a blueprint for the poem in his very own mock
befuddlement: "Besides, a fate attends on all I write, / That when I aim at
praise, they say I bite" (lines 408-09).
When not insulting the reigning British king, Pope attempts to explain
the history of the form in which the satirist conveys his attack. His
understanding replicates Dryden's in elevating the original rude, rough-
hewn status of satire to a higher level of poetic expression. Satire for our
"rural Ancestors" consisted of jests and taunts in village feasts and celebra-
tions, which, by the time Pope seems to identify with the Civil Wars in
England, became craftier, wittier, more indirect, subtle, and elaborately
designed to avoid the pitfalls of the law.
But Times corrupt, and Nature, ill-inclin'd,

Produced the point that left a sting behind;
Till friend with friend, and families at strife,
Triumphant Malice rag'd thro' private life.
Who felt the wrong, or fear'd it, took th' alarm,
Appeal'd to Law, and Justice lent her arm.
At length, by wholesome dread of statutes bound,
The Poets learn'd to please, and not to wound:
Most warp'd to Flatt'ry's side; but some, more nice,
Preserved the freedom, and forbore the vice.
Hence Satire rose, that just the medium hit,
And heals with Morals what it hurts with Wit. (lines 251-62)
Moreover, the refinement of public art in the Restoration, at a time when

the English court began to ape French culture, produced an almost heroic
status for public forms like satire, embodied in the great works of Dryden,
who, according to Pope, "taught to join / The varying verse, the full
resounding line, / The long majestic march, and energy divine" (lines
Z67-69). Pope echoes Dryden's own observation that the best that could be
done for satire was to release it from its sorry rank among the genres and
provide it with a better set of literary bona fides than any age but imperial
Rome had provided for it in the past.
"The Satyrical Itch"

The incursion into literary domains cordoned off by supposedly more
honored and noble genres defines the history of satire in the Restoration
39

MICHAEL SEIDEL
and early eighteenth century. Many of the period's writers collapse, merge,
and restyle traditional forms of literary representation into hybrids, all
controlled by an expanding civic consciousness and a heightened sense of
wit as an encompassing verbal strategy. These hybrid forms become the
greatest original works of the Restoration period and after, from a host of
famous stage comedies by Dryden, George Etherege, William Wycherley,
and William Congreve, to Samuel Butler's Hudibras (1663), Andrew
Marvell's Last Instructions to a Fainter [i66y), the Earl of Rochester's
Satire Against Reason and Mankind (1679), Dryden's Mac Flecknoe (1681)
and Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Swift's A Tale of A Tub (1704) and
Gulliver's Travels (1726), Pope's Rape of the Lock (1714) and Dunciad
(1729), John Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728), and Henry Fielding's stage
farces of the 1730s and his novels of the 1740s, Joseph Andrews, Jonathan
Wild, and Tom Jones.
Perhaps satire emerged from the ruins of the Civil War period in England
at a time when words themselves were a form of just slightly suppressed
warfare. More important - and harder to pin down exactly - the Wars
evoked a general skepticism about human behavior that invited satiric
speculation. In his Discourse upon Satire, Dryden suggested that faith itself
had come to grief against modern skepticism, a skepticism that undermined
the most compelling supernatural myths behind western, Christian culture.
According to Dryden, the language of modernity, a language indebted to wit
as a mode of historical and literary expression, tended to direct writers away
from the vivid embellishing of material so necessary to the belief systems and
heroic codes of the past. When in the interregnum, Abraham Cowley called
the classical myths a heap of "antiquated Dreams of senseless Fables and
Metamorphoses,"7 he opened the door directly to their burlesque. Writers at
first reacted in different ways to the discomfort of what they perceived as the
detritus of empty myths, broken-down world systems, and the odds and ends
of the heroic tradition. During the early years of the Restoration all sorts of
satire and burlesque were published and widely distributed, from the
infamous Rump Ballads about the radical politics of the Interregnum to the
more obvious burlesques and travesties of Homer and Virgil written by
Charles Cotton and others. The merit of any of these remains questionable,
but they were trial runs for the later, more sophisticated, mock-epic satires of
the age. This is surely the case for Pope's Rape of the Lock (1714) when he
burlesques - or perhaps parodies is the kinder word - his own earlier serious
translation of a famous passage on battle glory from the Iliad. Satiric
burlesque serves as a substitute literary program, a way of rearticulating an
important part of any culture's reassessment of its literary inheritance. For
Pope, heroic glory becomes drawing-room sexual power:
40

But since, alas! frail Beauty must decay,

CurPd or uncurl'd, since Locks will turn to grey;
Since painted, or not painted, all shall fade,
And she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid;
What then remains, but well our Pow'r to use,
And keep good-Humour still whate'er we lose
And trust me, Dear! good-humour can prevail,
When Airs, and Flights, and Screams, and Scolding fail.
Beauties in vain their pretty Eyes may roll;
Charms strike the Sight, but Merit wins the Soul.
(Canto 5, lines 25-34)
One of the Restoration's foremost satirists, Samuel Butler, was among

the first to notice the disparity between heroic presumption and contem-
porary performance in the post-Civil War period: "No Age ever abounded
more with Heroical Poetry than the present, and yet there was never any
wherein fewer Heroicall Actions were perform'd." 8 His brilliant satire,
Hudibras, a poem published over a fifteen-year period from 1663-78,
stakes out an elaborate anti-heroic terrain. The action is set in war-ravished
England, where an impoverished colonel travels the countryside in search
of ever-so-small material victories. In a heroic-chivalric plot gone haywire,
Sir Hudibras has his eyes on a widow's jointure, and the struggle for legal
and psychological control of the courtship that would allow him to possess
that jointure, which, in the larger satiric vista of the poem, is the mental,
moral, and physical estate of England. Civil war, of course, divides the
state, and that is the satiric metaphor that plays out in the poem. Martial
relations, like marital ones (and ineptly named "jointures") wrench people
apart.
A deep design in't, to divide

The well-affected that confide,
By setting Brother against Brother,
To claw and curry one another.
(Part 1, Canto 1, lines 737-40)
The opening lines of Hudibras place the scene in the middle of the Civil
Wars; indeed, the lines reflect the contentious, divided plot of the poem as
an image of those wars: "When civil Fury first grew high, / And men fell out
they knew not why." Satire usually begins in crisis, and the most disturbing
ones usually end right where they begin. Throughout Butler's poem there
are supporting players - sectarians, renegades, military men, astrologers,
thugs, casuists, and con men - who struggle to translate their obsessions,
and the peculiar idioms in which they express these obsessions, into power.
41

MICHAEL SEIDEL
For Butler's rebels and regicides, the Wars and Interregnum are the "good
old cause," but for Butler himself, and for satirists after him, the Wars
represented a national apostasy and a reversionary symbol, a nation and a
people gone mad. When England seemed on the verge of revolution again
in 1681, Dryden assumes in Absalom and Achitophel that "The Good old
Cause reviv'd, a Plot requires" (line 82). Even a half-century later, Pope's
son of Dulness in the Dunciad refers to his mighty mother's moment as a
reversionary, invoking Butler's version of the Civil War period to do so:
"Dulness! whose good old cause I yet defend, / With whom my Muse
began, with whom shall end" (Book 1, lines 165-66).
In the early decades of the Restoration, Hudibras was King Charles IPs
favorite satire, partly because he thought it so effectively mocked the
hypocritical bleakness and casuistry of the Wars and Interregnum. The
return of the Stuart court at the Restoration brought with it a great deal of
delight, glamor, wit, public display, and a vast literary energy directed at
abusing the religious, political, and economic values of the previous period.
Of course, the returned Stuart court soon fell victim to the very satiric
energy it had released. Though the Crown kept tight control on potential
seditious writing through the Licensing Act of 1662, satirists and lampoon-
ists were ingenious in figuring ways to represent current state affairs
indirectly: lampoons of court officials, pasquinades on current events,
mock court-session poems, instruction poems to historical painters, mock
pope-burning procession verses, dialogue poems, dream visions, pseudo-
monologues, songs, odes, dramatic epilogues and prologues, verse essays,
and formal verse satires were part of the abundant satiric literature of the
Restoration. Every significant writer of the period contributed to that
abundance.
Andrew Marvell is perhaps the most accomplished of the anti-court
satirists in the period. He was also the most careful. As a Member of
Parliament from Hull, he had no intention of running up against the
authorities in King Charles's court; therefore he signed none of his satiric
works, nor did he admit to writing them. Marvell's best anti-court satire is
the extraordinary Last Instructions to A Painter, printed only after the
Stuart kings were out of power but written and circulated at the time of
Charles IPs deteriorating position during the naval fiasco of 1667 after
England's military and merchant fleet was attacked by the Dutch Admiral
de Ruyter. De Ruyter advanced well into mouth of the Thames and the
inland waters of the Medway river, an action that represented to Marvell
the softness and rottenness of the realm and gave him the opportunity in
his satire to indict both the policies and the ethos of the restored monarchy
in England. Marvell's satiric attack began to do what the next generation of
42-

satirists - Swift, Pope and Gay - did so extensively and so well: present
entire social and political systems as vast conspiracies of state corruption
and ineptitude.
In Last Instructions, Marvell plays on the idea of a petto or secret crime
while mocking the attempt on the part of Crown and court officials to
avoid responsibility for the Dutch naval invasion. Charles's government
tries to scapegoat the hapless Peter Pett, superintendent of the dockyard at
Chatham. The satire's wit centers on the way Marvell uses the name and
word, Pett, to indicate those who would escape from the action implied by
it. Pett seems to suggest everything from slighted or piqued, to petty or
insignificant, to concealed or undisclosed. The figure blamed becomes less
real the more it is named, and part of the satire's power is the compression
of all Marvell's ironic indignation into one word.
After this loss, to rellish discontent,

Some one must be accus'd by Punishment.
All our miscarriages on Pett must fall:
His Name alone seems fit to answer all.
Whose Counsel first did this mad War beget?
Who all Commands sold thro' the Navy? Pett
Who would not follow when the Dutch were bet?
Who treated out the time at Bergen} Pett
Who the Dutch Fleet with Storms disable met,
And rifling prizes, them neglected? Pett
Who with false News prevented the Gazette}
The Fleet divided? Write for Rupert} Pett
Who all our Seamen cheated of their Debt?
And all our Prizes who did swallow? Pett
Who did advise no Navy out to set?
And who the Forts left unrepair'd? Pett
Who to supply with Powder, did forget
Languard, Sheerness, Gravesend, and Upnor} Pett
Who all our Ships expos'd in Chathams Net?
Who should it be but the Phanatick Pett. (lines 765-84)
As the political problems of Charles II magnified through the 1670s and

early 1680s, the king became subject to increasingly bitter satiric attack.
Charles had the machinery of state regulation at his disposal, and, at least
until 1679 when he allowed the Licensing Act of 1662 to lapse, used it
well. The Licensing Act had barred "abuses in printing seditious, treason-
able, and unlicensed books and pamphlets." For years the king's primary
propagandist, Sir Roger L'Estrange, served as "Sovereign of the Imprimery"
or state licenser. Behind the Licensing Act was the Treason Act of 1660,
43

MICHAEL SEIDEL
offering the Crown the opportunity to prosecute "all printing, writing,

preaching, or malicious and advised speaking calculated to compass or
devise the death, destruction, injury, or restraint of the Sovereign, or to
deprive him of his style, honor, or kingly name."
Anti-court satirists saw it as their greatest challenge in the Restoration to
deprive the king of his style and not suffer the consequences of imprison-
ment, or the legally dictated loss of an ear or a nose, in the process. Charles
II, after all, had a good deal of style of which to be deprived. Many thought
him nothing but style, and attacked him precisely because they perceived
him as wasting real power in licentiousness and luxury. Here, for example,
is what Charles would expect in regard to his well-known liaisons with
ladies of the court, stage, and streets. Of his most famous mistress, Nell
Gwynne, we learn:
Hard by Pall Mall lives a wench call'd Nell.

King Charles the Second he kept her.
She hath got a trick to handle his p ,
But never lays hands on sceptre.
All matters of state from her soul she does hate,
And leave to the politic bitches.
The whore's in the right, for 'tis her delight
To be scratching just where it itches. (Anonymous, 1669)
Lampoons and libels directed at the king had grown so rampant by the
late 1670s that a supporter of the Stuart monarchy, the dramatist Thomas
Otway, wrote a poem, The Poet's Complaint of His Muse; or, a Satyr
Against Libells (1679), cataloguing the volume of scurrilous verses and
pamphlets. Not only Charles but his courtiers and ministers were subject to
merciless treatment. When the Earl of Danby resigned as treasurer to be
replaced by commissioners led by Henry Guy, here is what the town heard
in a pasquinade.
Take a turd
Upon my word
And into five parts cut it,
And put it
Into a pie,
To convince
Our good prince
What it can be
To mince
Thomas Earl of Danby
Intofivecommissioners and a Guy. (1679)
44

Charles paradoxically eased up on strict censorship policies during the

Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis because he hoped that literary satire could
help release some of the more dangerous pressure that had been building
against his rule. Forbearance may have been his shrewdest recourse, though
attacks such as John Oldham's four Satires upon the Jesuits (1678-81),
secretly printed, were particularly trying for the king because in a round-
about way they got very close to the core of Stuart policy, an over-cozy
relationship with Catholic Europe at the expense of England's Protestant
succession. The scenes depicted in Oldham's poems read as though
Shakespeare's Iago and Moliere's Tartuffe were planning to sell out the
English Crown to the Catholic See in Rome.
Oldham's poems not only point directly at Catholic conspiracy in the
context of the Popish Plot of 1678 and after; they also point to a conviction
in seventeenth-century England that religion is always a deeper form of
politics. For Oldham, to speak of religion is to speak of infiltration and
state terror. The ghost of one of the conspirators in the Catholic Gun-
powder Plot of Jacobean times berates a cadre of living Jesuit conspirators
in the court of Charles II for failing to bring the English realm back to the
Roman fold in the name of the order's founder, Loyola.
Are you then Jesuits? are you so for nought?

In all the Catholick depths of Treason taught?
In orthodox and solid pois'ning read?
In each profounder art of killing bred?
And can you fail, or bungle in your trade?
Shall one poor life your cowardice upbraid?
Tame dastard slaves! Who your profession shame,
And fix disgrace on our great Founder's name.
(Satire 1, lines 23-30)
Oldham's poems reveal qualities central to political satire of the period.

No category of action is exempt from contamination by another. Politics
arrive disguised as religion. Religious principles mask aesthetic ones.
Aesthetics are aligned with class loyalties. For example, if Catholicism is a
code for state conspiracy in Oldham's satires, radical Protestantism is a
code for vulgar art in Dryden's. In Mac Flecknoe (1681), Dryden works
with a set of charged analogies that allow him to name a poet, Tom
Shadwell, as mock son of the awful Interregnum poet, Richard Flecknoe,
and then in the subtitle of the poem call Shadwell a "True-Blew Protestant
Poet." Religious dissent makes the overweight and overblown Shadwell
even worse than Dryden nominally presents him. As a writer, Shadwell is
45

MICHAEL SEIDEL
badly inspired by religious principles inimical to monarchy, which, from

Dryden's perspective, are also principles inimical to wit.
Dryden begins Lear-like, with the old wretched poet, Richard Flecknoe,
about to give over his reign to afigurewho has become almost a substance,
a waste product. The issue of succession is one that troubled the Crown at
the time of the poem, and Dryden knows it. By association, the realm of art
has its usurpers just as does the world of politics, and the inclination of
revolutionaries and regicides, whether in art or politics, is true-blue.
This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young

Was call'd to Empire, and had govern'd long:
In Prose and Verse, was own'd, without dispute
Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute.
This aged prince now flourishing in Peace,
And blest with issue of a large increase,
Worn out with business, did at length debate
To settle the Succession of the State:
And pond'ring which of all his Sons was fit
To Reign, and wage immortal War with Wit,
Cry'd, 'tis resolv'd; for Nature pleads that He
Should onely rule, who most resembles me:
Sh alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years;
Sh alone, of all my Sons, is he
Who stands confirm'd in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,
But Sh never deviates into sense.
Some Beams of Wit on other souls may fall
Strike through and make a lucid intervall;
But Sh 's genuine night admits no ray,
His rising fogs prevail upon the Day:
Besides, his goodly Fabrickfillsthe eye
And seems design'd for thoughtless Majesty:
Thoughtless as the Monarch Oakes, that shade the plain,
And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign. (lines 3-28)
Mac Flecknoe gains its greatest strength as satire by insisting that bad art
is bad succession. The bad successor poet, Shadwell, is not only a rival poet
- competing with Dryden as a playwright - but one who represents a
particularly broad and farcical style of humor comedy that Dryden had
long attacked as primitive in implicit opposition to the higher style, taste,
and wit of the Stuart court in the Restoration. That ShadwelPs very name is
represented in the poem as an unfortunately partitive "Sh ," only
46

suggests that the reader is correct to imagine what the poet is capable of
producing in Dryden's eyes.
It does not take long to realize that Dryden's very witty build-up of
charges and abuses against the poet Shadwell in Mac Flecknoe is essentially
the same bill of attainder Dryden would draw against those who would
replace the current reign of the Stuarts in England with a tyranny of mass,
of number, of mixture, of usurpation. The plot of Mac Flecknoe, buried so
casually under a heap of insults about the life and art of a fat rival
dramatist, is the same plot as Dryden's deeply thoughtful and powerful
political satire, Absalom and Achitophel. The unworthy son is on the alert
to take over from the father. At the end of the poem, Richard Flecknoe is
on stage delaying succession by speaking too long and too pompously. He
is king of dulness because he does what dulness does: goes on beyond his
time. As he proclaims his son's wit, actors from one of Shadwell's plays
release a trap door on stage underneath him, thereby replicating in the
poem the kind of absurd stage action that, from Dryden's perspective,
ruined Shadwell's comedies in the first place. Shadwell is ready to take the
throne of witlessness before his poetic father, the first Flecknoe, is fully
ready to relinquish it. As Richard Flecknoe praises the son-poet about to
depose him, the action ends.
For Bruce and Longvil had a Trap prepar'd,

And down they sent the yet declaiming Bard.
Sinking he left his Drugget robe behind,
Born upwards by a subterranean wind.
The Mantle fell to the young Prophet's part,
With double portion of his Father's Art. (lines 212-17)
The subterranean wind recalls the same satiric trope suggested by

Shadwell's truncated name: Father Flecknoe's artistic throne is the jakes, a
notion that is reinforced when the alliterative "prophet's part" demands the
ghost rhyme that does not quite exist, "father's fart." In Mac Flecknoe, the
termination of a king is a burlesque; in a more serious political poem it
could be a regicide.
Mac Flecknoe circulated in manuscript until Dryden chose to print it
close to the time he published a much more serious poem on succession
Absalom and Achitophel (1681). In that work, only intermittently satiric,
Dryden's task was not to represent a king who gave up power, but who
held onto it by choosing to exercise it sparingly and tactically. It is no
coincidence that at the very time Dryden depicts King Charles as King
David resuming control of the realm in Absalom and Achitophel, Charles
also began reimposing measures against seditious libels and satires. That is
47

MICHAEL SEIDEL
one of the things a strong king feels licensed to do when he has his style
back.
Thus long have I, by native mercy sway'd,
My wrongs dissembl'd, my revenge delay'd:
So willing to forgive th' Offending Age,
So much the Father did the King assuage.
But now so far my Clemency they slight,
Th' Offenders question my Forgiving Right.
That one was made for many, they contend;
But 'tis to Rule, for that's a Monarch's End.
They call my tenderness of Blood my Fear,
Though Manly tempers can the longest bear.
Yet, since they will divert my Native course,
'Tis time to shew I am not Good by Force.
(lines 939-50)
When Charles had fully secured his throne after the crisis that marked
the early 1680s he officially reinstituted the Licensing Act that had lapsed
in 1679. And the Act remained on the books for the benefit of William III,
at least in the first few years after the 1688 Revolution. It is ironic that
Dryden, no friend to William III, slyly castigated him in the figure of the
Roman Augustus for doing what Charles II had done just a few years
earlier: "conscious to himself of so many Crimes which he had committed,
[he] thought in the first place to provide for his own Reputation, by making
an Edict against Lampoons and Satires" (Discourse, pp. 66-67). F° r tn is
reason, among others, the last years of Charles II and the early years of
William III were lean ones for the satiric arts developed so assiduously in
the earlier Restoration. It would take the energies of Swift and Pope in the
next decade to reinvigorate them.
Modern times
tne
In 1695, Licensing Act lapsed again, but at a time when satire no longer
focused exclusively on the remnants of factions from Civil War and
Restoration politics. Instead, satire of the post-Revolutionary period cen-
tered on matters involving the burgeoning professional and entrepreneurial
classes in England - the very classes whose interests, obsessions, desires,
and styles would absorb the new literary empires of print journalism and
prose fiction that increasingly characterized the new age. Two important
satires of the post-Revolutionary period, Samuel Garth's Dispensary (1699)
and Defoe's True-Born Englishman (1701), reflect the changing interests of
the period. Garth sought and found his subject in the emerging professions
48

and monopolies of the expanding economic marketplace of the 1690s. His

mock-epic on the drug-dispensing practices of physicians and apothecaries
illustrates the shift in satire from a predominantly political focus to a more
broadly based social one. Individuals in the Dispensary are recessed into
social policy, which is essentially anonymous. Garth understood as much
when he depicted his chief physician in the poem, one Mirmillo, as desiring
to run everything behind the scenes without subjecting himself to any kind
of public scrutiny: "Then shall so useful a Machin as I / Engage in civil
Broyls, I know not why?" (Canto v, lines 23-24).
In his True-Born Englishman, Defoe offers a different insight into the
post-Revolutionary dispensation of England. His satire attacks the notion
that purity of bloodline and innate or inherent rights based upon descent
determine nationhood. Behind this attack, of course, is a revulsion at the
general idea of privilege as the basis for political dominance, a theme that
Defoe elaborates in his huge twelve-book satire, Jure Divino (1706). The
True-Born Englishman was one of the most popular satiric poems of the
era. For Defoe, the virulent xenophobia broadly directed at the reigning
king, William III, was particularly offensive in light of the "vain ill-natur'd"
claims that the native English made to power based on the purity of race.
These are the Heroes that despise the Dutch,
And rail at new-come Foreigners so much;
Forgetting that themselves are all deriv'd
From the most Scoundrel Race that ever liv'd.
A horrid Medley of Thieves and Drones,
Who ransack'd Kingdoms, and dispeopl'd Towns.
The Pict and Painted Britain, Treach'rous Scot,
By Hunger, Theft, and Rapine, hither brought.
Norwegian Pirates, Buccaneering Danes,
Whose Red-hair'd Off-spring ev'ry where remains.
Who join'd with Norman-French, compound the Breed
From whence your True-Born Englishmen proceed.
(lines 233-44)
Defoe employs many of the terms associated with satire in the period -
lampoon, irony, banter, ridicule - against the claims of rank or race.
The Wonder which remains is at our Pride,
To value that which all wise men deride.
For Englishmen to boast of Generation,
Cancels their Knowledge, and lampoons the Nation.
A True-Born Englishman's a Contradiction,
In Speech an Irony, in Fact a Fiction.
A Banter made to be a Test of Fools,
49

MICHAEL SEIDEL
Which those that use it justly ridicules.

A Metaphor invented to express
A Man a-kin to all the Universe. (lines 368-77)
The universal sweep of such satires as the Dispensary and The True-Born
Englishman connects the enterprise of these poems to what can be called
the great "systems" satires of a few years later, Swift's Gulliver's Travels,
John Gay's Beggar's Opera, Pope's Dunciad, and Fielding's Jonathan Wild.
Though earlier Restoration satirists such as Butler, Marvell, and Dryden
began the long and elaborate process of turning a heavily localized and
virtriolic brand of satire based mainly on verbal tirade, pointed lampoon,
and libel into a more general attack on systems of related behaviors that
encompass politics, aesthetics, religion, commerce, and knowledge, that
process was greatly expanded in the next generation of satirists. Satire drew
for its resources on the immensely various world of print that evolved in
the early decades of the eighteenth century. Print was big business, and its
productions a kind of compendium for modern living. Business was, by its
nature, a subject that intrigued - and sometimes horrified - satirists. John
Arbuthnot of Pope's circle of friends conjured up the new entrepreneurial
spirit of England by inventing a satiric figure to represent it - "John Bull."
The name has stuck through the ages. The image of a single-minded,
bull-headed, trade-oriented, on-the-make, commercially spirited John Bull
reflects not only the political dispensation that encouraged him but the new
print world that supported him, including that of the mercurial journalist
John Duntun and the dauntless Daniel Defoe, author of every kind of
review, manual, conduct book, memoir, and modern adventure imaginable.
Traditional forms of satire - burlesque, mock-epic, verse satire - still
thrived in the post-168 8 Revolution period in England, but satirists were
more and more eager to mimic the newer forms of print culture that they
saw as particularly commercial or particularly daft. The most powerful
group of satirists centered around Pope and Swift called themselves the
Scriblerian Club. The name is well chosen to mark the print world that at
once so intrigued and appalled them. One of the massive joint projects of
the Scriblerians - the sketchy Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus - was an
attempt to insinuate their own work into modern memory. The Memoirs
touched on everything from commercial autobiography to travel literature
and served as a mock template for all brands of modern writing and
modern sensibility.
The early dealings and discussions of the Scriblerian satirists around
1712 and 1713 produced their plan satirically to refashion all of modern
culture, though most of the Scriblerian memoirs were never written exactly
50

in the form conceived for them. Instead, the club shared ideas that ended
up as the great individual satires of the period, including Gay's Beggar's
Opera (1728), an idea given to Gay by Swift, Swift's Gulliver's Travels
(1726), an idea given to Swift by Pope, and Pope's Dunciad (1729), an
idea given to Pope by Swift. Each of these, to a degree, evokes worlds of
truly vulgar magnificence and each satirizes, to a degree, a new kind of
commercial and material order in England. A key subject of the Scrible-
rians is the figure of Robert Walpole, the Treasurer and then first Prime
Minister of the realm, as the entrepreneur of a huge spoils system that
dominated English cultural, political, and aesthetic life. Walpole shows up
in one form or another everywhere, as Reldresal and Flimnap in Swift's
Lilliputian court in Gulliver's Travels, as the thief MacHeath in Gay's
Beggar's Opera, as the slimy manipulator in many of Fielding's domestic
stage farces, as the head of an underworld network in Fielding's Jonathan
Wild, and as the corrupt force of history in Bolingbroke's often satiric
periodical, The Craftsman. In Pope's Dunciad, where one of the control-
ling ideas of the satire holds that government, like everything else, reflects
the chaos of modernity, Walpole steps forward at the very end of the
satire and names himself as first minister of Chaos and Tyrant of all
Dunces.
Perhaps more high some daring son may soar,

Proud to my list to add one Monarch more;
And nobly conscious, Princes are but things
Born for First Ministers, as Slaves for Kings,
Tyrant supreme! shall three Estates command,
And MAKE ONE MIGHTY DUNCIAD OF THE LAND!
(Book 4, lines 599-604)
The Dunciad is a monumental instance of how the scope of satire

expands in the early eighteenth century to absorb virtually everything
modern society can display and produce. Pope's poem offers the same
spectacle of cultural rot that Dryden portrayed in Mac Flecknoe, but
Dryden had confined that rot to a carefully delineated neighborhood of
London. Pope's subject is a full migration, "one, great and remarkable
action" described in the prefatory material to the poem as "the Removal of
the Imperial seat of Dulness from the City to the polite world." That
movement enacts the worst revolutionary nightmares of the previous
century, and Pope well knew it. His satire cuts across all classes, profes-
sions, and orders in the world of London, from the shops on Watling Street,
to the West End theatres, to the palace drawing rooms at Whitehall. The
sons of Dulness gather their mother's forces.
51

MICHAEL SEIDEL
And now the Queen, to glad her sons, proclaims

By herald Hawkers, high heroic Games.
They summon all her Race: An endless band
Pours forth, and leaves unpeopled half the land.
A motley mixture! in long wigs, in bags,
In silks, in crapes, in Garters, and in rags,
From drawing rooms, from colleges, from garrets,
On horse, on foot, in hacks, and gilded chariots:
All who true Dunces in her cause appear'd,
And all who knew those Dunces to reward.
(Book 2, lines 17-26)
Metaphors of abundance and multiplication rule in the Dunciad as

hacks, hawkers, tractarians, orators, pantomimists, patrons, entrepreneurs,
and virtuosi coagulate on the streets. From Pope's perspective as satirist,
London is stuffed with the bodies of dunces and awash in printer's ink.
Writers on the scene write too much and end up simply producing oblivion
in their readers: "While pensive Poets painful vigils keep, / Sleepless
themselves, to give their readers sleep" (Book 1, lines 93-94). The implicit
story of the poem is a Virgilian dispensation of mindlessness, a dispensation
that also suggests the worst kind of second coming.
"O! when shall rise a Monarch all our own,

And I, a Nursing-mother, rock the throne,
'Twixt Prince and People close the Curtain draw,
Shade him from Light, and cover him from L a w . . . "
(Book 1, lines 311-14)
Dulness annihilates so much sense and sensibility that the concluding

lines of the poem are a magnificent redaction of the creation of the world in
Genesis. The world is sucked back into a state of its own pre-origins. Pope
knows that the properties of dulness let loose will convert form and matter
to gas, and that the yawn at poem's end, a word etymologically connected
to the Greek chaos or gas, is the ultimate satiric spectacle, a reverse
creation. By time Pope is done with Dulness, there really is literally no
other subject left, and the end of the poem returns to an image presented
near the beginning where "things destroy'd are swept to things unborn"
(Book 1, line 241).
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,

Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heap'd o'er her head!
Philosophy, that lean'd on Heav'n before,
52-

Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.

Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for Aid on Sensel
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Not public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine.
Lo! Thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor'd;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All. (Book 4, lines 639-56)
The Dunciad is the closest satire gets in the eighteenth century to the full
project envisioned by the Scriblerian Club of writing up England as a
parody of its own worst literary productions. Always at issue in the
Scriblerian world is the impulse to invade the design of other literary forms
and subvert their premises. In a concentrated way, that same impulse is at
the heart of Jonathan Swift's great satires as well. For example, his famous
tract advocating an unusual solution for Ireland's economic problems, A
Modest Proposal (1729), works by foisting itself off as an economic
pamphlet consonant in tone with other schemes and projects of its time.
Swift knew that the form in which he conveyed his proposal would look
and sound familiar even while he imagined an outlandish scheme in which
an oppressed nation butchers, trades, and fricassees its own progeny.
From his first efforts at satire decades earlier, Swift identified his talent as
almost ventriloquial. In A Tale of A Tub, conceived in the early 1690s and
printed in 1704, he speaks of his own technique "where the Author
personates the Style and Manner of other Writers, whom he has a mind to
expose" (p. 3). Even the look of the printed page in A Tale suggests the
objects of Swift's parodies, the fits and starts of modern writing where
everything is a prospectus and a promise. In Gulliver's Travels, he actually
includes a diagram in the narrative representing a contrivance by which
writers could produce texts without the time-consuming effort of actually
writing them: "Every one knew how laborious the usual Method is of
attaining to Arts and Sciences; whereas by his Contrivance, the most
ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour,
may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and
Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study" (Book 3, ch.
5). The mechanism simply takes in letters and spews out random syllables
and, with luck, random phrases (see fig. 2.1).
53

MICHAEL SEIDEL
z.i Contrivance, from Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726), Book 3, chapter 5
54

In Gulliver's Travels, Swift bevels along the edges of the most important
evolving forms of contemporary writing: the personal memoir, the true
history, the life and adventure - forms contributing to what is now loosely
called the novel. His narrative seems at first to possess all the attributes of
the novel form - a detailed contemporary setting, a wealth of circumstan-
tiating information, a concentration on contingencies and necessities of
modern living, a narrative focus on an adventurer of middling or profes-
sional class status. But to mark Gulliver's Travels as a novel fails to grasp
that the style of novels such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) is precisely
what Swift satirizes. Gulliver, for example, sinks into Crusoe's skin when
he notes late in his adventures, "My Design was, if possible to discover
some small Island uninhabited, yet sufficient by my Labour to furnish me
with Necessaries of Life, which I would have thought a greater Happiness
than to be first Minister in the politest Court of Europe" (Book 4, ch. 11).
But instead of on his own island, Gulliver ends up in his own barn, deluded
into thinking he can talk to horses.
By getting so close to his subjects, that is, by taking over the very forms
in which they present themselves, Swift's work exacerbates a condition that
has always troubled satire. The relationship between satirist and subject
becomes not one of simple opposition but one of uneasy proximity or
sharing. In his fascinating short essay, Meditation Upon a Broomstick,
Swift imagines how that object which is supposed to do the job of cleaning
ends up making itself dirty. The result is not unlike the ending of Gulliver's
Travels. Swift's broom is "by a capricious Kind of Fate, destined to make
other Things clean, and be nasty it self." Swift goes on to point out that the
"universal Reformer and Corrector of Abuses; a Remover of Grievances;
rakes into every Slut's Corner of Nature, bringing hidden Corruption to the
Light, and raiseth a mighty Dust where there was none before; sharing
deeply all the while in the very same Pollutions he pretends to sweep
away."9
Swift is the last person who would want to be blamed for polluting the
literary environment, and, for this reason, above all others, he invents a
series of surrogates, sacrificial satiric brooms, to do his dirty work for him,
whether the modern hack in A Tale of A Tub, the economic projector in A
Modest Proposal, the astrologer in the Bickerstaff Papers, the cloth
merchant in the Drapier's Letters. Similarly, Swift sends Gulliver out at the
end of his travels to both absorb and perform all the dirty work the species
has to offer. As an English yahoo, Gulliver is left sputtering at the end
about what has plagued him as a character from the beginning, the absurd
vice of pride in his being, his bearing, his nation, and his times.
55

MICHAEL SEIDEL
I dwell the longer upon this Subject from the Desire I have to make the
Society of an English Yahoo by any Means not insupportable; and therefore I
here intreat those who have any Tincture of this absurd Vice, that they will
not presume to appear in my Sight. (Book 4, ch. 12)
Whose presumption is at issue here? The conclusion of the Travels brings

us back to the nature of satiric action. Most literary actions end with the
reader feeling a sense of closure or satisfaction. Satire tends to end in the
same state of disrepair in which it begins. Classical literary criticism calls
the process of resolving an action a denouement, meaning an unraveling of
the complicating knots within the plot. But satire knows no denouement
unless, of course, it stops being satire. More likely its action ends up
another kind of knot, a snafu, in which the reader comprehends in the
acronym the action satire represents: SITUATION NORMAL, ALL FOULED (or
a variant thereof) UP.
NOTES
1 A Parallel of Poetry and Painting, in The Prose Works of John Dry den, ed.
W. P. Ker, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), vol. 11, p. 146.
2 In The Works of John Dry den, ed. E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20
vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956- ), vol.
XVII, Of Dramatic Poesy (1971), ed. Samuel Holt Monk, pp. 196-97.
3 A Tale of a Tub, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), p. 100.
4 The Works of John Dryden, vol. iv, Poems 1693-1696 (1974), ed. A. B.
Chambers and William Frost, p. 71. Further citations to the Discourse will be to
this edition with page number given in parenthesis in the text.
5 Bickerstaff Papers and Pamphlets on the Church, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1966), p. 164.
6 "Epistle to the Whigs" of The Medal, The Works of John Dryden, vol. 11 (1972),
ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., p. 41.
7 "Preface to the Poems (1656)," in J. E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the
Seventeenth Century (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1957), vol. 11,
p. 88.
8 Characters and Passages From Note-Books, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1908), p. 442.
9 Meditation Upon a Broomstick, in A Tale of a Tub, with Other Early Works
1696-iyoy, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965),
pp. 239-40. The same notion seems to have carried into the twentieth century.
George Bernard Shaw, an Irish compatriot of Swift's two hundred years
removed, told an interviewer, "You cannot carry out moral sanitation, any more
than physical sanitation, without indecent exposures."
FURTHER READING
Elliot, Robert C , The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, i960).
56

Gill, James (ed.), Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century

Satire (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995).
Griffin, Dustin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: University of Ken-
tucky Press, 1994).
Lord, George deForest (ed.), Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse,
i66o-iyi4, 7 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963-75).
Paulson, Ronald (ed.), Modern Essays in Criticism: Satire (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1971).
Rawson, Claude, Satire and Sentiment, 1669-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1993).
Seidel, Michael, Satiric Inheritance, Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1979).
57

3
MARGARET A. DOODY
Gender, literature, and gendering

literature in the Restoration
At least until very recent times no literary era has been as conscious of what
we call "gender" as the period we call "the Restoration." It is impossible to
deal with literature of this period (not excluding Milton) without encoun-
tering observations upon masculinity and femininity, statements about the
male and the female and the androgyne.1 These elements or attributes, if
often represented in terms of opposition and conflict, are also represented
as essential.Yet if these attributes are essences, they lack Aristotelian fixity.
They are not fixed but mutable, iridescent and flickering like Pope's airy
sylphs in The Rape of the Lock.
Why was the Restoration so peculiarly gender-conscious? There may be
no absolute answer, but some important factors should be considered. The
Civil War was an event of the utmost importance to the English, an instance
of very open and certainly not imaginary conflict raging over questions of
power and authority (including the authority of interpretation).The king
and Court were associated with Continental rather than English beliefs and
fashion.The idea of the "foreign" is always "feminine" rather than "mascu-
line." That Charles had married a French queen seemed only a kind of
proof of the association of Royalists with dangerous, alien - and wickedly
alluring - femininity.
I have said elsewhere "The Civil War was a war of styles" (The Daring
Muse, p. 45). Style was both accident and essence. It is not only in the
modern popular view that the Cavaliers are associated with long locks,
lace, and licentiousness, or the Roundheads with short ugly haircuts and
dark plain clothing. Both the parties concerned and their enemies thought
so too. Royalists wore their hair long and in curls, a courtly style associated
with the reign of Charles I. Such a style was inveighed against as unnatural,
unChristian, and unmanly. One pamphlet attack was called The Unloveli-
ness of Lovelocks. According to John Aubrey (1626-97), an undergraduate
at Oxford in the early 1640s, the head of Trinity College in that era was
"irreconcileable to long haire." He went about with a pair of scissors for
58

Gender, literature, and gendering literature
the benefit of any Trinity Scholars whose hair had grown too long," and
"woe be to them that sate on the outside of the Table."2
Hair remained an issue. In that anti-Restoration Restoration epic Para-
dise Lost (1667), John Milton is at pains to deal with Adam's hair. Adam is
living in the natural state in Paradise, and the natural state of course
includes nakedness. That is less problematic, in a way, than the fact that
Adam's hair must grow, as he knows no tools nor barber. Milton must not,
however, allow his Adam to look like a Cavalier. Adam's hair is shorter
than Eve's, as Milton explains it should be:
His fair large Front and Eye sublime declar'd

Absolute rule; and Hyacinthin Locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustring, but not beneath his shoulders broad:
Shee as a vail down to the slender waste
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dissheveld, but in wanton ringlets wav'd
As the Vine curls her tendrils, which impli'd
Subjection, but requir'd with gentle sway
(Book iv, lines 300-08)
Long hair, long curls, signify wantonness and subjection, feminine

imperfection. Unfallen Nature is strangely careful not to let Adam's hair
grow, since Adam can take no technological means to curtail it. What can
be more "natural" than letting hair grow? And hair on a young male head,
when allowed to grow uncut, does not necessarily remain shorter than a
woman's - as young people in the 1960s satisfactorily demonstrated. In
Milton's later Restoration work, Samson Agonistes (1671), the Biblical
hero is suffering from the effects of barbering. He was "Effeminatly
vanquish'd" (line 562). Paradoxically, Samson "effeminated," seduced by
Dalila, stopped looking like a Cavalier. Samson became an inadvertent
Roundhead who needs to recover. He has recovered when he refers to the
hair he has regrown: "these redundant locks / Robustious to no purpose,
clustring down" (lines 568-69). Samson now is in tune with the Restora-
tion fashion, which went in for redundancy of hair (supplemented by the
wide wig); Samson with his restored and full "robustious" hair now may
even look a little like Charles II.
The hirsute contrast of Milton's heroes exhibits some of the tensions and
paradoxes within all such signs of gender and power. Hair seems an essential
part of the natural body, a visible and tangible portion of identity, and yet it
is easily parted, parted with, and altered. It is almost too carnal to be
comfortable, a redundancy of mere matter, subject to constant transforma-
59

MARGARET A. DOODY
tion. To have another person (more especially of the opposite sex) disarrange
or remove one's hair is a sign that the stable self is a fiction. Hair is ever
readily subject to drastic change, even at the very spur of the moment, as
Belinda will find in The Rape of the Lock (1712). Hair, grown or cut (and in
youth equally growable or cuttable), is a good indicator and sign of various
other kinds of cultural instability and changefulness. It is noticeable that
whenever the English arrive at times of stress and national tension they mess
about with their hair, as the punks did in the 1980s; such representations of
hair enact rebellion and instability, and point out the unfixedness of
conventional signs, including marks of gender and thus gender itself.
The Cavaliers' style was in the eyes of some an offense to traditional
masculinity. It expressed the decorative idea of the Renaissance in a
mannerist way, favoring the thin figure (like the real body of King Charles
I). It favored elegant decoration and appurtenances (lace and plumed hats)
and valued airy grace over what was stocky and muscular. We have to wait
for the era of Aubrey Beardsley and the aesthetes of the late Victorian age
to find another group of English males defining itself in a manner so little in
the bulldog style. The king's own (fatal) representation of himself, the
Royal Patriarch, as feminine or "effeminate" forced a conceptual disjunc-
tion. This is not a question of what we call "sexual orientation." It was
Charles's father who indulged himself with male favorites; this may have
added to a sense of offense in some quarters, but it was not different from
the practices of many other kings. Sexual preference did not in itself
accentuate the "feminine." King Charles I was considered both feminine
and uxorious. Indeed, to be too fond of a woman, or of women,
traditionally (if curiously) makes a man "effeminate." Opponents of King
Charles I and his heirs ridicule them in phrases indicating they are small
and soft, as Marchamont Needham did in perpetually referring to Charles
II as "Baby Charles." These people are not competent, they are not real
grown-up males.
Cromwell presented himself as a grown-up male, a stout and stout-
hearted warrior and a no-nonsense gentleman of the bulldog kind. But the
advent of this masculinity was associated with a sense of loss:
Though for a time we see White-hall

With cobweb-hanging on the wall,
Instead of gold and silver brave,
Which formerly, 'twas wont to have
With rich perfume
In every room,
Delightful to that princely train . . .
(Anon., ballad, "When the King Enjoys His Own Again")
60

According to this Cavalier view, a superflux of masculinity has adversely

affected the beautiful space. The palace is rendered barren, without
ornament, denuded not only of visual and tactile pleasures but lacking its
other sensualities, its "rich perfume." The feminine, the luxurious and
pleasurable, has not been displaced by strong male accoutrements and
signifiers. Rather, there is a gap, emptiness. Nothing replaces the sensuous
tapestries - save the feebly sensuous, unintelligent, and unsignifying
cobweb, more fragile than the fabric whose place it usurps.
If the major political events that constitute the Civil War and the
Interregnum involved complex senses of gender, gender roles, and displace-
ments, it can be no wonder that the culture of the next two or three
generations, of those who came of age or were born after the settlement of
1660, was imbued with ideas of gender - and of gender as problematic. As
we can see, it is quite possible to talk in gender terms and about gendered
conflicts even when all the human subjects involved are males. Class terms
readily become gender terms. If monarchy is "feminine," if aristocracy also
becomes feminized, then the merchant classes should, in contrast, be
"masculine." Hence, government and all proper patriarchy might really
belong to them, a view enforced by Protestant Puritan emphasis on the
head of the household's role as priest of his household, responsible for
saying prayers before his assembled subjects and looking well into all their
ways. The claim of the merchant class, its appropriation of the patriarchal
role, was again acted out in the so-called "Bloodless Revolution" of 1688
and the settlement of 1689.
Such gendered class warfare runs straight into a paradox. If the real
"male heir" to social power is the masculine merchant class, that class can
succeed only by persuading people to import and buy and use "feminine"
luxuries like silk and porcelain. This group's new money rests on feminine
and feminizing sources. Pope's Belinda, ambiguous heroine of The Rape of
the Lock, as Louis Landa points out, is an archetypal consumer.3 She thus
may represent the wastefulness of the female aristocrat, but she equally
represents the eligible image of England's desirable trade, productivity and
consumption. There is not really felt to be an alternative to this sort of
civilization. Thomas Hobbes had already pointed out that the truly simple
and individualistic life resting on male individual power is unlivable and
uncivilized - in the famous phrase of Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), in the
"naturall condition" of humanity, which is "a warre . . . of every man,
against every man," we find that "the life of man [is] solitary, poore, nasty,
brutish, and short" (Leviathan, ch. 13, pp. 88-89). This sounds like a
parodic account of manliness. Such brutishness is the logical conclusion of
an (imaginary) entirely non-effeminate masculinity.
61

MARGARET A. DOODY
Civilization always looks somewhat "feminine," and "masculinity," if it

is projected too far along one trajectory, ends in the Hobbesian state of
Nature. Very few of the new patriarchs wanted to be painted warts and all;
an endeavor to appropriate the stuff of the old "feminine" monarchic
aristocracy is noticeable in all trends, including manners and furnishings.
The concept of "sensibility," a major philosophical idea which was to
furnish a partial answer to the conceptual and philosophical-social pro-
blems of the new colonial and mercantile era, was not arrived at in a hurry.
The soothing mediation of "sensibility," as the eighteenth century devel-
oped it, ascribed previously "feminine" qualities to normal male psy-
chology and behavior, and assured us of a smoother social interaction
during a time of great economic and social disruption. This concept also
smoothed the progress to a complex capitalist society and the new
industrial age. As G. J. Barker-Benfield points out, part of the program of
the new "sensibility" is "The Reformation of Male Manners." Sensibility,
Barker-Benfield emphasizes, is connected with consumerism; although
others have argued that the period saw a new separation of the sexes in
public and private spheres, Barker-Benfield points out that the development
of capitalism meant that men and women now often shared, to a greater
degree than before, the same spaces in work and leisure. The new code of
decency was to question certain traditional male pastimes, including heavy
drinking, practical jokes, and wife-beating.4 To put it simply, shopkeepers
had to learn to treat customers with a new "civility," and not to offend
them by acts like spitting on the floor, as well as not to mock or curse or
grumble at them. The processes which bring such change were at work in
the Restoration, but without the new definitions and styles of resolution.
"Sensibility," which brings a new self-consciousness with it, made it
possible to grasp these inevitable alterations in what had seemed like
"nature." The relation between strangers and sensibility has perhaps been
insufficiently taken into account. As we can see clearly in a work like
Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54), with its universalist
optimism, the idea of "sensibility" furnished all classes not only with a
concept of "manners" but also with a belief in the inner responsiveness of
all mankind. It thus made less terrifying the unavoidable encounter with
strangers in this new, more mobile, and constantly exchanging society.
Despite Jean Hagstrum's claim that the "Age of Sensibility" begins with
Milton and Dryden, we can see that the Restoration was largely without
the reassuring mediation of the concept of "sensibility." Without this
emollient and intellectual resource, the Restoration played out its uncer-
tainties, its estrangements, its (often irate) apprehensions of social conflict,
and its understanding of conflicts within individual psychology, in terms of
62

what we, following theorists such as Judith Butler (see her Gender
Trouble), prefer to call "Gender" rather than "Sex." We should remember
that this is our terminology, though the concept is arguably already present.
"Gender" imbues everything, and nothing is to be discussed without it.
If this was so, it was partly at least because after the Restoration of
King Charles Ps son, Charles II, which represented a kind of triumph of
the "feminine," there was a sudden lack of clarity about the significance of
the gendrification of sociopolitical life. No gender was quite victorious. At
this point in English history, and at this point alone, the culture in general
demonstrated that it was possible to play with both gender and politics.
The situation almost meets the specifications of instability and interroga-
tion implicit in Judith Butler's prescription: "the task is . . . to repeat . . .
and through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender
norms that enable the repetition itself." Butler alleges that "there is no
ontology of gender on which we might construct a politics"{Gender
Trouble, p. 148). She wants us to recognize this now, when there is a
resistance to accepting such a lack, but in England just after 1660 (and
through the Revolution of 1688-89), t n e ontologies of both gender and
politics were radically fragmented. What we see in the literature is "a
radical proliferation of gender" and a displacement of gender norms.
Much of the "wit" for which the era is so often (if often vaguely)
celebrated arises from the recognition of the need constantly to repeat
gender norms - and constantly to break, reverse, dismiss, or otherwise
abuse them.
From the point of view of women, the prevalent distrust of both gender
norms and political truths, and the consequent lack of simple wholesome
clarity, presented certain welcome opportunities. Writing, which permitted
access to public media, including even the very public medium of the stage,
was not only economically tempting to women writers, but also psycholo-
gically inviting. For the first time it was really possible for a woman to
enter this public realm of the kingdom - or republic - of letters, and to do
so effectively. The printing press, however, was not grand; it had been
thoroughly deconstructed. It had produced not only books and poems but
also small pamphlets and squibs of all kinds. The press had got down and
dirty and spewed out many different kinds of propaganda during the Civil
War (and even in the highly censored Interregnum); it was visibly not
masculine master but feminine servant. If the press was, as its enemies so
frequently proclaimed, a prostitute, and not only a whore but a fecund
womb of error (as it is already in Spenser's The Faerie Queene), it was not
and could not be a patriarch.
Milton, in his 1644 defense of the liberty of the press and of its readers,
63

MARGARET A. DOODY
turns to a story of the feminine, an Egyptian myth about a goddess.

Readers and writers in search of truth are "imitating the carefull search
that Isis made for the mangl'd body of Osiris . . . gathering up limb by
limb still as they could find them" (Prose Works, vol. n, p. 549). What
Milton is too polite to say in Areopagitica is that the part of Osiris'
mangled body Isis had trouble finding (according to Egyptian myth) is the
virile member.5 We may read all the books and pamphlets that tumble out
of a printing press uncensored (as Milton wishes it to be), and never come
to an end, a final phallic say. Despite Derrida's well-known complaint
about the "phallogocentric culture," in this flow of emission coming from
the printing press it is hard - nay, impossible - to find the phallus. If the pen
is masculine, the press where the products of the pen come to birth is an
unruly feminine reproductive organ. So it is for Pope in the Dunciad
(1728-43) - the goddess Dulness is the new despicable dirty Power, the
teeming womb of the press.
In the Restoration, writing becomes a gender-indeterminate activity, if
yet an activity incessantly about gender. The Restoration's terms of stylistic
criticism are also terms of gender classification. But any classification is
followed by questioning, by revisions of unstable reclassification. We can
see this, for example, in Aphra Behn's "To the Unknown Daphnis on his
Excellent Translation of Lucretius":
Methinks I should some wonderous thing Reherse
Worthy Divine Lucretius, and Diviner Youl
In Gentle Numbers all my Songs are drest:

And when I would Thy Glories sing,
What in Strong Manly Verse should be exprest
Turns all to Womanish Tenderness within;
Whilst that which Admiration does Inspire,
In other Souls, kindles in Mine a Fire.
Let them admire thee on - whilst I this newer way
Pay thee yet more than They,
For more I ow, since thou hast taught Me more
Than all the Mighty Bards that went before;
Others long since have pauld the vast Delight,
In Duller Greek and Latine satisfied the Appetite:
But I unlearn'd in Schools disdain that Mine
Should treated be at any feast but Thine. (lines 5-24)
Behn goes on to say that until now she has "curst my Sex and Education I
And more the scanted Customs of the Nation" for forbidding "the Female
Sex to tread / The Mighty Paths of Learned Heroes Dead" (lines 25-28).
64

Women have hitherto been kept from Latin and Greek poetry, but Thomas
Creech's translation of Lucretius represents a progress of civilization;
Creech is the "Daphnis" of a literary love affair based on the old novel
Daphnis and Chloe, but he combines the role of pastoral lover with that of
a true caregiving pastor. Just as the bards once taught men to leave off
savage manners and ranging the woods,
So Thou by this Translation dost advance

Our Knowledge from the State of Ignorance
And Equallst us to Man! (lines 41-43)
Behn's poem of 1683 implicitly takes issue with the account of the world
given in the first chapters of Genesis and in Milton's Paradise Lost. Woman
did not lose the world in falling from her own original "State of Inno-
cence," but was left behind in a primitive "State of Ignorance" until
language came to the rescue, personified by heroic Creech who bridges the
gap between civilized knowledge and woman's language. Despite Behn's
proclamation that she, as Woman, knew no classical literature before, we
may catch echoes of Horace and of the kind of Epicurean history offered
in, for instance, the third Satire of the first book, where Horace paints a
picture of a rough and brutal mankind until life changed when man
acquired speech - "until they discovered words and names by which to
describe voiced cries and feelings" (lines 99-104). Behn's praise of Creech
may not be orthodox from a Christian point of view, and is not as
straightforward as it seems. There are further complexities.
At the outset the speaker of this poem is already a writer, and already
thoroughly female. She is not capable of "Strong Manly Verse," but finds
that her poetry emerges in "Gentle Numbers" and "Womanish Tenderness."
This might seem a thoroughly hierarchical arrangement, an orthodox
expression of humble inferiority. But the next lines express the ability of the
mind that owns gentleness and tenderness to seize on the (male) writer's
work not with cold admiration (like a male reader), but with "Fire." The
fire of passion, of sexual approval and desire, and the fire of literary
imagination kindled are all combined. Male readers and the other male
writers get the worst of it. They will not, or cannot, appreciate Creech's
accomplishment, as they have already dulled their appetites by plodding (at
school presumably) through Greek and Latin. The "vast Delight" is not to
be theirs. Poor souls, they have used up the supply of delightful incandes-
cence in the wrong way; they have taken in the source of inspiration at
dogged intervals and by rote. The leading metaphor at the end of the
opening verse paragraph is "Appetite" - and the woman reader has it. She
is ready for the feast, as male readers are not. Dulness and a lack of sexual
65

MARGARET A. DOODY
energy become the properties of males as readers (and implicitly of many

male writers). A doubt is cast on the ability of poets other than Creech to
rise to any occasion. Creech, in being thus singular among men, loses some
of the dull ordinariness of implied masculinity and acquires a kind of
androgynous allure, the power of the exceptional. The compliments to
Wadham College and its progeny in the second half of Behn's tribute to
Creech make it clear that there are wonderful male writers. But such male
writers themselves share "feminine" qualities:
No sooner was fam'd Strephons Glory set,

Strephon the soft, the Lovely, Gay and Great;
But Daphnis rises like the Morning Star
That guides the wandring Traveller from afar
Daphnis, whom every Grace, and Muse inspires
Scarce Strephons Ravishing Poetick Fires
So kindly warm, or so Divinely Cheer (lines 107-13)
Daphnis-Creech is like Lucifer and like Venus, the morning star.

"Strephon" perhaps should resemble the sun, as he has set. But "Strephon"
- a name for John Wilmot, Lord Rochester, one of his comic-poetic names
for himself - is also both masculine and feminine. He shares with the
speaker the leading quality of "Fire." His ardor, passion, sexuality - his
"Fires" - are to be found in his poetry, which is "Ravishing," not in the
sense of committing rape but in the feminine sense of being charming and
seductive. Strephon is "the soft, the Lovely, Gay and Great." Only one of
these substantial adjectives is masculine. Strephon-Rochester's "greatness"
would seem to be compounded of his softness, loveliness, and gaiety. That
he is "the Gay" suggests several qualities of airiness, wit, and sexual
gayness, or freedom to engage in a variety of adventures. The poet
pastoralized (or mock-pastoralized as "Strephon") is a perfect androgyne, a
sun king as gay lady. Indeed, the poem indicates that the very qualities that
make Rochester great as a poet are these astounding mixtures of gendered
qualities. Writing is an experience of mixing the genders. It is truly
promiscuous.
Such a view accords very well with Rochester's own literary practice, and
with the theories one can identify behind that practice. No poet of renown
in English literary history is more unstable than Rochester, or more in favor
of instability. This labile quality contributes largely to making his poems
ever fresh and ever shocking. It is possible, after all, to be both porno-
graphic and offensive and yet to be dull, as in, say, the works of the satirist
Charles Churchill later in the eighteenth century. Rochester is always
intellect at play - an intellect that is willing to discountenance itself.
66

In "To a Lady in a Letter," for example, the speaker addresses his Chloris
in terms totally opposed to Richard Lovelace's Cavalier who could not love
his lady so much did he not love Honor more. In Rochester's poem, nobody
loves Honor, and everyone is unfaithful. We might anticipate the pose of a
male speaker reprehending an unfaithful female - a traditional stance.
Complaints against female inconstancy and wickedness traditionally
abound in what are (as Rochester makes us realize) very male poems. There
is a customary presumption, behind such plaints, that the female has a duty
to be constant. Unchastity, according to dominant social morality, is hardly
a vice in a man but a dreadful vice in a woman, a terrible fall that makes
her totally unsuitable for the male, no matter how many sexual partners he
may have. As a male possession she has the absolute duty of not getting
stolen. Rochester deals very differently with the subject of the inconstant
female. The speaker in Rochester's poem defies all conventions of any
ownership by denying any right to jealousy:
Such perfect Blisse, faire Chloris, wee

In our Enjoyment prove
'Tis pity restless Jealousy
Should Mingle with our Love.
(lines 1-4; Poems, ed. Walker, p. 41)
Rather than a plea to the lady not to wrinkle her brow and ruin her
composure by being jealous of him, as we might expect after such a start,
the piece develops into an unexpected outline of what might make their
"perfection":
Lett us (since witt has taught us how)
Raise pleasure to the Topp:
You Rival Bottle must allow
I'le suffer Rivall Fopp. (lines 9-12)
The Gentleman-speaker's drinking and the Lady's promiscuity are treated

in parallel. The appetites of both, gargantuan and unstoppable, must be
respected. The matter is treated in regular meters and cadences resembling
those of love-elegies of an idealistic cast. This deceptive smooth manner
allows for the new tone - a tone itself part of the subject, and defended
implicitly as an expression of frankness. A new and open honesty is to
replace old poetic and social conventions. The free-ranging woman is
paradoxically desired, while a subordinated woman, far from being desir-
able, could not be a good partner at all:
All this you freely may Confesse,
Yett wee nere disagree
67

MARGARET A. DOODY
For did you love your pleasure lesse,

You were noe Match for mee.
Whilst I my pleasure to pursue

Whole nights am takeing in,
The Lusty juice of Grapes, take you
The Juice of Lusty Men. (lines 25-32)
It is not difficult to see why the bawdy Rochester was a favorite with women
writers, praised not only by the dissolute Aphra Behn but also by the
virtuous Anne Wharton, who sees in him an educative force: "He civiliz'd
the rude and taught the young, / Made Fools grow wise" ("Elegy on the Earl
of Rochester," lines 20-21 ).6 Rochester may have been a terrible husband in
real life, but as a poet he rejects the power role. He is perfectly conscious
that convention governs our ideas as to appropriate behavior. He will not
even play the conventional rake. In other works he writes about impotence
(a topic affording a kind of sub-genre of poetry of the late seventeenth
century), and he raises ideas of sexual pleasure by disconcertingly moving
from homosexual to heterosexual experience and back again.
Rochester certainly does want to shock - there is a punk rocker quality
about him, as about the Ovid of the Amoves. Or perhaps Ovid's Amoves is
to rock video what Rochester's work is to punk rock - but in Rochester the
punk rock quality is raised to the very highest style. His poetry is almost
always aggressive, but it is aggressively questioning.
Aggressiveness is a dominant tone or manner of the Restoration, and
aggressive questioning one of its norms. Sexuality is explored in its
connection with power constructs and power relations. Power relations of
any kind can hardly be talked of without recourse to sexual language and
very conscious gendered imagery.
Not that your Father's Mildness I condemn;

But Manly Force becomes the Diadem.
Perhaps his fear, his kindness may Controul.
If so, by Force he wishes to be gain'd,

Like womens Leachery, to seem Constraint:
Doubt not, but when he most affects the Frown,
Commit a pleasing Rape upon the Crown.
(John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, lines 381-474)
So says the villainous Achitophel in a great male-male seduction scene

where, like Satan with Eve, he tries to urge his unequal interlocutor on to a
68

bad deed. Achitophel uses Absalom (or Shaftesbury uses the illegitimate
Monmouth) for his own purposes, but Achitophel can arousingly delude
his puppet in the very act of seducing him by playing on his idea of
"manliness." The rhetorical scene plays with the parallel between Achito-
phel's seduction of Absalom-Monmouth and Absalom-Monmouth's fanta-
sized rape - or rather he would prefer to think, seduction - of his father, the
now-feminized King David-Charles. A number of gender cliches are
ironically implied and employed in Achitophel's speech: we're all men
together, we know that women really want it, that there's no such thing as
unwanted rape, manliness means getting on with what you want, force is
allowed both in sex and in war. . . Absalom-Monmouth, however, exhibits
his stupidity not only in his obtuseness to irony in general, but also in his
desire to believe that gender terms and ideologies of gender are stable, and
thus can serve as stable analogies to a politics still in the making.
All questions of war and politics seem here, as elsewhere in Restoration
writing, thoroughly sexualized. The word "Manly" is scarcely used in this
period without irony, though the irony was rarely carried so far as in
William Wycherley's presentation of his tormented and brutal hero Manly
in The Plain Dealer (1674). Wycherley's The Country Wife (1672) had
already dealt very fully with the ironies of sexual identity. Only by losing
the reputation for "manliness" can Horner be free to have all the women he
wants, and thus to cuckold all the husbands. The extreme of masculine
power has to become an apparently helpless feminized androgyny. The
more aggressive Horner is, the more asexual he has to look. In a society
which prefers reputation to realities, this is commonly thought too big a
price to pay. But the joke is that the males who think they are and look very
"manly" are as ridiculous as Horner appears. That Horner would or could
bring himself to pay the price of forfeiting the name of masculinity shows
that he is really, as others say he is, the figure of a man and not a
recognizable male. But that is only because the recognizable males dwell in
what we can clearly see are merely imbecilic if soothing communal fictions
about masculinity.
Paradoxically, in an era that dealt in paradoxes, the aggressiveness of male

writers in discussing sex and gender gave some freedom to women writers
to tackle gender matters from new points of view, and to deal with their
own anger, desire, and questioning. The very idea of writing is gendered,
but any gendering as soon as announced is ripe for question. "A Female
Pen" may be a contradiction in terms, but the Restoration lived by and
with contradictions. Aphra Behn complains in her preface to Sir Patient
Fancy (1678) that women did not support her but found fault with the play
69

MARGARET A. DOODY
because it was bawdy, although this is no fault in other theatrical produc-

tions. Behn's preface picks up the gender game and uses it in Behn's own
way, working up an anger (if partly in jest) against her own sex for not
acknowledging what they do like.
Behn uses aggression very wittily and effectively, and she is not alone.
Most of the leading Restoration writings sound like attacks on someone or
something. We should never make the mistake of thinking the women
writers are somehow "nicer." Pious Jane Barker in some unpublished satires
sends her (political) enemies, the supporters of William, to Hell (Magdalen
MS. 343), and the Duchess of Newcastle in The Blazing World imagines a
new kind of superweapon that confounds the Roundheads and subjugates
the world to the Stuart monarch. Absalom and Achitophel arguably goes
further than usual as the author, when he published it, was seeking the real-
life death of the model for the poem's anti-hero. Moreover, Dryden can
complain in The Medal (1682) that this man, this Shaftesbury, is not alive
to begin with - he is a fake, an image, a counterfeit, like the medal in his
honor, with its false writing. Lethal wishes are thus justifiable. Dryden,
who drew a famous comparison between the satirist and the skilled
executioner, uses writing to annihilate. Restoration writing sometimes
gleams with the weird luster of imaginary murder. Well into the next
century, this quality is still perceptible in Jonathan Swift, especially in his
poems:
Like the ever-laughing Sage,

In a Jest I spend my Rage:
(Tho' it must be understood,
I would hang them if I cou'd:)
("An Epistle to a Lady," lines 171-74)
Aggression in Restoration writing is intimately related to gender - it is
aggression sexualized, enacted between entities with a sexual dynamic that
exists even when the conflicted entities are both imaged as of the same sex:
for example, Hudibras and Ralpho in Hudibras (both male); Satan and
Christ in Paradise Regained (both male); the Hind and the Panther in
Dryden's poem of 1687 (both female); Aphra Behn and the females in her
audience in the case of Sir Patient Fancy (all female).
There is plenty of aggression in women's writings, and it emerges in
relation to all sorts of topics. The point is to be able to keep anger under
control, to make power-moves while looking cool. It helps that everything
is on the table for question, that new definitions can constantly be
introduced. The "virgin" is one of the figures refigured. The idea of the
"virgin" in much traditional male writing means centrally a young ripe
70

woman, not yet sexually branded as the possession of anyone other than
her father; she is to be disposed of to the most qualified male. The virgin is
attractive as a transitional figure, nubile, on the edge of initiation. Other-
wise, the virgin is an antiquated spinster and a figure of fun. But women
writers of the Restoration (especially but not only those of Catholic
backgrounds) speak in defense of the "virgin" as a representative of the
most desirable state for a woman. The virgin in the new definitions is not a
sentimental reflection of the Virgin Mary but a human being with a sense of
her own identity. She is free to think for herself, and to engage in good
works and sensible conversation:
Whose equal mind, does alwaies move,
Neither a foe, nor slave to Love;
And whose Religion's strong and plain,
Not superstitious, nor profane.
(Katherine Philips, "The Virgin," lines 19-22)
That Philips herself (not a virgin, but subject to the rules governing married
women) may not have wanted to hide her work from the public press, even
if she had to look as if she resented getting her poems published, has been
convincingly argued. 7 Jane Barker amplifies Philips's defense of the virgin,
in "A Virgin life":
Since, gracious Heven, you have bestow'd on me
So great a kindness for verginity,
Suffer me not, to fall into the power,
Of Mens, allmost omnipotent Amours.
But let me in this happy state remain,
And in chast verse, my chaster thoughts explain.
Fearless of twenty-five and all its train,
Of slights, or scorns, or being call'd Old Maid,
Those Goblings, which so many have betray'd:
Ah! lovely state how strange it is to see,

What mad conceptions, some have made of thee.
(lines 1-16)8
We can see that the poet steadily amplifies both her scorn for the "goblins"
(a Rossetti-ish touch) that scare ladies away from this desirable state, and
her love for the occupations of the unmarried woman, including reading
and religious meditation:
Her Closet, where she do's much time bestow,
Is both her Library and Chappel too,
Where she enjoys Society alone,

MARGARET A. DOODY
F th' Great Three-One -

She drives her whole Lives business to these Ends,
To serve her God, enjoy her Books and Friends.9
Barker included a version of this poem in her collection Poetical Recrea-

tions (1688) and another, heavily revised, in her novel of 1723, A Patch-
Work Screen for the Ladies. In this late publication she softened the impact
of the last line of 1688, changing it to "To serve her God, her Neighbours
and her Friends." One feels the loss of the powerful Restoration sex-word
"enjoy." In 1688, however, Barker was willing to risk explaining that the
unmarried woman has great resources of enjoyment - if not sexual
enjoyment. She needs no patriarch, no priest, no male center of family
prayers. The virgin's self-containment does not exclude relation to "Books
and Friends," a relation which is positive, pleasurable - even, some might
think, self-indulgent. The aggressiveness of Barker's attack on the social
bugbears and the women who are foolishly scared by them is matched by
the exhibition of available self-confidence. Far from wearing out a fretful
existence of lapdogs and maladies, any woman who tried this mode of
existence would find whole new dimensions to her life. The author is
willing to take on large sets of cultural stereotyping and produces a new
gender-type which doesn't quite fit traditional views. This "virgin" is
neither waiting for somebody else to give her a life, or lamenting that no
one has done so. Instead she makes a life. We find, here as so often
elsewhere in literature of the Restoration, an ambition to remake gender-
types, and to break the conventional mold.
This is of course not done easily - in fact in works by both men and
women a certain amount of wreckage may be expected. Anne Finch,
Countess of Winchilsea, complains of spleen and expresses some very testy
views - although neither so testy or so sexy as those of the saintly Anne
Killigrew identifying herself as one of Diana's nymphs in a poem entitled
"On a Picture Painted by her self, representing two Nimphs [sic] of
DIANA\ one in a Posture to Hunt, the other Batheing [s/c]":
In Swiftness we out-strip the Wind,

An Eye and Thought we leave behind;
We Fawns and Shaggy Satyrs awe;
To Sylvan Pow'rs we give the Law:
Whatever does provoke our Hate,
Our Javelins strike, as sure as Fate. (lines 9-14)
These maidens are free to move, free to hate and strike. But their
aggressiveness as male-resembling hunters and strikers has not canceled out
their femininity:
72.

We Bathe in Springs, to cleanse the Soil,

Contracted by our eager Toil;
In which we shine like glittering Beams,
Or Christal in the Christal Streams;
Though Venus we transcend in Form,
No wanton Flames our Bosomes warm! (lines 15-20)
This well-known topos (nymphs bathing) is frequently employed as a

means of enjoying female beauty as object in the works of Renaissance
painters; we can also find it in the works of Renaissance poetic writers,
such as Sidney's Arcadia. It is amazing how different the topos seems once
the figures become "we." Here, the pleasure of being crystalline and Venus-
like is subjectively experienced or indulged, like the pleasure of bathing.
Killigrew's "nimph" is regendered, or, rather, a new species of gender-
representative emerges, like a new discovery in natural philosophy. This
new strange entity is, as Killigrew knows, impossible to locate on the socio-
political map:
If you ask where such Wights do dwell,

In what Bless't Clime, that so excel?
The Poets onely that can tell. (lines 21-23)
Referring to or admitting the absence of these "nymphs" does not dismiss

them, but betrays a gap, a lack, in the nature of things as we are supposed
to accept them. Once we have subjectively imagined Killigrew's nymphs,
they participate in the proliferation of genders, displacing norms.
In identifying herself with the classical "nymphs," Killigrew arguably
stays within the conventions - she is a female representing herself as a
female. But, we ought to note, she escapes into being another kind of
female, not a well-bred Anglican gentlewoman in delicate health, but a
wild free aggressive goddess-led virgin. She reclaims a (non-existent) gender
identity which becomes increasingly confusing. Who is the speaker, where
does this voice come from? How can the speaker announce her own
unreality and remain so aggressive? In claiming a (male) pagan mythology
as her own, Killigrew frees it from one-sidedness, as she frees the feminine
from a decorous or obedient definition. She fantasticates her landscape and
relocates herself.
Writing, after all, is a fantastication, based on acts of imagination.
Writing takes liberties. Even non-fictional prose discourse in its speculative-
ness, its egotism, and its imaging of alternatives can be accused (nearly as
much as fiction) of juggling with the truth. We ought, so Puritans tell us,
strictly to contemplate only reality, and some complaints against
"Romance" or fiction in general are based on the dislike of humans
73

MARGARET A. DOODY
contriving an escape from the reality God gave us to deal with. (For
Puritans and other religious people, of course, reality includes divine
reality.) Fictions clutter up the psyche, displacing what ought to be there:
"they leave the Memory so full of fantasticall Images of things which are
not, that they cannot easily dismisse them." 10 It is, however, hard to find
pure material for the furnishing of the mind. When writers (even historians
or philosophers) offer to bring us "reality," they, like the Romancers, are
offering us mere representations. The Renaissance had already felt the
difficulties arising from the proliferation of mere language. Words were
supposedly merely feminine, after all, and only deeds masculine. Language
may be seen as the Word, the sacred word, the Logos, the authority of the
Father, the way of reality - which is how many editors, translators, and
interpreters of the Bible genuinely wanted to see it. But so much editing,
translating, and commenting had made people uneasily aware that the
Bible itself can dissolve into a multiple set of texts and possible texts, a
pattern of words upon words. 11 Contemplated that way, it is no longer the
clear voice from Horeb, Sinai, or Olivet. All written words, even those in
the Bible, are subjected to new forms of historical and stylistic criticism,
like Father Simon's Critical History of the Old Testament, which, as
Dryden said in Religio Laid (1682), showed us "what Errours have been
made / Both in the Copiers and Translaters Trade" and ironically pointed
out "where Infallibility has fail'd" (lines 248-51). Written words are no
defense against error, no bulwark against time. The Bible is a human and
erroneous text, even under "God's own people" and their devoted scholarly
or priestly Christian clerics who followed:
And who did neither Time, nor Study spare

To keep this Book untainted, unperplext;
Let in gross Errours to corrupt the Text:
Omitted paragraphs, embroyl'd the Sense;
With vain Traditions stopt the gaping Fence,
Which every common hand pull'd up with ease:
What Safety from such brushwood-helps as these?
(lines 260-66)
This is a succinct account of the first onslaught of what later came to be

called the Higher Criticism of the Bible, in Father Simon's attempt to refute
the Protestant's naive dependence on the Bible as a solid foundation-stone.
The Bible stops sounding like "itself" if we begin to talk of "text" and
"paragraphs." Moreover, in this version of Simon's account, the Bible itself
(and the Protestant and Catholic traditions alike) begins to seem curiously
feminine. Dryden's claim that oral tradition is as likely to err as the written
74

one makes everything a story of fallibility and confusion: "if one Mouth
has fail'd, / Immortal Lyes on Ages are intail'd" (Religio Laid, lines
269-70). Verbal religion and the inspired word become identified with
what is weak, wrought upon, full of gross errors, embroiled, gaping,
touched by common hands, lying . . . like a drab, in short. Neither written
text nor male transmitted tradition are dependable. Words - including the
words of the greatest written text of all - are a bricolage and confusion,
subject to the weaknesses conventionally associated with womankind.
The status and stability of written language is constantly queried in
Restoration texts. These texts themselves may be great and witty out-
pourings of words, but they are customarily distrustful about words, and
witty upon (as well as in) the written language. We have just seen how
Religio Laid questions the written religious words. The Hind and the
Panther is all talk but no action. No solution can be reached within
argument; we still have to wait for a divine revelation. In Samuel Butler's
Hudibras, the masculine interest in written language is everywhere regis-
tered as ridiculous; the eponymous anti-hero may pride himself on his
knowledge of language and discourse, but his ''Hebrew Roots" prove only
that he is "barren ground" (Part 1, Canto 1, lines 59-60). Hudibras's
pompous disquisitions and eagerness to take the text as his own property
are at one with his desire to take the Widow as his property - as he
attempts to do in his ridiculous love-letter, "An Heroical Epistle of
Hudibras to his Lady" at the end of Canto in. Her retort, "The Ladies
Answer to the Knight," clearly demonstrates that the male writer is not the
best writer. Hudibras might think her stupid enough to be caught by
"Poetique Rapture," but "Shee that with Poetry is won, / Is but a Desk to
write upon." Not a subject or a means of more bombastic text, the Lady
turns on Hudibras in a gender-crossing jeer: Hudibras, she says, may think
her stupid or subservient enough to be terrified into awe by men, and (by
implication) there may be some women silly enough to "Let Men usurp
th'unjust Dominion / As if they were the Better Women" ("The Ladies
Answer," lines 381-82). This complex jeer, the last lines of Butler's poem,
reverses common stereotypes of the bossy woman setting herself out to
prove "the better man" (in vulgar proverb the grey mare proving "the
better horse"). This gibe also makes fun of any appearance of the phrase
"better man," reminding us that social and political life is run by males as if
the world were only theirs, an assumption depending on the idea that their
superiority needs no proof. If Puritans fight against the "unjust Dominion"
of monarchs, they have in logic no reason to assent to male dominion. All
they have given us is the soapsuds of their texts. And if there is superiority
anywhere, why should not the victorious character be declared the "Better
75

MARGARET A. DOODY
Woman" as well as the "Better Man"? All this and more may be drawn
from the Widow's remark, and still we are left with the residue, the
conjuring-up both of the male-female which is not androgyne but in
conflict, and a public or republic of plural entities who are all primarily
definable as "women." The shock entailed in understanding these lines
provides part of the effect of Butler's mockery of the truly phallogocentric
Puritan males who are his butts and anti-heroes.
The Widow in Hudibras thinks little of the men's written language, and
she is not singular in the Restoration. Males are, very commonly, textual
persons, but the kind of written language that may be expected from males
is repeatedly cast into doubt. In William Congreve's The Way of the World
(1700), the bluff country squire Sir Wilfull Witwoud comes from Shrop-
shire to London to look up his half-brother, Witwoud, the would-be wit
and man about town. After Witwoud tells "Brother Wilfull of Salop" that
" 'tis not modish to know Relations in Town," the country gentleman
diagnoses the state of affairs:
The Fashion's a Fool; and you're a Fop, dear Brother. 'Sheart - I've suspected
this. By'r Lady I conjectured you were a Fop, since you began to change the
Stile of your Letters, and write in a scrap of Paper gilt round the Edges, no
broader than a Subpoena. I might expect this when you left off Honour'd
Brother; and hoping you are in good Health, and so forth - To begin with a
Rat me, Knight, I'm so sick of a last Nights debauch - Od's heart, and then tell
a familiar Tale of a Cock and a Bull, and a Whore and a Bottle, and so
conclude. You cou'd write News before you were out of your Time, when you
liv'd with honest Pumple Nose, the Attorney oiFurnivah Inn. (Act m, scene i)
Witwoud has changed his style, and exchanged one kind of letter for
another. But the old-fashioned epistle that Sir Wilfull prefers will strike the
audience as ludicrous and tiresome, while the new rakish style is cliched, as
well as egotistical and unsociable. Witwoud the younger has moved from
one standard male style to another, an affectedly and self-consciously
"masculine" style of writing - the manner of the rake who is living it up.
The rake is more "feminine" if less modest than the Shropshire clerk. Here,
in a characteristic trope of the Restoration, we see gendrification within
gendrification. Witwoud wants to be another kind of man, and his style is a
representation of himself as that other (fancied) kind of man, which is
practically a different gender within his gender. For Sir Wilfull, the ideal
sort of man writes like a country attorney - or a country attorney's
apprentice. But lawyerly writing is exactly the kind that has long been
considered verbose and inane, the opposite of nervous "manly" prose.
Witwoud's foppish kind of letter has some literary pretensions which the
76

first does not, but both kinds of masculine writing are rendered ridiculous.
No wonder the beautiful and intelligent Millamant, heroine of Congreve's
play and at times his most important voice, judges masculine writing as of
little worth, using the best of it - the verse - to pin up her hair, but finding
male prose hopelessly unfit for that or any other task.12 If, like the Widow
in Hudibras, she will not be a desk to write upon, Millamant mischievously
turns their writing into a matter for the toilette table. Once again, gender
troubles are associated and entangled with the hair.
To neither male nor female authors, evidently, is it clear that males excel
at writing, or that writing is an essentially masculine activity - even if it is
never an essentially feminine activity. The cosmetic work of Millamant and
her maid Mincing indicates that writing is a form of cosmetic. It is likewise
but a consumable commodity - even male writing done with the male pen,
uncontaminated by the promiscuous press.
For Millamant the power of the pen and the cosmetic powers are
interchangeable. From that point of view, the "Cosmetic Pow'rs" adored by
Pope's Belinda and Pope's own poem are the same thing, as I think Pope
knows (see The Rape of the Lock, Canto I, line 124). In Margaret
Cavendish's Blazing World (1666), writing offers the power of cosmic
creation - even if that creation is only of that which is not. As she says, her
world cannot be termed a poor world "for there is more gold in it than all
the chemists ever did and (as I verily believe) will ever be able to make"
(Salzman [ed.], Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction, p. 252). If the
reader can enjoy it, she will be "a Happy Creatoress" (as the phrase is
printed in the seventeenth-century printings). Her new word "Creatoress"
creates a feminine form of a word thought of usually only as a masculine
monad: the Creator. Writing offers a way out of all binary systems and all
depositions of reality; it mimics authority, but only on a basis of equality.
The author can claim "I endeavour to be Margaret the First" and admit her
own ambition: "rather than not to be mistress of one, since fortune and the
fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own." But making
such "a world of one's own" only acknowledges the right of all others to do
the same, as she says at the end of her preface, "for which nobody, I hope,
will blame me, since it is in everyone's power to do the like" (p. 253).
Writing is power but only in the terms which allow others access to the
same power. Hierarchy is destroyed and obedience rendered naught by the
power of a woman to make up her own world - a world that can be
innocent of any tales of Adam and his rib or Eve and the serpent.
Language playfully and not anxiously used allows gender to recreate
itself - as it does in The Blazing World where the Empress and her friend
Margaret the Duchess of Newcastle both go and inhabit the body of the
77

MARGARET A. DOODY
latter's husband, the Duke of Newcastle, making a new trinity in unity. We

could scarcely say "what sex" this new entity is, or who is the "Better
Woman." In the examination of gender in language, boundaries melt and
definitions shift. They shift, indeed - as Cavendish wittily shows - into new
categories impossible to define by old terms. To use language is to set
gender drifting. The eighteenth century had to cope with this insight of the
late seventeenth century, and to try to battle with and contain it. Some
early eighteenth-century works have the old Restoration ginger; Pope's
Rape of the Lock, particularly with the addition of the sylphs, is still in
touch with the aggressive wit and unsettling transmutations of the Restora-
tion. But as the eighteenth century proceeds we can see the process of
laying out new terms, fresh reassurances about stable gender boundaries
and relations. The new dictates which stabilized gender arose from a new
ideology, a blending of sensibility with the Whiggish politico-economic
ideology of the free market and the autonomous economic individual. Not
all elements of sensibility as a philosophic concept inevitably lead in this
Whiggish direction. I believe we can see in writers like Samuel Richardson
- at least, the Richardson of Pamela (1740-41) and Clarissa (1747-48) -
the possibility of using the terms of sensibility to fashion a radical respect
for human rights which would include a recognition of the need to share.
(Arguably this shadow side of an ideological alternative accompanied later
movements, especially in England, such as Chartism and women's suf-
frage.) The Whiggish individualized ideology and the new picture of gender
stability were, however, to be most fully defined in the powerfully influen-
tial work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Emile (1762) notably arrives at
a firm settlement of gender questions. The new ideology of gender entailed
the exchange of the old aggressive tone for a milder, more melancholy one.
Gender became the creature of an internalized sensibility rather than the
topic of wit's transformative powers.
NOTES
1 There are some parallel developments in France, especially during the period of
the wars of La Fronde (1648-52) and the minority of Louis XIV. For an
excellent discussion of the treatment of gender in French literature of this
period, see Joan Dejean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origin of the
Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
2 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Seeker and
Warburg, 1950), p. 183. This scissors-wielding college head was Ralph Kettell,
president of Trinity College from 1599 until his death in 1643.
3 See Louis A. Landa's essay, "Pope's Belinda, the General Emporie of the World,
and the Wondrous Worm," first published in South Atlantic Quarterly, 70

4 See G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in

Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. ii,
pp. 37-103. Barker-Benfield draws on Pocock's insights in Virtue, Commerce
and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) regarding the
demand of the new world of commerce for new behavior and a new kind of
persona.
5 Milton's Areopagitica connects the reader with the goddess: "the sad friends of
Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the carefull search that Isis made for the
mangl'd body of Osiris . . . gathering up limb by limb still as they could find
them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and commons, nor ever shall doe,
till her Masters second comming; he shall bring together every joynt and
member, and shall mould them into an immortall feature of livelines [sic] and
perfection" (Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. D. M. Wolfe et al. [New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82], vol. 11 (1959), ed. Ernest Sirluck,
P- 549)-
Readers, writers and all seekers after truth gather together under a female
sign to carry out a work that (like all woman's work) is never done; it cannot
come to a climax and cannot be complete. Milton makes a fascinating original
use of the myth of Isis and Osiris as he probably knew it from Plutarch. (See
Plutarch, De hide et Osiride, 365B, ed. John Gwyn Griffiths (Swansea:
University of Wales Press, 1970). That the phallus is only an image, a piece of
conceptual cobbling or bricolage, seems recognized by, for example, Butler in
Hudibras, in the ridiculous procession of the Skimmington and elsewhere. We
make a parade of what does not exist.
Unlike other types of the dying god, the reanimated Osiris never returns to
the upper world but becomes a god of the underworld. Even in his revivified
state, Osiris is a suitable emblem for what is hidden, incomplete. He is also not
easily classified as to gender in his posthumous state, and Milton's own rhetoric
soon changes Truth's representative from mangled god to beautiful woman. If
we follow Milton's rhetoricalfigures,we see a surprising gender-cross or gender
transformation, as torn-up Osiris becomes - hey presto! - a lovely lady.
6 Anne Wharton, like Aphra Behn, wrote an elegy on the death of Rochester (who
was her uncle). This presumably circulated in manuscript, and was soon
published, if only, apparently, after its author's own death; the quotation is from
the version in Nahum Tate's Poems by Several Hands (1685), reprinted in
Germaine Greer et al. (eds.), Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-
Century Women's Verse (London: Virago, 1988; New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux, 1989), pp. 287-88.
7 The case for Katherine Philips's intention to publish has been presented by
Germaine Greer, in public lectures and in Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition,
Rejection, and the Woman Poet (London: Viking, 1995), ch. 5, pp. 147-72.
8 Kissing the Rod, pp. 360-62.
9 Magdalen College MS version reproduced in Kissing the Rod, pp. 360-61.
10 The quotation is from Nathaniel Ingelo, who argues the case against fictions
(including Homeric epics as well as novels) in the preface to his Puritan allegory
of 1660, Bentivolio and Urania (Civ-C2r). (See my discussion of this work and
of seventeenth-century attitudes to fiction in The True Story of the Novel [New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996], ch. 11, pp. 251-73.)
79

MARGARET A. DOODY
Ingelo had reason to feel particularly sour in 1660, when his side had lost; in
the entire period (from the beginnings of the Civil War through the Restoration)
aesthetic issues are inseparable from political issues. They are perhaps never
truly separable from religious, or at least ontological, issues.
11 For an excellent discussion of anxieties over truth and the word in the
seventeenth century, see Richard Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Critics in
the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991). His essay of 1986, "Mise-en-Page: Biblical Criticism
and Inference during the Restoration," in O. M. Brack Jr. (ed.), Studies in
Eighteenth-Century Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986),
vol. xvi, is a valuable account of the perception of the multiplicity of biblical
texts and uncertainties about textuality in the period.
12 What Millamant actually says is "I am persecuted with Letters - I hate Letters -
No Body knows how to write Letters; and yet one has'em, one does not know
why - They serve to pin up one's Hair . . . Only with those in Verse, Mr.
Witwoud. I never pin up my Hair with Prose. I fancy ones Hair wou'd not curl
if it were pinn'd up with Prose" (Act 11, scene i).
Millamant's speech is obviously an impish boast about her attractiveness; her
pronominal "one" is upper-class mock-modest generalizing, meaning "I." Other
women are not necessarily beleaguered with daily epistles and verses. Mill-
amant's speech, however, is not uttered mainly in rivalry to other women, but in
mockery of the males who see their verbal and especially their textual utterances
as inevitably significant. "No Body knows how to write Letters" - that is males
don't, but ignorant males (really nobodies), perpetrate epistles, believing in the
power of masculine written language. Instead of receiving the publicity they
really crave, the would-be poets are condemned to a hopelessly private station,
which could be only symbolically erotically gratifying.
For a discussion of Congreve's own anxious endeavors to ensure himself
status as a man of letters, producing not ephemeral entertainments but books
that mattered, see Julie Stone Peters, Congreve, the Drama, and the Printed
Word (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
FURTHER READING
Aubrey, John, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Seeker and Warburg,
1950).
Barker, Jane, Poetical Recreations Consisting of Original Poems, Songs, Odes, &c.
(London: Benjamin Crayle, 1688).
Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-
Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Behn, Aphra, The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 1, Poetry, ed. Janet Todd (London:
Pickering, 1992).
Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York: Routledge, Chapman 8c Hall, 1990).
Butler, Samuel, Hudibras, ed. John Wilder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, The Blazing World, as reproduced in
Paul Salzman (ed.), An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991).
80

Congreve, William, The Complete Plays of William Congreve, ed. Herbert Davis
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1967).
Dejean, Joan, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origin of the Novel in France
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
Doody, Margaret A., The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996).
Dryden, John, Works of John Dry den, vol. 11, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972).
Greer, Germaine, Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection, and the Woman Poet
(London: Viking, 1995).
et al. (eds.), Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's
Verse (London: Virago Press, 1988; New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1989).
Hagstrum, Jean, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991).
Ingelo, Nathaniel, Bentivolio and Urania, in Four Bookes (London: Richard
Marriot, 1660).
Killigrew, Anne, Poems. By Mrs. Anne Killigrew (London: Samuel Lowndes, 1686).
Kroll, Richard, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early
Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
"Mise-en-Page, Biblical Criticism and Inference during the Restoration," in O. M.
Brack Jr. (ed.), Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1986), vol. xvi, pp. 3-40.
Landa, Louis A., "Pope's Belinda, the General Emporie of the World, and the
Wondrous Worm," first printed in South Atlantic Quarterly, 70 (1971), pp.
215-35; rPt* m Essays in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1980).
Milton, John, Areopagitica, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. D
M. Wolfe et al. 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82) vol. 11, ed.
Ernest Sirluck (1959).
Paradise Lost, in The Complete Poetry of John Milton, rev. edn., ed. John T.
Shawcross (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1971).
Peters, Julie Stone, Congreve, the Drama, and the Printed Word (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1990).
Philips, Katherine, Poems By the most deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips
The Matchless Orinda (London: J. M. for H. Herringman, 1667).
Plutarch, Peri Isidos kai Osiridos, ed. and trans. John Gwyn Griffiths as De hide et
Osiride (Swansea: University of Wales Press, 1970).
Pope, Alexander, The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson
(London: Methuen & Co; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962).
Swift, Jonathan, Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London and New York:
Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester, The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed.
Keith Walker (London: Basil Blackwell, 1984).
81

4
JESSICA MUNNS
Theatrical culture i: politics and theatre
Parliament's first ordinance against stage plays in 1642 did not entirely
suspend theatrical activity in England during the Civil War and Inter-
regnum. Companies played before the Cavalier court at Oxford, and in
London illicit performances continued to be staged at the Fortune, the Red
Bull, and other locations, including the great London fairs. The reissuing of
ordinances against stage playing and the frequency with which Parliamen-
tary soldiers were sent to close down performances indicate that though
often harassed, theatre was not dead. Masques were performed for state
occasions at Cromwell's court and Sir William Davenant (1606-68) played
a major role in the revival of professional theatre during the last years of
the Protectorate.1 The influence of Davenant's dramas with their use of
moveable scenery, dance, and music cannot be doubted, least of all given
that Davenant was one of the two men subsequently granted royal
permission to run theatre companies in London. However, this was not a
period during which many new plays were written: older plays were
recycled, often as popular episodes stitched together. Lack of regular
employment led many actors to work abroad, and the hand-to-mouth
existence of the surviving theatrical troupes inhibited the recruiting and
training of new actors. Although the degree to which theatre had been
quashed can be exaggerated, overall theatrical performance during the
period 1642-60 was occasional, often illicit, and was not an integral part
of the life of the capital. Nevertheless, the performances staged toward the
end of this period were already developing in directions that would be
consolidated after 1660.
Theatres, stages, audiences

Charles II landed at Dover in May 1660, and by August he had granted a
monopoly to run two theatre companies to William Davenant and to
Thomas Killigrew (1612-83), their heirs and assignees. The speed with
82

which these grants ensuring governmental control of theatrical perform-

ance were issued is indicative of the extent to which the "restoration" of
theatre was a significant part of the Stuart resumption of control in the
capital. The new patentees went rapidly into action, quashing all rivals,
dividing up the existing stock of plays, recruiting actors, and staging
dramas. During the reign of Charles II the relationship between court and
theatre was very close: legally, in terms of the status and privileges of the
actors as royal servants; financially, in terms of gifts of cash and clothing;
politically, in terms of censorship; and more generally in terms of the need
for noble patrons. The close relationship between theatre and state was
replicated in Ireland where in 1662 a Theatre Royal, established at Smock
Alley, Dublin, under the direct patronage of Lord Ormonde, the Lord
Lieutenant, was very much an extension of the viceregal court. 2
The patents of 1660, formally issued in 1662, did not restore theatre as it
had existed in London during the pre-Civil War era. Instead of a number of
theatres only two were licensed: Killigrew managed the King's Company
and Davenant the Duke's Company, named for the king's brother, James,
Duke of York. A very significant innovation was permission to employ
women to act female roles. Killigrew's 1662 grant explains that this was to
produce "harmless delight... useful and instructive":
for as much as many plays formerly acted doe conteine severall prophane,
obscene, and scurrulous passages, and the women's parts therein have byn
acted by men in the habit of women, at which some have taken offence, for
the preventing of these abuses for the future ... wee doe likewise permit and
give leave, that all the woemen's part ... may be performed by woemen soe
long as their recreacones, which by reason of the abuses aforesaid were
scandalous and offensive, may by such reformation be esteemed not onely
harmless delight, but also useful and instructive.3
The hope that this innovation would produce modest theatre and avoid
transvestism was not fulfilled and was not, perhaps, the paramount reason
for introducing women onto the stage.
There was a shortage of boy actors trained to portray women: Edward
Kynaston whom Samuel Pepys saw acting in The Loyall Subject in August
1660 - "the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life" - was a notable
exception. However, the decision to allow women on stage represents
more than necessity: actresses helped in the creation of a new style and
type of performance which aimed to attract the court and its adherents
and did not seek to conciliate Puritan sensibilities - which indeed would
have been vexed to decide whether boys dressed as women were more or
less deplorable than women flaunting their bodies publicly.4 The exiled
83

JESSICA MUNNS
courtiers, including Davenant and Killigrew, would have seen women

performing female roles at the theatres in Paris and there was a Stuart
tradition supporting female performance. The king's mother, Henrietta
Maria, for instance, had acted in theatricals at court, and been rather
hysterically denounced for so doing by the Puritan lawyer William Prynne
(to his cost - he lost his ears). The introduction of actresses in 1660 was
one of the many innovations that created a theatrical culture reflective of
the court's interests and tastes.
Killigrew was the first to present plays commercially, opening at
Gibbon's Tennis Court in Vere Street in November 1660. Davenant spent
longer converting his premises and opened at Lisle's Tennis Court in
Portugal Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields in June 1661, where the company
stayed for the next ten years. Tennis courts provided a viable theatrical
space since they were enclosed spaces with galleries and boxes for viewing.
Killigrew's King's Company took the lead in the race to construct custom-
built theatres, taking over an old riding school in Bridges Street near Drury
Lane and converting it into the first London Theatre Royal which opened
in May 1663. This structure burnt down in January 1672, forcing the
company to take over the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, now abandoned
by the Duke's Company. However, by March 1674 a new Theatre Royal
had risen in Drury Lane. The Duke's Company, still under the management
of the Davenant family, built the Dorset Garden Theatre fronting the river
Thames, according to tradition designed by Sir Christopher Wren, which
opened in November 1671.
All these new theatres were fully enclosed structures using artificial
lighting, and incorporating aspects of the private playhouses and court
theatres of the pre-Civil War era. In terms of staging techniques Davenant
was consistently more innovative than Killigrew. Even when performing in
Lincoln's Inn Fields, his was the first company to use the moveable and
changeable scenery typical of performances at court in a professional
theatre.5 These innovations have been described as productive of a "stable,
transcendent unity" that enabled "clarity of expression, elegance of plot
and the resolution of moral issues" in dramas where there are "no
unanswerable questions."6 However, the Restoration stage did not have the
physical capacity to represent a "stable, transcendent unity" through the
presentation of illusions sealed off from the spectators and is better seen as
transitional, neither as reliant on the audience's cultural senses of place,
space, and status as the Elizabethan stage, nor as distanced and illusionistic
as later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stages. Clarity of expression
was achieved only by some dramatists, plots range from the elegant to the
chaotic, and moral issues and questions are debated rather than resolved.
84

4.1 Dorset Garden Theatre c. 1671, design attributed to Sir Christopher Wren
Restoration theatres had a proscenium arch, equipped with entrance

doors for the players, and the part of the stage on which most of the
acting took place thrust out into the auditorium. The stage recessed
behind the arch to provide the "scenic stage," whose floor was grooved to
allow for sliding scenery, "shuts," for changes of scene and "discoveries."
A curtain hung from the proscenium arch was raised after the prologue
and not dropped until the epilogue, so all scene changes, usually accom-
panied by music to muffle the creaks, were carried out before the
spectators. As well as providing an area for scene changes, including aerial
descents, the space behind the proscenium arch allowed for perspective
scenery creating illusions of depth, as can be seen in the engravings of
Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco, performed at Dorset Gardens
in 1673. There is debate over how much acting, as opposed to static
tableaux effects, took place on the scenic stage; however, stage directions
such as "Scene opening discovers a Scaffold and a Wheel" for the
climactic execution of Pierre and suicide of Jaffeir in Thomas Otway's
Venice Preserv'd (Dorset Garden, hereafter abbreviated DG, 1681) indi-
cate that important and powerful episodes were acted in this area.7 What
was created was a stage whose physical shape allowed for the articulation
85

JESSICA MUNNS
4.2 A scene from Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco (1673)
of alternative representational modes - worlds of intimacy and complicity

and worlds of spectacle and wonder - and in this bifurcation the stage
was suited to the dramas performed on it. These ranged from dual plot
plays, especially popular during the first decade of the Restoration, which
combined heroic romance with situational and character comedy, as well as
serious dramas shot through with ironic humor and comedies seamed by
bitter cynicism.
The seating pattern established at these theatres was arranged in boxes,
86

galleries, and the pit, which was now a highly desirable and fashionable
part of the theatre. Audience capacity was around 650, and admission
prices varied somewhat according to the nature of the performance, but
were always relatively high. The size of the theatres, the seating arrange-
ments and their pricing all indicate that the new theatres of the Restoration
were not aiming to provide mass entertainment for a wide cross-section of
the London population - as theatres such as the Globe or Fortune had
done. From the first, tradesmen and merchants and their families went to
the theatres; indeed, prologues and epilogues frequently complain at the
absence of a more noble audience, and we know from Samuel Pepys's
Diary that minor bureaucrats also attended. Nevertheless, although the
audience was somewhat mixed, these were coterie theatres under direct
royal control and patronage, and the court and those who followed the
court made up a significant part of their spectators.
From the many anecdotes about members of the audience interrupting
performances to express knowing witticisms, from complaints in plays,
prologues, and epilogues about the audience chatting to each other or
making assignations, it seems clear that people came to socialize as much as
they came to see plays. Due to the repertory system of the companies'
organization, the audience rapidly knew the players well and would react
to performances in terms of their knowledge of their off-stage reputations
as well as their expected casting. Sometimes such knowledge was exploited
to produce ironic effects, as with the casting of Nell Gwynne, known both
for her comedy roles and for her affair with the king, as a virtuous Roman
princess in John Dryden's serious drama, Tyrannick Love (Theatre Royal,
Bridges Street, 1669).8 Dry den gave her an epilogue in which she rises from
her bier and mocks the conventions of theatrical death ("Hold are you
mad? You damn'd confounded Dog, / I am to rise, and speak the
Epilogue"), subverting the high seriousness of the preceding drama, and
drawing attention to her equivocal sexual status, "Here Nelly lies, who,
though she live'd a Slater'n, I yet died a Princess, acting in S. Cathar'n."9
Cross-casting was not always intentionally ironic nor was it always
successful. Colley Cibber describes a performance in the 1690s when
Samuel Sandford, renowned for acting villains, was cast against type. The
pit, he informs us, sat quietly for three of four acts in the expectation of
seeing him revealed as a villain, but when it turned out that "Sandford was
really an honest Man to the end of the Play, they fairly damn'd it, as if the
Author had impos'd upon them the most frontless or incredible Ab-
surdity."10 Roscius Anglicanus, Or An Historical Review of the Stage
(1708), by John Downes, book-keeper to the Duke's Company, is an
important source of information about how plays were cast, performed,
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and received and his brief descriptions often reveal the intimacy and
irreverence of this period's theatre.
Downes's comments frequently show that a full house could not be relied
upon: elite patronage fluctuated with the exodus of country gentry at the
end of the Parliamentary and legal sessions and army officers at the
beginning of wars. With the theatres competing for a limited audience,
which had other possible forms of entertainment - from gambling to
concerts - it is not surprising to find that they were obliged to change their
repertory rapidly. Four or five days represents a usual run - with the author
getting the house-takings on the third day - and ten days' consecutive
performance indicates a smash hit. A play that succeeded had to be a play
that people were prepared to see again and a play that was ridiculed on its
first performance by the all-powerful wits who sat in the pit meant a
terrible financial loss in sets and costumes for the company.
Popular theatre, that is theatre watched by the working people of
London as well as the middling and upper sections of society, took place
outside the two patent theatres, during the civic pageants of the Lord
Mayor's ceremonials and the annual London Bartholomew and Southwark
Fairs when drolls - short, often farcical, plays - and puppet shows were
performed.11 The Stuarts, however, did not favor the public processions,
entries, and civic ceremonials of the Tudor era. These were reinvented
during the time of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1678-82), when
public dramatic enactments such as London's Drollery; or, The Love and
Kindness between the Pope and the Devil (1680), and the Pope Burning
Processions, were the expression of oppositional politics. Ironically, in a
manner similar to the royal and aristocratic custom of passing on their fine
robes to the theatres, the Whig magistrate Sir William Waller provided
confiscated Catholic vestments for display in the processions.
Comedy, spectacle, and serious drama

R. D. Hume, in The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth
Century, presents us with a box-office driven theatre. He dismisses the
modern critical debates of those he terms "profundity-zealots" over plays'
modes and meanings to insist that "seldom do they probe character deeply
or present ideas which are essentially more than commonplaces." Their aim
was to "entertain" providing "casual entertainment, the equivalent of
everyday television fare" in a sharply competitive world in which a success
at either theatre had to be swiftly replicated, with embellishments, by its
rival.12 However, the theatrical culture of the Restoration was formed by
the opportunities and constraints of operating between royal and aristo-
88

cratic patronage, which was not especially generous, and a wider market-
place for theatre which as yet barely existed.13 The degree to which the
theatres were dependent on royal and court patronage was in the nature of
a double-edged benefit. While court patronage was vital, satisfying the
tastes of the court required expensive sets, costumes, stage machines, and
musicians, which could be ruinously expensive. Not so much profit, but
survival was frequently the issue. There are also problems with the assump-
tion that profit-driven dramas circulate "essentially... commonplace" ideas
or that such circulation does not require much analysis. The ideas that plays
articulated about love and marriage, subjects and sovereigns, liberty and
license, law, status, property and wealth, language and meaning are some-
times cliches, sometimes profound, and either way they are of interest as we
try to understand the dramatic modes which emerged. And while it is true
that dramas used stereotypical characters and formulaic plots, one might
argue that it is only via the manipulation of known terms and structures
that meaningful critiques get articulated.
Hume's description of vogues and fashions for varieties of tragedies and
comedies following hard on each other's heels is, however, more flexible
and useful than the traditional divisions of drama into Comedies of
Manners and Heroic Dramas. These are highly problematic categories that
can be interpreted either so generously that they include virtually all the
dramas written during this period, since most serious dramas consider
honor and most comedies at all times deal with manners and morals, or so
narrowly that only a few plays fit the categories. The comedies of this
period generally follow the mode of Caroline social comedy rather than
that of Shakespearean pastoral romance. With a few exceptions, such as
Thomas Shadwell's The Lancashire Witches (DG, 1681), not until the turn
of the century with plays like Sir John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (Drury
Lane, hereafter abbreviated DL, 1696) and the plays of George Farquhar
does comedy move to rural settings. Many Restoration and later seven-
teenth-century comedies are set in London locations familiar to the
audience - Pall Mall, Covent Garden Piazza - and generally the characters
in Restoration comedies are neither aristocrats nor rogues, but are the
younger sons of the landed gentry, wealthy heiresses, rich city merchants,
and town gentlemen of leisure and pleasure. There are, of course, excep-
tions such as dual-plot plays - Sir George Etherege's Love in a Tub; or, The
Comical Revenge (Lincoln's Inn Fields, hereafter abbreviated LIF, 1664), or
Dryden's Marriage a la Mode (LIF, 1672) - whose "high" plot characters
are noble and tend to speak verse. However, the "low" comedy plot
characters who are less socially elevated, more lively, and prose-speaking,
came to dominate the form.
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Comic form ranged from almost plotless plays such as Etherege's The
Man of Mode (DG, 1676) to densely plotted intrigue comedies often, as in
Samuel Tuke's The Adventure of Five Hours (LIF, 1663), taken from
Spanish sources, and set in exotic locations. Aphra Behn, in particular, had
a great aptitude for intrigue, brilliantly controlling large casts of characters
falling in and out of beds, balconies, and sewers. Edward Ravenscroft's
experimental play Scaramouch a Philosopher, Harlequin a Schoolboy (DL,
1677), which drew on the Italian commedia delVarte tradition (which was
based on the "stock" characters of Harlequin, Scaramouch, Columbine,
and Punchinello and used mime and improvisation) and the burlesques of
Thomas Duffet are indicative of the wide range of comic modes.
During the first decade of the Restoration, many comedies refought the
past war on a comic and domestic scale. Etherege's She Wou'd if She Cou'd
(LIF, 1668) shows Lady Cockwood attempting vainly to confine her
husband, Sir Oliver, to a Puritanical lifestyle and clothing, while Sir Jolly
Joslin, a cheery Cavalier, teaches him defiance and pleasure. Puritans are
frequently depicted as sexual hypocrites, like Snarl in ShadwelPs The
Virtuoso (DG, 1676) who berates his family for their license but sneaks
away to be birched by his mistress. Cavaliers, on the other hand, are
depicted as fun-loving and open-hearted. However, Cavaliers were rapidly
becoming old-fashioned, and the dismissal of Edward Hyde, Earl of
Clarendon from the Chancellorship in 1667 signaled a diminution of the
influence on the king of those who had shared his exile. A thread of
political realism that increasingly runs through many plays associates
Cavaliers with outmoded - and unrewarded - concepts of honor. As
Beaugard remarks in Otway's The Souldiers Fortune (DG, 1680), "Loyalty
and Starving are all one" and the Cavaliers "got such a trick of it at the
Kings Exile, that their posterity could never thrive since" (Act 1, lines 15-
17). By the late sixties and seventies, many comic heroes express a libertine
skepticism with regard to matters social and, above all, matters sexual.
Indeed, sexual idiom and innuendo often shaped the social and political
discourse of loyalty, liberty, rights, and obligations, expressed in terms of
family life, personal inclination, potency, and impotence.14
The combination of a politically correct rejection of Puritan morality, a
court-endorsed sexual license, and the erotic potential of actresses enabled
drama, comic and serious, to speak and enact sexual situations more
frankly than would again be the case until the later twentieth century.
However, the extent to which Restoration comedies were subversively
exploring a new sexual morality can be exaggerated. On the whole, virgins
remain virgin and their goal, marriage, comes to be shared by the young
men who pursue them. Usually the double-standard reigns and women who
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enact a sexual appetite equal to men are comic figures, such as Mrs. Loveit
in The Man of Mode. What is frequently acknowledged by playwrights,
however, is the very fact of the sexual double-standard as writers examine
its operations and consequences. Few do so more than Aphra Behn whose
Hellena in The Rover (DG, 1677), if attracted to a free and open sexual
contract, points out its disadvantages for women: "what shall I get? a
cradle full of noise and mischief, with a pack of repentance at my back?"
(Act 5, scene 1, lines 439-40).15
Male characters are allowed a large degree of sexual license, although it
is not until the mid-seventies when the trend for sex comedies sets in that
they are regularly to be found seducing women before settling down in the
fifth act with the virgin. The rampant sexuality of the predatory male, often
articulated via a fashionable Hobbesian discourse of nature and artifice,
has philosophic and political resonances; however, the unlimited freedom
of sexual choice the libertine hero longs for is usually shown to be
illusory.16 The possibility of operating outside the bounds of man-made
and, hence corruptible, law is shown as an unworkable option: although
society may limit freedom it also offers protection from anarchy - a real
consideration for a society recovering from civil war. As Rhodophil and
Palamede in Dryden's Marriage a la Mode conclude, although wife-
swapping is an attractive idea it raises too many problems and they "make
a firm league not to invade each other's propriety" (Act 5, scene 1, lines
319-21). The "Extravagant Rake," such as Nathaniel Lee's Duke of
Nemours in The Princess of Cleves (DG, 1680), or Willmore in Behn's The
Rover is an ambiguous figure and, despite his wit, as much an object as a
source of humor.17 Overall, the longevity of the bold and amorous young
male on the English stage is an indication of the extent to which this
character is not intrinsically subversive but represents conventional views
with regard to male sexual appetites and rights while also indicating that
sowing wild oats should not be a lifestyle. In the "cleaner" comedies of the
eighteenth century, the rake reappears as a wild but good-hearted character,
such as Charles Surface in Sheridan's School for Scandal (DL, 1777).
Arranged marriages for the wealthy were the norm, and in suggesting
that marriage should be based on love rather than money or property, and
in presenting strict fathers as blocking devices, playwrights were challeng-
ing parental authority. In William Wycherley's The Gentleman Dancing-
Master (DG, 1672), for instance, the heroine, Hyppolita, concludes the
play by blessing her father, rather than the other way around, and
announces, "When Children marry, Parents shou'd obey, / Since Love
claims more Obedience far than they."18 However, there are limits to the
young people's subversions, for although they seek to select their own
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partners, these partners are within their status group. Gerrard in The
Gentleman Dancing-Master is a gentleman disguised as a dancing-master
in order to court his mistress: marriage across social groups is a punishment
reserved for fools who find themselves wedded to other men's whores.
It was the Puritans who had put love and sexual compatibility in marriage
on the agenda and if these plays did not express these ideas in their terms
they were certainly not refuting them. Few comedies suggest that the
institution of marriage is itself at fault: it is materialistic criteria that are
attacked with a connection frequently made between arranged marriages
and prostitution. Female characters object to being sold in marriage by
parents or guardians and male characters are usually initially reluctant to
marry. Misogyny is a feature of both the comic and serious dramas with
heterosexual desire seen as enslaving the male to the lesser gender. However,
marriage to women of intelligence and vivacity frequently provides the
formulaic structural conclusion and may also be seen to articulate the
cultural trend toward what we know as the companionate marriage.19
The comedies that explore unhappy marriages are more subversive and
provide an ironic counterpoint to the pursuit of matrimony by other
characters in the plays. This trend has antecedents in the late 1670s with
such harsh comedies as Wycherley's The Country Wife (DL, 1676) and
Otway's Friendship in Fashion (DG, 1678) but comes into its own in the
nineties with plays such as Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife (LIF, 1697),
Thomas Southerne's The Wives' Excuse; or, Cuckolds Make Themselves
(DL, 1691), and even Cibber's Love's Last Shift (DL, 1696). The divorce
solution provided in some unhappy marriage comedies, such as Farquhar's
The Beaux' Stratagem (Queen's Theatre, Haymarket, 1707), was at that
time no solution but an expression of authorial idealism satisfying audience
fantasies. Heroic dramas have often been characterized in terms of their
idealism and escapism and comedies, seen as a reverse form, praised for
their cynicism and realism. However, just as it is misleading to read heroic
drama's exotic locations in terms of a distance from contemporary events,
the comedies' social realism and fashionable libertinism can obscure the
idealism with which they propounded unlikely liberties of choice for their
protagonists. Nevertheless, comedies work within the culturally agreed
designations of power: women may be witty but their liberty rarely extends
beyond the right to love the hero: men rule and socially appropriate
marriages are the goal.20
Charles IPs enthusiasm for the theatre, including its actresses, helped to
make theatre fashionable and his direct interventions were significant.
According to Charles Morrice, secretary to Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, it
was the king who suggested that Orrery write a heroic-couplet drama:
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King Charles was the first, who put my lord upon writing plays, which his
majesty did upon occasion of a dispute, that arose in his royal presence about
writing plays in rhyme: some affirmed it was not to be done; others said it
would spoil the fancy to be so confined, but Lord Orrery was of another
opinion; and his majesty being willing a trial should be made, commanded his
lordship to employ some of his leisure that way, which my lord readily did.21
Orrery's play Henry the Fifth (LIF, 1664) had ten consecutive perfor-
mances, and its success, due in part to clear signs of royal approval, helped
establish a trend for largely heroic-couplet verse dramas. These follow the
plots and patterns of French romance literature, are usually set in locations
distant in time and place, and present the major characters with dilemmas
based on conflicts between public duty and personal desire. The language is
elevated - characters do not simply fall in love, they feel love's flames - and
the action is exaggerated - Dryden's Almanzor in The Conquest of
Granada,, Parts 1 and 2 (Theatre Royal, Bridges Street, 1670) conquers
entire armies. The hero usually concludes the play happily triumphant in
both love and war with his honor tested yet intact.
These dramas have often been regarded as unreal and escapist, but
recently critics have stressed their contemporary relevance to the events and
politics of the 1660s. 22 Usurpation and exile are major themes in many of
these plays, with the hero frequently revealed as the true heir and
triumphantly enthroned, as in Sir Robert Howard's and Dryden's The
Indian Queen (Theatre Royal, Bridges Street, 1664). The plays can be seen
to delineate in elevated terms the dilemmas of a dangerous loyalty to an
exiled monarch or a comfortable life under an efficient usurper that many
of the audience had experienced.
Orrery's popular Henry the Fifth had topicality, given Charles IPs
reputation, in its depiction of a prince renowned for debauchery maturing
into a highly competent king, regaining lands usurped by the French and
restoring order to the realm. 23 The triangulated love-plot between Henry,
the Princess Katherine, and Owen Tudor has been dismissed by William
Smith Clark, Orrery's twentieth-century editor, as a "sentimental conflict
between love and honor attendant upon an appropriate, pseudo-historical
situation" (Works, vol. 1, p. 166). However, in Orrery's play, as, indeed, in
Shakespeare's, there is more than sentimentality in the submission of the
princess, who represents the land of France, to the rhetorically encoded
power of the legitimate monarch. Honor, as Richard Braverman argues,
"defines the relationship of sovereign and subject and lends political
resonance to the play insofar as it mediates the moral economy that binds
them. The sine qua non of honour, service, is expressed in the language of
debt." 24 Love, loyalty, submission is an expression of that debt owed by the
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JESSICA MUNNS
subject to the sovereign and, figured as wedlock, also establishes the

legitimacy and naturalness of political relationships in power and domina-
tion. Love and honor, in fact, are not really conflictual elements in many of
these plays, but parts of a whole that has been disrupted through usurpa-
tion and exile.
These plays articulated what have been called the "fictions of authority,"
and their monarchical biases were part and parcel of the ideological
apparatus of the restoration of the monarchy to England.25 Despite their
royalism, however, depictions of usurpations, the schemes of treacherous
statesmen, as well as a careless habit of mislaying royal babies, could
suggest the fragility, as much as the legitimacy of monarchical rule. Even
during the height of Charles IFs popularity in the sixties, many heroic-
couplet plays can be seen to explore, as much as to affirm, issues of
legitimate authority. Indeed, both serious and comic dramas look at how
authority is constituted and how it is challenged - in the state and in the
family.
In the prologue to Aureng-Zebe (1675) Dryden announced he had
"grown weary of his long-loved Mistress, Rhyme," and although rhymed
dramas continued to be written they no longer represented the norm. By
the mid-1660s a new generation of writers emerged - Thomas Otway,
Nathaniel Lee, Aphra Behn, Elkanah Settle, and Henry Nevil Payne - for
whom, as for the audience, the recycling of the previous generation's past
of exile and restoration was increasingly irrelevant. Explaining the past was
less important than dramatizing a present marked by disillusionment over
the character of Charles II, disappointment over a series of naval and
military fiascos, and anxiety over the succession with the king's wife (if not
his mistresses) barren, and his brother and heir, the Duke of York, a
declared Roman Catholic following the Test Act of 1673. Issues of
succession loom large in many plays, and unlike the earlier dramas' "lost-
heir" motif, the later dramas do not provide an easy solution. For instance,
Aureng-Zebe, the victor in the Indian throne succession dispute, is not the
eldest son and has also been described as "strikingly akin in mentality and
achievement to his villainous counterparts."26 In Otway's dramas of this
period the throne is either inherited by someone who does not want it,
Alcibiades (DG, 1675), kft m t n e possession of a demented monarch who
has just murdered his heir, Don Carlos (DG, 1676), or inherited by a ruler
bent on tyranny, Titus and Berenice (DG, 1677).
The new dramas of the 1670s turned away from courteous heroes and
military prowess toward blood and thunder with a large infusion of lust, as
in Settle's Empress of Morocco, and Behn's Abdelazar (DG, 1676).27 In
this, parallels can be drawn with the sex-comedies of the mid-1670s. The
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focus of serious drama changes, as does its depiction of heroes who tend to
be morally ambiguous, to be superseded in energy and emotion by charis-
matic villains of either gender, and to be faced by dilemmas whose
resolutions remain uncertain.28 Plots are set in motion not by conflicts
between competing rights but by lustful queens pursuing the hero, or
lascivious kings competing for their son's mistress - trends set by Aureng-
Zebe (DL, 1675) a n d followed in Otway's Don Carlos (DG, 1676), Charles
Davenant's Circe (DG, 1677), and Lee's Mithridates (DL, 1678). The new
dramatic fictions present regal authority as fractured and uncertain. Rulers
may be magnificent like Hannibal in Lee's Sophonisba; or Hannibal's
Overthrow (DL, 1675) or Alexander in his play The Rival Queens (DL,
1677), but, as with Antony in Dry den's All for Love and Sir Charles
Sedley's Antony and Cleopatra (staged in 1676 at Drury Lane and Dorset
Garden respectively), what is dramatized is their decline. Monarchs are
also depicted as entirely mad and tyrannical as in Dryden's Tyrannick Love
(1669), or Lee's Nero (DL, 1674). Undoubtedly profit motives encouraged
the rival theatres to produce spectacular horror-shockers drawing on
Elizabethan and Jacobean models rather than French romance novels for
their plots and incidents. However, anxieties felt over the uncertain political
situation were also significant.
Spectacle was often an important feature of Restoration serious drama,
and there was a distinct fashion for elaborate productions that involved
changeable scenery, sung episodes, and dance in the 1670s.29 Scenes
requiring such changes usually involved magic, as well as seduction,
activities whose mood was heightened by orchestral music, song, and
dance.30 The Duke's Company's move to their new theatre in Dorset
Garden enabled them to present musical spectaculars such as Psyche in
1675, which included a fifth act descent from the clouds by thirty-two
musicians. Undoubtedly, the machinery was expensive and the managers
wanted to see it used, and during the early and mid-seventies plays which
were not operatic dramas made heavy use of aerial descents and scene
changes, music and dance. However such utilization involved further
outlays and, despite successes, the costs involved in staging operatic
productions were not adequately rewarded. Spectacle and music remained
a feature of serious drama, but the vogue for operatic dramas ebbed to
reappear in the 1690s and, by the eighteenth century, the popularity of the
Italian opera made it a rival to English operatic dramas, indeed, to drama
in general.
Dryden's adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra as All for Love; or, the
World Well Lost helped to make Shakespeare fashionable and, during the
years of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1679-82), his Roman and
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history plays provided models for the dramatization of political conflict.

John Crowne adapted parts of Henry VI as The Misery of Civil War (DG,
1680) and Henry the Sixth (DG, 1681), and Nahum Tate produced
adaptations of Richard II, as well as Coriolanus, and his History of King
Lear (DG, 1681) - now notorious for giving the tragedy a happy ending.
Ravenscroft in Titus Andronicus; or, The Rape of Lavinia (DL, 1678-79)
and Otway in Caius Marius (DG, 1680) used Shakespearean sources to
give horrific depictions of civil conflict. In the process of using Shake-
speare's plays as models, the dramatists were also participating in the
elevation of Shakespeare to the status of national Bard.31
Most plays expressed royalist sentiments, though Dryden's The Spanish
Fryar (DL, 1680) while loyally replaying the theme of the true king restored
also satirizes Roman Catholics.32 Indeed, by 1680 the strength of the Whig
faction in London enabled the performance of plays such as Settle's
virulently anti-Roman Catholic The Female Prelate: Being the History, Life
and Death of Pope Joan (DL, 1680). There are also plays where it is
unclear which faction, if any, is being endorsed or satirized, for example,
Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus (DG, 1680), or Otway's Venice Preserved (DG,
1682). There is no doubt that the violent, corrupt, and disruptive civic
politics both plays depict are inspired by contemporary events. Comedies
also responded to the times with political satires such as Behn's The
Roundheads; or the Good Old Cause (DG, 1681), and John Crowne's City
Politiques (DL, 1683), and the Whig author Shadwell wrote explicitly
political comedies.33
The Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis produced some magnificent plays
but not equally magnificent profits and in 1682 Dorset Garden and Drury
Lane united, pooling their actors, plays, and material resources. This event
was catastrophic for writers since the United Company was now well
stocked with plays and commissioned few new works. Thomas Otway and
Aphra Behn died in poverty, Otway in 1685, Behn in 1689, and during
their last years they eked out a living with non-dramatic writing, and by
1692 Nathaniel Lee, one of the most talented writers of the age, died
insolvent and insane. Few playwrights enjoyed as did Dryden and Shadwell
consistent and generous noble patronage and when elite support waned the
theatre went into decline. Royal patronage declined during the brief and
troubled reign (1685-88) of James II and subsequently William of Orange
(1688-1702), and Mary (1688-92), and Queen Anne (1702-14) had little
interest in theatre. By 1695 Thomas Betterton led a "revolt" from the hard-
pressed United Company, taking its oldest and best actors to the now
rather dingy premises at Lincoln's Inn Fields where the company performed
for the next decade.
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Betterton had pioneered actor-management, but by the eighteenth

century this became usual and is symptomatic of the shift from an elite
theatre run by and for courtiers to a more commercial theatre orienting
itself toward a wider audience. Increased newspaper advertising is indica-
tive of the search for audiences whose varied tastes were appealed to by a
range of entr'acte song and dance routines. A 1704 Drury Lane advertise-
ment for Shadwell's The Miser, for instance, promises
Entertainments of Danceing by Monsieur du Ruell. And Mr. Clinch will

perform these several Performances, first an Organ with three Voices, then the
Double Curtel, the Flute, the Bells, the Huntsman, the Horn, and Pack of
Dogs, all with his Mouth; and an old Woman of Fourscore Years of Age
nursing her Grand-Child; all which he does open on the Stage. Next a
Gentleman will perform several Mimick Entertainments on the Ladder.34
Ballet, popular for entr'actes, gradually moved toward independent status

with the rise of the ballet d'action (an entirely danced narrative), the first of
which was John Weaver's The Loves of Mars and Venus (DL, 1717).
By the 1690s the theatre lacked royal patronage and there is strong
evidence that the "ladies" had campaigned consistently for a reformation of
stage morals; in such a context, the effectiveness of Jeremy Collier's attack
on the sexual laxity of the theatre - A Short View of the Immorality, and
Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) - is scarcely surprising.35 The
theatre had to find new plays more in tune with the altered moral codes of
representation. Unfortunately, two of the most brilliant new dramatic
talents, George Farquhar and William Congreve, did not last long:
Farquhar died after the premiere of The Beaux' Stratagem in 1707 and
Congreve did not write any plays after The Way of the World (DL, 1700).
From the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries onwards, there
was an influx of professional female dramatists - Susannah Centlivre,
Mary Pix, Catherine Trotter, Jane Wiseman, and Delarivier Manley. This
was in part due to the fact that playwriting was not sufficiently profitable
to produce intense male competition. These women writers' works, still
underrepresented in publications, are not necessarily "feminist" - any more
than were Aphra Behn's - however, they are female-oriented in terms of
characters and plots. Centlivre's plays, as she frequently points out, adhere
to Collier's prescriptions: they also treat the business of making and
keeping money as serious and laudable, as when Mrs. Lovely in A Bold
Stroke for a Wife (LIF, 1718), informs the hero that "Love makes but a
slovenly figure in that house where poverty keeps the door" (Act 1, scene 2,
lines 29-31 ). 36 In these respects, Centlivre's plays follow a trend toward a
more decent - and less aristocratic - drama.
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4.3 London playbill, 1725
Courtly insults to the merchant class were replaced by judicious estima-

tions of their benefit to the nation. Merchants, Joseph Addison wrote in
The Spectator, no. 69 (1711), "knit Mankind together in a mutual
Intercourse of good Offices, distribute Gifts of Nature, find Work for the
Poor, add Wealth to the Rich, and Magnificence to the Great." These
sentiments, alien to the earlier theatrical culture, are echoed in Richard
Steele's The Conscious Lovers (DL, 1730) when Mr. Sealand asserts "we
merchants are a Species of gentry, that have grown into the World this last
98

Century, and are as honourable, and almost as useful, as you landed Folks"
(Act 4, scene 2, lines 58-61 ).37 The merchant, Thoroughgood, in George
Lillo's The London Merchant (DL, 1731) has even more to say in their
praise.
Eighteenth-century drama is often regarded as a decline from that of the
late seventeenth century insofar as it expresses bourgeois values of comfort
rather than glory, and esteems trade rather than war. The emergent
dramatic mode has been characterized as "genteel" with "sentimental"
comedies, and "pathetic" domestic tragedies. However, the traditions of the
stage were powerful, older plays continued in repertory, and many of the
trends on the eighteenth-century stage had earlier antecedents. For instance,
Nicholas Rowe, first editor of Shakespeare as well as a successful tragic
dramatist, acknowledged the influence of Otway, genuinely reforming
heroes can be found in dramas of the earlier period, and spectacular
musical presentations on the professional stage can be traced back to the
1650s.
Seemly and exemplary dramas with improving moral agendas were not
the only new dramatic fare. Anti-government satirical ballad operas such as
John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (LIF, 1728) and Henry Fielding's The
Grub-Street Opera (Hay, 1731), played at much the same time as George
Lillo's didactic London Merchant (DL, 1731), or Sophonisba (DL, 1730),
James Thomson's Whig exploration of civic rights and individual liberties.
Meanwhile, John Rich and John Lun were enormously popular as Harle-
quin, and Hester Santlow enchanted all with her dancing. Lacking the
unifying patronage of the court, competing rather than dominant trends
emerged in the early decades of the eighteenth century as theatre engaged
with a more varied audience than before. The changes that took place were
not necessarily generic nor uniformly signaled by the emergence of an
affective sensibility. It is more profitable to look at the drama of this period,
as J. Douglas Canfield has, in terms of "shifting tropes of ideology" as a
new political and cultural orientation was working itself out through the
patterns of the stage.38
Theatre finances remained perilous, and during the early decades of the
eighteenth century companies rose, fell, regrouped, and rose and fell again.
Nevertheless, the licensed companies survived, unlicensed companies pro-
liferated, and new theatres were built. By the 1720s Londoners could
choose between the Queen's (later King's) Theatre in the Haymarket, The
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, a renovated Lincoln's Inn Fields, two theatres
in outer London at Greenwich and Richmond, and two new inner London
theatres - the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, so called to distinguish it
from the nearby grander theatre, as well as one at Goodman's Fields.
99

JESSICA MUNNS
4.4 The Queen's Theatre, the Haymarket (1707)
This proliferation was not welcomed by the government which had long
been seeking to reassert control over the theatres. Walpole had attended a
performance of The Beggar's Opera and pretended to be amused - but
Gay's follow-up, Polly, was swiftly banned. In 1737 the Little Theatre in
the Haymarket, whose company had come under Henry Fielding's manage-
ment, attempted to stage The Golden Rump (Anon., 1737), a skit on
Walpole and the king, which provided the precipitate occasion for the
Licensing Act of 1737. This reduced the London theatres to the two
licensed companies and provided that all new plays, prologues, epilogues,
and altered old plays must be submitted for approval to the Lord
Chamberlain's office. Although there was no lack of theatrical talent, least
of all in acting, by 1737 England's fictions of wealth, sexuality, and
authority would, as Henry Fielding found when he lost his job, be equally
or more effectively expressed in the novel.
NOTES
1 See Leslie Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1928).
100

2 See William Smith Clark's The Early Irish Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1955)-
3 The London Stage, 1600-1800, Part 1, 1660-1700, ed. William Van Lennep
with a critical introduction by Emmett L. Avery and Arthur H. Scouten
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), p. xxiv.
4 For Puritan views on acting see Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
5 See Eleanore Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage (1660-17 ox), With a
Particular Account of the Production of Calisto (London: Allen and Unwin,
1952), and Richard Southern, Changeable Scenery: Its Origin and Development
in English Theatre (London: Faber and Faber, 1952).
6 See Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in
Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 26, 92.
7 The Works of Thomas Otway: Playsy Poems, and Love-Letters, ed. J. C. Ghosh,
2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932; reprinted 1968); all citations are taken
from this edition. On the scenic stage, see Jocelyn Powell, Restoration Thea-
trical Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 54-55; Peter
Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration
Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 36.
8. All performance dates are as in The London Stage, 1660-1800, Part 1, 1660-
1700.
9 All citations from Dryden's works are taken from The Works of John Dry den,
ed. E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1956- ). Text's emphasis.
10 Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, ed. B. R. S. Fone
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), pp. 77-78. See also Peter
Holland, The Ornament of Action, on patterns of casting, pp. 54-98, 79.
11 See Sybil Rosenfeld, The Theatre of the London Fairs in the 18th Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, i960), and Paula R. Backscheider,
Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern
England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
12 Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth
Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 30-31.
13 See Deborah Payne's forthcoming book Patronage, Print, Professionalism and
the Marketplace of Restoration Theatre, 1660-1685.
14 See Giles Slade, "The Two Backed Beast: Eunuchs and Priapus in The Country
Wife," Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, second series, 7,
1 (1992), pp. 23-43.
15 Aphra Behn, The Rover, ed. Anne Russell (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1994).
16 See Dale Underwood's Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of
Manners (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), and Robert Markley's
Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wy-
cherley, and Congreve (Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press, 1988).
17 On the rake figure see Robert Jordan, "The Extravagant Rake in Restoration
Comedy," in Harold Love (ed.), Restoration Literature: Critical Approaches
(London: Methuen, 1972), and Harold M. Weber, The Restoration Rake Hero:
Transformation in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England
(Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1986).
101

JESSICA MUNNS
18 William Wycherley, The Complete Plays, ed. Gerald Weales (New York: Anchor
Books, 1966).
19 See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977). Stone's work on this topic has,
however, been vigorously challenged: see reviews by E. P. Thompson in New
Society, 8 September 1977, pp. 499-501, and Alan Macfarlane in History and
Theory, 18 (1979), pp. 104-25. Works such as Linda A. Pollock's Forgotten
Children, Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983) and Ralph Houlbrooke's The English Family, 1450-
iyoo (Harlow: Longman, 1984) and English Family Life, 1576-1716 (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1988), offer significant modifications of Stone's thesis.
20 See Christopher Wheatley's "Romantic Love and Social Necessities: Reconsider-
ing Justifications for Marriage in Restoration Comedy," Restoration, 14, 2
(1990), pp. 58-69.
21 The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, ed. William Smith Clark
II, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), vol. 1, p. 23.
22 See Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 1660-1671
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 141.
23 Richard Braverman, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body
Politic in English Literature, 1660-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), p. 38.
24 Ibid., p. 41.
25 See Susan Staves, Players* Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979).
26 See Derek Hughes, Dry den's Heroic Plays (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 149.
27 See Paul D. Cannan, "New Directions in Serious Drama on the London Stage,"
Philological Quarterly, 73, 2 (1994), pp. 219-42.
28 See Derek Hughes's discussion of the decline of heroic idealism, English Drama
1660-1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 140.
29 Hume, Development, pp. 205-09, 280-83.
30 James A. Winn, "When Beauty Fires the Blood": Love and the Arts in the Age
of Dry den (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), chapters 4 and 5.
31 See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adapta-
tion and Authorship, 1660-1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
32 See J. Douglas Canfield, "Royalism's Last Dramatic Stand: English Political
Tragedy, 1679-89," Studies in Philology, 82, 2 (1985), pp. 234-63.
33 See Jean Marsden, "Ideology, Sex, and Satire: The Case of Thomas Shadwell,"
and Jessica Munns, "'The Golden Days of Queen Elizabeth': Thomas Shadwell's
The Lancashire-Witches and the Politics of Nostalgia," in James E. Gill (ed.),
Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), pp. 43-58, and pp. 59-75.
34 Cited by Judith Milhous, Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's
Inn Fields 1695-1708 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979),
p. 175.
35 David Roberts, The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama 1660-
1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
36 Susannah Centlivre, A Bold Stroke for a Wife, ed. Nancy Copeland (Ontario:
Broadview Press, 1995).
102

37 Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers, in W. D. Taylor (ed.), Eighteenth-

Century Comedy (London: Oxford University Press, 1961).
3 8 See J. Douglas Canfield, "Shifting Tropes of Ideology in English Serious Drama,
Late Stuart to Early Georgian," in J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah Payne
(eds.), Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), pp. 195-227.
FURTHER READING
Brown, Laura, English Dramatic Form, i66o-iy6o (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1981).
Corman, Brian, Genre and Generic Change in English Comedy 1660-1710
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).
Howe, Elizabeth, The First English Actresses (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992).
Hume, R. D., The Rakish Stage: Studies in English Drama 1660-1800 (Carbondale
and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983).
Leacroft, Richard, The Development of the English Playhouse (London: Eyre
Methuen, 1973).
Loftis, John, The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford: Oxford
Milhous, Judith, and Hume, Robert D. (eds.), A Register of English Theatrical
Documents 1600-1737 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).
Owen, Susan J., Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Quinsey, Katherine M. (ed.), Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restora-
tion Drama (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996).
Randall, Dale B. J., Winter Fruit: Engish Drama 1642-1660 (Lexington: University
of Kentucky Press, 1995).
Rothstein, Eric, Restoration Tragedy: Form and the Process of Change (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1967).
Schofield, Mary Anne, and Macheski, Cecilia (eds.), Curtain Calls: British and
American Women and the Theatre, 1660-1820 (Athens: Ohio University Press,
1991).
Winton, Calhoun, John Gay and the London Theatre (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1993).
103

5
JAMES A. WINN
Theatrical culture 2: theatre and music
The political turmoil that drove English theatre underground between 1641
and 1660 had a similarly devastating effect on English music. Puritan
reformers disbanded cathedral choirs; Parliamentary soldiers smashed
priceless organs; foreign court musicians, fearful of reprisals against
Roman Catholics, returned to the Continent. But music was not utterly
silenced. Oliver Cromwell's court, mindful of the need for pomp, main-
tained a reduced version of the royal band; at the wedding of Frances
Cromwell on 11 November 1657, forty-eight violins accompanied "mixt
dancing (a thing heretofore accounted profane) till 5 of the clock."1 There
was even one occasion involving musical theatre: the Protector presented
Cupid and Death, a masque by James Shirley, as an entertainment for the
Portuguese ambassador in 1653.2 Matthew Locke, who may have written
the music for that performance and certainly wrote the music for a second
performance in Leicester Fields in 1659, lost his position as a boy chorister
at Exeter Cathedral in 1641, but managed to continue his musical develop-
ment during the Interregnum, traveling abroad and seizing what limited
opportunities were available in England; he became one of the most
important theatre composers of the Restoration period.
On the literary side, the central figure in the development of musical
drama was Sir William Davenant (1606-68), author of the last masque
presented at the court of Charles I (Salmacida Spolia, 1640), author and
presenter of the first opera in English (The Siege of Rhodes, 1656), and
after the Restoration, manager of the Duke's Company, which was
responsible for most of the innovations leading to the mixed form later
called semiopera. As Davenant knew from personal experience, the Stuart
court masques incorporated episodes of music and dance within a largely
spoken poetic text and employed impressive scenic effects. One early
masque may even have been a kind of opera: in the headnote to Lovers
Made Men (1617), Ben Jonson informs us that "the whole Maske was sung
(after the Italian manner) Stylo recitativo, by Master Nicholas Lanier; who
104

ordered and made both the Scene, and the Musicke." 3 The masques might
be regarded as forerunners of the popular semioperas of the later seven-
teenth century, which also mixed music with spoken dialogue and dazzled
their audiences with spectacular visions, but there are significant differ-
ences. The Stuart masques, performed on Twelfth Night at prodigious
expense, were seen only by invited guests of the court; their texts were brief
and abstract, presenting allegories splendidly realized by the visual illusions
of Inigo Jones. 4 Restoration semioperas, by contrast, had to attract paying
customers: their texts were fully plotted plays with interpolated musical
episodes; their "flyings" and transformations were more frankly enter-
taining than the scenic miracles of Jones.
Despite Davenant's experience as a masque-writer, the development of
Restoration musical theatre had less to do with the Stuart masque than
with attempts to imitate Italian opera. Many Royalists who traveled
abroad during the Interregnum were impressed by opera; John Evelyn's
description of an evening in Venice is typical:
This night ... we went to the opera, which are comedies &C other plays
represented in Recitative Music by the most excellent Musitians vocal and
Instrumental, together with variety of Seanes painted & contrived with no
lesse art of Perspective, and Machines, for flying in the aire, & other
wonderful motions. So taken together it is doubtlesse one of the most
magnificent and expensfull diversions the Wit of Men can invent: The historie
was Hercules in Lydia, the Seanes chang'd 13 times.5
Davenant also admired Continental operas. As early as 1639, he had

secured a patent from Charles I, licensing him to build a playhouse in
which to "exercise Musick, musical Presentments, Scenes, Dancing, or
other the like," 6 and though we cannot know whether his plans for
"musical Presentments" before the Civil War included operas with recita-
tives, he had embraced that plan by 1656, as he explains in his epistle "To
the Reader," printed in the first edition of The Siege of Rhodes: "The
Musick was compos'd, and both the Vocal and Instrumental is exercis'd, by
the most transcendent of England in that Art, and perhaps not unequal to
the best Masters abroad; but being Recitative, and therefore unpractis'd
here; though of great reputation amongst other Nations, the very attempt
of it is an obligation to our own." 7 The music, unfortunately all lost, was
composed by Matthew Locke, Henry Lawes, Henry Cooke, George
Hudson, and Edward Coleman; Locke and Cooke also sang in the produc-
tion. Davenant's insistence on the "reputation" recitative enjoyed abroad
reveals his interest in making that foreign form acceptable to potentially
resistive English audiences, but he was not the only producer of musical
105

JAMES A. WINN
dramas in the waning years of the Interregnum: Shirley and Locke must
have expected an audience for the revival of Cupid and Death in 1659, and
there is an extant record of An Eclogue; or, Representation in Four Parts,
to be Habited, Sung, and Acted . . . before the Lord Mayor ...by the City
Musick later in the same year.8
Most French and Italian operas of this period have supernatural or
mythological characters, but the singing characters in The Siege of Rhodes
are soldiers, admirals, and a noblewoman - the faithful Ianthe, sung by
Mrs. Coleman, who was presumably the first actress to appear on the
English public stage. This kind of plot, featuring noble characters in an
exotic setting, forced to choose between love and honor, became the norm
for the rhymed heroic plays of the early Restoration; John Dryden's essay
"Of Heroick Plays" (1672), printed with The Conquest of Granada, points
to The Siege of Rhodes as the original model for heroic drama, and
correctly identifies Davenant's sources: "For Heroick Plays . . . the first light
we had of them on the English Theatre was from the late Sir William
D'Avenant... The Original of this musick and of the Scenes which adorn'd
his work, he had from the Italian Opera's; but he heighten'd his Characters
. . . from the example of Corneille and some French poets." 9 More deba-
table, however, is Dryden's influential assertion that The Siege of Rhodes
was simply a play in disguise, an attempt to smuggle the banned drama
back into London during the last years of the Protectorate:
It being forbidden him in the Rebellious times to act Tragedies and Comedies,
because they contain'd some matter of Scandal to those good people, who
could more easily dispossess their lawful Sovereign than endure a wanton jest;
he was forc'd to turn his thoughts another way: and to introduce the examples
of moral vertue, writ in verse, and performed in Recitative Musique ... In this
condition did this part of Poetry remain at his Majesties return: When
growing bolder, as being now own'd by a publick Authority, he reviewed his
Siege of Rhodes, and caus'd it be acted as a just Drama. (Works, vol. xi, p. 9)
This version of Davenant's preferences and motives has been accepted by

most modern scholars, who have usually believed that he first wrote The
Siege of Rhodes as a play, and only had it set to music for political
reasons. 10 Yet there are reasons to treat this part of Dryden's testimony
with skepticism. Some parts of the text of The Siege of Rhodes appear to be
designed quite carefully for various kinds of music - recitative, aria,
chorus. 11 Davenant produced three more dramas in recitative before the
Restoration: The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658), Sir Francis
Drake (1659), and Part 11 of The Siege of Rhodes (1659), continuing the
story and adding a second female character. 12 Moreover, he continued to
106

stage musical dramas after the Restoration, doubtless aware that Charles
II, whom Dryden represents as the enabling patron of spoken drama, was a
lifelong opera fan. In 1661, having secured one of the two precious patents
for theatre companies available from the restored monarchy, Davenant
opened the new theatre at Lincoln's Inn Fields with a revised and expanded
version of The Siege of Rhodes, probably offering both parts on alternating
days. Contemporary testimony records the success of this show, but the
evidence about the music is incomplete and contradictory. Evelyn describes
a performance of Part 11 in 1662 as "in Recitativa Musique," and the
prologue to Dryden's The Wild Gallant (1663) appears to confirm that
description, but some of the actors taking part in the Duke's Company
production were not singers, and may have spoken their lines.13 Both parts
of the play remained in repertory for years, and performance practice
probably moved slowly toward the conventions of the form later called
semiopera, with episodes of song and dance alternating with scenes of
spoken dialogue. In a piece called The Playhouse to be Let, first performed
in the late summer of 1663, Davenant revived The Cruelty of the Spaniards
in Peru and Sir Francis Drake, but framed them ironically, thus economic-
ally recycling his own materials while indicating his awareness of the tastes
of the Restoration audience. The final act is a vulgar parody of a scene with
a singing ghost in Katherine Philips's Pompey, which had probably been
performed a few months earlier.14 Although Davenant was engaging in
parody and even self-parody with this strange production, his company
continued to offer musical dramas with a straight face: Robert Stapylton's
The Step-Mother, probably staged in the autumn of 1663, included "Instru-
mental, Vocal and Recitative Musick ... compos'd by Mr. Lock."
Although Charles II was not prepared to revive the masque tradition, he
was keenly interested in a plan to open a third theatre in Moorfields, which
was to be devoted to opera. A group of Italian singers actually came to
England hoping to start such a venture, but Charles lacked the funds to
underwrite their company, and through-sung opera, as Davenant was
discovering, had a limited commercial appeal.15 On a more modest
financial scale, Charles helped both his theatres stage musical shows: an
extant warrant of 1664 orders "the Master of the Great Wardrobe to
prouide and deliuer to Thomas Killigrew Esqr [patentee of the King's
Theatre] to the value of forty pounds in silke for to cloath the Musick for
the play called the Indian Queen"; later in the same year, the twenty-four
string players of "the King's Musick" were split into two bands of twelve to
play at the theatres.16 Dryden and Sir Robert Howard, who collaborated
on The Indian Queen, were helping Killigrew's company compete with
Davenant's in lavish costumes, frequent changes of scenery, exotic settings,
107

JAMES A. WINN
and effective music. Both The Indian Queen (1664) and Dry den's sequel,
The Indian Emperour (1665), couplet dramas closely modeled on The
Siege of Rhodes and The Cruelty of the Spaniards, have important musical
episodes: each play features a musical scene of prophecy and incantation
(using a set depicting a sorcerer's cave); The Indian Emperour also has a
scene of seduction, in which a lyric song performed by an Indian woman
lulls some Spanish soldiers into letting down their guard and being captured
by Indian warriors.17 As in most subsequent plays of the period, the major
characters do not sing. In both companies, the leading actors were not
singers, though several prominent actresses were able to sing; the standard
solution was to have songs performed by servants, spirits, angels, and other
peripheral figures.
Heroic plays with musical scenes enjoyed not only the patronage of the
court but its imitation. In January of 1668, the diarist Samuel Pepys heard
about a court performance staged by noble amateurs: "the ladies and the
Duke of Monmouth and others acted The Indian Emperour - wherein they
told me these things most remarkable: that not any woman but Duchesse of
Monmouth and Mrs. Cornwallis did anything like, but like fools and
sticks; but that these two did do most extraordinary well."18 A month later
both these ladies were in the cast of a similar court performance of
Katherine Philips's translation of Corneille's Horace, with added music.19
While these court theatricals were in progress, the current commercial hit
was a substantially altered version of The Tempest, the most overtly
musical of Shakespeare's plays, which opened in November of 1667.
Although nominally a comedy, The Tempest engages issues not unlike
those featured in the rhymed heroic play - revenge, succession, conjuring,
and courtship - but the drunken sailors so effectively parody the noble
characters that there is no danger of our taking anything too seriously; the
revised version, a collaborative effort by Davenant and Dryden, also under-
mines the purity of the Ferdinand-Miranda plot by adding new characters:
Miranda's sister Dorinda, who has also never seen a young man before, and
a young man named Hippolito, kept in a cage by Prospero, who has never
seen a woman. Dryden and Davenant retained most of Shakespeare's songs
and added a number of additional musical episodes, of which the most
memorable was an "Echo Song" composed by John Banister, sung by
Ferdinand and Ariel.20 The success of this play encouraged more musical
performances, despite Davenant's death in April of 1668. A revival of
Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess in October of 1668 seems to have been
chiefly memorable for the singing of a castrato,21 and Dryden's Tyrannick
Love, staged at great expense in June of 1669, has an extended operatic
episode calling for a fast duet sung by flying spirits, a slow recitative, a
108

strophic song, and a dance. 22 The Rehearsal (1671), the Duke of Buck-
ingham's devastating parody of the heroic plays, includes a comic version
of the duet, probably set to the same music.
Competition between the theatre companies was fierce: the Duke's
Company gained the upper hand late in 1671, when they opened their
splendid new house at Dorset Garden, equipped with all the latest
machinery; their victory became complete when the rival theatre at Bridges
Street burned to the ground on 25 January 1672, destroying all the scenes
and machines owned by the King's Company. Although the King's men
eventually completed a new theatre of their own at Drury Lane, it was, in
Dryden's words, a "Plain Built House," not comparable to Dorset Garden
when it came to operatic shows. Multimedia spectaculars at Dorset Garden
included an operatic revival of Davenant's version of Macbeth (February
1673), a n elaborate production of Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco
(July 1673), 23 a n d a refurbished, operatic version of The Tempest (March
[?] 1674), with further adjustments to the text, probably by Thomas
Shadwell. 24 All three had music by Matthew Locke, who was under
contract to the Duke's Company; Pelham Humfrey and Pietro Reggio also
contributed music to the operatic Tempest. The detailed stage directions for
the opening of that show may suggest its musical and visual complexity:
The Front of the Stage is open'd, and the Band of 24 Violins, with the
Harpsicals and Theorbo's which accompany the Voices, are plac'd between
the Pit and the Stage. While the Overture is playing, the Curtain rises, and
discovers a new Frontispiece, joyn'd to the great Pylasters, on each side of the
Stage. This Frontispiece is a noble Arch, supported by large wreathed
Columns of the Corinthian Order ... Behind this is the Scene, which
represents a thick Cloudy Sky, a very Rocky Coast, and a Tempestuous Sea in
perpetual Agitation. This Tempest (suppos'd to be rais'd by Magick) has
many dreadful Objects in it, as several Spirits in horrid shapes flying in the
Air. And when the Ship is sinking, the whole House is darken'd, and a shower
of Fire falls upon 'em. This is accompanied with Lightning, and several Claps
of Thunder, to the end of the Storm.25
Locke's "Overture," played by a group twice the size of the usual theatre
orchestra, is an effective piece of program music, with unusual chromatic
harmonies and rapid scales (marked "violent" in the score) vividly repre-
senting the storm.
Still under contract to the King's Company, which had inferior compo-
sers and limited scenic resources, Dryden responded by writing a rhyming
semiopera based on Paradise Lost, The State of Innocence and the Fall of
Man, but his colleagues chose not to present it; a French opera, Ariane, ou
le manage de Bacchus (1674), was performed instead. For the London
109

JAMES A. WINN
performances, the French musicians devised a new prologue in which three

nymphs in a seashell sing the parts of the rivers Thames, Seine, and Tiber.26
Masking intractable problems in vague halos of music and fond affection,
the nymphs declare England the isle of love, praise Charles for bringing
peace to his nation, and compliment the recent marriage of the Duke of
York. Evidently impressed by the capacity of opera for political allegory,
some members of the court, possibly led by York's new bride, Mary of
Modena, began planning a musical show of their own. In February of
1675, after many public rehearsals, John Crowne's Calisto was acted at
court by Princess Mary, Princess Anne, and their ladies-in-waiting.27 This
mythological masque (frequently referred to as "the opera" in surviving
documents) includes five musical scenes performed by professional singers,
the first of which is a fully sung, transparently political prologue with
Peace, Plenty, and the four continents among its characters. Like the
prologue to Ariane, it features the river Thames and compliments members
of the court; Crowne also takes note of the political resistance long centered
in the City of London, here called "Augusta."
Many of the same musicians, domestic and imported, also appeared in
Psyche, a Dorset Garden production with French dancers, music by Locke,
and a rhyming text by Shadwell, which opened a few days later.28 Although
the plot is another piece of mythological fluff, Shadwell and Locke did
produce a more unified work than any earlier musical drama; Curtis Price
has argued that "the synthesis of music and drama in Psyche is remarkably
good, certainly unmatched in any later semi-opera, even King Arthur."29
Significantly, this increased operatic activity during the early 1670s coin-
cided with the waning popularity of the rhymed heroic play. If playgoers
were willing to laugh with Buckingham at the absurdities of the rhymed
heroic play, including its use of music, they continued to relish some
aspects of those productions, including epic plots, magic, elaborate scenery,
formal language (including rhyme), and music. Following the model
provided by The Tempest, the semioperas of the early 1670s satisfied those
needs without asking audiences to take their plots seriously; the frequent
recourse to mythological plots is a symptom of that escapist impulse. But
mounting such elaborate productions proved costly: the prologue to
Aureng-Zebe (November 1675), Dryden's last rhymed play, and his only
one without a musical episode, closes by comparing the theatre companies
to "Monarchs, ruin'd with expensive War" (line 38). The King's Company,
whose financial and managerial troubles soon led Dryden to break his
contract, produced no more plays with elaborate music. The Duke's
Company produced only one more full-scale semiopera, Charles Dave-
nant's Circe (1677); three other productions - Dryden and Nathaniel Lee's
no

Oedipus (1678), Lee's Theodosius (1680), and Shadwell's The Lancashire

Witches (1681) - had operatic elements.
When the King's Company finally collapsed in 1682, its assets and actors
were absorbed into the so-called United Company. The resulting monopoly
reduced the incentive to produce expensive semioperas, and there was
clearly now pressure from the court to move toward through-sung opera.
Two short, private "masques" on classical subjects - Venus and Adonis
(music by John Blow, libretto anonymous) and Dido and Aeneas (music by
Henry Purcell, libretto by Nahum Tate) - were staged at court during the
1680s, though exact dates are uncertain.30 Also unclear is whether these
works were intended or interpreted as political allegories.31 Both were
through-sung, catering to the king's taste for opera with recitative; neither
had elaborate scenes or machines. Happily, the music for both works
survives, and may remind us of how effectively the best English composers
of the period could write for voices; the closing choruses of both works are
especially impressive.32
In 1683, Charles dispatched the actor-manager Thomas Betterton to
France to "fetch ye designe"33 for a full-scale opera in the French style;
Betterton brought back Louis Grabu, a Spaniard with a French name and
compositional style who had written music for Ariane and Oedipus^ but
had returned to France during the anti-Catholic hysteria connected with
the Popish Plot. Dryden, who was recruited to provide a libretto, planned
to produce a mixed entertainment, with a semiopera based on the story of
King Arthur serving as the main plot. He also wrote a fully sung prologue
on the model of those for Ariane and Calisto, a transparent political
allegory presenting the troubled relations between city and court as the
unstable marriage of Augusta (London) and Albion (Charles). The king,
whose taste in music ran strongly to French conventions, approved of a
rehearsal of the prologue, whereupon the collaborators decided to
abandon the Arthurian semiopera and expand the prologue into a work in
its own right. Postponed by Charles's sudden death in February of 1685,
Albion and Albanius finally opened on 3 June 1685; ten days and six
performances later, news reached London that the Duke of Monmouth
had landed in the West with an army. The resulting turmoil spoiled the
run of the only publicly staged through-sung English opera of the period,
but even without that misfortune, Albion and Albanius was not a
promising model. A completely obvious allegory of political events from
1660 until 1683, with the title characters representing Charles and
James, it departed radically from the conventions of earlier English
operas. Grabu's ignorance of English meter and accent led to distortions
of Dryden's carefully varied poetic text, and the music is generally
i n

JAMES A. WINN
undistinguished. The production lost over £2,000 for the United

Company.34
Remarkably enough, the company nonetheless returned to semiopera
just five years later: Dioclesian, or The Prophetess (1690), adapted by
Betterton from an old play by Massinger and Fletcher, is a semiopera in the
tradition of The Tempest, with wonderful music by Purcell. The success of
The Prophetess probably led Dryden to revise his abandoned King Arthur,
which Purcell set for performance in 1691. As audiences in Paris and
London discovered from the full-scale revival presented in 1995, King
Arthur is a rich and complex work, by far the best of the English
semioperas. Not only is it a collaboration between the leading poet and the
leading composer of the period, both operating at the height of their
powers, but it picks up and extends many of the motifs we have noticed in
our survey of musical dramas: heroic rant, conjuring and magical illusions,
singing spirits, music as sexual temptation, political allegory,35 and inter-
polated masques showing alternate worlds of ice and ocean. The next year
saw an equally lavish production of The Fairy-Queen, again with music by
Purcell; the "author," who constructed a libretto from A Midsummer
Night's Dream, remains anonymous.36 These performances initiated a
decade in which no less than fourteen semioperas were performed,
including a revival of The Indian Queen with new music by Purcell and a
restaging of Nathaniel Lee's The Rival Queens as a semiopera entitled
Alexander, Neither the death of Purcell in 1695 nor the secession of
Betterton and some other leading actors from the United Company in the
same year interrupted this string of dialogue operas; not only were new
semioperas staged in almost every year from 1690 until 1701, but those
from previous years, especially King Arthur, stayed in repertory, with
frequent revivals.37
During the first decade of the eighteenth century, there were several
attempts to stage Italian operas - some sung in Italian, some translated into
English (in whole or in part), some in the form called pasticcio, in which
favorite arias were strung together without much pretense of connected
plot. The most successful of these was Camilla (1706), with music by
Giovanni Bononcini and a text sung entirely in English.38 During this
period of experimentation and ferment, English semiopera held its own. As
late as 1706, Betterton produced George Granville's The British Enchan-
ters, a semiopera written and set aside during the 1680s, to considerable
applause. The venue was the new theatre at the Haymarket, designed by
John Vanbrugh and designated by the Lord Chamberlain in 1707 as the
only theatre allowed to produce operas. As Robert D. Hume points out,
"We can only wonder what demon of perversity had seized Vanbrugh that
112

he should imagine a separate opera company to be financially viable."39

Although there was clearly some interest in opera, imported singers
demanded huge salaries, which led in turn to high ticket prices, frequent
changes of management, bankruptcies, and vain appeals for payment by
the performers.
Even George Frederick Handel, whose Rinaldo was a considerable
success in 1711, staged only three more operas between that first produc-
tion and the founding of the Royal Academy of Music in 1720. Moreover,
despite the simplifications of common operatic histories, Rinaldo did not
constitute a sharp break with the English theatrical past. As Curtis Price
has shown, Aaron Hill, who wrote the scenario for Rinaldo, constructed it
as a logical next step in the development of English musical theatre; there
are many resemblances between episodes in Rinaldo and King Arthur.40
Although Rinaldo was far more coherent musically than the various kinds
of "opera" that preceded it, London audiences experienced Handel's work
as an improvement over earlier operas, not as something wholly different in
kind. To be sure, there were differences between Rinaldo and the English
semioperas, not least the conventions of the da capo aria, which require a
character to repeat the music and text of the "A" section after singing the
contrasting "B" section, thus more or less paralyzing the action. The
responses of English audiences to those conventions - acceptance in the
theatre, humorous criticism in the press - resemble the earlier debates
about the conventions of rhymed heroic drama.
We owe many of Handel's operas - including such masterworks as
Giulio Cesare and Tamerlano - to the patronage of the Royal Academy,
which opened in 1720 with a substantial capital base raised from the
nobility and high hopes. As Hume laconically notes, "it bankrupted itself in
fewer than nine seasons - capital, royal subsidy, high attendance, and
astronomical prices notwithstanding."41 When the artistic reaction came,
in a powerfully original work by John Gay, who had served as Aaron Hill's
secretary when Hill was working with Handel, it involved a return to a
mixture of spoken dialogue and singing. The melodies in The Beggar's
Opera (1728), which includes no less than sixty-nine musical numbers, are
largely drawn from the familiar repertoire of British ballads, though Gay
also borrows tunes from Purcell and Handel. Much of the irony that
delighted the original audiences came from the disjunctions between the
well-known words to these ballads and the new words written by Gay:
Polly's sad, cynical Air vi ("Virgins are like the fair flower in its lustre"), for
example, uses a tune originally associated with a male singer's boasting of
his heroic feats as a lover. Framed by witty spoken dialogue and neatly
incorporated into an effective plot, the songs appear without elaborate
113

JAMES A. WINN
instrumental introductions and without the conventional repetitions of the

da capo aria.42 Gay's brilliant satire has many targets, including the
excesses of Italian opera, but it is misleading to suppose that his main
purpose was to poke fun at Handel, with whom he remained on cordial
terms.43 Nor should we give The Beggar's Opera blame (or credit) for the
failure of the Royal Academy, which was doomed by its own financial
structure. Gay was more interested in lampooning the corruptions of the
Walpole administration and gaining his own audience than in damaging the
Italian opera; the success of The Beggar's Opera, which ran for an
unprecedented sixty-two performances in its first season, is largely the
result of his genius, but may also indicate the stubborn survival of the
British preference for forms of musical theatre combining the spoken and
sung word. There were numerous imitations, and songs based on ballad
tunes were incorporated into many theatrical productions during the rest of
the eighteenth century.
The revival of Handel operas in major houses and recordings during the
last thirty years has allowed audiences to experience the stunning power of
his operatic music; recent productions more faithful to the performance
practice of the eighteenth century have revealed the dramatic and even
psychological subtlety of his work. But the fact that the libretti are in
Italian means that these works are and were inevitably separate from the
main line of English theatre and musical theatre. Although Handel wrote
nearly twenty more Italian operas after the failure of the Royal Academy,
he devoted a large part of his compositional energy during his later career
to composing oratorios with English texts, including such familiar works as
Messiah, Israel in Egypt, and Solomon. Although invariably performed in
concert (and therefore not properly dramatic), these works apply the
musical conventions of opera seria to biblical stories; they have remained in
the choral repertoire since their premieres. If Handel, who set English texts
in the oratorios with considerable skill, had composed English operas, the
later history of British musical theatre would doubtless have been very
different.
NOTES
1 See Roy Sherwood, The Court of Oliver Cromwell (London: Croom Helm,
1977), pp. 84, 135-38, and the letter from William Dugdale to John Langley,
printed by Percy Scholes in The Puritans and Music in England and New
England (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 144.
2 For a complete text, see Cupid and Death in Dramatic Works and Poems ...,
ed. William Gifford and Alexander Dyce, 6 vols. (London, 1833; reprinted New
York: Russell and Russell, 1966), vol. vi, pp. 343-67. For a score, see Cupid
114

and Death, ed. Edward J. Dent, Musica Britannica, vol. 11 (London: Stainer and
Bell, 1951). There is no recording. See also Murray Lefkowitz, "Matthew
Locke," in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music (London:
Macmillan, 1980).
3 See Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11
vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), vol. vn, p. 454. The music is lost.
4 The best account remains Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The
Theatre of the Stuart Court (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1973).
5 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. De Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1955), vol. 11, pp. 449-5O ( M e 1645).
6 Thomas Rymer, Foedera, conventiones, literae, et cujuscunque generis acta
publica ..., 20 vols. (London: A. & J. Churchill, 1705-35), vol. xx, pp. 377-78.
7 The Siege of Rhodes, ed. Ann-Mari Hedback (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis
Upsaliensis. Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia, 1973), vol. xiv, p. 4.
8 The London Stage, Part 1, 1660-1700, ed. William Van Lennep, with a critical
introduction by Emmett L. Avery and Arthur H. Scouten (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1965), p. 9.
9 The Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr.
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956- ), vol. xi, p. 9.
10 Edward J. Dent argues that "D'Avenant originally wrote the work as a drama in
rhymed heroic couplets, and that it was only when he found it impossible to
produce it as a play, that he decided to turn it into an opera by cutting it down,
altering the lengths of the lines here and there, inserting songs and choruses, and
finally getting the whole set to music." See his Foundations of English Opera
(1928; reprinted New York: Da Capo Press, 1965), p. 66. Dent supports his
argument by conjecturally rewriting some of the short lines as pentameters.
11 For a detailed argument, which I compress here, see my essay, "Heroic Song: A
Proposal for a Revised History of English Theatre and Opera, 1656-1711,"
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30 (1997), pp. 113-37.
12 All the vocal music for these works is lost. In Music in the Restoration Theatre
(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979), p. 158, Curtis Price identifies a
surviving piece of instrumental music as the "sarabande with castanets"
specified to be danced in The Cruelty of the Spaniards.
13 See The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 111, p. 309 (9 January 1662); John Downes,
Roscius Anglicanus (1708), ed. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (London:
Society for Theatre Research, 1987), p. 51; and Mary Edmond, Rare Sir
William Davenant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 160.
Samuel Pepys, who greatly admired The Siege of Rhodes, composed an alternate
setting for one of the songs, "Beauty Retire," which may be heard in a recording
by Richard Wistreich and Robert Jeffrey, The Musical Life of Samuel Pepys
(SaydiscCD-SCL385).
14 This translation of Corneille's Pompee, produced in Dublin in February 1663,
was probably performed in London a few months later; see The London Stage,
Part 1, pp. 64, 6j. On the music, much of which is extant, see Price, Music in
the Restoration Theatre, pp. 62-64.
15 For details about this troupe, see Margaret Mabbett, "Italian Musicians in
Restoration England (1660-90)," Music and Letters, 6j (1986), pp. 237-47.

JAMES A. WINN
16 Public Record Office, Lord Chamberlain's Papers, 5/138, f. 15, printed in The
London Stage, Part 1, p. 74. "The Musick" was the term for the instrumentalists
who played between the acts and accompanied the songs. See also Andrew
Ashbee, Records of English Court Music, vol. 1 (1660-1685) (Snodland, Kent:
Andrew Ashbee, 1986), pp. 59-61, and Peter Holman, Four and Twenty
Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court, 1540-1690 (Oxford: Oxford
17 There is an extant setting by Pelham Humfrey, more likely to have been used in
a revival than in the original production. The music was first printed in
Playford's Choice Ayres, Songs, & Dialogues, The Second Edition (1675). All
five books of this important series are now available as Choice Ayres, Songs,
and Dialogues, ed. Ian Spink, 2 vols. (London: Stainer and Bell, 1989), each of
the five original volumes separately paginated. For a good facsimile of Hum-
frey's song, see vol. 1, pp. 66-67.
18 The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, ed. Robert
Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (London: Bell, 1970-83), vol. ix, pp.
23-24 (14 January 1668). The entry also notes the presence in the audience of
"the players of the Duke's house," including the singer and dancer Moll Davis,
who had recently become the king's mistress, and who had important parts in
The Tempest, Calisto, and Venus and Adonis.
19 See The London Stage, Part 1, pp. 128-29; Evelyn, Diary, vol. m, p. 505:
"twixt each act a Masque 8>c Antique: daunced."
20 Pepys calls this "a curious piece of Musique in an Echo of half-sentences, the
Echo repeating the former half while the man goes on to the latter, which is
mighty pretty" (Diary, vol. VIII, p. 522 [7 November 1667]).
21 Pepys, Diary, vol. ix, p. 329 (14 October 1668).
22 There is an early setting of the duet in BL Add. MS 19759, fols. 29v~3or,
reproduced in facsimile in The Songs of John Dryden, ed. Cyrus L. Day
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), pp. 19-20. This has some-
times been thought to be the original, but Curtis Price has argued shrewdly that
the minor changes in the text make it more likely that this anonymous music
was used for a revival. See Henry Pur cell and the London Stage (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 46-53. No contemporary music survives
for the other songs in this play.
23 This play also had a court performance by amateurs, this time previous to its
commercial staging; see James A. Winn, John Dryden and his World (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 245.
24 On the "authorship" of this adaptation, see George R. Guffey (ed.), After The
Tempest (Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1969), especially p. xxi, n. 20.
25 For an edited score, see Matthew Locke, Dramatic Music, with the Music by
Humfrey, Banister, Reggio and Hart for "The Tempest,3' transcribed and edited
by Michael Tilmouth, Musica Britannica, vol. LI (London: Stainer and Bell,
1986). There is now a recording of all the extant music by Christopher
Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music (L'Oiseau Lyre, DSLO 507). The
incidental music has also been recorded by Peter Holman and the Parley of
Instruments, on their disc entitled Four and Twenty Fiddlers: Music for the
Restoration Court Violin Band (Hyperion, CDA66667).
26 For a comparison of the two versions of the opera, see Pierre Danchin, "The
116

Foundation of the Royal Academy of Music in 1674 and Pierre Perrin's Ariane,"
Theatre Studies, 25 (1984), pp. 55-67, especially pp. 58-60. For a much fuller
account of the sources, see C. Basford, "Perrin and Cambert's 'Ariane, ou le
mariage de Bacchus' Re-examined," Music and Letters, 72 (1991), pp. 1-26,
especially pp. 3-14.
27 For a detailed account, with many new facts and interpretations, including a
revised date for the first performance, see Andrew R. Walkling, "Masque and
Politics at the Restoration Court: John Crowne's Calisto," Early Music, 24
(1996), pp. 27-62. The music, by Nicholas Staggins, survives in fragmentary
form. There are seven melodies for the songs; Walkling prints one of these with
a conjectural bass-line, p. 31. Peter Holman has found what may be some of the
dance music; see Four and Twenty Fiddlers, pp. 366-73.
28 For a modern edition of the score, see Musica Britannica, vol. LI. There was a
concert performance of Locke's music for Psyche by the Early English Opera
Society in 1990, but no recording is yet available.
29 Henry Purcell and the London Stage, p. 297.
30 Venus and Adonis is usually dated 1681 or 1682. It received a second
production in 1684 at Josias Priest's boarding school for girls in Chelsea; see
Richard Luckett, "A New Source for 'Venus and Adonis,'" Musical Times, 130
(1989), pp. 76-79. We have long known that Dido and Aeneas was produced
by the same school in 1689; recent scholarship suggests that it was produced
earlier at court, though there is considerable disagreement as to the possible
date. See Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock, "'Unscarr'd by turning times'? The
Dating of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas," Early Music, 20 (1992), pp. 372-90;
Mark Goldie, "The Earliest Notice of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas," Early Music,
20 (1992), pp. 392-400; Curtis Price, "Dido and Aeneas-. Questions of Style and
Evidence," Early Music, 22 (1994), pp. 115-25; Andrew R. Walkling, "'The
Dating of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas'}: A Reply to Bruce Wood and Andrew
Pinnock," Early Music, 22 (1994), pp. 469-81; and subsequent replies.
31 For a specific argument in favor of such interpretation, see Andrew R. Walkling,
"Political Allegory in Purcell's "'Dido and Aeneas,'" Music and Letters, j6
(1995), pp. 540-71. For more general speculations on politics and opera in the
entire period, see Curtis Price, "Political Allegory in Late Seventeenth-century
English Opera," in Nigel Fortune (ed.), Music and Theatre: Essays in Honour of
Winton Dean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 1-30; James
A. Winn, "When Beauty Fires the Blood": Love and the Arts in the Age of
Dryden (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), especially chapters 3 -
5; and Robert D. Hume, "The Politics of Opera in Late Seventeenth-Century
London," forthcoming in Derek Hirst and Richard Strier (eds.), Destinies and
Choices: Politics and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (Durham:
Duke University Press).
32 Among the many recordings of Dido and Aeneas, three especially fine perfor-
mances are those conducted by Andrew Parrott (Chandos ABRD 1034),
Christopher Hogwood (L'Oiseau-Lyre 436 992-2) and William Christie (Erato
4509-98477-2). There is an excellent recording of Venus and Adonis conducted
by Charles Medlam (Harmonia Mundi HMC 901276).
33 The quoted phrase is from correspondence that passed between Richard
Grahame, Viscount Preston, Ambassador to France, and Robert Spencer, Earl of

JAMES A. WINN
Sutherland. See Reports of the Commission on Historical Manuscripts, vn, i,

288, 290.
34 Judith Milhous, "United Company Finances, 1682-1692," Theatre Research
International^ 7 (1981-82), pp. 37-53. The score, printed in folio at the time of
the performance, is extant. There is no recording, though there was a concert
performance of Act 11 by the Early English Opera Society in 1990. One short
instrumental piece appears on Four and Twenty Fiddlers (cited above, n. 25).
3 5 The problem of political allegory in King Arthur takes on additional complexity
because of the lost original version of 1683 and Dry den's claims to have revised
it. I have argued that the revised play "walks a political tightrope, offering
Williamites a vaguely patriotic vision of British glory while giving clever
Jacobites frequent opportunities to detect Dry den's cynicism and irony." See
"'When Beauty Fires the Blood" pp. 273-302.
3 6 Some of the music from Dioclesian may be heard on a recording conducted by
Alfred Deller (Bach Guild BG 682); all of the music from The Fairy-Queen
appears on a three-record set conducted by John Eliot Gardner (Archiv Produk-
tion 2566 103, 104, 105); there are now numerous recordings of King Arthur,
including one conducted by Alfred Deller (Harmonia Mundi HMC 252-HMC
253), and one conducted by Trevor Pinnock (Archiv Produktion 435 490-2,
491-2,493-2).
37 I summarize here material much more fully described in Robert D. Hume,
"Opera in London, 1695-1706," in Shirley Strum Kenny (ed.), British Theatre
and the Other Arts, 1660-1800 (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library,
1984), pp. 67-91.
38 See Curtis Price, "The Critical Decade for English Music Drama, 1700-1710,"
Harvard Library Bulletin, 26 (1978), pp. 38-76. For details about the shifting
financial arrangements during this period, see Robert D. Hume, "The Sponsor-
ship of Opera in London, 1704-1720," Modern Philology, 85 (1988), pp. 420-
32.
39 "Sponsorship of Opera," p. 424.
40 "English Traditions in Handel's Rinaldo," in Stanley Sadie and Anthony Hicks
(eds.), Handel Tercentenary Collection (London: Royal Musical Association,
1987), pp. 120-35. See also some further development of this argument in my
essay, "Heroic Song."
41 "Sponsorship of Opera," p. 431.
42 The only source for the music is the third edition (1729), which prints the full
score of the overture (by Pepusch) and gives the airs as melodies with unfigured
bass lines. Most scholars have assumed that the orchestra on hand for the
overture (strings and two oboes) accompanied the singing. Of modern record-
ings, the least offensive is conducted by Denis Stevens (Musical Heritage
Society, MHS 4011/12).
43 See William A. Mclntosh, "Handel, Walpole, and Gay: The Aims of The
Beggar's Opera," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 7 (1974), pp. 415-33.
FURTHER READING
Alssid, Michael W, "The Impossible Form of Art: Dryden, Purcell, and King
Arthur," Studies in the Literary Imagination, 10 (1977), pp. 125-44.
118

Theatrical culture z: theatre and music
Charlton, David, "'King Arthur': Dramatick Opera," Music and Letters, 64 (1983),
pp. 183-92.
Dean, Winton, and Knapp, John Merrill, Handel's Operas, 1704-1726 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987; rev. edn., 1995).
Hammond, Paul, "Dryden's Albion and Albanius: The Apotheosis of Charles II," in
David Lindley (ed.), The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1984), pp. 169-83.
Haun, Eugene, But Hark! More Harmony: The Libretti of Restoration Opera in
English (Ypsilanti: Eastern Michigan University Press, 1971).
Highflll, Philip H., Jr., Burnim, Kalman A., and Langhans, Edward A., A Bio-
graphical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and
Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1973-90).
Luckett, Richard, "Music," in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and
William Matthews, 11 vols. (London: Bell, 1970-83), vol. x, pp. 258-82.
Milhous, Judith, "The Multimedia Spectacular on the Restoration Stage," in Shirley
Strum Kenny (ed.), British Theatre and Other Arts, 1660-1800 (Washington,
DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1983), pp. 41-66.
Milhous, Judith, and Hume, Robert D. (eds.), Vice Chamberlain Coke's Theatrical
Papers, 1706-1-715 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982).
Parsons, Philip, "Restoration Tragedy as Total Theatre," in Harold Love (ed.),
Restoration Literature, Critical Approaches (London: Methuen, 1972), pp. 27-
68.
Pinnock, Andrew, "Play into Opera: Purcell's The Indian Queen" Early Music, 18
(1990), pp. 3-21.
Powell, Jocelyn, Restoration Theatre Production (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1984).
Roberts, David, The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama 1660-1700
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
White, Eric Walter, A History of English Opera (London: Faber, 1983).
119

6
JOSHUA SCODEL
Lyric forms
The personal lyric, conceived as the expression of a highly individualized

voice and subjective feeling, was not a major form between the early
seventeenth-century flowering of the "metaphysical" lyric and the lyric
resurgence of the late eighteenth century and Romanticism. From 1650 to
1740, England witnessed great social and political change, from the
successive upheavals and reactions of the Interregnum, Restoration, and
Glorious Revolution to the stabilizing consolidation of Whig constitution-
alism, oligarchy, and bureaucracy. Profound economic and cultural trans-
formations also occurred: a financial revolution, a growing commercial
empire, and the increasing hegemony of a middle-class culture commercial
in background and "polite" in aspiration. Traditional martial values (still
crucial for England's foreign relations but tarnished by associations with
civil war) clashed with aristocratic libertinism and middle-class ideals of
civility. Men and women renegotiated their relations within the context of
an increasingly prosperous, pacific, "feminized" domestic culture. Aggres-
sively modern scientific and philosophical trends challenged the classics'
still potent authority. After the Puritans' failure to transform the nation and
its church, the English church's internal struggle between liberal and
conservative factions and its external confrontation with diverse hetero-
doxies and secular currents kept religious life in ferment. Major talents
cultivated discursive and didactic forms such as satire, epistle, and georgic
in which public poetic voices participated directly in debates over politics,
religion, and manners. Epigram, which could wittily attack social devia-
tions or deftly install domestic life in its small place within a larger scheme,
rivaled lyric as the dominant short form. While poets wrote notable poems
considered lyric both then and now, their particular interest often lies in
their relative "impurity," their incorporation of the public attitudes and
themes characteristic of the period.
Andrew Marvell's "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from
Ireland" (1650) is unique in its complex response to epochal change but

Lyric forms
typical in exploiting a classic lyric genre to make a rhetorically weighty

intervention in public events.1 Awed at Oliver Cromwell's destruction of
"the great work of time" (the English monarchy) (line 34), the poet speaks
with a communal "we" that presumes, but actually seeks to forge, a post-
monarchical consensus. Cromwell figures both as a Providentialist saint
who heeded his calling as "heaven's angry flame" (line 26) and "urged"
(line 12) his divine destiny, and as a Machiavellian "Fortune's Son" (line
113) whose military valor accrued power to be maintained with untiring
force. Horace's political odes, written by a former supporter of the Roman
republic, praise Augustus for bringing internal peace and external power.
While English Royalists had written Horatian odes celebrating monarchy,
Marvell adopts Horace's acknowledgment of new realities. In MarvelPs
principal model, the ode honoring Augustus's victory over Antony and
Cleopatra at Actium, Horace declares that Romans must celebrate "now,"
while before this would have been criminal. Marvell begins his poem
declaring, not without regret, " Tis time" (line 5) to abandon books and
"languishing" (line 4) verse for armor - that is, to quit the life and poetry of
retirement (which Marvell embraces in other lyrics) to defend the new
order. Cromwell's victim, Charles I, appears dignified in dethronement, but
his refusal to protest execution - he "bowed his comely head, / Down as
upon a bed" (lines 63-64) - authorizes the new regime. Classical imitation
underscores the point through differences: Charles recalls Horace's Cleo-
patra, who commits suicide to elude participating in a Roman triumphal
ceremony (Ode 1.37.30-32), while Charles dies a "royal actor" in a
"memorable scene" (lines 53, 58) scripted by Cromwell.
While Marvell's Horatian ode has no generic heirs, the "Pindaric" ode,
fashioned by Abraham Cowley in the late 1650s, became the period's most
popular lyric innovation and was widely considered the highest, quintessen-
tial lyric form. Transforming a classical genre, Cowley, an uneven but
fascinating poet, created an instrument for treating themes particularly
suited to so intensely political a period - the diverse sources of power. The
odes of the archaic Greek poet Pindar, composed for public performance,
celebrate the athletic victories of a ruler or aristocrat and his community as
heroic achievements. Written for various occasions (marriages, funerals,
military victories, book publications), English Pindaric panegyrics honor
the accomplishments of monarchs, aristocrats, generals, scientists, and
poets, often presented as both powerful individuals and icons of national
strength. For ancient and English critics alike, Pindar's brilliant but obscure
images, mythological digressions, and puzzling transitions encode a force-
ful "sublimity" that befits his great subjects by transcending decorous rules.
Displaying less imagistic daring and clearer argumentative structures,
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Cowley and his heirs pursue sublimity through stock images of power,
some from Pindar himself, such as volcanoes or predatory animals. Despite
Pindar's strict metrics, in a famous ode loosely translated by Cowley (Ode
4.2), Horace associates Pindar's poetic power, figured as an uncontrollable
flood, with prosodic freedom. English poets follow Cowley and compose
Pindaric odes that freely vary the number of stanzas, number and length of
lines within stanzas, and rhyme patterns. Critics both then and now have
complained that such formal freedom made the Pindaric easy to carry out
but difficult to carry off, and numerous poets cranked out lengthy Pindarics
that flatly flattered the powers-that-be. The best Pindaric panegyrics,
however, particularly those by Cowley himself and John Dryden, convey
genuine enthusiasm for or fascinated ambivalence toward power.
Cowley's Pindaric Odes, published in 1656 after Cowley's arrest by the
Interregnum regime as a Royalist spy, includes political poems that imply
the poet's hedged acceptance of the Royalists' defeat. Pindar mingled praise
of his various patrons' victories with reminders of fortune's vagaries and
the dangers of excessive pride; he also used myth for oblique warnings.
Cowley's "Brutus" adapts Pindar's ambivalence about greatness and stra-
tegic obliquity to respond to current history.2 Brutus's killing of Julius
Caesar is defended, first, as "Th'Heroick Exaltations of Good" (stanza 2,
line 5) misunderstood as "Vice" (stanza 2, line 7) but then Christ's passive
suffering is represented as superseding Brutus's heroic tyrannicide. Pro-
viding an historical example with an ambiguous contemporary application,
Cowley (like Marvell) acquiesces but prudently obscures whom he respects
more, the Puritan victors or the defeated Royalists. If Caesar represents
Charles I and Brutus represents Cromwell, Cowley praises Cromwell's
heroic virtue while implying that the Puritan revolution was too extreme
for Christians, who should passively suffer like Christ. If Caesar represents
Cromwell (excoriated by Royalists as a tyrant), then Brutus represents
Royalists who, in Cowley's view, nobly but vainly wished to continue
battling the Interregnum regime instead of humbly accepting Providence.
Cowley's 1660 ode upon Charles IPs Restoration is farther from Pindar
and correspondingly more typical of many later English political Pindarics
in its unambiguous praise of ruling powers.3 With repeated images of
destructive and beneficent greatness contrasting Cromwell's and Charles
IPs power, Cowley glorifies the latter as a Christie figure, whose trials recall
the Savior's "suffering Humanity" (stanza 12, line 18) and justify a
victorious return as the "Image" of Christ's "Power Divine" (stanza 12, line
20). Participating in the widespread identification of the Restoration with
England's recovery of "Liberty" (stanza 4, line 2), pleasure, and bounty,
Cowley's nineteen-stanza poem, the longest of his Pindarics, associates

Lyric forms
both its metrical freedom and formal expansiveness with "Poetick rage"
(stanza 16, line 21), a transport of inspiration that befits a nation
"flow[ing]" with celebratory wine and a "wild fit" (stanza 16, line 26) of
joy-
Pindar often compares athletic to military prowess; in two Pindaric
translations that open his 1656 volume, Cowley obliquely laments English
civil war by elaborating Pindaric glorifications of peaceful competition. In a
much imitated Pindaric ode lauding eminences in arts and letters composed
during both the Interregnum and Restoration, Cowley glorifies English
intellectual prowess with traditional heroic and martial imagery even while
decrying "barb'rous Wars unlearned Rage" ("Upon Dr. Harvey," stanza 5,
line 3). The physician Charles Scarburgh has won a "Crown" for medical
"Conquests" ("To Dr. Scarborough," stanza 5, lines 1, 13), Thomas
Hobbes's reason resembles Aeneas's shield ("To Mr. Hobs," stanza 5), the
Royal Society contains "great Champions" in the "glorious Fight" for
knowledge ("To the Royal Society," stanza 6, line 1, stanza 7, line 1).
Cowley partially aggrandizes his subjects at the expense of his own poetic
mode, praising in Pindaric high style Hobbes and the Royal Society's anti-
rhetorical subordination of verbal expression to plain truth. Yet just as
Pindar often analogizes the athletic victories he celebrates to his own poetic
superiority, so Cowley's odes on modern English achievements highlight his
own role as modernity's bard. Praising the Royal Society for freeing
"Captiv'd Philosophy" ("To the Royal Society," stanza 2, line 16) from
bondage to ancient thinkers, Cowley draws an implicit link to his own
espousal of Pindaric "Liberty." Yet Cowley's aggressive self-placement
among the moderns also pits him against Pindar: the description of Hobbes
as a Columbus who discovers a "vast Ocean" of knowledge beyond the
"slender-limb'ed" Mediterranean ("To Mr. Hobs" stanza 4, lines 2-5)
reverses Pindar's warnings against hubris, often couched in claims that one
should not dare sail beyond that sea's bounds - the "pillars of Hercules"
(Olympian 3.42-45, Netnean 3.19-21, Isthmian 4.9-13).4
Cowley also writes odes on his Muse, on poetic wit, and on the poet
Katherine Philips, whose posthumous Poems (1664) made her the first
major female secular poet in English, very widely celebrated for her
accomplishment, and an authorizing figure for later English women poets.
Representing Philips as a woman without Greek or Roman rivals, Cowley
treats her as the embodiment of modern English achievement. He also
extends his praise of bloodless but glorious struggles to gender rivalry.
Philips's "bold sally" ("On Orinda's Poems," stanza 1, line 14) against male
dominance in "wits milde Empire" (stanza 5, line 5) reveals her victorious,
androgynous combination of (manly) strength and (female) sweetness.
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JOSHUA SCODEL
Cowley associates Philips's blend of traditionally male and female virtues

with a widely shared cultural agenda of the Restoration - the recivilizing of
England after a time of barbaric radicalism and violence: she can teach
"rude" English men "Arts, and Civility" (stanza 4, lines 16-17).5
Pindaric odes after Cowley continue to construct an English line of
powerful poets who rival the ancients. They also celebrate or advocate
women's role within modern culture. "The Emulation, A Pindaric Ode"
(1683), f° r example, protests that men have deprived women's "rational
unbounded Mind" (line 16) of the learning with which they could challenge
male "Empire" (line 37).6 The title glorifies female emulation of male
achievement by associating it with the Pindaric ode's traditional praise of
competition, and the poem harnesses the Pindaric ode's formal associations
with liberty to espouse female freedom from tyrannical male constraints.
The greatest writer of Pindaric encomia, John Dryden, celebrates mon-
archs, aristocrats, other artists, and the power of music (including the
music of poetry). "To the Pious Memory of ... Anne Killigrew," prefaced to
Killigrew's posthumous book of poetry (1686), associates her with Philips
and expands Cowley's theme of the androgynous female poet.7 Dryden
praises the deceased for her feminine beauty; a virtuous innocence that
contrasts sharply with the immorality of contemporaneous male writers
(including Dryden himself); and her poetic power, figured in masculine
terms. Luxuriantly hyperbolic in associating Killigrew with the divine, the
poem evokes an ideal of poetic excellence more than it memorializes a real
woman. Yet echoes of Killigrew's own verse particularize the praise and
intimate that her respectable (if minor) poetry has inspired Dryden's
celebration of the ideal. Noting Dryden's own commitment to "art" (poetic
craft and learning) as well as "nature" (natural talent), some critics have
concluded that Dryden disparages when he praises Killigrew's sole reliance
on "nature": "Art she had none, yet wanted none; / For Nature did that
Want supply / So rich in Treasures of her Own, / She might our boasted
Stores defy; / Such Noble Vigor did her Verse adorn" (lines 71-75). Yet
Dryden, who throughout his career counterposes "nature" and "art,"
consistently notes the greater importance of natural power even when
claiming the need for tempering art. Figuring Killigrew's untutored
"nature" as a conventionally masculine "vigor," Dryden turns female
cultural disadvantage - Killigrew's lack of the classical education deemed
necessary for full access to "art" - into a "natural" male asset. His Pindaric
praise of Killigrew decorously relies, moreover, upon Pindaric values
espoused by Killigrew herself. Pindar often proclaims his dependence upon
nature rather than art, and in her Pindaric ode "The Discontent" Killigrew
bids her Muse no "Art or Labour use."8
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Lyric forms
Dryden further emphasizes Killigrew's "male" energy when character-

izing her decision to paint as well as write verse: "But what can young
ambitious Souls confine?" (line 91). Dryden's playful, hyperbolic analo-
gizing of Killigrew to a conquering monarch who could not be "content"
with a "Spacious Empire" (lines 88-90), which recalls Cowley's praise of
intellectual achievements in martial terms while glancing satirically at
Louis XIV, invites readers to weigh Killigrew's artistic successes against
male violence. Killigrew herself contrasted masculine violence with female
accomplishments: her volume opens with a fragmentary "Alexendreis"
praising Alexander the Great's discontent after conquering the "spacious
World" (line 3), but then proceeds in "To the Queen" to reject such
"Frantick Might" (line 33) as far "inferiour" (line 22) to the "sublime" (line
17) virtue of Mary of Modena.9 Dryden's analogy implies that Killigrew
the innocent but forceful androgyne did not simply reject, but rather
transmuted, masculinist ambitions.
"Alexander's Feast, or the Power of Music" (1698), the last and perhaps
greatest of Dryden's Pindarics, is both joyous and disillusioned about
masculinist power.10 Written for St. Cecilia's Day, honoring music's patron
saint, the poem celebrates poetry's power by depicting how the shifting
melodies of the bardic Timotheus, a "Mighty Master" (line 93), aroused a
gamut of passions in a helpless Alexander the Great before lauding, in a
final stanza, St. Cecilia's Christian music. In this tour de force of metrical
mimetics, Dryden applies the formal variety of the Cowleyan Pindaric ode
to demonstrate metrical effects and the passions they arouse. In his
mocking portrait of Alexander as vain, drunken, lecherous, and violent,
Dryden, a Jacobite loyal to the deposed James II, satirizes the new king
William III, who was praised as another Alexander by Dryden's poetic
contemporaries, while the portrait of Timotheus encodes Dryden's fantasy
of conquering England's despised conquerer. Yet Dryden also mocks
Timotheus, who self-servingly flatters Alexander into believing himself a
god; here the satiric target extends past Dryden's contemporaries to the
Pindaric panegyrist as such, whose greatness depended upon celebrating
the powerful, including perhaps Dryden himself, the erstwhile Pindaric
encomiast of the Stuarts.
Eighteenth-century Pindaric panegyrics gradually became more restrained
in praise, more metrically regular, but less interesting. Edward Young's series
of odes in "Pindar's spirit," "Imperium Pelagi [Empire of the Sea] A Naval
Lyric" (1729) employs varying numbers of a single six-line stanza to develop
an aggressively modern theme, British trade as opposed both to bloody war
and Pindaric athletes' "glory vain." Young's attempt to rescue trade from
"the shore of Prose" fails, however, to reach sublime crests.11
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JOSHUA SCODEL
Among his Pindaric odes Cowley had included meditative poems that
mixed autobiographical with philosophical reflections on abstract forces
like "Destinie." Pindaric expansiveness served numerous poets in treating
such subjects by grandly surveying their diverse effects. Perhaps the greatest
example, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea's "Spleen" (1701) exploits
the Pindaric's metrical variety to treat, in tonalities ranging from wistful to
comic to bitter, melancholy's protean forms.12 The poem includes won-
derful lines on smells' psychological effects; comic and satiric observations
on how melancholy provokes conflict between husbands' "Imperial Sway"
and wives "arm'd with Spleen" (lines 61-63); and the poet's lament over
her own melancholy as she anticipates criticism for writing poetry on
"unusual Things" (line 83) (such as spleen!) rather than practicing the
amateur visual arts deemed suitable for ladies. A Jacobite, Winchilsea also
ventures a witty, guarded swipe at William III by declining to paint "The
Sovereign's blurr'd and undistinguish'd Face" (line 88). Though context
suggests this portrait would be as inept as an "ill-drawn Bird" (line 87),
readers could infer that it would be all too verisimilar.
The gender struggles often addressed in Pindaric odes are central to the
period's lyrics of love and friendship. Philips, whose originality as a female
poet was extolled by Cowley, proves most innovative and influential in
celebrating friendship between women. Writing most of her poems during
the Interregnum when she was the wife of a Parliamentarian but the
member of a circle composed of Royalist sympathizers, Philips finds in such
friendship an alternative to the "angry world" ("Friendship's Mystery, To
my dearest Lucasia," line 4). Protesting the usual confines of ideal friend-
ship (the mutual admiration of virtuous persons celebrated by so many
classical and early modern writers) to "rational" men, her poem "A Friend"
exclaims "If Souls no Sexes have, for Men t'exclude / Women from
Friendship's vast capacity, / Is a Design injurious or rude, / Only maintain'd
by partial [i.e., biased] tyranny" (lines 19-22). Philips asserts that such
same-sex friendship is superior to marriage because more spiritual and free.
She also, however, often adapts male love poetry's passionate adoration of
women, infusing with erotic intensity a relationship treated as purer than
physical desire.13
In constructing her ideal, Philips exploits John Donne's love poetry,
taking up his treatment of heterosexual love as a religious mystery and
mixing of souls: "There's a Religion in our Love," she declares ("Friend-
ship's Mystery, to my dearest Lucasia," line 5), for "our twin-Souls in one
shall grow, / And teach the World new Love" ("To Mrs. M.A. at Parting,"
lines 49-50). Adapting the conceit of twin compasses in "A Valediction,
Forbidding Mourning" to signify the bond between separated female
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Lyric forms
friends, Philips substitutes for Donne's stay-at-home foot that "leans, and
hearkens after" (line 31) the traveling other, which encodes a conventional
gender hierarchy of active male and responsive female, an image of
mirroring equality: "Each follows where the other leans" ("Friendship in
Embleme," line 27). In "An Answer to another perswading a Lady to
Marriage," Philips claims that the single woman is a "public Deity" who by
marrying would reduce herself to "A petty Household God" (lines 5, 8). In
"The Sun Rising," Donne, with macho bravado, bade the sun confine itself
to shining on himself and his beloved: "Shine here to us, and thou art
everywhere" (line 29). Deflating both the suitor addressed and the mascu-
line pride of Donnean love poetry, Philips equates the suitor's desire to
marry with a presumptuous desire to monopolize the sun: "First make the
Sun in private shine, / And bid the World adieu, / That so he may his beams
confine / In complement to you" (lines 9-12).14
Philips inspired several late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century
female poets - including Winchilsea, Jane Barker, Elizabeth Rowe, Mary
Masters, Mary Chandler, and Mary Barber - to celebrate female friendship;
they often echo her conceits. Concurrently, however, the libertine erotic
poetry of the late 1660s to early 1680s - coterie verse written by
aristocratic amateurs at a hedonistic court - celebrates the male aristocrat's
roving sexual appetite. In traditional metrical forms, many of them fit for
song, these writers puncture conventional poetic conceits with conversa-
tional and obscene idioms and images. They not only treat longstanding
erotic situations like persuading a lady to grant her favors and cursing one
who refuses but also proclaim male inconstancy and deplore the sensual
life's disappointments - impotence, premature ejaculation, post-coital
satiety, and boredom. They frequently appeal to "nature," understood as
the natural appetites described by hedonists from Ovid to Thomas Hobbes,
to justify their rakish pursuits and satirize those foolish enough to accept
traditional sexual mores.
In demystifying conventions in the light of "nature," the libertines
resemble Cowley's lauded philosophers and scientists who attacked obfus-
cating verbiage in the name of truth. In "The Advice," the most stylistically
distinctive and intellectually serious of the libertines, John Wilmot, Earl of
Rochester, curses a chaste woman by exhorting "Live upon modesty and
empty fame, / Forgoing sense [i.e., physical sensation] for a fantastic name"
(lines 49-50). Rochester casually juxtaposes euphemistic poetic diction and
brutal obscenity, beginning a "Song" by grandly but vaguely evoking love as
a powerful yet rule-governed force before concluding the quatrain with
graphic references to bodily realities: "By all loves soft, yet mighty powers, /
It is a thing unfit / That men should fuck in time of flowers, [during
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JOSHUA SCODEL
menstruation] / Or when the smock's beshit" (lines 1-4). Charles Sackville,

Earl of Dorset's "A Song to Chloris ..." partially revivifies the hoary carpe
diem form by linking a woman's well-timed yielding with the enlightened
disenchantment of the period: "We live in an age that's more civil and wise /
Than to follow the rules of romances" (lines 3-4). His reference to the
woman's inevitable aging, a conventional feature of the form, is untradi-
tional in its slangy crudity: "When once your round bubbies begin but to
pout / They'll allow you no long time for courting" (lines 5-6). Dorset's
jaunty "A Song on Black Bess," which celebrates a whore for her beauty and
erotic playfulness, contrasts "The truth that I know of bonny Black Bess"
with the illusions of "fools" who complain, with the stock names and diction
of pastoral lament and neopetrarchan adoration, that "Phyllis and Chloris"
are "cruel and fair" (lines 1-6). Mocking pastoral conventions with more
shocking originality, in another "Song" Rochester replaces the idealized
shepherdess in her pretty pastoral setting with a pigkeeper in her sty - "Fair
Chloris in a pigsty lay; / Her tender herd lay by her" (lines 1-2) - and
recounts the girl's masturbatory fantasy of being raped, which keeps her
both "innocent and pleased" (line 40).15
The libertines reject not only erotic illusions but also traditional heroism.
Yet like Cowley in his Pindarics, they seek substitutes for the martial values
that once undergirded male aristocratic claims to superiority. Dorset
associates libertinism with "noble pride" ("The Advice," line 9), Rochester
with the "pride" of those who "in love excel" ("Against Constancy," lines
14-15). Rocheter's libertinism is identified with an aristocratic greatness
disdainful of constraint: in "Upon his Leaving his Mistress" he rationalizes
his inconstancy by claiming that he thereby frees the mistress from being
"confined" like "meaner spirits" to one man; instead she must live up to her
(that is, his!) "mighty mind" (lines 8, 19-20).16 "Sardanapaulus," a mock
Pindaric of the 1670s by John Oldham, the satirist and ambivalent member
of Rochester's circle, treats an infamously debauched ancient monarch who
resembles both Charles II and his libertine courtiers. Obtaining a "vast
Dominion" (line 54) of mistresses, Sardanapaulus made "C—t the only
Field" in which to be "Great" (line 14) believing there was no crucial
difference between having "Fought, or F—k'd for Universal Monarchy"
(line 35). He is immolated along with a "Hecatomb" of virgins whom he
rapes.17 The poem simultaneously satirizes libertines and aggrandizes them
as pornographic heroes of Pindaric disproportions.
Celebrations of another male pleasure, convivial drinking, dominate
other lyric sub-genres of Restoration libertines, symposiastic (drinking-
party) poems and drinking songs. The Greek poet Anacreon and the
Anacreontic verse ascribed to him in our period advocate drunkenness as
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Lyric forms
an escape from anxiety over one's place in the social world (riches, high
station) as well as over aging and inevitable death. In the 1650s Ana-
creontic poetry appealed to Royalist Cavalier poets deprived of political
power who were eager simultaneously to make a virtue of necessity and to
mock Puritan sermons and Interregnum legislation against alehouses and
drunkenness. Thomas Stanley's translations of Anacreon appeared in 1651,
Cowley's in 1656 with an elegy celebrating Anacreon's inebriated rejection
of "Bus'iness, Honor, Title, State."18 Alexander Brome, dubbed the
"English Anacreon," writes songs defying the killjoy Parliamentary-Puritan
regime with "freedome of drinking" ("The Murmurer," line 4).19 Charles
Cotton similarly associates drinking with Royalist freedom; his "Ode:
Come, let us drink away the time" concludes by impudently proposing that
Cromwell sanction Cotton's modest sensual pleasures: "Let me have sack,
tobacco store, / A drunken friend, a little wh-re, / Protector, I will ask no
more" (lines 40-42).20
In two Interregnum sonnets of the mid-1650s, "Lawrence, of virtuous
father ..." and "Cyriack, whose grandsire ...," John Milton captures a
distinctively Horatian note in portraying companionable eating or drinking
as what one "interpose[s]" between one's duties ("Lawrence," line 14).
Horace diverges from Anacreon (and his English Royalist imitators) by
treating symposiastic pleasure as a temporary, revivifying respite from
social responsibilities. With numerous Horatian echoes, Milton contests
the Cavaliers' appropriation of convivial poetry, pointedly celebrating a
moderate Parliamentary-Puritan pleasure - a "light and choice" meal
("Lawrence," line 9), wine, restrained "mirth, that after no repenting
draws" ("Cyriack," line 6) (and no Cavalier drunkenness or whores!).
These recreational moments are set within a larger historical, Providential
order evoked by scriptural echoes and by Milton's Horatian-style addres-
sing of his young invitees in terms of their ancestry, the public-spirited
lineage whose values they must uphold.21
With the Restoration, Royalists took up a different Horatian theme -
celebration as a decorous response to joyous political events. Cotton's "To
Alexander Brome" opens by echoing the first lines of Horace's Actium ode
(used so differently by Marvell!): "Now let us drink ... / Never so fit a time
for harmless mirth" (lines 1, 3). Cotton celebrates a loyal, free-spirited
unanimity he missed in Interregnum England: "One Harmony, one Mirth,
one Voice, / One Love, one Loyalty, one Noise / Of Wit, and Joy, one Mind,
and that as free / As if we all one Man could be" (lines 49-52).22 While
ancient lyrics praise wine for loosening men's spirits, Cotton provides the
most resonant lyric description of wine's dissolving of ego boundaries,
bringing the possibility (at last!) of a unified body politic.
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JOSHUA SCODEL
Tory drinking songs during the political struggles between Charles II and
his Whig opponents in the late 1670s and early 1680s oppose conviviality
to rebellious sullenness. In Thomas D'Urfey's "The King's Health" (1681),
still a popular tune in the early eighteenth century, loyal toasts - "Joy to
great Caesar, I Long Life, Love and Pleasure; / 'Tis a Health that Divine is, /
Fill the Bowl high as mine is" (lines 1-4) - counter rebellious "Faction and
Folly, / And State Melancholy" (lines 40-41 ).23 The libertine poet Alex-
ander Radcliffe's drinking songs of 1682 note that whoever drinks all day
and "all night hugs a Whore" has no time for rebellion.24
Libertine drinking songs also celebrate drunkenness, more subversively,
as expressions of transgressive personal hedonism. In a poem based upon
Anacreontic models, Rochester requests a drinking cup carved with scenes
of drunkenness and sex rather than battles, for with "war I've nought to
do." The final quatrain moves from the geniality of Anacreontic verse, in
which mythological bric-a-brac decorates the sensuality, to a simulta-
neously cruder and darker vein: "Cupid and Bacchus my saints are: / May
drink and love still reign. / With wine I wash away my cares, / And then to
cunt again" ("Upon his Drinking a Bowl," lines 10, 21-24).25 Rochester
complicates carefree Anacreontic joy by implying that eroticism itself
brings cares - unless properly distanced by drink and thereby reducible to
casual wenching.
Libertinism was not, however, the male poet's exclusive property. Aphra
Behn, the most important Restoration female writer and, besides Philips,
the most celebrated woman poet, sometimes adopts the voice of male
speakers with typical libertine views. Other poems argue that women
should be allowed the same erotic freedom as men. Reversing conventions,
Behn dwells on men's physical attractions to women. More than her male
libertine contemporaries, however, Behn celebrates happy lovers' mutual
sexual ecstasy rather than male erotic "conquest" as the ne plus ultra -
"Raptures unconfin'd; / Vast and Luxuriant" ('On a Juniper Tree, cut down
to make Busks," lines 57~58).26
Behn also deplores the gender inequities of libertinism. Her best-known
poem, "Love Arm'd" (1677), which like many lyrics of the period originally
appeared as a playsong, details in pageant-like fashion the "Tyranic power"
of "Fantastique" love over a woman whose heart is "harm'd" while her
beloved "Victor is, and free" (lines 1, 4, 15-16). Behn's female speaker
cannot master the libertine's professed strength, detachment from erotic
delusions.27
Behn's frank expressions of female desire shocked but also fascinated
contemporaries and successors. Other female poets followed Behn in both
espousing and protesting libertinism. In "Maidenhead ..." the pseudony-
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Lyric forms
mous Ephelia, for example, mocks virginity. Yet her poetic volume, pub-
lished circa 1679, reveals in an effectively straightforward style her unhappi-
ness with a faithless lover. Occasionally she attacks rather than laments, as
when she reverses a Roman and seventeenth-century topos that the male
poet-lover's fancy created his beloved's charms and can strip them away.
"To my Rival" claims her "Fancy," which "rais'd" her lover to his "Glorious
State," "can as easily Annihilate" him (lines 18-20); the following poem,
"Neglect Returned," extends the theme, noting that her amorous looks can
"create" new lovers (line 14). Yet numerous poems that profess enduring
passion concede Ephelia's inability to escape female victimization.28
Just as Pindaric panegyric became more restrained in the early eighteenth
century, the celebration of sensual pleasure became more compatible with
middle-class notions of politeness. The drinking song gradually gave way
to depictions of more sober pleasures, as in the neoclassical invitation-to-
dinner poem, which adopted the measured, conversational tone of Horace's
epistles and Martial's epigrams. Even when celebrating promiscuity, erotic
poetry similarly lost its shocking crudity. Matthew Prior, a master of light
verse, leavens libertinism with polite epigrammatic wit that warns against
taking either him or his arguments too seriously. In "A Better Answer"
(1718), Prior defends himself in tripping meter against his mistress's
complaints that he has praised in verse (and presumably enjoyed) other
women by invoking the crucial period distinction between poetic fancies
and real life: "What I speak, my fair CHLOE, and what I write, shews / The
Diff'rence there is betwixt Nature and Art: / I court others in Verse; but I
love Thee in Prose: / And they have my Whimsies; but Thou has my Heart"
(lines 13-16). Prior writes verse that claims to be prose, whimsies that
claim to be sincere, to a pastoral "Cloe" whom he treats as his "real"
mistress. In another poem of uncertain date, "Chloe Beauty has and Wit,"
Prior good-naturedly praises his mistress's "good Nature" (line 8), i.e.,
promiscuity. He plays with Christian morality - Chloe charitably "keeps
poor Mortals from [the sin of] despairing" (line 12) - and with poetic
cliches - Chloe rightly brings a "Bucket" to "quench" the otherwise
unbearable "Fire" she arouses in men (lines 19-20). "Bucket," earthy but
euphemistic, is designed to amuse rather than shock. Eschewing the heroic
posturing of the aristocratic Restoration rake, Prior pursues pleasure with
awareness that it is not everything. His "Written in the Year 1696," also in
a lighthearted rhythm, presents a sexual liaison as the weekend reward of a
hard-working diplomat: "While with Labour Assiduous due pleasure I mix
/ And in one day attone for the Busyness of Six I ... I This Night and the
next shal be Hers shal be Mine / To good or ill Fortune the Third we
resign" (lines 1-2, 9-10). In so circumscribed a context, great claims for
131

JOSHUA SCODEL
sexual liaisons are perforce mock-heroic: "Thus Scorning the world and
superior to Fate /1 drive on my Car in processional State" (lines 11-12).29
Poems devoted to the delights of the simple country life, a form of
pleasure often contrasted with heterosexual relations, also became ubiqui-
tous in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in reaction against
London's ever increasing prominence as commercial metropolis and site of
state power. Often nostalgically echoing classical retirement poetry, such
poems celebrate contented ease far from the strife or pomp of city and/or
court. During the Interregnum, retirement was praised by Royalist gentle-
men sequestered on their estates as well as those unhappy for diverse
reasons with Interregnum politics and policies. In "The Garden," probably
written during this period, Marvell, tutor to the daughter of the disaffected
ex-commander of the Parliamentary army Thomas Fairfax, celebrates what
his (closely contemporaneous?) "Horatian Ode" rejects.30 With unique wit,
"The Garden" depicts retirement's sensual, intellectual, and spiritual plea-
sures in an ascending scale. The sensual pleasures of superabundant fruits
surround the speaker and make him "fall on grass" (line 40) with a cheerful
innocence implicitly contrasted with Adam and Eve; intellectual pleasures
compress the outside world to the mind's dimensions, making, in a joyous
phrase that eludes full explication, "a green thought in a green shade" (line
48); and the soul delights in its own beauty while preparing for a "longer
flight" (line 55) to heaven. For such pleasures Marvell dismisses both public
life and erotic desire. Wittily positing that the ambitious seek not public
honor but only its tokens, laurels and bays, and that the pagan gods
analogously pursued not nubile nymphs but the plants into which they
metamorphosed to escape, Marvell playfully presents his garden with its
"garlands of repose" (line 8) as the most inclusive object of everyone's
desire. This outrageous reduction ad absurdum of incompatible goals
bespeaks MarvelPs awareness that choosing a way of life demands simpli-
fying the alternatives. Katherine Philips's praise of retirement is more
traditionally solemn. Closely associating retirement with same-sex friend-
ship, she celebrates a detachment from society's troubles particularly
resonant during the turbulent 1650s: "Here is no quarrelling for Crowns /
Nor fear of changes in our Fate" she enthuses of the retired life in "A retir'd
Friendship, To Ardelia" (lines 5-6).31
Marvell, Philips, and other retirement writers of the 1650s deploy strict
stanzaic forms in short, tightly argued lyrics. In his posthumously published
Essays, in Verse and Prose (1668), Cowley celebrates the joys of country
life in a variety of genres, including - most influentially - Pindaric odes.
Cowley's use of the form brings a new tonal complexity to retirement verse,
adding the sense of both carefree and heroic activity to the conventional
132

Lyric forms
praise of restful ease. The Pindaric's formal freedom can convey the
impromptu delights of a comfortable country gentleman following his
whims rather than an imposed routine. The changing line lengths in
Cowley's "Upon Liberty," for example, mime the unscheduled life with
conversational ease: "Now will I sleep, now eat, now sit, now walk, / Now
meditate alone, now with Acquaintance talk. / This I will do, here I will
stay, / Or if my fancy call me away, / My Man and I presently go ride"
(stanza 4). But Cowley also exploits Pindaric grandeur. While taking up the
traditional theme of being contented with little by limiting one's desires, in
an expansive countermovement Cowley compares his freedom to the
"soaring boldly" of "Heroic" birds (stanza 3). Adapting Pindar's sublime
self-representation as eagle (Nemean 3.80-82, 5.20-21), Cowley concludes
by comparing the retired man's roving spirit to the "Imperial Eagle" always
seeking "fresh game" (stanza 6).32
Celebrating the country gentleman's freedom with Cowleyan conversa-
tional informality, Cotton's Pindaric ode "The Retirement" enriches the
portrait by evoking Cotton's own estate and natural environs.33 Other
Restoration Pindarics exalt genteel country pleasures. Wentworth Dillon,
the Earl of Roscommon's well-known "Ode upon Solitude" grandly
declaims of "Pleasures which ... exalt the mind" (line 40), though the
poem's dual claim of "constant quiet" (line 22) and "nobler Vigour" (line
20) for the country life betrays strain.34 By contrast, Dryden's Pindaric
imitation (1685) of Horace's ode 3.29 uses the genre's expansiveness both
to convey the uncontrollable power of fortune, figured as a powerful river,
over those immersed in the active life and to suggest the supreme self-
mastery of the retired person: "Happy the Man, and happy he alone, / He,
who can call to day his own: / He, who secure within, can say / Tomorrow
do thy worst, for I have liv'd to day. / Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine, /
The joys I have possest, in spight of fate are mine. / Not Heav'n it self upon
the past has pow'r; / But what has been has been, and I have had my hour"
(lines 65-72).35 Celebrating the ownership of one's own life, Dryden
intensifies with Pindaric amplitude Horace's praise of retired self-mastery
by contrasting it with the limited power of "Heav'n it self." The varied
cadence conveys the ease, while the three ringing alexandrines (twelve-
syllable lines) convey the grandeur, of self-possession.
Partly inspired by men of science such as Isaac Newton and Robert
Boyle, retirement poetry of the early to mid eighteenth century often
celebrates nature as the manifestation of God. Poets praise the country life
not only for its freedom but also for the tranquil survey of God's creation
that they, as members of the leisured elite, could experience in joyful piety.
Extended description of the landscape, whose beauty and usefulness
133

JOSHUA SCODEL
revealed God's beneficence, and straightforward didacticism become more

pronounced. Pindaric odes and longish poems in couplets accommodate
open-ended, meditative expansiveness (often with allusions to the fuller
vision one acquires after death). Thomas Parnell's seventy-eight line,
octosyllabic couplet "A Hymn on Contentment" (1714) for example, finds
"Peace of Mind" (line 1) in "sweet Retreat" (line 50) and ends with a vow
to sing both of natural beauty and the "great SOURCE OF NATURE" God
(line 63).36 Winchilsea's 293-line "Petition for an Absolute Retreat" (1713)
in octosyllabic couplets wishes for the "Unaffected Carelessness" (line 71)
of retired life, for the "Windings and Shade" with which she closes each
verse paragraph and which will provide the complementary pleasures of
unconstrained movement through a bountiful landscape - with straw-
berries "Springing wheresoe'er I stray'd" (lines 45-46) - and escape from
the sociopolitical world. She concludes, typically, wishing for the "extensive
Joy, / When all Heaven shall be survey'd" (lines 291-92). In "A Nocturnal
Reverie" (1713), Winchilsea's heroic couplets evoke solitary contempla-
tion's "sedate Content." Descriptions of nocturnal sights, sounds, and
smells emphasize the non-human world's serenity, inspiring the poet with a
mystic sense of "Something, too high for Syllables to speak" (line 42).37
The accomplished octosyllabic couplets of Parnell's much-admired
ninety line "A Night-Piece on Death" (1722) express the period's interest
in "natural" piety by rejecting Scholastic theology and bookish ethics for a
"readier Path" to moral wisdom "below" (lines 7-8). Literalizing the
Christian spiritual journey and ideal of being "lowly wise," the poet
describes his path to a churchyard in which he contemplates the buried
dead and hears a voice promising immortality. Description of nightfall
and the sky's reflection in a still lake "below" (line 16) allows somber
meditation to emerge gradually from the natural scene. The didactic
graveyard voice presents death as the final "Path" to God (line 67) and
beatitude as access to a limitless view of "the glad Scene unfolding" (line
88).38
John Dyer's "Gongar Hill" combines the description of a specific land-
scape with the moralizing strains of natural religion.39 The poem had
begun as a sublime Pindaric in praise of an "aweful" hill but was reworked
into a lengthy but modest octosyllabic poem celebrating the hill's "humble
shade" (line 131). Dyer's poem mingles the cheerful and meditative tones of
Milton's companion poems on outdoor wandering and reverie, "L'Allegro"
and "II Penseroso," which became popular models in the eighteenth
century. Dyer celebrates "stray[ing]" (line 23) through a landscape that
embodies life's delightfully "various journey" (line ^j) but also inspires
intimations of mortality. Ruins, for example, elicit didactic reflections on

Lyric forms
power's transcience: "A little rule, a little sway, / A sun beam in a winter's
day" (lines 89-90).
The prominence of God as source of nature in retirement poetry is one
culmination of a gradual process whereby religious verse lost its doctrinal
focus upon the salvation of an individual "I" by a personal God conspic-
uous in the powerful meditative lyrics of such early seventeenth-century
poets as Donne and George Herbert. The process began with the Puritan
dismantling of the established church and the proliferation of religious
sects and attitudes during the Interregnum, which loosened dogmatic
underpinnings and poetic structures alike. While often echoing his ac-
knowledged model Herbert, Henry Vaughan in Silex Scintillans (1650;
1655) replaces Herbert's carefully structured, Calvinist, liturgically attuned
lyric devotions with poems memorable for their new range of tonality and
thematics. These include high moments of Platonic rapture (conveyed in
such famous lines as "I saw Eternity the other night," which opens "The
World"); celebrations of a divinized nature that draw on occult Hermetic
philosophy and voice such anti-Calvinist views as the belief that all
creatures (not only the Calvinist "elect") will be "made new" on the Last
Day ("The Book," line 27); evocations of a (nonCalvinist) innocence in
which a child perceives the "shadows of eternity" in nature ("The Retreat,"
line 14); and elegiac laments in which the blissful state of the dead
highlights the poet's isolation in a world out of joint ("They are all gone
into the world of light! / And I alone sit ling'ring here" begins a famous
poem).40
Thomas Traherne, whose poems went unpublished until the twentieth
century, has an even more heterodox vision. Like Vaughan, he produces
great passages rather than wholes, subordinating development to rapturous
expostulation. Influenced like Vaughan by Hermeticism and Platonism,
Traherne is additionally fascinated by contemporaneous scientific specula-
tions on the universe's infinitude. His poems are most typical of their age
when they celebrate the "boundless" - a "boundless" human spirit that can
recover childhood wonder and grasp an infinite (rather than personal) God.
As contemporaneous Pindaric odes were doing, Traherne celebrates a
sublimely heroic mind that "Rove[s] ore the World with Libertie"
("Thoughts 1," line 66). The "vast, enquiring Soul" that "Brooks no
Controul" in its search for God's "infinit Variety" transcends (like a
spiritualized Alexander the Great) the "mean Ambition to desire / A single
World" ("Insatiableness," part 11, lines 1-8). Traherne's poems recall his
childhood intuition that he possessed the "Various and Innumerable"
"Treasures" of the world - "Fields, Mountains, Valleys, Woods, / Floods,
Cities, Churches, Men" ("Speed," lines 17-18, 20, 22). His joyously

JOSHUA SCODEL
heterogeneous lists suggest the innocent mind's unmediated grasp of God's

superabundant bounty. Appropriating to mystic ends the diverse socio-
political theories of his times, Traherne compares his felicity both to an
absolutist monarch's ownership of his realm and to the Levellers' commu-
nitarian world without "Cursd ... Proprieties" (i.e., private properties) and
their "Bounds" ("Wonder," lines 49, 53).41
Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century religious poetry also used
the Pindaric ode's high style to praise God's infinite power. Writing Pindaric
odes based upon scriptural descriptions of God as cosmic creator and
destroyer, Cowley provides a popular form for the self-consciously
"sublime" religious lyric, replacing not only the early seventeenth-century
focus on personal salvation but also the individual "I" still present in
Vaughan and Traherne with a public poet's awe before a "boundless" God.
The Nonconformist poet Isaac Watts writes a number of religious
Pindarics such as "The Adventurous Muse" (1706), which imagines an
"unconfined" (line 27) survey of the "boundless" (line 20).42 The early
eighteenth-century Pindaric odes of Mary, Lady Chudleigh have the
particular resonance of a woman's piety. Chudleigh prefaces her first
published poem, "The Ladies Defence" (1701), with an exhortation that
fellow women resist being confined by ignorance, their passions, or
misogynist preconceptions. Displaying wide reading as well as religious
fervor, her 1703 Pindarics passionately resist constraint. "The Observa-
tion," for example, praises "the'active Mind" (line 16) that will not be
"confin'd" (line 10) in the body. Her Pindaric paraphrase of the Hymn of
the Three Children, an apocryphal addition to Daniel, runs to ninety
stanzas. The headnote explains that Chudleigh chose the Pindaric form for
its "Liberty" of "Fancy," while the poem praises contemplation that "will
not be to any Place confin'd" (line 776) and provides pious "Delights" by
surveying "boundless" nature, cosmic history from primeval chaos to
apocalypse, and God's infinitude.43
The hymn is the other typical form of early eighteenth-century religious
lyric. Like the ode it de-emphasizes the personal "I" but, in place of the
Pindaric poet's rapturous and rambling adoration of a boundless God, the
hymn features clear, concise expressions of devotion suitable for singing by
a community of believers. Religious Nonconformists were major hymn
writers. Watts wrote many; in contrast to his Pindarics, his popular hymns
eschew (he notes) "bolder Figures" and "unconfin'd" "Variety" in order to
remain understandable when sung. Closely echoing Scripture, their major
license consists in Christianizing Old Testament passages (for which they
were attacked). They present boundedness positively as a defense of the
Nonconformist church, as in "The Church the Garden of Christ" (1707):
136

Lyric forms
"We are a Garden wall'd around, / Chosen and made peculiar Ground; / A
little Spot inclos'd by Grace / Out of the World's wide wilderness."44
Other poets, by contrast, adopted the hymn's clarity and succinctness in
order to proclaim (with a note of spiritual imperialism) the universality of
natural religion. Joseph Addison's "The spacious firmament on high"
(1712) announces in three compact stanzas the universe's proclamation of
God "to every land" (line 7) when attended to by "reason's ear" (line 21).
Echoing Psalm 19, Addison joins Scripture to an explicitly rational,
enlightened theology appropriate to his urbane middle-class audience but
(potentially) accessible to all.45 Adopting the metrical form of many
hymns, "The Universal Prayer" (written 1715, published 1738) by Alex-
ander Pope (a Catholic in a Protestant England that subjected Catholics to
legal penalties) begins and ends by celebrating the universality of devotion
and implicitly promoting religious toleration: "Father of All! in every Age, /
In every Clime ador'd, / By Saint, by Savage, and by Sage, / Jehovah, Jove,
or Lord!"; "To Thee, whose Temple is all Space, / Whose Altar, Earth, Sea,
Skies; / One Chorus let all Being raise! / All Nature's Incense Rise" (lines 1-
4, 49~52).46 Despite his ethnocentric contrast between "Saint" and
"Savage," Pope claims distinctive terms, dogmas, and places do not matter;
God's true temple is the universe, as the four elements of earth, water, air,
and fire combine in the altar and burning incense of praise.
While religious poetry treated death as the road to immortality, funerary
poetry increasingly responded to secular trends. As in numerous Pindaric
funerary poems, poetry commemorating the dead throughout the period
often consists of public panegyric that recounts their enduring fame and
heavenly blessings. Such panegyrics often serve a political function, as in
the numerous Civil War poems commemorating fallen Royalists; as befits
an age of satire and public polemic, elegies also often mixed praise of the
dead with attacks on the living. Over the course of the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth century, however, more personal modes of funerary poetry
emerge as poets focus increasingly on personal attachments to the dead
rather than upon their public significance and ignore religious strictures
against extreme grief for the deceased.
Dryden's greatest elegiac poem, "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham"
(1684), differs strikingly from his other major funerary poems in registering
a personal sense of profound loss as well as joy in glorious achievement.47
Virgilian allusions generalize and claim public importance for Dryden's
feelings as he pays tribute to a younger fellow satirist and kindred spirit,
comparing himself and Oldham to the well-known tragic Virgilian compa-
nions Nisus and Euryalus. The two final couplets - "Once more, hail and
farewel; farewel thou young, / But ah too short, Marcellus of our Tongue; /

JOSHUA SCODEL
Thy Brows with Ivy, and with Laurels bound; / But Fate and gloomy Night
encompass thee around" (lines 22-25) - evoke Roman mourning rituals
and allude to the early death, lamented in the Aeneid, of Augustus's heir
Marcellus, whom gloomy night surrounds in Hades (Aeneid 6.866). The
Virgilian ambience registers the feeling of loss by ignoring Christian
consolation for pagan pessimism about the dead. Yet Dryden's allusions
also provide their own secular consolation by implying that both Oldham
and Dryden glorify England's achievement by rivaling Roman achievement;
Dryden plays the role of both grieving Augustus and commemorating
Virgil.
To convey Oldham's public achievement, Dryden relies upon classical
critical norms, simultaneously praising and criticizing Oldham as a satirist
of vigorous "Wit" whose rough metrics betray the "noble Error" of youth,
"too much force" (lines 15, 17-18). Dryden deploys Pindaric values to
glorify Oldham. Oldham's winning of the "Race" (line 10) in satire and his
"early ripe" (line 11) dying before "maturing time" could mellow his
writing to "the dull sweets of Rime" (lines 20-21) recall Cowley's praise in
his rendition of Pindar's Nemean 1 of an athletic victor who "early" won
his race and of the victor's mythological analogue Hercules, who "ripe at
first... did disdain / The slow advance of dull Humanities But Dryden's
tempering of praise with blame adapts Horatian values to assess Oldham.
Horace praises Pindar's overpowering natural force but also criticizes harsh
meter and lack of artful restraint (Satire 1.4.6-8, 1.10.64-71). Dryden
compliments the deceased by assessing him in terms of Oldham's own
highest (Horatian) artistic standards: Dryden's question - "to thy abundant
store / What could advancing Age have added more?" (lines 11-12) - as
well as its answer, metrical art, echo Oldham's own Horatian values as
expressed in his ode "Upon ... Ben. Jonson." Oldham's poem claims not
only that to Jonson's "unbounded store / Exhausted Nature could vouch-
safe no more" (lines 171-72) but also that Jonson, the supreme poet,
combined "Nature and Art" (line j6) as well as "vig'orous youth" and
"temp'erate age" (line 62).49
In contrast to Dryden's elegy, which appeals to public norms despite its
personal grief, Pope's "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady"
expresses more personal lament. The poet passionately defends an
unnamed woman whose love suicide under obscure circumstances left her
an outcast deprived of a public ritual and memorial. Like the opening of
Cowley's "Brutus," Pope's "Elegy" celebrates a heroism mistaken for vice,
defending a woman "Above the vulgar flight" who "love[d] too well," who
was "too tender" in her feelings and "too firm" in her Roman resolve (lines
6-y, 11-12). Pope's unknown heroine is not, however, a public figure like
138

Lyric forms
Brutus, and instead of promising to immortalize her, Pope ends by stressing

their personal bond. He imagines his own eventual death and oblivion and
the woman's consequent loss of her (one?) admirer: "The Muse forgot, and
thou belov'd no more!" (line 82).50
While still a much-practiced form through the mid eighteenth century,
poetic epitaphs, which had traditionally been epigrammatic, impersonal
verse encomia, became more expansive and elegiac, expressing the particu-
larized grief of the poet and/or relatives of the deceased. In influential
epitaphs of the 1720s and 1730s, Pope moves from impersonal panegyric
to more elegiac compositions that prevent the reader from separating the
commemoration from the poet's own personal mourning process. While
the first stanzas of his epitaphs on Simon Harcourt and on Robert and
Mary Digby provide conventional panegyric, the second stanzas conjure
the moment when the mourning poet inscribes his composition on the
monument or implores its acceptance by the deceased: "Oh let thy once-
lov'd Friend inscribe thy Stone, / And with a Father's Sorrows mix his
own!" (lines 7-8); "Yet take these tears, Mortality's relief, / And till we
share your joys, forgive our grief; / These little rites, a Stone, a Verse,
receive, / 'Tis all a Father, all a Friend can give!" (lines 17-20).51
Elegies became a popular vehicle for widows and widowers to fervently
articulate ideals of conjugal love, as if such personal feelings earned their
full right to public treatment only in tragic retrospect. Elizabeth Rowe, for
example, composed a much-admired elegy for her husband (published in
1719) that first proclaims a "grief" that can have "no excess" because of his
"merit" (lines 9-10) but later describes her conjugal love as bothfittingand
excessive: "Whate'er to such superior worth was due, / Whate'er excess the
fondest passion knew, /1 felt for thee, dear youth" (lines Z3-Z5).51
Non-satiric funerary poetry traditionally ignored the faults of the dead as
a matter of decorum, but the growing importance of personal feeling, even
at the expense of traditional morality, appears in elegies that forgive the
dead. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's elegy of the mid-i73os upon an
adulteress, for example, claims the poet's right to "pay a pitying tear" (line
19) and "To draw a vail o'er faults she can't commend" (line 17).53 Yet
Montagu provides social critique as well as pathos: her determination to
protect the deceased from "envious rage" and "prudes" (lines 16, 18) leads
on to a final, mordant claim that gossips will soon find new victims and
forget the deceased.
Montagu's elegy reveals both change and continuity in lyric forms during
the period we have considered. The contrast between her concern with
clashing social mores and Marvell's with military and political conflict in
the "Horatian Ode," with which we began, registers a major shift in lyric
139

JOSHUA SCODEL
focus from the mid seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century. Like Pope's
and Rowe's, Montagu's appeal to personal feeling points forward to late
eighteenth-century lyrics associated with the cults of sentiment and sym-
pathy. Yet her satiric attack upon "th'illnatured crowd" (line 21) exempli-
fies the attentiveness to public norms and resultant tonal complexity that
enrich the diversely "impure" lyrics of 1650-1740.
NOTES
1 Andrew Marvell: Oxford Authors, ed. Frank Kermode and Keith Walker
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 82-85.
2 Abraham Cowley, Poems, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1905), pp. 195-97-
3 Ibid., pp. 420-32.
4 Ibid., pp. 157-78, 188-92, 197-201, 416-18, 448-53-
5 Ibid., pp. 404-06.
6 Germaine Greer et al. (eds.), Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth
Century Women's Verse (London: Virago, 1988), pp. 309-14.
7 The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1958), vol. 1, pp. 459"^5-
8 Anne Killigrew, "The Discontent," lines 1-2 in Poems (1685), ed. Richard
Morton (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars' Facsimiles &C Reprints, 1967), p. 51.
9 Killigrew, Poems, pp. 1, 6-7.
10 Dryden, Poems, vol. 111, pp. 1428-33.
11 The Poetical Works of Edward Young, ed. John Mitford (London, 1896), vol.
n
, PP- 335-93 (quotations from p. 372).
12 The Poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Myra Reynolds (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1903), pp. 248-52.
13 Katherine Philips, Poems (1667), intro. Travis Dupriest (Delmar, New York:
Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1992), pp. 21, 95.
14 Philips, Poems, pp. 21, 76, 38, 155; John Donne, The Complete English Poems,
ed. A. J. Smith (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 85, 81.
15 The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 19, 139, 27-28;
The Poems of Charles Sackville, Sixth Earl of Dorset, ed. Brice Harris (New
York and London: Garland, 1979), pp. 76, 91.
16 Dorset, Poems, p. 77; Rochester, Poems, pp. 82, 81.
17 The Poems of John Oldham, ed. Harold F. Brooks and Raman Selden (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 344-51.
18 Cowley, Poems, p. 60.
19 Alexander Brome, Poems, ed. Roman R. Dubinski, 2 vols. (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 109-10; cf. vol. 1, pp. 96-97, 117-18, 121-
26, 129-30, 135-36, I37-4I, 150-51, 153-56, 158-62, 209-11.
20 Charles Cotton, Poems, 1630-1687, ed. John Beresford (London: Richard
Cobden-Sanderson, 1923), p. 359.
21 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New
York: Odyssey Press, 1957), pp. 168-69.
140

Lyric forms
22 Cotton, Poems, pp. 361-63.

23 The Songs of Thomas D'Urfey, ed. Cyrus Lawrence Day (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1933), pp. 47-55.
24 Alexander Radcliffe, "Now at last the Riddle is expounded" (1682), line 14 in
The Ramble: An Anti-Heroick Poem (London, 1682), rpt. in The Works of
Alexander Radcliffe (1696), intro. Ken Robinson (Delmar, New York: Scholars'
Facsimiles & Reprints, 1981), pp. 33-34; cf. pp. 15-19, 27-28, 34-35.
25 Rochester, Poems, pp. 52-53.
26 The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 1, Poetry, ed. Janet Todd (Columbus: Ohio
University Press, 1992), p. 40.
27 Ibid., p. 53.
28 Poems by Ephelia (c. 1679): The Premier Facsimile Edition, ed. with intro.
Maureen E. Mulvihill (Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints,
1992), pp. 138-40, 158-61, 168-74.
29 The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K.
Spears, 2 vols. (1959; 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), vol. 1, pp. 451,
715, 158.
30 Marvell, pp. 47-49.
31 Philips, Poems, p. 28.
32 Abraham Cowley, Essays, Plays, and Sundry Verses, ed. A. R. Waller (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906), pp. 389-91.
33 Cotton, Poems, pp. 45-48.
34 The Works of the English Poets, ed. Alexander Chalmers, 21 vols. (London,
1810), vol. VIII, pp. 267-68.
35 Dryden, Poems, vol. 1, p. 436.
36 Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell, ed. Claude Rawson and F. P. Lock
(Newark: University of Delaware Press/London and Toronto: Associated Uni-
versity Presses, 1989), pp. 111-13.
37 Winchilsea, Poems, pp. 68-77, 2.68-70.
38 Parnell, Poems, pp. 168-71.
39 John Dyer, Gongar Hill, ed. Richard C. Boys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
40 Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 227, 309-10, 172-73, 246.
41 Thomas Traherne, Poems, Centuries and Three Thanksgivings, ed. Anne Ridler
(London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 63, 134, 36-37, 8.
42 Isaac Watts, Horae Lyricae (1706; London, 1779), p. 186.
43 The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh, ed. Margaret J. M. Ezell (New
York and London: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 3-10, 124-25, 169, 201.
44 Isaac Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1707-1748, ed. Selma L. Bishop
(London: Faith Press, 1962), pp. liv, 71.
45 Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 45.
46 The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1963), pp. 247-48.
47 Dryden, Poems, vol. 1, p. 389.
48 Cowley, "The First Nemean Ode of Pindar," stanza 6 in Cowley, Poems, p. 173.
49 Oldham, Poems, pp. 196, 199.
141

JOSHUA SCODEL
50 Pope, Poems, pp. 262-64.

51 Ibid., pp. 473,498.
52 Elizabeth Rowe, Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse, 2 vols. (1739; 3rd
edn. London: 1750), vol. 1, p. 112.
5 3 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems and Simplicityy A Comedy, ed.
Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 278.
FURTHER READING
Barash, Carol, English Women's Poetry, 1649-1-714: Politics, Community, and
Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Cohen, Ralph, "On the Interrelations of Eighteenth-Century Literary Forms," in
Phillip Harth (ed.), New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Literature (New
York and London: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 33-78.
Davie, Donald, The Eighteenth-Century Hymn in England (Cambridge: Cambridge
Hobby, Elaine, Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing, 1649-1688
(London: Virago Press, 1988).
Miner, Earl, Dry den's Poetry (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press,
1971).
The Restoration Mode from Milton to Dry den (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
Morris, David B., The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in
i8th-Century England (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1972).
Rostvig, Maren-Sofie, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical
Ideal, 1600-iyoo, 2 vols. (Oslo: Oslo University Press, 1954-58).
Scodel, Joshua, The English Poetic Epitaph: Conflict and Commemoration from
Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Smith, Nigel, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1994).
Weinbrot, Howard D., Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from
Dry den to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Williams, Anne, Prophetic Strain: The Greater Lyric in the Eighteenth Century
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Williams, Marilyn L., Raising their Voices; British Women Writers, 1650-1-750
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990).
Zwicker, Steven N., Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture,
1649-1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
142

7
PAUL HAMMOND
Classical texts: translations and

transformations
In what respects is Andrew Marvell's "Horatian Ode" an Horatian ode?

Marvell and his contemporaries gathered their ideas of Horace and of
Horatian odes from a variety of sources. They would have read the Latin
text of Horace's poetry in editions which surrounded it with glosses, notes,
parallel passages, and perhaps a prose paraphrase; they would have
practiced translating and imitating Horace's poetry at school; they would
have read English translations and imitations of Horace by writers such as
Jonson or Milton. Horace, therefore, was already a complex text for
readers of Marvell's poem, a text which they fashioned for themselves out
of all these interpretative materials. Horace's odes spoke of private and
domestic experiences - love and desire, both homosexual and heterosexual;
friendship and the pleasures of conviviality; the passage of time and the
poignant delight which may attend an awareness of life's passing. The
poetry also spoke of the great public events which were shaping Rome
under Augustus, though often addressing such matters at a tangent,
cautious about how a private citizen might speak to power or understand
history, and jealous of the poet's precarious independence. It was perhaps
with a teasingly deliberate naivety that Horace wrote:
Vertue, Dear Friend, needs no defence,

The surest Guard is innocence;
None knew till Guilt created Fear
What Darts or poyson'd Arrows were.1
For many seventeenth-century poets and readers, virtue was to be sought in
innocent pastoral retirement, and this ideal was often imagined through
material taken from Horace, notably his Epode n on the delights of
country life.2 But virtue does need defense in a period of civil upheaval such
as both Horace and Marvell experienced; and much as Horace might praise
the delights of the retired life on his Sabine farm, there might be times when
retirement itself was no longer a virtue. And so,

PAUL HAMMOND
The forward Youth that would appear

Must now forsake his Muses dear,
Nor in the Shadows sing
His Numbers languishing.
Tis time to leave the Books in dust,
And oyl th'unused Armours rust:
Removing from the Wall
The Corslet of the Hall.
(Marvell, "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland", lines 1-8)
As readers pondered the significance of Marvell's invocation of Horace,

they would recognize certain features of the ode as approximating to
Horace's methods. The verse form mirrors one of Horace's meters, and
there is a comparably adroit management of tone and voice through teasing
shifts in subject matter and perspective which challenge readers to negotiate
transitions and make connections, so allowing political implications to
emerge obliquely rather than as directly authorial observations. Like some
of Horace's odes, Marvell's poem addresses the movement of public affairs,
and through the shifts in tone and contents it speaks of the precariousness
of our powers of recognition and representation, the difficulty of turning
our present experiences into an historical narrative.
But as we read into the poem, its manipulation of Horatian motifs, and
of other kinds of classical Roman material, becomes puzzling, teasing us in
a way which is perhaps not too dissimilar to Horace's own style. The poem
deploys a Latinate vocabulary and philosophical framework: we are in a
world of temples (line 22), gods (line 61), Fortune (line 113) and Fate (line
37), but this classicizing is problematic. Since some had thought that it was
primarily Charles Fs devout adherence to the Church of England which led
him to the scaffold, to associate him with "the Gods" is to traduce rather
than translate, or is at best a tendentious translation. So too when
Cromwell, who continually referred his military successes to divine Provi-
dence, is called "the Wars and Fortunes Son," this translation of English
history into a Roman idiom is more than an elegant classicizing gesture, it
questions the very language through which Cromwell represented his
motives to himself and to observers. Later we are told that Cromwell is
"still in the Republick's hand," but the word "republic" is also problematic.
A Latin term, it used to mean in English simply "the state" or "the public
sphere." After the execution of the king in 1649 England was a republic in
the usual modern sense, but the word itself was not commonly used to
describe the new state, which was instead officially called the "Common-
wealth and Free State." 3 It was not clear, when Marvell was writing in
1650, who or what constituted "the republic": the Roman term does not
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quite pass into modern English speech. Because of the poem's Roman
allusions, we are more sensitive than usual to the word's Roman history
and its imperfect naturalization, and so we are led to hear a strangeness in
its usage. Moreover, there are unsettling associations if we trace the word
back to Horace's time, for Augustus had, in effect though not in name,
abolished the Roman republic with its liberties and instituted a monarchy,
even while avoiding the hated name of king.
Similarly, the poem's use of allusions to Julius Caesar is problematic.
Cromwell's forceful rise unseated Charles,
And Caesars head at last
Did through his Laurels blast. (lines 23-24)
Caesar here stands for Charles I, both rulers who were killed because they
were thought to pose a threat to the people's liberties; but later in the poem
Caesar is now Cromwell:
A Caesar he ere long to Gaul,
To Italy an Hannibal. (lines 101-02)
Here Cromwell is the Caesar who expanded the Roman empire through his
foreign conquests, and yet since Caesar's untimely end has already been
alluded to, it is difficult to expunge that part of his story from our memory
as we ponder this image. But Cromwell is also aligned here with Hannibal,
the foreigner who invaded Italy to destroy Rome, but was himself destroyed
in the attempt. What does that suggest about Cromwell's future? These
allusions appear at first to locate Cromwell in a clear narrative of military
success, and yet if we remind ourselves of the original Roman contexts,
they turn into narratives of hubris and nemesis.
These various allusions suggest parallels, both large-scale and local,
between England in 1650 and Rome in the years after its civil wars had
ended but before the triumph of Augustus was secure. But the parallels are
fragmentary, inconsistent, and contradictory, suggestive (teasing, even)
rather than definitive, disturbing us and through their interaction disturbing
one another. The reader faces a complex interpretative problem, as no
coherent narrative pattern is able to triumph. The experience of reading the
"Horatian Ode" with Horace's own odes in mind becomes a lesson in the
complexities of reading history and reading the present.
The local and structural tensions in Marvell's use of classical precedent
are paralleled on a larger scale in his contemporaries' political uses of
Roman material. The Parliamentarian Thomas May translated Lucan's
poem on the Roman civil war,4 Edmund Waller celebrated Cromwell as
Augustus,5 and the Protectoral coinage depicted Cromwell as a Roman

PAUL HAMMOND
emperor, but Roman history and iconography were not used with any
consistency to forge a new civic idiom. Meanwhile, Royalist writers turned
to the translation of Latin poetry as a way of making coded statements of
their loyalty to the defeated cause.6 And some distrusted the classics
altogether: from contrasting ideological standpoints extreme Puritans con-
demned all classical learning as ungodly, while Hobbes blamed the dis-
content which led to the Civil War on too much reading of classical
histories.7 The reading of contemporary events via classical texts was as
unsettled and unsettling as the times themselves.
John Dryden, too, pondered Roman examples as he wrote about Cromwell.

In his Heroic Stanzas Cromwell's funeral becomes a Roman rite, where the
sacred eagle is released to fly over the pyre, and the hero's ashes rest in a
sacred urn (lines 1-4; 145). Other allusions cast Cromwell as a quasi-
Roman ruler:
When past all Offerings to Feretrian Jove
He Mars depos'd, and Arms to Gowns made yield, (lines 77-78)
The first allusion associates Cromwell with Romulus, the founder of the
Roman state, who dedicated arms which he had captured in battle to
Jupiter Feretrius, while the phrase "Arms to Gowns made yield" echoes
Cicero's description of his own consulship, cedant arma togae ("let arms
yield to the toga" - the toga being the dress of peace). The poem's allusions
and vocabulary classicize Cromwell not by suggesting a single point of
comparison with Roman history (which would link past and present in an
allegorical or typological reading) but by suggesting that England might be
able to fashion equivalent but idiomatic classical forms and structures.
Dryden may be attempting to shape a classical republican aesthetic in these
sober quatrains, but like the concurrent development of a Puritan classicism
in architecture,8 it was short-lived.
The association of England and Rome is rethought in Astraea Redux, the
poem in which Dryden greets the return of Charles II, and with him the
return of Astraea, goddess of justice. Here the association which Dryden
develops (in common with many of his contemporaries, who found the
analogy irresistible) is that of Charles and Augustus, and the Latin quota-
tion which Dryden places as the epigraph to his poem - iam redit et virgo,
redeunt Saturnia regna ("now the goddess returns, the reign of Saturn
returns") - brings into play Virgil's fourth Eclogue and its promise of a
golden age under Augustus. Time present is renewed by a recovery of time
past.
But the past which is being recovered in this trope is not an historical
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moment but an already mythologized time, not Rome but Virgil's hopes for
Rome. Dryden knew, of course, that such mythologies have only an
hortatory force, no predictive or definitive power, and the actual poetry
which establishes such parallels is apt to underline their fictive status. As
Paul de Man observes, "A literary text simultaneously asserts and denies
the authority of its own rhetorical mode ... Poetic writing is the most
advanced and refined mode of deconstruction."9 Dryden's uses of classical
reference - like MarvelPs in the "Horatian Ode" - tend to set to work in
the text a semiotic movement which cannot be contained, for these
invocations of Rome lead readers into a complex world, the imaginative
world of a poem in which time and space are both English and Roman, and
so not quite either, and where the English language is made to disclose its
Latin roots: we hear another language resonating through Dryden's
English.
Annus Mirabilis is a good example of a poem which uses Latin pre-texts
both to construct an interpretation of the present and at the same time to
set in motion (as all true poetic language must) a deconstruction of the
authority of that interpretation. A Virgilian thread running through the
fabric of Dryden's poem invites us to see a parallel between the burning of
London in the Great Fire of 1666 and the destruction of Troy as told in the
Aeneid. The allusion is present in the epigraph from Aeneid 11, urbs antiqua
ruit, multos dominata per annos ("The ancient city falls, having dominated
for many years"), and in a series of tiny echoes which shape the texture of
the work. For example, when Dryden writes that the homeless Londoners
"repeat what they would shun" (line 1028), he is using "repeat" in the
Latin sense of "encounter again," and recalling the moment when Aeneas
says urbem repeto ("I encounter the city again": Aeneid 11. 749) in telling of
his escape from the flames of Troy. But set alongside these Virgilian signals
- which move the account toward epic, so dignifying subject, writer, and
reader - there are other Latin texts drawn into the poem's imaginative
world. Lines adapted from Ovid describing an exhausted hare pursued by a
dog evoke our sympathy for the plight of the weary sailors in the Dutch
war (lines 521-28), reminding us that military success has its human price;
while verses adapted from Petronius speak of man wandering blindly in the
dark empire of Fortune (lines 125-40), a philosophical vision which clearly
works in tension with the poem's assertions that the hand of God is directly
guiding the nation's history. What this mixing of classical material achieves
is a complex texture (complex, that is, both linguistically and philosophi-
cally) which invites the reader to see parallels between his experience and
Roman history, while at the same time setting to work a deconstructive
movement between the various components which questions the stability of
147

PAUL HAMMOND
these conceptual structures. The result is neither a glib mystification of

power nor a nihilistic destruction of meaning, but a responsibly complex
meditation on the acts of representation and of reading. It is a poem
written by a man whose study housed annotated editions of Virgil alongside
newsbooks and manuscript satires, where Lucretius and St. Paul inhabited
the same space.
This deployment of allusion and quotation is one kind of translation

between Roman and Restoration culture: another is the formal translation
of complete poems into modern English. Dryden was the unrivaled master
of translation in his age, and in the course of his career he turned
increasingly to this mode of writing. This was partly for commercial
reasons, since translations began to find a market (ably exploited by
Dryden's publisher, Jacob Tonson) among both lovers of the classics and a
growing reading public which lacked Latin and Greek (including women
readers). It was partly also for political reasons, since the Revolution of
1688-89 displaced Dryden from his positions as Poet Laureate and
Historiographer Royal, and compelled him to find new ways of writing
poetry and history: translation offered an opportunity for oblique commen-
tary on the times. But primarily there was throughout his later life a strong
imaginative and philosophical necessity for Dryden to translate the classics,
since he had a dramatist's fascination with the play of different voices, and
a skeptic's reluctance to adhere to any single system.
Dryden's formal translations began with versions from the Heroides for
Ovid's Epistles (1680), where he took on the voices of women embroiled in
tragic love affairs; then he rendered portions of Virgil, Lucretius, Horace,
and Theocritus for the first two of Tonson's anthologies, Miscellany Poems
and Sylvae (1684-85); several of Juvenal's satires and all of Persius for a
collected translation which he supervised and prefaced with a long essay on
satire (1693); t n e n t n e complete works of Virgil (1697); and finally tales
from Homer and Ovid alongside Chaucer and Boccaccio in the crowning
achievement of his career, Fables Ancient and Modern (1700).
In the preface to Ovid's Epistles Dryden summarized the varied methods
of translation current in his day. Some translators (like Ben Jonson with
Horace's Ars Poetica) used metaphrase, a close word-by-word rendering
which was liable to result in stilted, unidiomatic English; others (like
Waller with the fourth book of the Aeneid) used paraphrase, translating
with some latitude; while a third group practiced imitation, a transposition
of the original not only into the English language but into the contemporary
social world, peopling the text with modern references. Dryden cites
Cowley's versions of Pindar as examples of imitation, and this form of
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Classical texts
translation had been practiced by Rochester in An Allusion to Horace, and

would be developed with great verve by Oldham and Pope. Dryden's own
practice as a translator generally follows the middle path, with some
diversions into imitation: he seems to have been concerned to produce
neither a close crib for those who wanted the bones of the Latin poem, nor
a virtuoso variation on classical themes to divert contemporaries, but an
imaginative recreation of the voice of the original, paying attention not
only to the poet's ideas but to his persona and style.
The translations which Dryden produced in this middle way are poems
which situate themselves between England and Rome. As an example we
may take his translation of Horace's Epode n, which tells of the delights of
a country life. Dryden does not consistently preserve Horace's references to
the Italian countryside as Jonson had done in his version; neither does he
simply transpose it into an English setting, as Oldham had chosen to do
with Horace's Ode I. xxxi, which he transferred to the Cotswolds. Instead,
he fashions a poetic world in which Roman references can coexist with a
plausibly English life. As a sample of his working methods, here is the
opening:
How happy in his low degree,

How rich in humble Poverty, is he,
Who leads a quiet country life!
Discharg'd of business, void of strife,
And from the gripeing Scrivener free.
(Thus e're the Seeds of Vice were sown,
Liv'd men in better Ages born,
Who Plow'd with Oxen of their own
Their small paternalfieldof corn.)
Nor Trumpets summon him to War
Nor drums disturb his morning Sleep,
Nor knows he Merchants gainful care,
Nor fears the dangers of the deep.
The clamours of contentious Law,
And Court and state he wisely shuns,
Nor brib'd with hopes nor dar'd with awe
To servile Salutations runs.
("From Horace, Epod. 2d.," lines 1-17)
This is neither metaphrase nor paraphrase nor imitation, but a version

which is often close to the Latin while sometimes adding whole lines (lines
2-3, 7, and 11-12 are additions, while others are substantial expansions of
single words or short phrases). 10 This world seems to belong recognizably
to Horace's Italy, where men grow vines and plow with oxen, but also
149

PAUL HAMMOND
recognizably to Dryden's England, where men eat turbot and complain of

scriveners. (A scrivener was a money-lender, and at the end of the poem we
discover that this praise of country life has been spoken by a money-lender
called Morecraft - a name from the English tradition of satirical comedy.)
And many of the details of this imagined world are comfortably common
to England and Italy (the sheep, the mead, the mallows). In lines 14-15
Dryden eliminates the specifically Roman reference in forumque vitat ("and
he avoids the Forum"), and by choosing the word "Court" he allows the
reader to see both the lawcourt and the king's court as oppressive places.
Dryden has made the moral thought of the poem more explicit, adding the
striking quasi-biblical paradox in line 2, while in line 16 he anticipates a
reference later in the poem to larks who are caught by being "dared"
(dazzled with mirrors), using this as an image of men helplessly intimidated
by power. Some of the vocabulary is taken from the seventeenth-century
English tradition of writing about the joys of rural retirement: "How
happy" and "quiet" and "business" are part of this hallowed vocabulary,
and help to evoke in the reader's mind that collection of morally informed
meditations on the countryside. Some of the phrasing has been influenced
by other Latin poets: line 7 comes not from Horace but from Virgil's
magnanimi heroes nati melioribus annis ("great heroes born in better
times") in Aeneid Book vi. Other ideas are prompted by the glosses in the
editions which Dryden was using: from the 1605 commentary by Lubinus
the phrase lucri spe ("hope of gain") seems to have suggested line 12, which
has no equivalent in Horace. The vocabulary has occasionally resulted
from a careful perusal of previous translations both in English and in
French, for Dryden apparently noted down "void of" from Alexander
Brome's version and "decharge" from Otto van Veen's (which prompted
"discharged"). Other phrases have been shaped by recollections of Spenser,
of Cowley's Essays, Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, and other poems by
Horace. So what Dryden is fashioning here is not only a translation of
Horace's Epode 11, but a concentrated meditation on the poem and the
questions which it raises, with its vocabulary bringing into play a tradition
of both classical and contemporary thought.
Dryden turned to classical translation particularly as a way of moving
aside from the contingencies of the present to imagine other ways of living,
and to manage the incoherence and instability of life. The skeptical
sensibility which led him to weave together such different philosophical
strands in Annus Mirabilis drew him also to translate parts of Lucretius's
passionately argued account of the universe as a collection of atoms in
random motion, a world in which the individual consciousness arises from
and returns to chaos. But Lucretius's philosophy also encourages man to
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Classical texts
seek tranquillity of mind, and Dryden responded to this by selecting

passages "Against the Fear of Death" and "Concerning the Nature of
Love," where Lucretius urges us not to be anxiously possessed by the fear
of death, or obsessed with the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Equanimity is the
goal of this text, and indeed the goal of many of Dryden's translations:
readers are brought to take possession of themselves more profoundly by
making this detour through the philosophies of the ancient world. The
movement away from contemporary England and the compromises of
public life does not take us into a private world of untroubled communion
with the classics, but into a variety of contrasting, competing textual
worlds which challenge us to rethink ourselves.
The translation of Virgil which occupied much of Dryden's attention
after the Revolution is the epic, the national poem, which the nation could
not have, and did not, perhaps, deserve. While the supremacy of epic as a
genre was widely acknowledged, and some writers, including Milton and
Dryden, had aspired to write an epic on British history, the epics of this
period all refuse, in some way, to be poems of nationhood: Paradise Lost
meditates on the failure of the English nation to respond to its God-given
freedom, while The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad use epic strategies
to reveal the impoverished values of social and literary coteries. The nation
has no epic; the epic has no nation.
Dryden's Aeneis begins with lines which hover between Rome and
England:
Arms, and the Man I sing, who, forc'd by Fate,

And haughty Juno's unrelenting Hate,
Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan Shoar:
Long Labours, both by Sea and Land he bore,
And in the doubtful War, before he won
The Latian Realm, and built the destin'd Town:
His banish'd Gods restor'd to Rites Divine,
And setPd sure Succession in his Line:
From whence the Race of Alban Fathers come,
And the long Glories of Majestick Rome. (Book i, lines I-IO)
While Dryden preserves the Roman proper names, some of the phrasing
here invites us to recall the recent political history of England as we read.
The phrase "expelled and exiled" might prompt memories of the expelled
and exiled James II, while line 7 is a curiously free translation of inferretque
deos ("and brought in his gods"): the Latin verb does not mean "brought
back" so the stress on return and restoration is Dryden's own. Line 8 is
entirely Dryden's addition, and seems to recall the disturbed succession to

PAUL HAMMOND
the English throne. "Alban Fathers" is an exact translation of Albanique

patres, but readers who have by now been alerted to undercurrents in the
text may remember that James had been Duke of Albany, and had been
celebrated by Dryden under the allegorical title of Albanius in the opera
Albion and Albanius (1685). Ironically, it is this absolutely faithful transla-
tion of Albanique patres which permits a reading which leaves faithful
interpretation far behind. But then, keeping faith is exactly what both
Virgil and Dryden, in their different ways, are concerned with. This
teasingly unfaithful yet faithful opening to the Aeneis sets these issues
working in the mind of the reader, and the irresolvable tensions of the
initial paragraph initiate us into a complex mode of reading. Dryden is
opening the poem out to include England, without making it an allegory of
English history. The temporary association of Aeneas and James is quickly
shown not to be allegorical as the poem itself rapidly deconstructs the
rhetorical scheme which it had appeared to offer: the present tense in
"come" takes the poem into a present in which the long-established glories
of Rome are still flourishing. This present tense would be appropriate for
Virgil, writing when Rome was indeed still glorious, though in fact the
Latin lacks a verb here, and so does not specify any tense. It is Dryden's
translation which, by creating this emphatic but impossible present - a time
in which the Alban fathers and the glories of Rome are fully present -
makes us recognize our own separation from such a time, and our
displacement from such a rich kind of nationhood. It establishes for the
duration of the poem a milieu which is neither Rome nor England, but a
placing and displacing of both.
It was also by the translation and imitation of classical texts that Alexander
Pope shaped a world which he could control, a milieu in which his friends
and enemies appeared translated, some like Bottom sporting an ass's head,
others made into sometimes equally unrecognizable models of sophistica-
tion and generosity. Underlying much of Pope's writing in this mode is a
vision of the impossibility of Britain having an Augustan age, if that
entailed taste and decency being promoted by rulers rather than flourishing
in private enclaves of classical culture and embattled patriotism. The
Dunciad is an epic not about the founding of empires, as the Aeneid had
been, but about the displacement of literary achievements and civic values
by a bizarre gallimaufry of tasteless entertainments and witless writing,
presided over by a travesty king. In this empire of dulness, where "Dunce
the second reigns like Dunce the first" (The Dunciad Book 1, line 6), the
responsibilities of the poet can, it seems, only be exercised through travesty:
the ironic distancing of the contemporary world from the classical past is
152

Classical texts
both the appropriate tribute which the modern writer pays to his classic
predecessors, and the necessary means by which he asserts his own taste
and judgment and independence. In The Dunciad Pope fills a poem with
writers, scholars, actors, clowns, and publishers, and surrounds it with a
critical apparatus which mimics the variorum commentaries in Renaissance
classical texts. Paradoxically, the lavish mise-en-page of this poetry pro-
claims its own value at the same time as it offers itself as a satire on the
encrustation of classic texts by editorial secretions. The poem comes
accompanied by a ready-made critical tradition, ostensibly saving readers
the labor of thinking for themselves. And yet, of course, it is precisely in
order to maneuver readers into shaping their own interpretative space and
fashioning their own commentary on literary and political affairs, that
Pope creates such an elaborate textual playground.
In the Imitations of Horace Pope invites the reader to make comparisons
with Horace's own epistles and satires, and to see Pope as a second Horace.
In contrast with Oldham's imitations of Horace, where a lone voice spoke
against the age, and was content to publish his work anonymously, Pope's
collection is an exercise in self-promotion which also delineates a Horatian
circle of named friends, including Arbuthnot and Swift. Yet there is a
problem with replicating Horace's recurring references to his patron
Maecenas. Viscount Bolingbroke is paralleled with Maecenas in "Epistles
of Horace. Book I. Epistle I," but "The Seventh Epistle of the First Book of
Horace" (addressed in the original to Maecenas) is addressed by Pope to an
unspecified lord, while in "The Sixth Satire of the Second Book of Horace"
(to which Swift and Pope both contributed) Maecenas is paralleled with
Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. The absence of a single, dominating
Maecenas is partly a mark of Pope's independence, for he had had sufficient
commercial success as a man of letters not to need the practical financial
help of a patron. But it also suggests that the trio of ruler, patron, and poet
represented classically by Augustus, Maecenas, and Horace cannot be
replicated in early eighteenth-century England because there is no Au-
gustus. Bolingbroke, who was probably the nearest equivalent to Maecenas
in Pope's life, as a source of political and philosophical ideas if not of
forms, was himself displaced and at odds with the country's rulers, for he
was a Tory statesman whose public influence ended when the Hanoverian
line succeeded, and he fled abroad to join the Pretender. When Pope was
writing his imitation of Epistle I. i in 1738, Bolingbroke was back in
England, but only on a brief visit before returning to his retirement in
France. Readers who register Pope's difficulty in establishing a convincing
modern parallel for Maecenas thereby register much of his own displace-
ment from public affairs. And yet these local tensions between past and

PAUL HAMMOND
present cumulatively work to suggest rather that it is the rule of the

Georges which has displaced the country from its true culture and its true
origin.
Pope's "First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated" defines this
displacement through a teasing reworking of the Latin original which
Horace had addressed to Augustus. Writing in 1737, Pope apparently
addresses George II, who had been christened Augustus. At first, the
coincidence looks even more heaven-sent than the Augustan parallel which
delighted Dryden's contemporaries when Charles II returned in 1660. But
for Pope nothing about the Hanoverians was heaven-sent. The very title
warns the reader to be alert when interpreting the poem, for it includes an
epigraph which comes (with disingenuous simplicity) from the Latin text:
Ne rubeam, pingui donatus munerel ("I hope that I may not blush at
having given such a stupid gift"). The gift was, in one sense, self-evidently
stupid, because George II was notoriously insensitive to poetry; and so this
apparent act of homage begins the work of its self-deconstruction before
we have even read a line of Pope's English, simply through a straight
quotation from Horace.
This imitation includes passages whose ironies even a Hanoverian might
be thought capable of perceiving, but many of its deadliest effects derive
from Pope's trust in the ability of his readers to compare the English with
the Latin, to note subtle adjustments, and to register additions and
omissions: even silence speaks. Both Horace and Pope begin with an
address in the second person direct to the ruler, and Horace delays the
moment when he names Augustus as the recipient of this poem until a
suitably climactic moment at the end of the fourth line, when he calls him
"Caesar," a title which associated Augustus with his predecessor and
adoptive father Julius Caesar, warrior, statesman, and god. Pope too delays,
using in the first line an ostensibly grand (but on careful inspection,
vacuous and ironic) phrase "great Patron of Mankind"; but in this case
there is no climactic name to follow. It is not simply that none of the names
which Pope might have wished to call George II were printable, but that
this refusal to implement a similarly powerful act of naming (which in
Horace was an act of praise, an affirmation of Augustus's legitimacy and
his place in history) deprives George II of a secure place in the poem and in
the English language. This suspension places him in limbo, declining to
define his relation to Augustus, as if the two names could not possibly
appear together in the syntax of cultural history.
Among the various places where Pope's text diverges from that of
Horace is the reference to servile writers who praise:

Classical texts
some monster of a King,

Or Virtue, or Religion turn to sport,
To please a lewd, or un-believing Court. (lines 210-12)
By consulting the Latin text which was conveniently placed alongside the
English, readers could see that there is no justification for this in the
original. Also added to Horace here is the reference to Swift as a poet
whose writings defended Ireland and made good the deficiency of the laws;
by noticing that there is no precedent in Horace for this, we take the point
that in the reign of Augustus poets did not need to act to defend public
interests which government and law neglected. In such places we note the
absence of any Latin pretext for Pope's English; elsewhere we realize that
there is, damningly, no English equivalent available for Horace's Latin
when he praises Augustus for his discriminating critical judgment in
favoring the poets Virgil and Varius. His gifts to them have redounded to
the credit of the giver, says Horace (Pope lines 389-90; Horace lines 245-
47). Pope's silence tells us that no contemporary English equivalent is
imaginable.
As silence speaks, so too does slyly inexact translation. A significant
mismatch of English and Latin occurs at the point when Pope is describing
the staging of the coronation scene from Shakespeare's Henry VIII. In his
note to line 319, Pope observes that in a recent performance "the Armour
of one of the Kings of England was borrowed from the Tower, to dress the
Champion" (Pope's note at line 319), the champion being one of Pope's
many betes noires, Colly Cibber. Whereas Horace is concerned only about
the low Roman taste for spectacle, Pope's example extends beyond this
point to suggest that in a world where the armour of the English kings can
be borrowed and turned into stage props, the coronation of George II
(which had taken place just two weeks before Cibber's performance) is a
similarly empty charade, a borrowing of regalia and titles to which a
Hanoverian has no better claim than any other actor.
Another mismatch invites interpretation when Horace's allusion to the
library established by Augustus on the Palatine hill as part of the complex
around the temple of Apollo is paralleled by a reference to Merlin's Cave
(line 355). This was a thatched house with gothic windows established in
the royal gardens at Richmond, containing wax figures of Merlin and his
secretary, two Tudor queens, and two characters out of Ariosto, a poet who
had celebrated the Hanoverians' ancestors. As part of the decoration of this
"cave" the king ordered a collection of English books to be installed. The
site is therefore an attempt to legitimize the Hanoverians by associating
them with ancient British historical legend and with the Tudor monarchy.

PAUL HAMMOND
The contrast between this self-serving and grotesque fabrication and the
Palatine library makes embarrassingly clear the gap between the two
cultures.
If Horace helped Pope to define culture, Homer helped him to define

nature. What Pope said of Virgil might also be said of Pope himself:
"Nature and Homer were, he found, the same" (An Essay on Criticism, line
135). Homer was the primary genius, not simply the first poet but the
originary poet. 11 In the Preface to his translation of the Iliad, Pope credits
Homer with supreme powers of invention (principally in the Latin sense of
inventio, the discovery of material), for he saw nature with such clarity and
reported it with such force that "no Man of a true Poetical Spirit is Master
of himself while he reads him" (Poems, vol. vn, p. 4). Homer indeed saw
the animation of the material world ("An Arrow is impatient to be on the
Wing, a Weapon thirsts to drink the Blood of an Enemy" [Poems, vol. vn,
p. 10]), but by "Nature" Pope primarily means "how the world is" or "how
human beings behave": the basic nature of man is Homer's subject, and
Pope's subject too.
In his translation of the Iliad Pope made his understanding of Homer as
a moral writer explicit in notes which analyze Homer's conception of the
principal characteristics of his heroes: "he has plac'd Pride with Magnani-
mity in Agamemnon, and Craft with Prudence in Ulysses. And thus we
must take his Achilles, not as a meer heroick dispassion'd Character, but as
compounded of Courage and Anger" (Pope's note to Iliad Book 1, line
155). Whether or not this now seems a plausible account of ancient Greek
psychology, it is a reading which neatly fits with Pope's own understanding
of man as a creature driven by ruling passions, as set out in his Epistle to
Cobham. And it is Pope's own mode of moral thought which often shapes
the way he translates the Greek verse. Here he is at a moment in Book 1
which might have specially appealed to him, when Achilles confronts
Agamemnon, the supreme commander of the Greek army, who has just
tried to appropriate one of Achilles' prisoners. Pope shows us a man telling
his ruler that he is behaving unjustly:
O Tyrant, arm'd with Insolence and Pride!

Inglorious Slave to Int'rest, ever join'd
With Fraud, unworthy of a Royal Mind.
What gen'rous Greek obedient to thy Word,
Shall form an Ambush, or shall lift the Sword?
What Cause have I to war at thy Decree?
The distant Trojans never injur'd me.
To Pthia's Realms no hostile Troops they led;
156

Classical texts
Safe in her Vales my warlike Coursers fed:

Far hence remov'd, the hoarse-resounding Main
And Walls of Rocks, secure my native Reign,
Whose fruitful Soil luxuriant Harvests grace,
Rich in her Fruits, and in her martial Race.
Hither we sail'd, a voluntary Throng,
T'avenge a private, not a publick Wrong:
What else to Troy th'assembled Nations draws,
But thine, Ungrateful, and thy Brother's Cause?
(Book i, lines 194-210)
Pope's reworking of Homer begins by translating Agamemnon from a

military commander into a tyrant whose behavior is paradoxically dis-
turbing the natural hierarchy: although a ruler he has made himself morally
a slave. He is all the more servile, in fact, the more he deploys his power in
the service of his self-interest, which is shown to be his ruling passion. It is
not control so much as self-control that concerns Pope here, a general
moral lesson which he takes Homer to be illustrating. The Greek soldiers,
by contrast with Agamemnon, are truly noble (the meaning of "generous"
here). All this moral placing of Agamemnon has been added by Pope to
Homer's confrontation between the two generals, as has the distinction
between private and public in line 208. Pope's habit of expounding the
moral issues in a generalized vocabulary, however, can lead him away from
the unsettling directness of Homer's Greek: Pope's Achilles cannot be
allowed to call Agamemnon anything like Homer's kunopa, metaphorically
"shameless" but literally "dog-eyed." For Pope the moral force of "Ungrate-
ful" is quite strong enough.
By way of comparison, here is Dryden's version of the same passage:
O, Impudent, regardful of thy own,

Whose Thoughts are center'd on thy self alone,
Advanced to Sovereign Sway, for better Ends
Than thus like abject Slaves to treat thy Friends.
What Greek is he, that urg'd by thy Command,
Against the Trojan Troops will lift his Hand?
Not I: Nor such inforc'd Respect I owe;
Nor Pergamus I hate, nor Priam is my Foe.
What Wrong from Troy remote, cou'd I sustain,
To leave my fruitful Soil, and happy Reign,
And plough the Surges of the stormy Main?
Thee, frontless Man, we follow'd from afar;
Thy Instruments of Death, and Tools of War.
Thine is the Triumph; ours the Toil alone:
157

PAUL HAMMOND
We bear thee on our Backs, and mount thee on the Throne.

For thee we fall in Fight; for thee redress
Thy baffled Brother; not the Wrongs of Greece.
("The First Book of Homer's Ilias," lines 225-41; in Fables Ancient and Modern)
Dryden was a dramatist, as we can hear in these lines which ask to be

declaimed, for his rhythms are more varied than Pope's, and the passage
effectively combines swelling periods with terse phrases such as "Not I."
We can see that Pope has taken some of his vocabulary from Dryden, but
the two translators generally find quite different interests in the passage.
For Dryden, what needs to be stressed is that Agamemnon, having been
made a king for the sake of the public good, has now turned his subjects
into slaves. Though Pope picks up Dryden's word "slave," the moral issue
for him primarily concerns the government of the passions. Dryden's
Achilles harps on the theme of the Greeks being reduced to mere instru-
ments and tools, even (in an image which makes Agamemnon into a
barbarian monarch) reduced to being trodden on as the ruler ascends the
throne. None of Dryden's emphasis on the individual being brutally
subjected to the power of the ruler is present in Pope, or, indeed, in Homer.
While these brief passages cannot be taken as representative of the two
translations, they do illustrate that to translate is to transform.
The translator is, whether implicitly or explicitly, implicated in a myth of

origins. He has an original text in front of him, but in only a limited sense
could Pope's copy of Homer or Marvell's copy of Horace be thought of as
supplying the "original" text. The text is always already reconstructed. Nor
was the trope of originality itself original: what Pope said of Homer's
unrivaled proximity to Nature, Dryden had already said more eloquently
of Shakespeare. 12 And Dryden had also reminded his readers that the
Greeks were not the originators of European culture:
Whether the fruitful Nile, or Tyrian Shore,
The seeds of Arts and Infant Science bore,
'Tis sure the noble Plant, translated first,
Advanc'd its head in Grecian Gardens nurst.
("To the Earl of Roscommon, on his excellent
Essay on Translated Verse," lines 1-4)
The Greeks were only the first translators.

Translation reimagines the original according to the ideals of the present,
while redescribing the present in terms of this irrecoverable past. Through
translation, past and present are reciprocally mythologized. But they are
not thereby confused: translation demanded of its practitioners and readers
158

Classical texts
a comparative movement between past and present which enabled a

sharper understanding of their difference. Through poetry's recurring
marks of separation from its supposed origins - its many signs that the
translation is not the original, that England is not Rome, that Pope's
Homer is not Homer's Homer - the culture of the present is made legible.
And the disappointments of the present are made bearable by the consola-
tion that there is a world elsewhere - even if this is, inevitably, always a
Rome recomposed in each reader's imagination.
NOTES
1 Ode i. 22 translated by the Earl of Roscommon; quoted from Horace in
English^ ed. D. S. Carne-Ross and Kenneth Haynes (Harmondsworth, 1996),
p. 114.
2 Epode 11 was translated by Jonson, Cowley, and Dryden; for the tradition of
Horatian meditation in rural retirement see Maren-Sofie R0stvig, The Happy
Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal (Oslo, 1954-58; second
edn. 1962).
3 David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and
Republicanism (Cambridge, 1995), PP- X5> 27-2.8.
4 See David Norbrook, "Lucan, Thomas May, and the Creation of a Republican
Literary Culture," in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in
Early Stuart England (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 45-66.
5 "A Panegyric to My Lord Protector," lines 169-72, in The Poems of Edmund
Waller, ed. G. Thorn Drury, 2 vols. (London, 1901), vol. 11, p. 17.
6 Lawrence Venuti, "The Destruction of Troy: Translation and Royalist Cultural
Politics in the Interregnum," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 23
(1993)> PP- 197-2.19; Timothy Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture
(Newark, 1994), pp. 183-88.
7 Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, or The hong Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tonnies
(London, 1889), p. 3.
8 See Timothy Mowl and Brian Earnshaw, Architecture without Kings (Man-
chester, 1995).
9 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, 1979), p. 17.
10 For details of Dryden's treatment of Horace's original, see the notes in The
Poems of John Dryden: Volume 11: 1682-1685, ed. Paul Hammond (London,
1995), PP-378-85.
11 See Kirsti Simonsuuri, Homer's Original Genius (Cambridge, 1979).
12 Pope's praise of Homer's originality in his Preface to the Iliad echoes Dryden's
praise of Shakespeare's originality in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (The Works
of John Dryden, eds. E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. [Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1956- ], vol. xvn, p. 55), while "Nature and Homer were, he
found, the same" is traced by the Twickenham editors to Dryden's lines on
Shakespeare in his "Prologue to The Tempest" lines 7-8.
159

PAUL HAMMOND
FURTHER READING
For a list of translations from the classics, see the relevant volumes of the Cambridge
Bibliography of English Literature, supplemented by Stuart Gillespie's article, "A
Checklist of Restoration English Translations and Adaptations of Classical Greek
and Latin Poetry, 1660-1700," Translation and Literature, 1 (1991), pp. 52-67.
General works
Erskine-Hill, Howard, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London, 1983).
Lord, George deE, Classical Presences in Seventeenth Century English Poetry (New
Haven, 1987).
Martindale, Charles, and Hopkins, David (eds.), Horace Made New: Horatian
Influences on British Writing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge, 1993).
Rostvig, Maren-Sofie, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical
Ideal, 1600-1700 (Oslo, 1954-58, revised 1962).
Sowerby, Robin, The Classical Legacy in Renaissance Poetry (London, 1994).
Weinbrot, Howard, Augustus Caesar in "Augustan" England (Princeton, 1978).
Dryden
The Works of John Dryden, eds. E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols.
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956- ). This does not yet include the Fables.
The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1958). Particularly
for the Fables.
The Poems of John Dryden: Volume 1: 1649-1681 and Volume 11: 1682-168 5, ed.
Paul Hammond (London, 1985). For detailed annotation to the early transla-
tions.
Bottkol, J. McG., "Dryden's Latin Scholarship," Modern Philology, 40 (1943), PP-
214-54.
Hammond, Paul, "The Integrity of Dryden's Lucretius," Modern Language Review,
78 (1983), pp. 1-23.
"John Dryden: The Classicist as Sceptic," The Seventeenth Century, 4 (1989), pp.
165-87.
John Dryden: A Literary Life (Basingstoke, 1991), chapter 7.
Hopkins, David, "Nature's Laws and Man's: The Story of Cinyras and Myrrha in
Ovid and Dryden," Modern Language Review, 80 (1985), pp. 786-810.
"Dryden and Ovid's 'Wit out of Season,'" in Charles Martindale (ed.), Ovid
Renewed (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 167-90.
Jones, Emrys, "A 'Perpetual Torrent': Dryden's Lucretian Style," in D. L. Patey and
Timothy Keegan (eds.), Augustan Studies: Essays in Honour of Irvin Ehren-
preis (Newark, 1985), pp. 47-63.
Mason, H. A., "The Dream of Happiness," Cambridge Quarterly, 8 (1978), pp. 11-
55 and 9 (1980), pp. 218-71. On the translation of Horace's Epode 11.
"Living in the Present," Cambridge Quarterly, 10 (1981), pp. 91-129. On the
translation of Horace's Ode m. 29.
"The Hallowed Hearth," Cambridge Quarterly, 14 (1985), pp. 205-39. On the
translation of Horace's Ode 1. 9.
160

Classical texts
Reverand, Cedric D., Dryden's Final Poetic Mode: The "Fables" (Philadelphia,
1988).
Sloman, Judith, Dry den: The Poetics of Translation (Toronto, 1985).
Zwicker, Steven N., Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise
(Princeton, 1984).
See also Martindale and Hopkins, Horace Made New, under "General works"
above.
Marvell
The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, third edn.
revised by Pierre Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971).
Coolidge, J. S., "Marvell and Horace," Modern Philology, 63 (1965), pp. 111-20.
Wilson, A. J. N., "Andrew Marvell: An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return
from Ireland: The Thread of the Poem and its Use of Classical Allusion,"
Critical Quarterly, 11 (1969), pp. 325-41.
above.
Oldham
The Poems of John Oldham, ed. Harold F. Brooks and Raman Selden (Oxford,
1987).
Hammond, Paul, John Oldham and the Renewal of Classical Culture (Cambridge,
1983).
Selden, Raman, "Oldham's Versions of the Classics," in Antony Coleman and
Antony Hammond (eds.), Poetry and Drama 1570-1700: Essays in Honour of
Harold F. Brooks (London, 1981), pp. 110-35.
Pope
The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 10
vols. (London, 1938-67).
Mason, H. A., To Homer through Pope (London, 1972).
Stack, Frank, Pope and Horace (Cambridge, 1985).
Williams, Carolyn D., Pope, Homer; and Manliness (London, 1993).
above.
161

8
CEDRIC C. BROWN
"This Islands watchful Centinel": anti-

Catholicism and proto-Whiggery in
Milton and Marvell
To consider the writings of John Milton and Andrew Marvell in a collection

on Restoration and Augustan literature is to focus on the last part of the
careers of two men who had been friends and both employed by the
Cromwellian regime. With Milton this is potentially to consider all three
major poems, Paradise Lost (1667, second edition 1674), Paradise Re-
gained and Samson Agonistes (1671), and a small number of prose
pamphlets, chiefly Of True Religion (1674), and some printings of earlier
work issued before his death at age nearly sixty-six in late 1674. With
Marvell it is to consider a range of political writing connected with his
parliamentary experience until his sudden death at agefifty-sevenin 1678,
that is, a number of satirical poems (with many others of uncertain
attribution), a few occasional poems, and some influential prose works.1 It
is also to look at the way their oppositional roles were interpreted in the
politics of the 1660s and 1670s. That was influenced in turn by their earlier
activities and in the case of Milton by a lot of previous well-known political
writing. Beyond that it is to see, too, how those writings were appropriated
by the Whigs from the late 1670s, for both Milton and Marvell, despite
various prejudices against them, achieved the status of ideological autho-
rities. For that, however, I shall glance only briefly into the 1680s and
beyond.
This chapter is not a simple overview and it is selective in its treatment of
texts. It examines ideological underpinnings which most clearly have to do
with the appropriation of these texts by the Whig press very soon after
Marvell's death. Although the writings of two politically engaged men
cannot be explained from any single argument, it may be possible to
discover a significant convergence of purposes by looking at the situation of
the mid-1670s especially. I shall focus in particular upon a widely shared
ideology, that of anti-Catholicism, together with its adjunct, a polemic
against tyrannical or arbitrary government, and its accompaniment, tolera-
165

CEDRIC C. BROWN
tion of dissent for Protestant sects. Anti-Catholicism informs a discourse

without which the Whig appropriation could not have happened.
We might begin with a prose work which Marvell wrote, or in which he
had a hand, in 1677. This was An Account of the Growth of Popery, and
Arbitrary Government in England, written during a mistrustful deadlock
between parliament and King Charles II. The book seems to have been
organized by the oppositional group around the Earl of Shaftesbury. It
offers a polemical analysis of the history of England since the Restoration,
deriving the nation's ills from popish conspiracy and French connections.
The opening sentence is startlingly direct:
There has now for diverse Years, a design been carried on, to change the
lawfull Government of England into an Absolute Tyranny, and to convert the
established Protestant Religion into down-right Popery.. ?
This is a conspiracy theory which posits that a group associated with the
court was working for those bugbears of national Protestantism, the Pope
and the Jesuits ("Romish Idolatry"), channeled through the power of
France under Louis XIV ("French Slavery") (An Account, p. 14), which in
the later seventeenth century had replaced Spain as the demonized nation
of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans. (Marvell himself had been to France
and witnessed state persecution of the Huguenots.) The text capitalizes on
the polemic of generations, seeing a repeated story of the attempted ruin of
monarchs at the hand of Catholic conspirators: the excommunication of
Queen Elizabeth I and the Spanish invasion of 1588; the papal exclusion of
James I and the Gunpowder Plot; the Irish War fostered by Catholics to
destroy Charles I; and most recently, the rumored firing of London in 1666
by Catholic French. The mid-1670s saw a large increase in anti-Catholic
publications, and each crisis centering on fears of popery caused not just a
rehearsal of earlier crises, but publications of books belonging to the earlier
crises.3
This anonymously published little history touched sensitive points, and a
reward was offered for information about author and printer. Several
pamphlets suspected Marvell's involvement and one dubbed him "a shrewd
man against Popery."4 As scholars have delighted to tell, because the
incident shows such characteristic mischief in him, Marvell himself re-
ported the suspicions to his nephew William Popple in what is probably his
latest surviving letter. Several publications, he said, had suggested that the
Member of Parliament, Mr. Marvell, might have written An Account, "but
if he had, surely he should not have escaped being questioned in Parlia-
ment, or some other Place." 5
If this shows Marvell as parliament man and writer relishing a reputation
166

"This Islands watchful Centinel"
as an English patriot, then one elegist even in 1678 could praise him as
"this Islands watchful Centinel" and the brave enemy of "the grim Monster,
Arbitrary power," 6 and soon that reputation had hardened into virtual
canonization. Marvell did not quite live to see the Popish Plot of 1678, in
which Titus Oates's fabricated conspiracy built on just the discourses used
in An Account and in which the whole range of fears about popery was
exploited. An Account itself went to a second edition in 1678, a French
translation in 1680, and a Whig continuation in 1682. 7 In other words, the
work played a part in the Whig attempts to exclude the Catholic James
from the succession, which occurred nevertheless in 1685. At the Glorious
Revolution of 1688, when James II departed, it had become so useful that it
was reprinted in the collection of State Tracts justifying the dethronement, 8
and in the flood of Protestant-patriotic literature at that time one book-
seller put out (in January 1689) a little pamphlet entitled Mr. Andrew
MarvelVs Character of Popery, which reprinted a general description of
Catholicism from An Account and offered these pages as the true dying
prophecy of a patriot:
The Author... laboured to set it [Catholicism] forth in its proper Colours, as

if he had intended it as his last Legacy to this Nation ... And as it were
prophetically to let us understand what a Deliverance God has bin pleased to
bless us withal, in so lately freeing the Kingdom from that Inundation of
Antichristian Pomp & Vanity.9
The persuasiveness of this lay in its legacy as the words of a dying prophet
and in the nation's sustained fears of popery.
Similar evidence of Whig assimilation can be told of some other prose
works of Marvell. A Short Historical Essay, concerning General Councils,
Creeds, and Impositions in Matters of Religion (1676) was a contribution
to the toleration debate. It claims that the church itself, through the power
of the bishops working with monarchs over the centuries, has been more
likely to persecute fellow believers than the early pagan emperors. It was
published at the end of a satirical essay about toleration, the mischievous
Mr. Smirke; Or, The Divine in Mode. (Marvell frequently attacked estab-
lishment clergymen who wished to enforce conformity in religion.) The
Essay was on a topic of huge importance to Whigs and had posthumous
printings in 1680 and again under James in 1687.
Marvell's recent writing was politically close to the Whig party which
formed just after his death, and it was probably his ideological credit that
led to the posthumous publication of his poems by 1681 by a Whig
bookseller, Robert Boulter. The great majority of texts included in Mis-
cellaneous Poems were social and patronage poems from the end of the
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CEDRIC C. BROWN
1640s through the 1650s, but there was nervousness about those in praise
of Cromwell, and most copies omitted them. The publication of many of
the verse satires of the Restoration period was not straightforward either:
after 1688 popular satirical poems written under the Stuarts were collected
and published in Poems on Affairs of State.10 In these celebrated volumes,
Marvell's name was given prominence, and many more poems were
attributed to him than are his, so much was he championed by the now
victorious Whig party.
The main focus of this chapter is, however, the late 1660s and the 1670s.
In this period, Marvell was best known as a long-sitting and active Member
of Parliament for Hull, between 1659 and his death. It was a career which
began under some suspicion. Like Milton, he had served as a Secretary for
Foreign Languages in the Cromwellian regime (from 1657 until the collapse
of the Commonwealth), and had previously been employed by both leading
Parliamentary Generals, Fairfax and Cromwell, as tutor in languages in
their households, in the early 1650s. The Fairfax connection was not so
disadvantageous for him in the Restoration, because Fairfax was a mod-
erate who had distanced himself from the trial of Charles I, married his
daughter to the second Duke of Buckingham, son of Charles's former
favorite, and worked finally toward the Restoration settlement. Cromwell
connections were a problem, and they had to be played down. By the time
of the Restoration Marvell was in the thick of political intrigue and, as a
parliament man of no independent means, supported by his constituency
stipend and by whatever short-term assignments he could get, and being a
man moreover of varied overseas experience, he was ripe for suspicion as
an upstart modern Machiavel.
Restoration parliaments eventually came to be dominated by fears of
popery to an extraordinary degree, especially from the 1670s, and the
Popish Plot of 1678 was built upon assumptions way beyond rationality. In
general, fears of a reimposition of Catholicism in England were hugely
exaggerated: the Catholic constituency was no larger than it had been for a
century and would have provided completely inadequate support for a
changed orthodoxy. Romanism was mainly organized around landowners
and their clients and tenants, using priests trained abroad. Some of those
families held court positions. Whenever court connections with foreign
Catholic powers came to notice, the way was open for a whole host of
conspiratorial fears.11
By 1673 there had been a complete breakdown of trust between the
king and parliament. It was based on two key underlying issues: Charles's
policy toward toleration - trying to ease the punitive measures on
recusants by linking them to measures of toleration for Protestant
168

dissenters; and the suspicion, confirmed by 1673, t n a t the hd r to the

throne had actually turned Catholic. What is more, the king had declared
war on Protestant Holland in 1672 without the consent of parliament.
The royal Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, allowing toleration for
Dissenters, was resented as an imposition without parliamentary consent
and distrusted as a blind for toleration of papists. In the Test Act of 1673
parliament effected a bar on Catholics holding high office. Oppositional
groupings gradually formed which stood upon the principles of resistance
to absolute monarchical power (though rarely expressing itself in terms of
republicanism), associated more and more with a phobia about Catholic
designs at court. By the time of the crisis of negotiation when An
Account was written, opposition was organizing about the Earl of
Shaftesbury, who was for some time imprisoned, and Buckingham, with
whose family Marvell had various patronage connections. Following the
hysteria of the Popish Plot, the Whig party, loosely formed though it was,
was united in one aim, to exclude James from the succession. By that
time, the catchphrase "Arbitrary Power" was wholly identified with
popery, Parliament had cast itself as guardian of the Protestant nation,
and the issue of toleration for Dissenters had become completely
enmeshed with fears about letting popery loose. Into this complex
MarvelPs Account and Essay were received, and he was set to become
"This Islands watchful Centinel."
But before looking selectively at Marvell's role in Restoration politics
and the importance of anti-Catholicism as a shaping discourse, we should
perhaps review the strand of anti-Catholicism in his earlier poetry. There is
a story, to begin with, of Marvell's own brief fling with Romanism during
his university days, from which his father, a stoutly Protestant clergyman,
had to rescue him (Legouis, Andrew Marvell, p. 4). As if in conformist
compensation, one of the early satirical poems, occasioned by his being in
Italy, "Flecknoe, An English Priest at Rome" (1645 o r 1646) presents
Catholicism as a confirming mark of unmannerly otherness. There is an
obsession especially in earlier poems with manners and refinement, and
social insecurities can be felt in many of Marvell's writings. For a much
lighter touch, we might note the ideological undertow in "The Nymph's
Complaining for the Death of her Fawn" where, though the heartless
troopers who have mortally wounded the deer are Scottish Presbyterians,
the gently mocked sentimentality of the girl is figured in a kind of super-
stition sainting the animal and deifying virginity. Similarly to be shared
with the reformist reader is the irony of "The Mower Against Gardens,"
where the "puritan" fieldworker, jealously disapproving of high-life sophis-
tications up in the big house, convicts himself of superstition concerning
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CEDRIC C. BROWN
native gods (fairies) whilst seeking to brand the statues in the garden as
pagan. But the issue of anti-Catholicism becomes more seriously defining,
where religion is more obviously written into current history, as in the
laudatory treatments of Queen Christina of Sweden ("Letter to Ingelo" and
the epigram for her), and of course in the poems to or about Fairfax and
Cromwell.
The matter is particularly clear in "Upon Appleton House." The whole
poem in praise of the family, probably presented to Fairfax as a thank-
offering at Marvell's leaving the household,12 is structured upon the history
of the Reformation in England. The story of the family, through the house,
is presented as coterminous with the progress of Reformation, transforming
a wickedly portrayed corrupted nunnery into a place symbolizing heroic
action for the cause of Protestantism in Europe, and allowing virtuous
retirement for the general. That legitimate retirement is set off not only
against the earlier unreformed monasticism but also the relative self-
indulgence of the poet's sojourn there. "Upon Appleton House" meditates
on the difficulties of interpreting the providential meaning of the present
historical moment, in the uncertain post-Civil War period before the
ascendancy of Cromwell had become clear, but one of the remarkable
things about its organization is the way in which anti-Catholicism is
accepted as established upon history, something certain against which
present uncertainties are measured. Implicitly, much the same is true of the
elusive "private" "An Horatian Ode." If victories continue, Cromwell "to
all states not free / Shall climacteric be" (lines 103-04).13 In other words,
what gives credence to the idea of a new phase of history is the crushing of
Catholicism in Ireland, and with Catholicism is associated regimes "not
free."
This is all private or social verse, but it already seems likely that anti-
Catholicism is being used as an orientation in times of uncertainty of
direction, whether in Marvell's private life or in considerations of the
meaning of the historical present. His Restoration writings, however, are
public and political, and they follow the contours of parliamentary
debate. They concern parliament itself, the court, the church, and the
state of the Protestant nation. By 1678 they have also revealed a
political analysis involving popery as an ideological given shared with the
reader.
The poem "Last Instructions to a Painter" of 1667 is a devastatingly
detailed indictment of the court party under the Earl of Clarendon, and
could only have been written by a Parliamentarian.14 The venality of these
men is used as an explanation for the collapse of organization leading to
the disaster in the Medway, when the Dutch fleet sailed in unchecked and
170

fired some of the English ships there. The implied comparison is with the
better naval success of the more disciplined Cromwellian regime, and the
implied subject is the humiliation (ironically by another Protestant state) of
English national Protestantism, so often associated with the sea. It is also,
traditionally, a kind of advice document to the monarch - "Blame not the
Muse that brought those spots to sight" (line 957) - and it was part of the
campaign to remove Clarendon from office. When Clarendon fled to
France, Marvell was equally suspicious of the new ministers, the Cabal.
Warren L. Chernaik (The Poet's Time, p. 71) is probably right to point to
the fact that the appeal of much of his political writing is in the offer to
uncover what is hidden from view. By that not unfamiliar method,
conspiracies are likely to be unveiled in the true interests of the Protestant
state.
In "The Loyal Scot," an offshoot of "Last Instructions," written about
1669, the causes of national humiliation are now seen to lie in the worldly
corruption of the bishops. The poem is based on the idea of ironically
reversing John Cleveland's Royalist satire against the Presbyterian Scots:
now a Scottish captain is not "The Rebel Scot" as in Cleveland's satire, but
the patriotic example to the English, refusing to leave his post and dying on
his burning ship. The court party must look to their own church for the
roots of such laxity as had led to the judgmental disasters of 1666 or on the
Medway.
By the 1670s, although many of the targets remained the same, an even
greater cynicism seems to have set in about the corruptibility of parlia-
ment and church. The court was seen to be bribing parliament men,
which was like giving away "the whole Land, and Liberty, of England,"
Marvell wrote intemperately in a letter of 1671.15 There is a particular
distaste for dishonorable turncoats, men who had compromised principle
to join the crowd for reward, and some such issue may also be at stake in
Marvell's biggest literary success of this period, The Rehearsal Transpros'd
of 1672 (Second Part, 1673), m which the writings of the self-important
careerist churchman Samuel Parker, a man of Puritan background, were
subjected to merciless, witty, point-for-point satire. It is like an educated
defeat at fencing. The pretentious cleric is reduced to the status of a bit
part, Mr. Bayes, in one of Buckingham's plays (a tactic which will be
imitated in Mr. Smirke), and convicted of madness, the slur usually
reserved by the establishment for fanatics. Like "The Last Instructions,"
The Rehearsal Transpros'd offers to guide the king away from a set of
false counselors, whose instincts in the matter of toleration seemed to be
more tyrannical than might be expected from monarchs (The Rehearsal
Transpros'd, p. 89). Critics have been puzzled by Marvell's continued

CEDRIC C. BROWN
loyalism to the king, but the method must be seen in convention and in
political context, in other words in terms of the pragmatism which an MP
would well understand. In the light of private sentiment about national
liberty, it may be doubted whether Marvell really dissociated either the
king or the king's party from analyses of something like arbitrary power,
about which he would speak clearly, as we have seen, in An Account in
1678, on the eve of the Popish Plot, and as the Whigs were about to
appropriate his writings.
To rehearse the ground Marvell and his parliament covered also brings
the writings of Milton to mind. Strengthening the radical resolve of
parliaments had been Milton's repeated aim in the 1640s and 1650s; the
examination of the prelacy and of attempts to limit conscience and apply
censorship had been a main concern of his writings since the tracts against
the bishops and the debates at various times about censorship, most
memorably in Areopagitica in 1645; analyses of tyranny and of manipula-
tions of parliaments had been the main preoccupation of the anti-monarch-
ical tracts from 1649; and Milton had reiterated his analyses on all these
fronts in the clutch of publications on the eve of the Restoration. What is
more, he had written as a schoolboy on the Gunpowder Plot and posted a
watchful sentinel on Protestant England as early as 1637, with St. Michael
in "Lycidas."16 He had helped Marvell to gain his Secretaryship; Marvell
had helped Milton when he was in trouble at the Restoration. It is
unimaginable that Marvell's political thinking was untouched by Milton's
vigorous output.
Milton's own position at the Restoration was precarious. In 1660 he
was fifty-two and had already been blind for about eight years. He had
retired from his government position of Secretary for Foreign Languages
which he had held from 1649 to the mid-1650s. Unlike Marvell, he had
for most of his life just enough private means to be more or less
independent, and he eagerly cultivated, along with his high-principled
authorship as civic reformer in what he hoped might be a free-speaking
commonwealth, an Horatian stance, that brought with it the assumptions
of the educated gentleman. But his regicide writings had made him
infamous and he had problems with censorship. The great Latin Defence
(Defensio) of the regicide and Eikonoklastes of 1650 - his attempt to
counter the martyrologies of the dead king - books written at the behest
of the Council of State (the ruling body of the early Commonwealth), had
given him wide, if notorious, recognition in Europe. They were also
picked out by the authorities in 1660, and copies of both were burned by
the public hangman. (There were further burnings of his books at the
failed Rye House Plot of 1683.) The episcopal licenser seems to have been
172

reluctant about the first edition of Paradise Lost in 1667; the text of The
History of Britain was pruned in 1670; when Milton himself republished
his 1645 collection of shorter poems and augmented it with later poems in
1673, n e omitted the sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell, and Vane; Of True
Religion had an anonymous imprint in 1673; a n ^ after m s death the
publication of his state letters and the heretical De Doctrina Christiana
was blocked.17
Owning a debt to the anti-monarchical Milton was something one had to
be careful about before 1688 especially, but there are many signs of his
being assimilated by Whig writers.18 Two writers on press censorship, for
example, drew on Areopagitica, Charles Blount in 1679 and William
Denton in 1681, but neither named their source, and the same thing
happened as late as 1698, with Matthew Tindal's A Letter to a Member of
Parliament}9 Two writers of 1682 against arbitrary power seem to have
used the Defensio without acknowledgment: Samuel Johnson, against
church authority, and Thomas Hunt, against state authority.20 There was
no lack of explicit mention amongst hostile Tories, and Sir Robert Filmer's
Patriarcha (published 1680) ranges itself openly against the Defensio.
However, the influence of Milton's writings on key Whig writers is
important, and the list includes John Locke in Two Treatises (1690), James
Tyrrell in Patriarcha Non Monarcha (1680), Algernon Sidney in Discourses
Concerning Government (early 1680s, published 1698), and Milton's
editor and biographer, and radical writer, John Toland.
The pattern changed after 1688, when there was a demand to acknowl-
edge Milton's political works: two editions of the prose writings were
planned, though neither appeared until the late 1690s; the notorious
Eikonoklastes was republished in 1690; there was an English translation of
the Defence in 1692, and the resistance arguments of the Tenure had been
taken over in the anonymous Pro Populo Adversus Tyrannos of 1689,
though only the later edition of 1691 made the Miltonic connection evident.
Meanwhile the fame of Paradise Lost took a leap with the publication of the
impressive folio edition of 1688, and the literary indebtedness of such works
as Sir Richard Blackmore's Prince Arthur (1695). Paradise Lost now began
to take on the appearance of a great Whig epic.
When, round about 1674, Marvell wrote a commendation for the second
edition of Milton's Paradise Lost, he fashioned a good-humored, self-
deprecating poem which kept more sensitive matters of politics at arm's
length. The blind singer is celebrated for the hugeness of his godly
argument and the inimitable decorum of his writing. In fitting matter and
manner together so perfectly, therefore, Milton proves himself, in his
blindness, to have become a true prophet:

CEDRIC C. BROWN
Where couldst thou words of such a compass find?

Whence furnish such a vast expense of mind?
Just heaven thee, like Tiresias, to requite,
Rewards with prophecy thy loss of sight. (lines 41-44)
There may be several acts of friendship in this deft tribute. With his own
"tinkling rhyme" (line 46) Marvell is left at the level of the merely fashion-
able poet about town, whereas Milton is mythologized into a figure of such
independent purpose, mind, method, and faith as to seem to transcend
current thoughts and manners. For a writer who had achieved notoriety as
a dangerous reformer and defender of regicide, such transcendent status
was a comfortable antidote, as well as a high tribute.
Although in the 1660s and 1670s Milton was no longer in the thick of
political maneuverings as Marvell was, it makes sense to see not just the
late prose tracts but also the three major poems as belonging to the
political climate of the 1660s and 1670s. True prophets speak to their
own times, and Paradise Lost, inscribing amongst other things forms of
history, automatically encompasses in a method working with continuities,
repeats, and parallels, significant traces and interpretations of its own
times. 21 What is more, when the poet constructs his own prophetic
presence within his text, he does so in such a way as to contextualize his
seeking for the truth. The opening of Book 111, where Milton mythologizes
himself as blind seer-poet, is complicated by the opening to Book vn,
where it is revealed that, as well as with blindness, he is beset with
darkness and dangers. He makes himself a solitary and perhaps unheard
witness in times of adversity. So there is an invitation to see the patterns
revealed in his telling of the Fall as being implicit and ongoing in the world
of poet and reader.
One might consider the impact of Milton's way of beginning his
narrative, immediately exposing the reader to Satan and the gathering
powers of Satan in Books 1 and 11. No one reading Paradise Lost at the time
could have been in any doubt after the first two books that the evil
institutions initiated by Satan and his company after their fall into Hell are
active, through history, into the Restoration, and that, indeed, a mid
seventeenth-century political discourse is shaping that history of the world.
By the end of Book 1 tyrannical monarchy has already been built on the
basis of idolatrous religion.
As the satanic powers gather off the lake, they are defined by reference
to godless tyranny or the ruin of civilization: Egyptian cruelty with Busiris
(Book 1, line 307); or the Pharaoh holding the Israelites in bondage (line
342); a paynim Sultan (line 348); or hordes of barbarians (line 353). Ruin

follows from false religion. The roll-call of the chief fallen angels names
them as idols in the Old Testament, the infections threatening to over-
whelm God's people. Although the first frame of reference is Old
Testament, the reader is subtly reminded at the end of the list with the
slack but dangerous spirit of indiscipline, Belial, that the patterns of
behavior over which he presides are to be seen through to the present day:
"In courts and palaces he also reigns / And in luxurious cities" (lines 497-
498).22 A similar indication is given with Saturn, who expresses lawless
license, and who long ago reached western kingdoms: "Fled over Adria to
the Hesperian fields, / And o'er the Celtic roamed the utmost isles" (lines
520-21).
As with amazing speed the forces of evil create the institutions which are
to replicate themselves through the history of the world, tyrannous govern-
ment is set up on the base of false religion. Pandaemonium is the
architectural center from which the forces of a powerful new empire are
supported. The building has an aggregate design, reminding readers of the
seats of tyrants over the centuries, beginning with Nimrod and the rulers of
Babylon and Egypt. It is the site of secular power, but it employs for
political ends the intimidating features of a temple; it is part temple, part
palace, in the combination of religion and state which Milton so distrusted.
The architecture and interior lighting strike admiration and the trumpets
announce "awful ceremony" (line 753). Thus tyrants manipulate minds. As
the hosts of angels gather, they are diminished, in Milton's withering irony:
"Thus incorporeal spirits to smallest forms / Reduced their shapes
immense, and were at large" (lines 789-90). The fallen angels are hood-
winked by the princely caste -
But far within
And in their own dimensions like themselves
The great seraphic lords and cherubims
In close recess and secret conclave sat. (lines 792-95)
- and are vulnerable to exploitation. Like Marvell and others, Milton takes
the lid off hidden manipulative practices. Even within the inner council
chamber, when the "great consult" begins, it turns out to have been stage-
managed by Satan and his henchman Beezebub: so easily are weakened
minds, even of great angels, led. Confronting Satan's falsehood with his
own witness, Raphael gives the appropriate analytical definition, when he
calls the false monarch "idol of majesty divine" (Book vi, line 101), one
who inspires awe with the trappings of false religion.
This is a polemical analysis of the way tyrannous regimes work and it
uses the same discourse that Marvell relies upon in An Account^ when he

CEDRIC C. BROWN
talks (p. n ) of "inslaving men by the assistance of Religion more easily."

Indeed, it would be surprising if Marvell did not have Milton in mind as
he wrote his oppositional pieces of the 1670s, especially perhaps
Eikonoklastes. Eikonoklastes was a cultural critique, a revelatory decon-
struction. It offered to show the manipulative meanings behind the
language and iconography of Caroline Royalism, and the sense of danger
from Catholic conspiracy is particularly clear, in its relentless focusing
upon the weakening effect of Charles I's French Catholic queen,
Henrietta Maria. It assumed that women are often the chief channels of
Catholic influence, leading to the ruin of Protestantism and the inception of
tyranny.
In this regard the sequence of events in Milton's telling of the Fall
should be noted. In his temptation of Eve, Satan plants superstitious
thoughts in her mind by offering to worship the "magic" tree in his
speech (Book ix, lines 679ff.). The suggestion sticks: Eve's first act, after
falling, is one of worship of the plant (lines 834-38). In Milton's analysis
she becomes the first of many female agencies tending to weaken rational
minds. Also, when Satan first breaks into Paradise in Book iv, the
moment is treated as proleptic of the whole spoiling of the true church
by materialistic manipulators: "So since into his church lewd hirelings
climb" (line 193). Paradise Lost is a meditation on faith and politics
over the whole of human history, as Milton had charted it, but there can
be no doubt that a reader like Marvell could have seen expressed in it a
polemic against popery and arbitrary government which Milton would
have expected any "fit audience" to share. Adam's education by Michael
in the last books begins by telling how the sons of God were ruined in
marriage by godless fair women, "oppression" and "sword-law" fol-
lowing from these mixed marriages, diluting religious discipline, with
"luxury and riot" and civil wars to follow before the Flood. Infections of
true religious discipline are to be seen at the base of each successive fall,
and the great fall of the Christian era is into Catholicism, as Adam is told in
Book XII.
Read contextually and in the light of the anti-Catholic, anti-tyrannical
discourses, Milton's Samson Agonistes, published in the same volume as
Paradise Regained in 1671, is a narrative of hugely suggestive power,
telling the story of one man's fraught resistance.23 We might begin,
however, as the volume does, with Paradise Regained. Although this
four-book epic has often been read primarily as a work of religious
instruction, there is much to be gained by appreciating its encouragement
of spiritual discipline in the context of the religio-political discourses of
the time. It is true that, like all three of Milton's major poems published
176

in the Restoration, it goes back to fundamentals, but it is likely that the

Whig printer who put out the second edition of Paradise Regained and
Samson Agonistes in 1680 saw ideological alignments with which his
readers could identify. For one thing, Milton's recasting of the story of
Jesus' temptation in the wilderness, the great educative test and prepara-
tion for his ministry, provides an enabling, encouraging narrative for the
faithful in the context of political oppression and pharisaical religion, just
as Samson Agonistes tells a story of doubt and faith in the context of
idolatrous oppression. Whilst we should not give too much credence to
the self-congratulatory account of Milton's young Quaker friend, Thomas
Ellwood, that he had made the crucial suggestion which led to the
writing of Paradise Regained?-4 it is quite likely that Dissenting readers
would have particularly identified with a poem about the "inward oracle"
(Book 1, line 463) which alone is necessary, the individual's search rather
than an obedience to established church doctrine. It is the same point
which Adam learns at the end of Paradise Lost, about the guiding Spirit of
God.
Some of the peculiarities of Milton's reordering of the wilderness
narrative, as told in Matthew and Luke, should be noted in this context. To
begin with, by treating separately and reinterpreting the temptation of
hunger in his first episode, Milton creates a foundation for his action which
is entirely predictable in terms of his usual arguments: a test of the
separation of truth from falsehood in matters of religion. This episode,
which rewrites his early anti-Catholic "Nativity Ode," establishes the first
challenge to be that of facing infections within the church itself. After the
temptation has failed, Satan himself acknowledges in his discomfiture that
his role has been like that of the "hypocrite or atheous priest" (line 487). In
the second day's temptation, for which different kinds of worldliness are
organized, such is the insistence on the separation of religion from all
aspects of career or state, that established connections seem more feasible
for the tempter (dressed as one from city or court) than for the tempted,
and even the use of learning is severed from considerations of secular
power.
Paradise Regained also shares with Samson Agonistes the influence of
the informing narrative of the Book of Job, a model for works dealing with
interlocutive tests of strength of faith. Samson Agonistes is an exhausting
and exhaustive study of religious states of mind in adversity, concerning
not just Samson's progress but also the divergent lines of thought of the
other Israelites, represented by his father Manoa, and the Chorus of
Danites. It debates the meaning of Providence rather as the divergent
voices in the Book of Job try, with varying degrees of enlightenment, to see
177

CEDRIC C. BROWN
meaning in God's purposes. The fact that the poem shows attitudes to
faith and doubt in adversity forms an important part of its significance,
and that aspect of the text invites consideration against the background of
the long struggles of Dissenters under the Clarendon Code. But the
spiritual debate of Samson is also fiercely politicized: its theme of religion
oppressed by idolatrous power argues the importance of anti-Catholicism
to the poem as a whole. One of its teasing qualities is that as a dramatic
narrative with no guiding narratorial voice it leaves its readers to do their
own work in applying Old Testament to past, present, or future and in
doubt as to just how the irresolute state of the tribes in the highly
politicized last part of the Book of Judges might apply to the character of
England.
Anti-Catholicism provides a fundamental discourse, within which the
action is turned. Not only is the dramatic climax a day of games (so that
the final outcome becomes, as in many Old Testament narratives, a trial of
strength between true and false gods), but Samson's crucial re-encounter
with and final rejection of his Philistine wife, Dalila, is sealed by religious
allegiance.25 The wife of a false idolatrous religion is meant to adopt the
true religion of the husband, as in the heroic example of Ruth, celebrated in
Milton's Sonnet ix. In his divorce tracts, Milton opined that there should be
grounds for divorce, if the right-thinking partner had no hope of converting
the other to true religion. Such thought was not simply about general
matters of domestic discipline: it was informed by generations of anxieties
concerning the role of idolatrous consorts in high places. What Samson
achieves, if intemperately, in the episode with Dalila is the putting away of
a wife beyond hope of conversion; the clarification through argument is
that she had been deaf to her duty to follow her husband's one God and
had also been swayed and rewarded by the priests of Dagon for reasons of
state in the continuing Philistine oppression of the Israelites. Since her
faithlessness is also in a sense her faithfulness, to her roots, it makes for
good ironic drama.
With different degrees of acuteness, all the Israelites have a sense of
religious nationalism and destiny. But, as we have seen, in the kind of
analysis developed by Milton and apparently followed by Marvell, false
religion is the foundation for a set of other ills. Whether the idolatry is
imposed from outside the culture or embraced within the culture, it is likely
to be used by a tyrannous regime to awe the populace into acceptance of
arbitrary government. The Israelites are pictured in Samson as typical of
those who have long suffered lack of discipline and morale, both before
and after falling into servitude to foreign oppressors:
178

But what more oft in nations grown corrupt,

And by their vices brought to servitude,
Than to love bondage more than liberty,
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty.
(Samson Agonistes, lines 269-72)
The part of the Book of Judges which deals with Samson is a study of
national disunity and lack of morale, and, perhaps most ironically, the
educated reader of Milton's poem will know that even the temple disaster
inflicted on the Philistines did not fuel a national resurgence. The Israelites,
like the English perhaps, had God-given opportunities, but were not good
at taking their chances. The poem engages the morale and spirit of a
nation.26
Some of the subtlest effects of the poem concern the varying moods of
the Israelites, their wonderfully differentiated states of doubt, disagree-
ment, and resolve. In a cathartic rehearsal of conflicting opinion in a
community of nevertheless pious men, it may be as important that there is
communication between the Hebrews as that there is disagreement in the
understanding of the mysteries of Providence. This is in agreement with Of
True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, Milton's contribution of 1673
to the debate about toleration.27 All men err, including God's champions,
and it is more important for Protestants to seek together, in debate, than it
is to labor divisions and define heresies in the adverse circumstances of the
Clarendon Code, the series of measures seeking to control Puritan radic-
alism through the 1660s, fettering Dissenters, ejecting ministers, banning
meetings, stopping academies, and forcing conformity on lay officials as
well. To reforming spirits, this was a new bondage of conscience, Israel in a
new idolatrous tyranny; and better toleration of Dissenters would form a
major plank in Whig policy. As we have seen, the issue got entangled with
the king's desire to ease penalties on Catholics.
In the context of fears of popery, Milton's participation in the debate
over toleration was timed to encourage the right outcome of that debate.
Following the Declaration of Indulgence of March 1672, he was supporting
the more radical position, discriminating fundamentally between Protestant
and Catholic schism, and bringing into play the old discourses of fear about
Catholic effects on courts, citing the Gunpowder Plot and the infiltrations
before the Civil War and opining that if England had been more disciplined
in its true religion, it would not have invited the judgments of plague, fire,
and war. "True Religion is the true Worship and Service of God, learnt and
believed from the Word of God only," whilst "Popery is the only, or the
greatest, heresy" (The Complete Prose Works, vol. vm, p. 421). Here are
179

CEDRIC C. BROWN
the familiar associations, to be exploited by the Whigs. Catholicism is

tainted with worldly power. What is needed is zealous laboring toward the
truth, and as long as men seek diligently by their own lights in the Word of
God schismatics should be tolerated, for only when such conscienceful
seeking takes place can there be any hope of better religious discipline.
Church authorities need not always be followed: "Every member of the
Church, at least of any breeding or capacity, so well ought to be grounded
in spiritual knowledg, as, if need be to examine their Teachers themselves"
(p. 435). His arguments repeated many positions he had taken up in the
1640s and 1650s: in particular, he recast material he had used in Of Civil
Powers (1659).
It is quite clear that this searching has a special purpose in times of
adversity, as in this passage, referring to Job:
But so long as all these profess to set the Word of God only before them as the
Rule of faith and obedience; and use all diligence and sincerity of heart, by
reading, by learning, by study, by prayer for Illumination of the holy spirit, to
understand the Rule and obey it, they have done what man can do: God will
assuredly pardon them, as he did the friends of Job, good and pious men,
though much mistaken, as there it appears, in some Points of Doctrin.
(Of True Religion, The Complete Prose Works, vol. vm, p. 424)
This distinctive interpretation expresses a general situation in which, as in

Samson Agonistes, the elect find it hard to understand the "unsearchable
dispose" of God, and yet must for all that trust in divine justice and
benevolence. On such bases of obedience and searching in times of trial, the
actions turn in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Jesus' final
triumph over Satan in the brief epic is in a trial of strength on the pinnacle
in which the crucial factor is a total trust in the power of the true God. As
with Paradise Lost these works show no simple retreat into an unpolitical
world: they exploit deeply embedded ideological discourses and make
statements about the fundamental disciplines of the mind, even as freedom
of conscience for the Dissenters was being debated.
This chapter has suggested a convergence of discourses centering particu-
larly on the 1670s. It does not seek to make the writings of Marvell and
Milton say all the same things: despite the evident connections, it is
obvious, for example, that Milton's determined republicanism, 28 as ex-
pressed particularly in his writings of 1659, is not quite matched by
Marvell's more pragmatic dealings with limited monarchy (shared with
most Whigs), and it would be wrong to seek unchanging politics in the
writings of either, during the bewildering changes of this period. Nor is
there a neat Whig consensus. What we seem to have is a crucial informing
180

anti-Catholic discourse, a given base around which other arguments are

organized and from which orientation is sought. On the one hand, this is a
widely shared cultural discourse automatically shaping the utterances of
those who identified with national Protestantism; on the other, it is a
propagandistic counter which is obviously being used for political persua-
sion. In Milton's texts, it is part of a whole analysis of political process,
which was understood by Marvell and others. This informing discourse is
not marginal: it stands at the center of many texts, some of them very well-
known texts, and the beginnings of Whiggery are as much founded on fear
of Papists as they are on any more comfortable notions of liberalism.
NOTES
1 The canon of Marvell's poems is notoriously difficult to establish and particu-
larly for the Restoration period. There is a brief summary in Warren L. Chernaik,
The Poefs Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Appendix A, pp. 206-14.
2 An Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government in England,
More Particularly, from the long Prorogation of November, i6y$ ... (London,
1677), p. 3. There has been no modern collected edition of Marvell's prose
works since The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Andrew Marvell, ed. A.
B. Grosart, 4 vols. (London, 1872-75).
3 For example, in relation to the Gunpowder Plot alone: A true and perfect
relation of the whole proceedings against the late more barbarous traitors,
Garnet a Jesuite, and his confederats ... (London, 1679); Robert Widdrington,
The tryal and execution of Father Henry Garnet ... (London, 1679); Antoine
Arnauld, The king-killing doctrine of the Jesuites ... (London, 1679); Thomas
Morton, An exact account of the Romish doctrine: in the case of conspiracy and
rebellion ... (London, 1679). My thanks to Arthur F. Marotti for these
references.
4 See Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Patriot, Puritan, second edn.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 160. The phrase comes from the
anonymous pamphlet, A letter from Amsterdam, to a Friend in England
(London, 1678).
5 Letter to William Popple, 10 June 1678, in The Poems and Letters of Andrew
Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, third edn., revised by Pierre Legouis with the
collaboration of E. E. Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1971), vol. 11, p. 357. Quoted in Legouis, Andrew Marvell, p. 160.
6 Legouis, Andrew Marvell, p. 225. The poem was first printed in Poems on
Affairs of State (see note 10, below). It can be found in George de F. Lord et al.
(eds.) Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714, 7 vols.
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963-75), vol. 1, pp. 436-37.
7 Legouis, Andrew Marvell, p. 227. The last chapter, "After Death" (pp. 224-44),
is a brief review of Marvell's subsequent reputation.
8 State Tracts: in two parts ... being a collection of several treatises relating to the
government... (London, 1693).
181

CEDRIC C. BROWN
9 Mr. Andrew MarvelVs Character of Popery ... Printed for Richard Baldwin
(London, 1689), pp. 3-4.
10 Poems on Affairs of State: From the Time of Oliver Cromwell, to the Abdica-
tion of K. James the Second (London, 1689, 1697, and later editions). In the
1697 edition, twelve satires were attributed to Marvell.
11 For a general account on Catholicism and Restoration politics, see John Miller,
Popery and Politics in England, 1660-1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1973).
12 An essay arguing a precise date for "Upon Appleton House" is Derek Hirst and
Steven Zwicker, "High Summer at Nun Appleton, 1651: Andrew Marvell and
Lord Fairfax's Occasions," Historical Journal, 36, 2 (1993), pp. 247-70.
13 Quotations are from Andrew Marvell: a Critical Edition of the Major Works,
ed. Frank Kermode and Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
14 Chernaik's (The Poefs Time) is the only study devoted specifically to the
Restoration writing of Marvell.
15 Letter of 9 August 1671, "To a Friend in Persia": Margoliouth, Poems and
Letters, vol. 11, pp. 324-25; Chernaik, The Poefs Time, p. 75.
16 "In Quintum Novembris"; "Lycidas," lines 161-63. See also the early verse
paraphrases on Psalm 94 and Psalm 136, joining in the rejoicing at the failure of
the Spanish Match.
17 An interesting case of an indirect contribution to the succession debate, not
discussed here, is provided by Milton's issuing A Declaration, or Letters Patent
(London, 1674), a translation of a document urging elective monarchy in Poland.
18 For a detailed analysis of the late seventeenth-century Whig assimilation of
Milton's writings, see Nicholas von Maltzahn, "The Whig Milton, 1667-1700,"
in David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and
Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 229-53.
An earlier and less discriminating analysis of Milton's career in relation to the
Whig tradition is George Senabaugh, That Grand Whig Milton (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1952).
19 Charles Blount, A Just Vindication of Learning (London, 1679); William
Denton, Jus Caesaris (London, 1681); Matthew Tindal, A Letter to a Member
of Parliament (London, 1698).
20 Thomas Hunt, Mr. Hunt's Postscript (London, 1682); Samuel Johnson, Julian
the Apostate (London, 1682).
21 The line of evidence on Paradise Lost closely follows that in my John Milton: A
Literary Life (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1995), chapter 8, pp. 155-
81. See also Mary Ann Radzinowicz, "The Politics of Paradise Lost," in Kevin
Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), Politics of Discourse: The Literature and
History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1987), pp. 204-29; reprinted in Annabel Patterson (ed.),
John Milton (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 120-41.
22 Quotations from Milton: The Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London and New
York: Longman, second edn., 1997); and the companion volume Milton:
Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (revised edn., London and New York:
Longman, 1971).
23 The line of evidence in this section is similar to that in my John Milton, chapter
9, pp. 182-207.
182

24 C. G. Crump (ed.), The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (New York and
London, 1900), pp. 144-45.
25 See Cedric C. Brown, "Milton and the Idolatrous Consort," in Cedric C. Brown
(ed.), "The Politics of Literature in Early Modern English Culture," a special
number of Criticism, 35, 3 (1993), pp. 441-62.
26 The parallel analysis, not discussed in this chapter, is in The History of Britain,
which has a fascinating publication history in the late seventeenth century. See
Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton's <(History of Britain": Republican Historio-
graphy in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). See
also Gary D. Hamilton, "The History of Britain and its Restoration Audience,"
in David Loewenstein and James G. Turner (eds.), Politics, Poetics and
Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), pp. 241-55.
27 The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. D. M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82), vol. vm, p. 421. On some effects of Of
True Religion see Martin Dzelzainis, "Milton's Of True Religion and the Earl of
Castlemaine," The Seventeenth Century, 7 (1992), pp. 53-69.
28 For a varied collection of essays on Milton's politics, see Armitage, Himy,
Skinner, Milton and Republicanism. On republicanism see also Blair Worden,
"Milton's Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven," in Gisela Block, Quentin
Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 225-45.
FURTHER READING
Achinstein, Sharon, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994), esp. chapter 5, pp. 177-223.
Armitage, David, Himy, Armand, and Skinner, Quentin (eds.), Milton and Repub-
licanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Brown, Cedric C , John Milton: A Literary Life (Basingstoke and London: Mac-
millan, 1995).
Chernaik, Warren L., The Poefs Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of
Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Condren, Conal, and Cousins, A. D. (eds.), The Political Identity of Andrew
Marvell (Aldershot and Brookfield, Vermont: Scolar Press, 1990).
Davies, Stevie, Images of Kingship in "Paradise Lost": Milton's Politics and
Christian Liberty (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1983).
Griffin, Dustin, Regaining Paradise: Milton in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Hill, Christopher, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries
(London and New York: Faber, 1984).
Keeble, N. H., The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-
Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987).
Legouis, Pierre, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Patriot, Puritan (second edn., Oxford:
Loewenstein, David, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Icono-
clasm and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990).
183

CEDRIC C. BROWN
Miller, John, Popery and Politics in England, 1660-1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge

Patterson, Annabel, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1978).
Patterson, Annabel (ed.),John Milton (Harlow: Longman, 1992).
Radzinowicz, Mary Ann, "The Politics of Paradise Lost," in Kevin Sharpe and
Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of
Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1987).
184

9
STEVEN N. ZWICKER
John Dryden
Is there a writer in the history of English letters who more completely

defines an age than John Dryden? His writing life coincides exactly with the
second half of the seventeenth century: he was eighteen in 1649 when he
published his first poem; his last work was finished a few weeks before his
death in May 1700. Between the elegy for Lord Hastings and The Secular
Masque, Dryden created what we have come to know as Restoration
literature. He wrote in every mode and genre that thrived in these years; in
most cases, Dryden's contributions outgo all rivals.
The creation of the poetry and drama, the translations and literary
criticism, what we have come to know as The Works of John Dryden,1 is
an incomparable achievement from a writer whose early verse gave little
indication of incomparability and whose career was variously driven by
partisanship and faction, by professional alliance and literary rivalry, and
by the incursion of something like a modern commercial market into the
aristocratic precincts of literary patronage.2 Without his writing, Restora-
tion literature would be difficult to recognize; without his example, Augu-
stan literature would have developed in quite different ways. Next to his,
the careers of Marvell and Rochester seem brilliant but slight; even Milton's
career, an achievement of which Dryden was sharply aware, does not
display the variety of his younger rival's work. In prose Dryden excelled all
others. What began as sheer enterprise came to conclusion in remarkable
creation. Dryden's career shows unswerving development. Milton began
after long delay; he had read in leisure, toured Italy, and aimed at the
classical model: pastoral to epic. Dryden was hurried under the hand of Dr.
Busby from Westminster School to Cambridge University and thence to
London, minor service in Cromwell's government, and to his debut as
public poet on the death of Oliver Cromwell.3 Within months of the
publication of Heroique Stanza's to the Glorious Memory of ... Oliver
Cromwell Late Lord Protector (1659), Dryden began a career as Stuart
apologist that would end only with his death in 1700.
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STEVEN N. ZWICKER
There was not a moment in his career when Dryden lacked enterprise.
There are times when the writing lacked, if not ambition, then genius. But
he pursued the idea of literary profession unflaggingly, with learning and
daring, and through every turn of Restoration politics. He wrote quickly
and brilliantly; he could produce verse almost to order. Rather than
constraining him, the demands, the intrigues, and the personalities of
national and of literary politics released in Dryden the full measure of his
talent. He was able to pursue sublime genres and exalted expression in
compromising circumstance, often in defense of programs and positions
that struck later generations - and more than a few of his contemporaries -
as compromised, shabby, perhaps wishful and deluded. Out of such
circumstances, and often in the midst of turmoil, came Dryden's quartos
and folios, his plays, translations, and miscellanies. Dryden commemorated
the death of the Lord Protector in 1659; he celebrated the return of Charles
Stuart in 1660; he early courted the Lord Chancellor and the Lord
Chancellor's daughter, the Duchess of York: throughout his career he
attached himself to aristocratic patrons. He celebrated a damaging com-
mercial war in the 1660s; he defended the court's impolitic moves toward
Indulgence in the 1670s; he excoriated the king's enemies, denigrated the
Popish Plot, and derided Exclusion in the 1680s; he mounted a brilliant and
nearly unintelligible defense of James II and of his own conversion to Rome
late in that king's reign; and after the revolution that deprived the king and
his laureate of office (1688-89), Dryden spent a decade regretting the
revolution and meditating on its politics and motives in a set of remarkable
translations.
In triumph and humiliation Dryden was able to summon the muse. But
the beginnings did not augur anything so lofty as Dryden's career, in fact
they seemed to augur hardly anything at all. The beginnings are recorded in
the verse that Dryden contributed to Lachrymae Musarum (1649), a
collection of elegies on the death of Henry, Lord Hastings. Son and heir of
the Earl of Huntingdon, Henry died on 24 June 1649; his death was
lamented by aristocrats and Royalist poets, among them the Earl of
Westmorland and Lord Falkland, Charles Cotton, Robert Herrick, and
John Denham.4 What prompted such a group to lament the death by
smallpox of this nineteen-year-old? Six months earlier, Charles I had been
executed. That event was not only a political climacteric, it changed the
course of writing. The most immediate evidence was the production in
1649 of thirty-five editions of the king's own book, the Eikon Basilike. But
on other occasions, and in less direct forms, the death was also recorded.
The demise of Lord Hastings offered such an opportunity to recall that
"unforgettable blasphemy"; the conflation of the two deaths is echoed
186

John Dryden
throughout Lachrymae Musarum. Dryden joined the chorus of outrage in

an ambitious appearance. The verse elegy would become one of Dryden's
most expressive and elastic forms, but the elegy on Hastings is thoroughly
conventional. What are of interest, though strained and self-conscious, are
the rhetorical figures, the materials of classical antiquity, the allusions to
science, history, and art, and of course the shadow of contemporary
politics.
Between the elegy on Hastings and Dryden's next poem, Heroique
Stanza's (1659), almost a decade elapsed: the only hiatus in this career.
Perhaps Heroique Stanza's should be considered the real beginning of
the career for the poem is remarkably poised. The rhymed quatrains are
borrowed from Sir William Davenant's Gondibert (1651), but the
quality of expression is Dryden's own, fluent and exact. Dryden surveys
the achievements of the Lord Protector; he admires the boldness, the
military prowess, and political force, but by contrast with Marvell's
bathos in A Poem upon the Death of O.C^ Dryden seems unmoved.
The debut in Heroique Stanza's must have been a calculation, an effort
to win attention by a young poet who joined Edmund Waller and John
Denham as junior partner in an enterprise called Three Poems on the
Death of His Lord Highness (1659).5 The poem was a gamble and it
turned out to be a mistake. His detractors never let Dryden forget that
in 1659 he had lamented the death of the "usurper," and within months
composed an elaborate panegyric to welcome home the son and heir of
Charles I.
One more beginning: Astraea Redux (1660), Dryden's poem on the
return of Charles II. Here finally affect and technique are joined. The
nation as a whole celebrated the bloodless restoration of the person of the
king and the institution of monarchy. Dryden's poem stands out among the
more than one hundred panegyrics composed for the occasion. It is long, a
third as long as some books of Paradise Lost; it is learned, full of analogies,
of mythology, and Scripture; and here first appears that most telling
comparison between two kings, "Thus banish'd David spent abroad his
time, / When to be Gods Anointed was his Crime."6 Dryden was not the
only poet to see in the careers and persons of David and Charles an
invitation to compare; but in years to come he would exploit the analogy in
ways none could have imagined in 1660. In Astraea Redux the Davidic
analogy and, more broadly, scriptural allusion argue a prophetic order for
restored monarchy. But the recourse to sacred history raises more complex
historiographical and interpretive issues for the whole of Restoration
culture: after a decade of Puritan scripturalism, after the repudiation of the
politics of inspiration, and after the restoration of a court fixed from early
187

STEVEN N. ZWICKER
days on oblivion and pleasure what public force might Scripture hold?
Much has been made of the hardened libertinism, even the pornographic
character, of court culture in the years after the king's return; what also
needs to be acknowledged is the continued presence of Scripture, the force
of sacred history in so many articulations of Restoration programs and
personalities. The true model of this culture insists both on the tensions and
the colloquy between sacred and profane texts.
Scripture and prophecy have recuperative force in Astraea Redux, but
the poem plays out other restorative themes: "Oh Happy Age! Oh times
like those alone / By Fate reserv'd for Great Augustus Throne! / When the
joint growth of Armes and Arts foreshew / The world a Monarch, and that
Monarch You''' (vol. I, p. 24). Virgil is resonant in these lines, so too is the
conjoining of arts and empire. The intimacy of the first Caroline court with
visual and literary culture was not to be ignored in polemicizing the second.
Perhaps Dryden's lines are a bid for personal favor, but they also announce
the cultural meaning of monarchy as a system of patronage that assured the
revival of arts within the refurbishing of empire. Such an assertion blandly
elides the cultural, to say nothing of the military, achievements of the
Commonwealth and Protectorate, but we could hardly expect evenhanded
appraisal in these acts of oblivion.
Dryden produced more occasional verse and several influential plays in
the first years of the Restoration, but the most significant achievements
were Annus Mirabilis (1666) and the Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668). The
poem is ambitious and clever, an experiment in which Dryden practiced
intellection and strategy. The Essay of Dramatic Poesy, by contrast, is
mature and brilliant. It is Dryden's first effort at literary theory and one of
the most elegant and important contributions to criticism between Sidney's
Apology for Poesy (1587) and Pope's Essay On Criticism (1711). We might
see Annus Mirabilis and An Essay of Dramatic Poesy as companion pieces,
experiments in new forms, but the prose is more knowing, more sophisti-
cated than the verse.
There are however effects in Annus Mirabilis worth noting. It occupied
an important moment in Dryden's career and in the career of Restoration
literature. Dryden's subjects are military exploit and civic fortitude: the
triumph of the English navy over the Dutch, the triumph of London over
war, fire, and plague. The poem also celebrates the heroism, suffering, and
magnanimity of the king; but its real aim is less celebration than defense
and diffusion.
Faced with war, fire, and plague, and with poems, pamphlets, and
sermons savagely denouncing its quality, the court struck back, and Annus
Mirabilis was one of its most important texts. The poem would refurbish
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John Dryden
and reinterpret: it uses the schemes and devices of providential history to

denounce political radicalism, to rehearse the effects of the usurper's hand,
to see fire and plague as the last vestiges of a program that had, in the
1650s, brought the nation low. Whatever its value as polemical warfare,
the poem proved an invaluable exercise in the creation of a high polemical
style. With the Restoration, myths of commonweal and commonality had
been restored; the king proposed and parliament voted an Act of Indemnity
and Oblivion (1660). But few had forgotten the past, and by the mid-
16605, in fierce satire, in the truculent responses of parliament, and in the
hounding from office of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, a sense of formidable
opposition had begun to coalesce. None, however, proposed a return to
civil war. What emerged, rather, was the first evidence of party politics. By
the end of this century, the facts of opposition had become central to
politics as well as to aesthetics. The first moves toward acknowledging a
political culture of opposition were taken in the satires of the 1660s. Annus
Mirabilis suggested that it was not the opposition alone that could invoke
such a muse.
We have said nothing of the dedication and elaborate preface to Annus
Mirabilis, and the role such texts would play in Dryden's mature work and
in Restoration literature more generally. The dedication of Annus Mirabilis
and Dryden's "account of the poem" are central to its polemical work; the
preface indicates a shrewd awareness of the role of literary theory in the
production and reception of poetry, in the twinning of aesthetics and
politics, and an expanded notion of what constitute the texts of a work of
literature. In the brilliant reprisals of Swift's Tale of a Tub (1704) and in
the apparatus to Pope's Dunciad (1728) we see the legacy of Dryden's
performance in prefaces and dedications. They provided sites for the
development of literary theory and for literary experimentation, and they
leave us a record of the relations between patronage and production, and
between production and consumption.
An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) is Dryden's first sustained work in
literary theory and in practical criticism. Here Dryden reviews the topics
that will become central themes of Restoration criticism: wit, rhyme, and
the dramatic unities; the mixing of genres and the imitation of nature; the
war of the ancients and moderns; and the rivalry of French and English
aesthetics. Dryden's rehearsal of these topics is casual and brilliant, and
they recur throughout the criticism of the age: in Milton's truncated critical
exercises that preface Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes and in more
sustained pieces of critical writing from Sir Robert Howard and Thomas
Rymer to Jeremy Collier and John Dennis. The Essay not only fixes the
topics of critical debate, it helps formulate a national style, that loose and
189

STEVEN N. ZWICKER
flexible aesthetic that defines so much of Restoration literary practice. The

king's taste for French whores and French manners may have inflected the
tone, even the politics, of the Restoration court, but the Essay reminds us
that the relations between native and foreign sensibilities, even sensualities,
were very much in negotiation in the 1660s, that French neoclassicism did
not sweep native genius aside, and that earlier English drama would prove
crucial to the unfolding of English aesthetics.
Such issues are central to the Essay of Dramatic Poesy as well as to the
practical business of creating a new drama for the English stage in the
1660s, an effort that includes Dryden's The Rival Ladies (1664); The
Indian Queen (1665), which Dryden wrote in collaboration with Sir
Robert Howard; the Indian Emperour (1667); Howard's The Duke of
Lerma (1668); and the Earl of Orrery's Mustapha (1665). But the Essay
seems the theatrical masterpiece of the 1660s, a drama whose subject is
literary theory, whose setting is Anglo-Dutch war, and whose method is
colloquy and contest. The characterizations of Lord Buckhurst, Sir Robert
Howard, Sir Charles Sedley, and Dryden's own self-presentation as
Neander are pointed, subtle, and sustained. The Essay displays not only
Dryden's capacity to orchestrate ideas and dramatize abstractions, but his
wide and sophisticated knowledge of English and European drama. It
illustrates Dryden's fluent knowledge of both theory and practice and his
grasp of the state of English theatre. Late in the decade he began to think
more directly on how that drama could combine the concerns of epic
literature with the resources of the stage.
Restoration culture, we were once told, denied epic invention. The
turmoil of civil war, the barrenness of the Commonwealth, the libertinism
of the restored court could hardly sustain the heroic imagination. Such
literary history was naive in its cultural biases and wrong in many of its
particulars, but it forces us to think about the emergence of the sublime
after 1660. The formulation of an epic drama, the perfection of the genre,
and the vivid critical debate over its character and quality all point to the
status of epic in this age. Rather than witness their demise, the Restoration
witnessed the flourishing of epic forms. Surely Paradise Lost (1667) and
Dryden's translation of Virgil's Aeneas (1697) rival Spenser's Faerie Queene
(1590) and Edward Fairfax's translation of La Gerusalemme Liberata
(1600) as they do Pope's Dunciad (1728) and his Homer (1715). But
neither Paradise Lost nor Dryden's Virgil are now placed at the center of
Restoration culture. Paradise Lost was written against that center; rather
than a celebration of imperium, it is a hymn to forbearance and denial, an
epic of exile and loss. We have been taught to imagine Paradise Lost as a
leviathan beached on the shores of an alien culture, but Restoration readers
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John Dryden
heard in this text a powerful engagement with the themes and sources of
their own political authority. The poem may not have won broad accep-
tance at publication (it would be more than two decades before the epic
was taken up as cultural icon), but it surely registered in the literary
awareness of its contemporaries, and with no one more vividly than with
Dryden.7
Indeed, Dryden's most pointed encounter with Milton took place over
the body of Paradise Lost in an adaptation that Dryden called The State of
Innocence (1677). Milton's thousands of lines are here reduced to a
handful of theatrical scenes, his masterful Protestant epic narrowed, indeed
miniaturized - perhaps even mocked - in Dryden's dedication of the State
of Innocence to the Roman Catholic bride of the Roman Catholic Duke of
York, to the point of irony. Not all of Dryden's literary relations are so
dominated by his competitive drive. His responses to Shakespeare are
deeper and more sympathetic; surely All for Love (1678) is the great
theatrical adaptation of the age. Like The State of Innocence, it condenses a
vast amount of material; unlike The State of Innocence, the result is not
trivializing. All for Love concentrates the power of Antony and Cleopatra-.
the movement is unified, the freedom of Shakespeare's blank verse main-
tained, the language richly figurative. Dryden's meditation on pleasure and
on civic care is mindful both of the Jacobean complexity of the original and
of the contemporary meaning of such themes. Dryden's encounters with
Jonson and Shakespeare, like his meditations on Latin poetry, are domi-
nated by the will to reshape the past but in ways that might accommodate
the pleasures and the anxieties - literary as well as political - of the present.
Indeed the virulence of literary politics in the Restoration certainly
outgoes even the jealousies and rivalries that run through Jacobean letters.
That very rivalry opened a space for epic energies but now in inverted,
mocked, and miniaturized forms. Literary mockery had a distinguished
history, but Dryden's Mac Flecknoe (1682) is the opening move in some-
thing rather grander than mockery. Not only does Dryden treat his
contemporaries to a brilliant and topical routing of dulness, he enlarges the
scope of literary satire into a near epic kind. The attack on Richard
Flecknoe and Thomas Shadwell is blunt and damaging, at points wonder-
fully crude, but the literary texture of the poem is unnervingly elegant. The
poet's sources are elevated and disparate: Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal;
Shakespeare and Jonson; Milton, Cowley, Waller, and Cleveland; Shadwell
and Flecknoe. The machinery is elaborate, outsized; the target might seem
hardly worth the effort. But the aim of mock heroic is not simply to crush
the opposition beneath classical culture and contemporary letters; it is to
indict the whole quality of the opposition, to call into question their
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STEVEN N. ZWICKER
aesthetic principles and practices, their manners and morals, and of course
to implicate art in politics and here in political succession. The Dunciad
(1728) is the masterpiece of the genre, but Swift too understood the
implications of Mac Flecknoe.
Dryden's work in the 1670s had been largely theatrical, and there is no
question that the stage encouraged literary sophistication and economy.
But neither the nondramatic verse nor the theatrical writing of the first two
decades prepares us for the masterpiece of 1681. Indeed there is nothing in
all of Dryden's verse quite as brilliant, capacious, and nuanced as the
opening dozen lines of Absalom and Achitophel. Certainly there is no
partisan verse that can make the claims of high art so rightly allowed for
this poem. Andrew Marvell had posed, with the utmost delicacy, questions
of political legitimacy and engagement in An Horatian Ode (1650); but An
Horatian Ode seems to argue the impossibility of partisanship in the midst
of crisis. Absalom and Achitophel does not have the luxury of disinterested-
ness; it claims the protection of political neutrality, but Dryden's poem is
bitterly and brilliantly partisan. Dryden seems to be the instrument of all
the energy and anxiety, the suspicion, even distemper released by the
Popish Plot, that baroque fabrication of "evidence" that the king's Roman
Catholic wife and brother had hatched a plot to murder Charles and place
the Duke of York on the throne. Written in extremely close quarters to the
Exclusion Crisis - and perhaps at the behest of the king himself and
certainly with the knowledge and approval of the court8 - the poem
engages with all the principals of Exclusion. It is crowded with contem-
porary portraits and caricature, with slanders and accusations and set
pieces of praise; with civic theory and political argument; with speeches
and dramatic colloquy - that is, with all the intimacy and particulars to
which this servant of the court was privy. Could the daring slight to the
queen - "a Soyl ungrateful to the Tiller's care" (line 12) - have been written
without the knowledge of the king? But for all the poem's proximity to
civic authority, it is set neither at Whitehall nor Oxford, but in an
indeterminate biblical past. While its plots and portraits may be those of
Charles IPs reign, the poem claims sacred history throughout. But the
allegory of Absalom and Achitophel does not hide the politics or arguments
of the laureate; nor does sacred history render oblique or obscure the
application of tenor to vehicle. Dryden's biblical analogy exploits a long
tradition of scriptural parallel at once to suggest the sanctity of Royalist
politics and to mock the heated scripturalism of the crown's enemies and
opponents. The applications of sacred history to English politics reach back
to the middle decades of the century, and earlier; such scripturalism had
achieved a frenzied height in the triumph of the Puritan theocracy:
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John Dryden
Cromwell's army marched to battle singing David's psalms; they took Lord
Jesus to be their king. But the appropriation of sacred history was not
confined to one party, nor can the role of Scripture in political life be
narrowed to one decade. Of course, by 1681 we need to allow irony as well
as admonition in proximity to sacred metaphor, but Absalom and Achito-
phel gives vivid evidence of the flexibility and continuing power of sacred
politics late in the century, fully three decades after the execution of the
king and the triumph of militant Puritanism.
Absalom and Achitophel was not the only essay in the politics of sacred
history to emerge from the Exclusion Crisis. John Locke's Two Treatises of
Government (c. 1679-80) was in many ways a similar act of imagination,
and the text that most clearly links Locke's radical tenets and Dryden's
Tory apologetics is Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha (1680). That treatise was
conceived half a century before Exclusion; its language is archly Royalist
and absolutist.9 Patriarcha conjures up a Jacobean political world more
than it does Exclusionary politics, but it was in fact a text first published in
1681 and then widely read, often quoted, and vigorously refuted in
Exclusion. Indeed, the quality and thoroughness of the refutation are as
much an acknowledgment of the power of scriptural politics in the 1680s
as are the actual uses of patriarchalism in Royalist polemic.
If we were to judge the status of patriarchalism by that touchstone of
Royalist poetry, Absalom and Achitophel^ we might well be surprised by
the central role of patriarchalism in the pamphlet literature of Exclusion.
Dryden's poem handles patriarchalism cautiously, often ironically. The poet
is aware of the absolutist implications of Filmer's text, perhaps even of its
French overtones, but he understands as well the authority of foundational
myths and histories. Absalom and Achitophel has much to teach us about
the uses of poetry for polemic and about the management of political
satire. The poem also instructs us in the character of political thought late
in this age. While it is hardly a sustained piece of political argument - its
theory of governance is threadbare, all compromise, metaphor, and
innuendo - the text is shrewdly attuned to all the idioms of political
argumentation. It suggests both the conservatism of the late seventeenth
century and the precariousness of Royalist political theory.
The months following the defeat of Exclusion were buoyant and opti-
mistic for the crown and for the Tory cause. The king's authority had been
reaffirmed, and he ruled for the next three years without summoning a
parliament. When the Duke of York came to the throne, his first parliament
voted him the largest annuity that any monarch had yet enjoyed. And this
renewed sense of authority is certainly expressed in the literature. Absalom
and Achitophel is its masterpiece, but there is a substantial and an exuberant
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STEVEN N. ZWICKER
literature of the Exclusion Crisis which includes not only pamphlets,

broadsides, and squibs but the satires of John Oldham, Tom Durfey,
Nahum Tate, and Roger L'Estrange, and the brilliant and intricate thea-
trical allegory of Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved (1682).
Dryden himself produced not only Absalom and Achitophel but a
number of theatrical prologues and epilogues that reflected on the crisis; he
collaborated with Nahum Tate on The Second Part of Absalom and
Achitophel (1682), and he produced a vindictive political satire called The
Medal. The harsh tone of this satire should not surprise in the context of
Exclusion pamphleteering, but set against the remarks regretting partisan-
ship and passion that the poet himself makes in the preface to Absalom and
Achitophel, the spirit of The Medal might seem disturbing. Dryden's satire
is a vivid reminder that politics in the 1680s were hardly polite; losing a
political struggle meant more than the diminution of civic authority: one
anti-court satirist was executed for a libel against the king (1681), and
theorists of republicanism in these years risked the block.
Yet in 1682 Dryden also began a short career as a religious poet; in the
midst of Exclusion Crisis turmoil came the first of Dryden's two major
religious poems: Religio Laid. The poem seems a halcyon moment within a
partisan whirlwind:
Dim, as the borrow'd beams of Moon and Stars

To lonely, weary, wandring Travellers,
Is Reason to the Soul: And as on high,
Those rowling Fires discover but the Sky
Not light us here; So Reason's glimmering Ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtfull way,
But guide us upward to a better Day. (vol. 1, p. 311)
The body of Religio Laid engages seriously and sagaciously with issues of
faith and belief: it offers a history of religious thought, weighs the rival
claims of natural religion and pagan piety, and addresses the infallibility of
Scripture and the status of tradition in revealed religion. These themes
reappear in The Hind and the Panther (1687); and the learning in divinity
that Dryden displays in both texts suggests the depth of his intellectual
engagement with religious vocation. Indeed the Restoration saw the
production and consumption of enormous quantities of religious writing:
sermons and religious pamphlets, scriptural manuals, redactions, and
paraphrases. And yet religious poetry published by a servant of the court
who had achieved not simply a civic voice but public notoriety could not
easily have been received as the meditations of a private man.
In Religio Laid Dryden makes strenuous profession of privacy and laity;
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John Dryden
and the text of his poem provides an elegant demonstration of his ability to
write meditative as well as satiric verse. But in both preface and poem
Religio Laid often veers closer to satire than to meditation. A man might
prefer the quiet of his study to polemical tumult, but to publish a confession
of faith in 1682 was to pronounce civic engagement. The civil wars had
powerful religious motives; the Exclusion Crisis was an effort to bar a
Roman Catholic from the throne; the Glorious Revolution aimed to
remove that Roman Catholic and his heirs from rule; and the Act of
Settlement (1701) forever barred Roman Catholics from the English
monarchy. Religio Laid is the laureate's expression of the Anglican confes-
sion at a moment when he must have found the argument of religious
quietism as strategic as the expression of polemical savagery. More such
expression would be forthcoming in James IPs reign.
How are we to understand The Hind and the Panther} The poem was
written in 1687, a time if not verging on crisis, certainly of political anxiety.
The poem is a defense of James IPs policy of Indulgence - the king's efforts
to remove by royal declaration the restrictions and penalties levied by
parliament against Roman Catholics; but more largely it is a defense of
Roman Catholicism itself and of a monarch who was alienating his most
powerful allies and who would soon make flight under cover of darkness
from London to St. Germain. The Hind and the Panther is also an act of
self-defense and spiritual redefinition. The Protestant laureate who had
been raised in a Puritan household and educated at a university that was a
stronghold of Puritanism in the 1650s was now a Roman Catholic. The
exact date of the conversion is not known, but by the time Dryden wrote
The Hind and the Panther he was willing to make the conversion public.
There is a body of scholarship on the question of Dryden's conversion,
much of it an effort to show the logical steps between Religio Laid and the
conversion to the Roman faith.10 But Religio Laid is a confession of
Anglican faith. Dryden had long made a case for deploring the politics, if
not the spirituality, of sectarian dissent. But the Anglican quietism of
Religio Laid is no step on the road to Rome. In a political community
scarred by religious controversy, a nation that held pope-burning proces-
sions and hailed the memory of Queen Elizabeth as defender against the
Roman antichrist, conversion to Roman Catholicism was no simple matter.
And Dryden was among the very few converts at the court of James II.
Perhaps the Earl of Sunderland was a more important catch; but Sunder-
land promptly converted back after James's flight. Dryden alone among the
prominent converts remained attached to his new faith. As he poignantly
noted after the Revolution, "I know not what Church to go to, if I leave the
Catholique."11 Nor would the public relations involved in the reclamation

STEVEN N. ZWICKER
of Protestant faith have been an easy matter for Dryden at this date in a
career of conversion and partisanship.
But The Hind and the Panther is more than apologetics and self-defense.
It is Dryden's most ambitious piece of original verse. The poem is composed
of allegories, parables, puzzles, mysteries, and prophecies; it is formally a
beast fable, but the fable is so outsized, so intricate and learned that its
relations to fable seem ironic and distant. Such complexity afforded cover
and aesthetic enterprise; into its turning structure Dryden folded personal
apologia, official defense, religious satire, spiritual meditation, and a
variety of prophecies and anxieties. The poem is a device of wonderful
complexity and invention; and its determinedly literary character shows us
a poet fully conversant with the native fabling tradition, in the debt of
Chaucer and Spenser, and ever the keen student of Virgil. The Hind and the
Panther is Dryden's most confessional piece of writing, and it marks a
turning point in his career. It accurately predicts the political disasters of
James's regime, though the prediction is so closeted within the fable of the
poem that it makes but a very oblique appearance. What the poem openly
foretells is the brilliant last turn of Dryden's career. Who could have
predicted literary triumph out of displacement and defeat? Dryden seemed,
by the end of James's reign, old and out of luck. He had lost pension and
prestige in the Revolution of 1688, yet now would begin the most
remarkable phase of his literary career: a return to the theatre, 24,000 lines
of the best English Virgil yet made, and a brilliant collection of translations
from ancient and modern poets known as Fables. The sheer production of
the last decade is remarkable; more remarkable is the quality of the writing,
the expressiveness of the poetry, the intimacy and candor of the prose, and
always the sense of continuous invention.
The theatrical masterpiece of the 1690s is Dryden's Don Sebastian. Or
rather, since the former laureate would encourage the work of a coterie of
young dramatists - among them Southerne, Etherege, and Congreve - it
would be more accurate to call Don Sebastian the theatrical masterpiece of
the Glorious Revolution. In fact, it is the literary masterpiece of that crisis,
for the Glorious Revolution was a political crisis unlike any other in this
century. It has been argued that the Glorious Revolution wrought a more
profound change on the body politic than the civil wars;12 certainly the
Revolution was a momentous event compared with the Exclusion Crisis.
The earlier crises of this century produced civic turmoil and cultural
ferment; we rightly associate the crises at mid-century with the literary,
political, and intellectual careers of John Milton and Andrew Marvell. The
Restoration and nearly every significant crisis for the next thirty years are
forcefully articulated in cultural forms. The Exclusion Crisis produced a
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John Dryden
feast of narrations and representations. But the Glorious Revolution was

acceded to in near silence. There were of course conventional efforts -
official panegyrics, crudely satirical squibs on James and his wife, Mary of
Modena, on the birth of their son, James Francis Edward Stuart, and then
on William and Mary. But the muse was remarkably silent in the days and
months following William's landing at Torbay. The outstanding cultural
monument of the Glorious Revolution turns out not to have been a
celebration of the triumph of liberty but a tragedy which discovers in the
failed heroics of a Portuguese king and the brutality of an infidel warrior
the long shadow of English politics.
Such a conjunction of affairs predicts much of the fate of high culture in
the coming decade. Not that the production of great literature excludes
political defeat, or exile and despair. Consider Hobbes writing Leviathan in
Paris, Milton's remarkable productivity in the 1660s, or the example of
Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, writing his subtle and brilliant
history of the Revolution in exile, first after civil war, and then in personal
ruin in France when he had been driven from office in 1667. Dryden's
career evokes exactly this model. But the 1690s were not a propitious time
altogether for high culture. Profound structural changes in English politics
were underway: a European war would determine the course of its politics,
economy, and foreign policy for the next century and more. The 1690s
proved to be years not so much for literary invention as for fabling,
paraphrase, and translation.
Jacobites remained true to the cause of James II, but the nation as a
whole had no such political mission. Yet it was not Jacobites alone who
took cover under fabling and translation. More editions of Aesop were
produced in the 1690s than in any previous decade of the century. One
conclusion we might draw about the relations between politics and culture
from this decade is that wariness and uncertainty, more than turmoil and
change, quelled the muse. The legitimacy of William Ill's authority and title
was worried throughout the decade: in satires, in assassination attempts, in
votes of association. Programs of moral reform, societies for the improve-
ment of manners, and charitable foundations flourished in the 1690s, but
alongside the decade's overt moralism lay an uncertainty about the legal
authority of the government. The unsteady relations between moral reform
and political legitimacy surely recall the 1650s; both decades had begun in
usurpation and conquest; and both were undermined by moral uncertainty
and defined in their literatures by indirection and unsteadiness. Obliqueness
and innuendo are the safest modes for troubled times. Whether you are
intent on hiding dangerous opinions or simply uncertain of what to say,
fable and translation offer shelter, a space in which to negotiate a voice.

STEVEN N. ZWICKER
How prescient of Dryden to have begun a career of fabling not in the

winter of 1689 but in the summer of 1687 when he must have sensed that
the girders underpinning the Stuart regime were beginning to tremble. He
would later write in Fables (1700):
What should the People do, when left alone?
The Governor, and Government are gone.
The publick Wealth to Foreign Parts convey'd;
Some Troops disbanded, and the rest unpaid.
Rhodes is the Soveraign of the Sea no more;
Their Ships unrigg'd, and spent their Naval Store;
They neither could defend, nor can pursue,
But grind their Teeth, and cast a helpless view. (vol. iv, p. 1757)
The verse is Boccaccio's but the language clearly intimates the Revolution
and its settlement. The mood, poignant and bitter, is one that we find
throughout the 1690s. What is to be done when authority has been wrested
from weak but legitimate hands? Marvell had posed the question in 1649;
the relations between power and legitimacy are crucial to Dryden's writing
in the whole of the 1690s: they drive Don Sebastian and they are at the
center of the Aeneid or, rather, at the center of how Dryden sought to
translate the epic of Latin empire and eternity. The troubled relations
between power and authority run like a bright thread through his Virgil
and through the translations and original verse of Fables. And though they
were not Dryden's alone, the answers he achieved in the 1690s form the
most moving legacy of the Revolution and the most enduring expression of
Jacobitism.
New work of course appeared late in the decade; Swift began the Tale of
A Tub in 1697; Defoe had begun to write in the 1690s, and the most
perfect examples of the comedy of manners date from the last years of this
decade. But for students of high culture, the center of the 1690s must be
Dryden's Virgil.
What Virgil wrote in the vigour of his Age, in Plenty and at Ease, I have
undertaken to Translate in my Declining Years: strugling with Wants,
oppress'd with Sickness, curb'd in my Genius, lyable to be misconstrued in all
I write; and my Judges, if they are not very equitable, already prejudic'd
against me, by the Lying Character which has been given them of my Morals.
(vol. in, p. 1424)
Perhaps there is self-dramatization here, a hint of self-pity, but it must have

seemed daunting, even to so prodigious a worker as Dryden, to begin a
project late in his life, late in his century, that he may have suspected he
would not live to complete. It turned out not to be Dryden's last project,
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John Dryden
not in fact by some measure. But there are summative effects in the
Virgilian project that are worth noting as we look back across the decades
of Dryden's career and his time.
The poet's apprenticeship in the Virgilian line began early.13 There is a
suggestion of Virgil in the Cromwell verses and in Astraea Redux; we can
hear Virgil in Annus Mirabilis and in the heroic drama; Virgil is a subtext
in Mac Flecknoe, a presence in Absalom and Achitophel, and crucial to the
political and prophetic gestures in The Hind and the Panther. We can
watch Dryden experimenting with the translation of Virgil in Sylvae
(1685), and in the miscellanies that Jacob Tonson published in 1693 a n d
1694. The consolidation of this work began in the spring of 1694 when
Dryden signed a contract with Tonson for a translation to consist of the
Georgics, Pastorals, and the Aeneid. The 1697 Virgil is then a culmination
of years of affiliation and affinity. Some have thought it was the epic which
Dryden could never bring off, but if we see The Works of Virgil as
substitution or displacement, we construct a false model not only of
Dryden's career but as well of the mood of the late seventeenth century. For
three decades Dryden worked rapidly and steadily as public poet, as
dramatist to a commercial theatre, and as literary theorist. His career bore
no resemblance to the careful constructions that Spenser and Milton made
of their work. They were epic poets by design, literary career was an
important act of self-fashioning. Jonson's career, in a different way, also
suggests studious self-presentation. Dryden could not have entertained such
designs when he contributed to Lachrymae Musarum or Three Poems on
the Death of O.C.. These he conceived as opportunities, not for a career as
Renaissance poet but for something humbler, not yet for Grub Street but
for patronage and profession. The late seventeenth century saw the
transformation of the career in letters from membership in the priesthood
of Mount Parnassus to commercial enterprise, and Dryden's ambition for
place, his work in the theatre both early in his career and late, even his
Virgil we must understand in terms both of professional needs and some-
thing akin to poetic furor. He did everything to qualify himself for both
worlds, but he belonged fully to neither. He was not completely the
patronized servant of the great man, not a Spenser in the household of a
magnate, but neither was he Swift, Defoe, or Johnson. And the way in
which he would go about producing his Virgil is an emblem of the
transitional point that his career identifies.
The Virgil is a translation of one culture into the idioms of another; it is a
steady and lofty and moving meditation on the price that empire exacts
from a nation. But the Virgil is also a business transaction. And happily for
our awareness of its position both in the life of the poet and in his culture,
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STEVEN N. ZWICKER
the contract for the Virgil has been preserved: so many lines for so many
guineas.14 Dryden was writing not only to claim his identity as the English
Virgil, he was also working as a professional and ever, as writers are,
suspicious of the motives of his publisher. The correspondence that survives
between Dryden and Tonson is brusque and wary on both sides, concerned
with the production of a book and not with the transmission of a culture.
But clearly, the poet, if not the publisher, had both aims in mind.
In the transmission of antiquity, this English Virgil occupies a crucial
place. The seventeenth century was a time in England, and throughout
Europe, when Virgil stood very high. The number of Virgil translations
into modern languages from this age is striking as is the number of efforts
in England alone, from Richard Stanyhurst in 1582 to Dryden's contem-
porary, Richard Maitland, fourth Earl of Lauderdale. Dryden was aware
of the cultural preeminence of Virgil as a European master. But surely the
presence of Virgil in English literary and political culture was not the
same at the beginning of Dryden's career as by its end. We are familiar
with the term Augustan as a description of literature of the late seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries. But that literature was not Augustan
in 1660. The central book of English literary culture at mid-century was
the Bible. Scripture dominated the idioms of culture and politics. This
was not quite so in 1700. The turn in English culture between 1650 and
1700 might best be understood by considering how Virgil's Aeneid
replaced the Holy Scriptures as the central book of literature. By the late
seventeenth century we are steadily aware of the Roman idioms of
English literature; pietas had replaced piety, and the Virgilian sublime had
replaced sacred passion as the height of literary expression. Of course, the
displacement of Scripture by Virgil is a signature, an emblem rather than
an outline or an anatomy. But the creation of an Augustan age depended
on the honoring of certain texts, and Virgil's epic poem occupied the most
important place.
Dryden tells us that he had hoped to lay the new Virgil at the feet of his
old master, but he knew by 1697 that he could not delay for that event. He
would not, however, dedicate the book to William III. Perhaps William was
the best of a bad lot - language which Dryden gives to Virgil as the Latin
poet instructs the elective monarch, Augustus Caesar, on the proprieties
and dangers of such an office. But in his patrons and among the aristocrats
to whom he dedicates various pieces of his book, Dryden celebrates the
political world that he had lost. Dorset, Ormonde, Abingdon, Orrery,
Ailesbury - these were the men and the families whom he had long honored
and whose names would be affixed to his book.15 Dryden's Virgil was both
a commercial success and a literary masterpiece, a fitting text for solace and

John Dryden
fame. The Virgil was a summary of the career and a crucial point in the
creation of Augustan literature.
But the career was not over when Dryden made the corrections and
postscript to the Virgil. He signed another contract with Tonson for more
translations, this time from ancient and modern authors. Fables (1700) is a
more miscellaneous effort than The Works of Virgil, but not a lesser
masterpiece. There is a trial here for a new Homer and translations from
Boccaccio, Ovid, and Chaucer. There are also several original pieces,
including an elegant verse epistle to his cousin John Driden and a lavish
panegyric to the Duchess of Ormonde. Best of all is the capacious Preface
to Fables, Dryden's most beautiful piece of critical writing:
'Tis with a Poet, as with a Man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he
supposes, in casting up the Cost beforehand: But, generally speaking, he is
mistaken in his Account, and reckons short of the Expence he first intended:
He alters his Mind as the Work proceeds, and will have this or that
Convenience more, of which he had not thought when he began. So has it
hapned to me; I have built a House, where I intended a Lodge: Yet with better
Success than a certain Nobleman, who beginning with a Dog-kennil, never
liv'd tofinishthe Palace he had contriv'd. / vo j IV p
The intimacy and ease of voice are characteristic of the whole; it is as if

Dryden spoke directly across these pages. While the prose is informal, even
digressive, it has a superb economy; there is not a wasted breath here. The
effects are now second nature, for we have the illusion of the poet's words
wholly without art. And this is true for much of the writing of the last
decade. Not all is so condensed and fluent as the prose of the Preface to
Fables, but the best of Dryden's work of the 1690s achieves exactly this
effect. And it is an aesthetic - a simplification and clarification - toward
which the whole of the age had moved. We associate the term neoclassical
with literature of brilliant artifice; but the Preface and the verse translations
- steady, fluent, utterly idiomatic in effect, condensed, and lucid - convey
as exactly the ideals of neoclassicism as the pointed juxtapositions and
archness of what is often celebrated under that rubric.
Dryden began his life as a poet wholly dependent on materials that were
ready to hand, on devices and conceits that none could have mistaken for
his own. The prose and verse of Fables reveal the identity of its author at
every turn, and yet the writing is without idiosyncrasy. But the creation of a
literary voice was more than a personal triumph. Would it be naive to
accept Dryden's own estimate of his work, that it was a national treasure,
an act of patriotism, and an enrichment of "our native language"? Because
the writing is so varied and the poet intent both on theory and invention, he
201

STEVEN N. ZWICKER
was able to produce a body of literary texts and to create a literary culture.
He enabled his younger contemporaries to invent the next age as he now
allows us to imagine his own. The "works" of John Dryden may have
begun as an unlikely venture, but it came to embody an idea of national
culture at a moment when ideas of empire and nationhood had more than
begun to hold sway.
NOTES
Some material in this chapter has appeared in my "John Dryden e la Restau-
razione," in Franco Marenco (ed.), Storia della Civilita Letteraria Inglese, 4 vols.
(Turin, 1996).
1 I refer to what is still the only complete edition of Dryden's writing, ed. Sir
Walter Scott, 18 vols. (Edinburgh, 1808), revised and corrected by George
Saintsbury (Edinburgh, 1882-93). The "California" Dryden, edited by E. N.
Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956- ),
bears the same name.
2 Dryden's relations with his publishers Henry Herringman and Jacob Tonson
have been thoroughly examined; see Clarence Miller, "Henry Herringman,
Restoration Bookseller-Publisher," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of
America (New York, 1948); Harry M. Geduld, Prince of Publishers (Bloom-
ington, 1969); Kathleen Lynch, Jacob Tonson, Kit-Cat Publisher (Knoxville,
1971); and the exhibition catalogue, Annus Notabilis (Los Angeles, 1981). We
still await - Anne Barbeau Gardiner's "Dryden's Patrons," in R. P. Maccubbin
and M. Hamilton-Phillips (eds.), The Age of William and Mary (Williamsburg,
1989) notwithstanding - a full study of Dryden and his aristocratic patrons.
3 For the early years through Cambridge and the 1650s, see James A. Winn, John
Dryden and His World (New Haven and London, 1987), pp. 1-103.
4 See Hugh Macdonald, John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of
Drydeniana (Oxford, 1939), pp. 1-2.
5 For bibliographical details, see ibid., pp. 3-4.
6 The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1958), vol. 1, p.
18; subsequent citations will be to volume and page number in the Kinsley
edition and included in parentheses in my text.
7 Dryden's supposed response to Paradise Lost, "That Poet had cutt us all out"
was recorded in a MS note by Jonathan Richardson, Sr., p. cxxix of his
annotated copy of Remarks on Milton's Paradise Lost by Jonathan Richardson
Father and Son (London, 1734), now in the London Library. Reproduced in V.
de Sola Pinto, Sir Charles Sedley, 1639-iyoi (London, 1927), p. 94m
8 See Macdonald, John Dryden, p. 19.
9 On the dating of Filmer, see Sir Robert Filmery "Patriarcha" and Other
Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1991), pp. xxxii-xxxiv.
10 The argument can be traced to Louis I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of
John Dryden (Ann Arbor, 1934).
11 The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles Ward (Durham, 1942), p. 123.
12 See J. G. A. Pocock, Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton,
1980).
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John Dryden
13 See, among others, Reuben Brower, "Dryden's Epic Manner and Virgil," PMLA,
55 (1940), pp. 119-38; Brower, "An Allusion to Europe: Dryden and Poetic
Tradition," ELH, 19 (1952), pp. 38-48 (reprinted in Alexander Pope: Poetry of
Allusion [Oxford, 1959]); and, more recently, the remarks on Dryden and Virgil
in Geoffrey Hill's The Enemy's Country (Stanford, 1991), and the notes in Paul
Hammond (ed.), The Poems of John Dryden (London and New York, 1995- ).
14 The contract between Dryden and Tonson is reproduced in Hooker and
Swedenberg (eds.), The Works of John Dryden, vol. vi, Poems: The Works of
Virgil in English, 1697, ed. William Frost (1987), pp. 1179-83.
15 See the two subscription lists to Dryden's Virgil reproduced in Hooker and
Swedenberg (eds.), The Works of John Dryden, vol. v, Poems: The Works of
Virgil in English, 1697, ed- William Frost (1987), pp. 67-71, as well as Dryden's
dedications of the Georgics and the Aeneid.
FURTHER READING
Brower, Reuben, "An Allusion to Europe: Dryden and Poetic Tradition," ELH, 19
(1952), pp. 38-48.
Bywaters, David, Dryden in Revolutionary England (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1991).
Hammond, Paul, John Dryden: A Literary Life (New York, 1991).
Hill, Geoffrey, The Enemy's Country (Stanford, 1991).
Macdonald, Hugh, John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Dry-
deniana (Oxford, 1939).
McKeon, Michael, Politics and Poetry in Restoration England (Cambridge, MA,
1975)-
Miner, Earl, Dryden's Poetry (Bloomington, 1967).
Verrall, A. W, Lectures on Dryden (Cambridge, 1914).
Winn, James A., John Dryden and His World (New Haven, 1987).
Zwicker, Steven N., Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise
(Princeton, 1984).
203

IO
ROS BALLASTER
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

He that can rail at one he calls his Friend,
Or hear him absent wrong'd, and not defend;
Who for the sake of some ill natur'd Jeast,
Tells what he shou'd conceal, Invents the rest;
To fatal Mid-night quarrels, can betray,
His brave Companion, and then run away;
Leaving him to be murder'd in the Street,
Then put it off, with some Buffoone Conceit;
This, this is he, you shou'd beware of all,
Yet him a pleasant, witty Man, you call
To whet your dull Debauches up, and down,
You seek him as top Fidler of the Town.1
Carr Scroope, frequent object of Rochester's scorn, here summarizes the

character that has been handed down to posterity: rake-hell, misanthropist,
fantasist, orchestrator and recorder of the "dull Debauches" of Restoration
London. These dramatic roles, which Rochester himself both contributed
to and colluded in, have for some time obscured the writer. Born in 1647 in
the midst of one political crisis, the English Civil War, and dying in 1680
after the onset of another (the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis),
Rochester's short life was attended by contradiction. He was the son of a
Cavalier ennobled for his service to the exiled Stuarts, although his mother,
Anne, came from a Parliamentarian family and had been previously
married to a Parliamentarian. Reputed a brilliant scholar, Rochester (he
acceded to his father's title on the latter's death in 1658) toured Europe in
the early 1660s, returning to England to be introduced at court with a letter
from Charles IPs sister in 1664. The following year he was confined to the
Tower for the attempted abduction of an heiress, Elizabeth Malet, the same
woman who agreed to marry him in 1667, and went on to bear him a son
and three daughters. Notwithstanding the early passion and later evident
affection between Rochester and his wife, in 1675 he entered into a liaison
with Elizabeth Barry, who later became the leading actress of the Restora-
tion stage and bore him a daughter in 1677. His martial, like his sexual life,
indicates paradoxes. He distinguished himself by notable heroism in the
second Dutch war in 1665 and 1666, but, in the incident to which Scroope
204

referred, Rochester drew his sword upon the watch and seems to have
killed his friend Captain Downes in a drunken brawl at Epsom in 1676; he
earned the contempt of John Sheffield, Duke of Mulgrave by failing
(through ill-health) to attend a duel; and he was rumored to have hired
ruffians to set upon Dryden in an alley as revenge for an anonymous satire
in fact authored by Mulgrave. A close friend of the king's mistress, Nell
Gwynne, and leading member of a circle of court wits including Sir Charles
Sedley, the Duke of Buckingham, and Lord Buckhurst, Rochester incurred
the displeasure of Charles II on a number of occasions, and was repeatedly
exiled from the court, first in 1673 for a satirical poem on Charles II which
apparently went too far; then in 1675 f° r smashing the king's pyramidal
chronometer; and again in 1676 as a result of the infamy following the
Epsom brawl. His facility with disguise and persona touched not only his
verse but also his life; his best-known exploit in the second period of exile
entailed the impersonation of a mountebank, Doctor Alexander Bendo,
who purveyed his cures by the Tower of London.
If the impressive scholarship of David Vieth and Keith Walker has
wrested a relatively secure canon of some 80 poems from the 250 once
attributed to Rochester, the works themselves defy secure categories of
tenor and vehicle, voice and persona. We can with relative confidence
assert that Rochester produced (at least) the following: a collection of
some thirty-six attractive Cavalier lyrics often comic and often obscene;
twenty-one satires and lampoons on topics philosophical, political, sexual,
religious, aesthetic, and scandalous, five of which exceed 120 lines
("Artemiza to Chloe," "A Satyr against Reason and Mankind," "Timon,"
"Tunbridge Wells," "An Allusion to Horace"); one tragedy (Valentinian)
and one pornographic comedy (Sodom); a few fragments of translation
from Ovid, Lucretius, and Seneca; three prologues and epilogues; a
handful of epigrams and impromptu verses. Some twenty-two of his
poems were published during his lifetime, but most circulated in manu-
script, and none appeared collected under his name until after his death.
Approximately one hundred of his letters have been identified, addressed
in the main to his wife, his mistress Elizabeth Barry, and his closest friend
Henry Savile.2
Despite Rochester's evident expertise in stagecraft (he supposedly taught
Elizabeth Barry to act) and, in particular, his deftness in staging himself, he
is the least flamboyant, the most restrained, of Restoration writers, his
strength located in "adroit syntax, diction and cadence" as Bernard Beatty
notes, by contrast with the extravagance of image associated with his
contemporary, John Dryden.3 It is this remarkable economy of expression
and, more generally, a discernible preoccupation with an economics of the
205

ROS BALLASTER
body politic and private, with which the following argument will be
principally concerned.
The language of economy permeates Rochester's writing, nowhere more
obviously than in the representation of sexual exchange as a form of
economic trade, usually entailing "loss" for the male lover. "A Ramble in
Saint James's Parke" complains that Corinna has sex with foolish fops,
devaluing the currency of her lover's sperm. She is, he expostulates, "a
Whore in understanding / A passive pott for Fools to spend in" (lines 101-
02). Rochester's male speakers insistently remind their female addressees
that they must capitalize on their beauty while it is worth something (see
for example "The Advice" to Celia), yet an aristocratic subtext of contempt
for all forms of measure associated with vulgar mercantilism ultimately
discredits the addressee for assenting at all to the validity of an "economy"
of sexual practice. When her lover ejaculates prematurely, Corinna of "The
Imperfect Enjoyment" cries "All this to Love, and Rapture's due, / Must we
not pay a debt to pleasure too?" (lines 23-24). Strephon (a name frequently
applied to Rochester by members of his circle) tells his past mistress,
Daphne, that his new one flies "Tedious, trading, Constancy" ("A Dialogue
between Strephon and Daphne," line 56). Thus, Rochester's poetry seems
at once to contravene, while participating in, the ascendancy of a vocabu-
lary of debt, exchange, and commerce.
This vocabulary might be associated with the emergent language of
political and sexual contract, now associated with John Locke, whose own
thinking was informed by that of those latitudinarian advocates to whom
Rochester was so bitterly opposed. Stephen Clark draws our attention to
Rochester's marked preference in philosophy and political thought for a
Hobbesian spendthrift pursuit of sensation, by contrast with the Lockean
philosophy of accumulation, with its imperative to hoard, conserve, and
protect.4 Rochester's debt to Thomas Hobbes extends to a critique of the
tendency in more tolerant and nascently liberal thinking to attempt to
distinguish between different spheres of culture, the private and public, the
political and the domestic. Hobbes's totalizing political theory makes no
distinction between state relations, sexual relations, and aesthetic relations
as objects of sovereign power.5 Rochester's lampoons and satires insistently
refuse all distinctions between state and sexual politics. Thus, a lampoon
"To longe the Wise Commons" of 1673 fuses topical and sexual innuendo
expertly and, for the modern reader, confusingly:
To longe the Wise Commons have been in debate

About Money, and Conscience (those Trifles of State)
Whilst dangerous Greyvances daily increase,
206

And the Subject can't riott in Safety, and peace.

Unlesse (as agaynst Irish Cattle before)
You now make an Act, to forbid Irish whore. (lines 1-6)
Parliament in 1673 obliged Charles to abandon his policy of toleration of

Nonconformists ("Conscience") in exchange for granting him money to
continue his war against the Dutch ("Money"). The poem asserts these are
"Trifles of State," however, beside the threat posed by pox-ridden Irish
whores. It proceeds to cite some Irish court ladies as evidence, and advises
the Commons to extend a law it had passed in January 1666/7 against
importing cattle into England from Ireland to such human "cattle." The
proposal is, of course, ironic, but the juxtaposition serves to cast a cynical
light on the process of government itself which operates through the mean-
spirited trading of one unlike thing for another: "Money" can be traded for
"Conscience," and hence why not ban Irish whores as well as Irish cattle?
In his letters, Rochester frequently expresses contempt for statecraft; he
comments in spring 1676 to Savile that "They who would be great in our
little government seem as ridiculous to me as schoolboys who with much
endeavour and some danger climb a crab-tree, venturing their necks for
fruit which solid pigs would disdain if they were not starving" (Letters, p.
119). Rather than concluding Rochester's disinterestedness or independence
from the intense political fissures of his period,6 it might be more exact to
observe that he found the available models of statecraft constraining and
diminishing.
In Rochester's poetic and dramatic works we can identify a consistent
tendency toward critique of the very discourse of commerce and exchange
within which he is writing, a restless unhappiness with the demarcation of
boundaries between the social, sexual, and political, condemning such
discriminatory activities as part and parcel of a culture that continually
balances its books, and attempts to value and delimit its component parts.
James Turner has marked this general tendency in libertinism to resubmit
to the terms that it challenges: "the rebellious display of illicit sexuality is
linked, by latent associations and ghostly companionships of language, to
the religious and moral systems it purports to reject."7 In Rochester's case
the escape from such resubmission, although ostensibly a call to hedonistic
excess, ultimately manifests itself by retreat into forms of extreme minim-
alism, nihilism, and non-entity.8 These gestures of negativity attend the two
primary forms of figuration that dominate his writing and become the
subject of both investigation and critique: first, a figuration of waste or
emission identified with the physical and symbolic properties of the penis/
phallus; and second, a figuration of surfeit and absorption identified with
207

ROS BALLASTER
the physical and symbolic properties of the vagina/cunt. If Rochester's

famous misogyny can be located anywhere it is here: in the repetitive
assignment of gendered psychological identities, indeed agency, on the basis
of fixed mechanical sexual properties.9 That Rochester's writing is preoccu-
pied with the physical mechanics of sexuality yet repeatedly eschews issues
of procreation and generation indicates the ultimate barrenness of the
totalizing philosophy it pursues. As Marianne Thormahlen shrewdly ob-
serves: "At the centre of Rochester's poems on love, there is an empty
space."10 Apparent materialism dissolves into abstraction, and physical
body parts are revealed to be the chimeric products of mental processes and
intellect.
Waste
In Rochester's poetry, emission and loss are consistently associated with
male sexuality and, especially, the penis. His most famous poem on this
theme, "The Imperfect Enjoyment," partakes of a lengthy tradition stem-
ming from Ovid and Petronius and developed by the French poets, Remy
Belleau and Mathurin Regnier in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries.11 However, Rochester also departs from the tradition in that the
"debt to pleasure" that the speaker has failed to pay, the achievement of
orgasm in his partner, is the result of premature ejaculation rather than
impotence. His failure is one of self-control and timing rather than the
machinery itself. However, the speaker's invective, commencing on line 46,
displaces anger from its rightful target, the mind, to the body part. And the
punishment the speaker calls down upon his/its head is a fitting one, that
future emissions should be the result of disease, or should fail outright:
May'st thou to rav'nous Shankers, be a Prey,
Or in consuming Weepings waste away.
May Strangury, and Stone, thy Days attend.
May'st thou ne're Piss, who didst refuse to spend,
When all my joys, did on false thee depend. (lines 66-70)
Rochester frequently deploys mock-heroic conventions to figure the comic

failure of the penis to fulfil its single purpose. The speaker of "The
Imperfect Enjoyment" figures his penis as a failed street bully who shrinks
from his military duty when called upon by king and country:
Like a Rude roaring Hector, in the Streets,
That Scuffles, Cuffs, and Ruffles all he meets;
But if his King, or Country, claim his Aid,
The Rakehell Villain, shrinks, and hides his head:
208

Ev'n so thy Brutal Valor, is displaid,

Breaks ev'ry Stew, does each small Whore invade,
But when great Love, the onset does command,
Base Recreant, to thy Prince, thou darst not stand, (lines 54-61)
Similarly, the speaker of "The Disabled Debauchee" adopts the conceit that
he is a war-scarred admiral admiring the military prowess of younger
combatants from a distance, which casts light on "His present glory, and
his past delight" (line 8). The only emissions he is now capable of are
"flashes of rage" from "his fierce Eyes" (line 9) and words from his mouth
in the shape of stories of his past exploits used to "fire [the] Blood" (line 31)
of the "cold complexion'd Sot" (line 29) who shrinks from the fray. Again,
the language of commerce is smuggled into the military metaphor; despite
falling victim to venereal sufferings, he claims, "Past joys have more than
paid what I endure" (line 24). The agency of the speakers in both these
poems lies in their utterance, which comes to substitute for the physical act
in which they have failed. Male speech compensates for mechanical sexual
failure. And the potency of speech is considerable. The "disabled debau-
chee" claims that, in passing on his tales to the younger man, he can lead
him toward blasphemy and obscenity: "I'll make him long some Antient
Church to fire, / And fear no lewdness he's called to by Wine" (lines 4 3 -
44)-
Evidently, we must understand both the disabled debauchee and the
speaker of "The Imperfect Enjoyment" as subject to their creator's irony:
preoccupied with sensual pleasures, they trivialize political and military
glory by invoking the comparison and reveal themselves to be trivial in the
process. Perhaps the scabrous lampooning, invective, and obscenity in this
period even carried specific overtones of resistance to latitudinarian
attempts to promote civility and appeasement as a means of furthering the
rational religion seen as favorable to the increase of trade, empire, and
science. In aligning his poetry with "wanton expression," satiric invective
rather than the kind of civil satire that Dryden promotes in his "Discourse
concerning the Original and Progress of Satire," Rochester is repudiating
this latitudinarian model of political and state culture (most overtly of
course in his "Satyr against Reason and Mankind"). 12 Speech is then
characterized as a form of effective emission for the male agent, but only
when the sexual body fails to perform. Ineffective speech is also figured as a
debased form of emission which substitutes for sexual prowess. The
speaker of "An Epistolary Essay" - perhaps a send-up of Rochester's
enemy, John Sheffield, Duke of Mulgrave 13 - refers to his writing as a form
of excretion:
209

ROS BALLASTER
Perhaps ill Verses, ought to be confin'd,

In meere good Breeding, like unsav'ry Wind;
Were Reading forc'd, I shou'd be apt to thinke
Men might noe more write scurvily, than stinke:
But 'tis your choyce, whether you'll Read, or noe,
If likewise of your smelling it were soe,
I'd Fart just as I write, for my owne ease,
Nor shou'd you be concern'd, unlesse you please:
I'll owne, that you write better than I doe,
But I have as much need to write, as you,
What though the Excrement of my dull Braine,
Runns in a harsh, insipid Straine,
Whilst your rich Head, eases it self of Witt?
Must none but Civet-Catts, have leave to shit? (lines 30-43)
Here then writing is, like the physical act of farting, shitting, or ejaculating,
beyond the mental control of the poet.
In Rochester's writing, male "tackle" consistently fails its owner as he
seeks to have it figure his own power and authority. The comedy of both
the "Satire on Charles II" and "Signior Dildo" lies in the acknowledgment
of "bollocks" as undermining the regal symbolism and unified authority of
the penis/phallus. "Signior Dildo" - an anti-Yorkist satire which lays the
import of dildoes and their enthusiastic embrace by the ladies of the
English court at the door of James Duke of York's Italian bride of 1673,
Mary of Modena - concludes with another mock-heroic scene in which
"Count Cazzo" (the fleshly penis) and his "Rabble of Pricks" attempt to
chase "Signior Dildo" out of town. Nell Gwynne's friend, Lady Sandys, is
described as bursting into laughter:
To see how the Ballocks came wobbling after,

And had not their weight retarded the Fo
Indeed't had gone hard with Signior Dildo. (lines 90-92)
Similarly, in the "Satire on Charles II," it is the king's bollocks that

undermine his magisterial prick. When impregnating his Catholic mistress,
Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, we are told "For though he
setles well his Tarse [penis] / Yett his dull graceless Ballocks hang an arse"
(lines 26-27). To "hang an arse" according to Johnson's dictionary is "to be
tardy, sluggish, or dilatory." In both these cases, then, the physical
machinery of reproduction (the bollocks) slows down the organ of plea-
sure, the penis, preventing it from completing its task, bringing the woman
to orgasm. The bollock-less efficient machine of the dildo directed by the
210

woman outstrips the penis, freed of the encumbrance ("weight") of the

spermatic juices carried in the testes.
Anal penetration does not discriminate between male and female as
sources of gratification for the male protagonist. In "The Imperfect Enjoy-
ment" the speaker remembers his penis's previous mastery of coition
regardless of the sex of his partner:
Stiffly resolv'd, twou'd carelessly invade,
Woman or Man, nor ought its fury staid,
Where e're it pierc'd, a Cunt it found or made, (lines 41-43)
As Harold Weber notes, "The feminized object of desire remains essential

to the procurement of male pleasure within this libertine sexual
economy."14 Yet, ultimately, and paradoxically, the magisterial phallus is
undermined by the materiality of the penis, the object for which it stands,
which emits (whether piss, venereal weepings, or sperm) uncontrollably.15
The political implications of this economy of waste in the poetry are
made overt in the comic closet drama, Sodom.16 Bolloximian, King of
Sodom, passes an edict that men may only bugger and must abstain from
cunt, an edict which his wife, Cuntigratia, and her maids of honor,
Fuckadilla, Cunticula, and Clitoris, as well as his heir, Prince Prickett, and
the Princess Swivia, proceed to ignore. On the authority of his physician,
Flux, Bolloximian declares "Products spoil cunts. Flux does allow / That
what like woman was, it makes like cow" (Act 3, lines 157-58, Lyons [ed.],
Complete Poems and Plays, p. 146). The paradox here is that emission in a
cunt results in "products" (babies) which "spoil" the sexual gratifications it
might offer so that total abstention is seen as preferable. The play
humorously reveals the paradoxical force of "liberty"; Bolloximian, in a
sideswipe at Charles IPs pursuit of religious toleration in his reign, must act
tyrannously in order to ensure freedom:
Let conscience have its force of liberty.
I do proclaim, that buggery may be used
O'er all the land, so cunt be not abused.
(Act 1, lines 68-70, Lyons [ed.], Complete Poems and Plays, p. 131)
Sexual freedom is here seen to result in, precisely, a dead-end, in non-

procreative anal sex. In order to prevent "spoiling" the cunt by using it for
purposes other than pure sexual pleasure (procreation), male seed must be
wastefully expended in the anus. However, this leaves the state in a condition
of permanent revolt and chaos, deprived of the sovereign phallic power the
king set out to assert. The play concludes with Bolloximian agreeing to share
his dynastic potential with his fellow-king, Tarsehole (Louis XIV), who is

ROS BALLASTER
given the freedom to "command like me what cunts do live / Within my

precincts that are fit to swive" (Act 3, lines 179-80, Lyons [ed.], Complete
Poems and Plays, p. 46) in exchange for the forty young men he has sent
for his brother-in-law to use. Heterosexual procreative activity is frequently
rejected by Rochester's speakers in a gesture of aristocratic disdain, similar
to that of Bolloximian here, who considers it below his dignity. Likewise, in
the song "Love a Womanl y're an Ass," the speaker announces his
preference for his "sweet soft Page" (line 15) and pronounces:
Let the Porter, and the Groome,

Things design'd for dirty Slaves,
Drudge in fair Aurelias Womb,
To get supplies for Age, and Graves. (lines 5-8)
Yet, in the case of the king of Sodom and the aristocracy in general it is
precisely the need to stoop to the "labour" of ensuring legitimate heirs
through conjugal intercourse to which Rochester is calling attention. 17 The
authority of the phallus is, paradoxically, secured only through its reduc-
tion to the menial task of marital reproduction.
Sodom also asserts the independence and threatening power of the
female cunt which challenges the symbolic authority of the phallus through
its potential inexhaustibility. Where vaginal sex with women is figured as a
form of unwelcome labor by Buggeranthus, who complains that "toils of
cunt are more than toils of war" (Act 3, line 35, Lyons [ed.], Complete
Poems and Plays, p. 142), Cuntigratia responds "Fucking a toil! Good
lord! you do mistake. / Of ease and pleasure it does all partake" (Act 3,
lines 36-37, Lyons [ed.], Complete Poems and Plays, p. 142). Both Weber
and Thormahlen note that Rochester's representations of eroticism are less
concerned with sexual pleasure than the struggle for power, which figured
as a conflict over which determines the action of the other's body, penis or
cunt (Weber, "Drudging," pp. 104-05), or between animal (associated with
women) and cerebral (associated with men) pleasure (Thormahlen, Roche-
ster, p. 27). The autonomy of the female cunt is figured in Rochester's
obscene verse and drama as a suffusing greed which ultimately cannot be
satisfied by the feeble emissions of the penis.
Surfeit
If "The Imperfect Enjoyment" shifts its course mid-stream to an invective
against the speaker's penis, "A Ramble in Saint James's Parke" enacts an
equivalent movement in relation to the female vagina. As in "The Imperfect
Enjoyment" the poem's speaker is a male lover spurred to sexual excitement
212

who suddenly experiences a reversal of desire and emotion, here not

through premature ejaculation but rather the sight of his mistress, Corinna,
allowing three foolish lovers "With wriggling tailes [make] up to her" (line
44). At line 109, the speaker shifts to apostrophize his mistress in an
invective as obscene and perverse as that directed toward the penis in "The
Imperfect Enjoyment." If the penis is complained of for its shortcomings
and its too nice discriminations (it can perform for a common whore but
not a loved mistress), the cunt is figured as an exorbitant and indiscriminate
agent. It is the combination of these two attributes that particularly enrages
the speaker who complains that:
Had she pickt out to rub her Arse on

Some stiff prickt Clown or well hung Parson
Each jobb of whose spermatique sluce
Had filPd her Cunt while wholesome Juice
I the proceeding should have praisd
In hope she had quench'd a fire I rais'd. (lines 91-96)
However, Corinna's cunt proves neither quenchable nor capable of discri-

minating between "wholesome" and corrupting "Juice." She sleeps with
fops for reasons other than sexual pleasure:
Did ever I refuse to bear

The meanest part your Lust could spare
When your lewd Cunt came spewing home
Drench't with the seed of halfe the Town
My dram of sperm was sup't up after
For the digestive surfeit water.
Full gorged at another time
With a vast meal of nasty slime
Which your devouring Cunt had drawn
From Porters Backs and Footmens brawn
I was content to serve you up
My Ballock full for your Grace cupp
Nor even thought it an abuse
While you had pleasure for excuse. (lines 111-24)
The speaker's objection is that Corinna's activities indicate insatiability (his

sperm can no longer act as "surfeit water," a digestive taken after excessive
consumption) and blasphemy (her cunt is "prophaned" [line 166] in that
his spermatic "offering" no longer has the priority over others' unconse-
crated juices). The "curse" on Corinna is, like that on the speaker's penis in
"The Imperfect Enjoyment," fitting. Since her cunt cannot be satisfied and
she allows "whiffling Fools" (line 136) to copulate with her, he prays:
213

ROS BALLASTER
You may goe madd for the North wind

And fixing all your hopes upont
To have him bluster in your Cunt
Turn up your longing Arse to the Air
And perrish in a wild despair. (lines 138-42)
The paradoxical desire to be filled by an absence, air, will, the speaker

threatens, result in expiry.
Rochester's poetry constructs female desire as unfulfillable precisely
because it is a desire to be filled to excess. Hence, it never imagines the
possibility of female same-sex desire or indeed sexual gratification not
organized around the penis or a phallic substitute: dildo or thumb. Hence,
in the mock-pastoral song, "Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay," Chloris is
prompted to masturbation by a dream of penetration by an amorous swain
in which the grunts of the pigs she tends are equated with her lover's cries:
Frighted she wakes and wakeing Friggs

Nature thus kindly eas'd
In dreams rais'd by her murmring Piggs
And her own Thumb between her leggs
She's Innocent and pleas'd. (lines 36-40)
Strikingly, however, those few poems that Rochester puts in the female
voice rarely imply such uncomplicated desire for the penis or its substitutes
on the part of women. Those women who do express such desires are
treated satirically. Of the six women who are shown to actively use the
dildo in "Signior Dildo," four belong to the York sphere against whom
Rochester aligned himself with his friend, Buckingham, whereas those
women associated with the king or Buckingham reject the artificial
phallus.18 "Mistress Knights Advice to the Dutchess of Cleavland in
Distress for a Prick" is a satirical attack on Barbara Palmer, Duchess of
Cleveland, who made an enemy of Rochester by having an affair with
Mulgrave. By contrast, female speakers with a modicum of intellect show a
marked preference for power over pleasure in their sexual choices. "The
Platonick Lady" expresses her preference for loveplay without penetration
and implies that only here can her sexuality be active rather than receptive:
I love a youth, will give mee leave

His Body in my arms to wreath;
To presse him Gently and to kisse,
To sigh and looke with Eyes that wish.
For what if I could once Obtaine,
I would neglect with flatt disdaine. (lines 13-18)
214

In "A Letter from Artemiza in the Towne to Chloe in the Countrey," one of
Rochester's longest and most complex poems, the poet takes the unusual
move of allowing the critique of the reduction of love to a form of
economic exchange in the mouth of a woman. Artemiza relates to Chloe an
account in verse of her encounter with a fine lady married to a foolish
knight. The lady in turn tells the brief story of Corinna, seduced and
abandoned by a man of wit, who obtains and fleeces a married country
bumpkin as a lover, poisoning him once she is secure in the house, plate,
and jewels he has bought for her by mortgaging his estate. Like the Corinna
in "A Ramble in Saint James's Parke," the fine lady and this Corinna prefer
foolish lovers to men of wit. However, as Artemiza concludes, the woman
of intelligence who chooses the fool as her sexual partner is ultimately
more to blame than the driven cunt who indiscriminately hosts fool, man
of wit, dildo, or thumb. While the fine lady plays with a monkey admiring
it as a "curious Miniature of Man" (line 143), Artemiza comments:
I took this tyme, to thinke, what Nature meant,
When this mixt thinge into the World shee sent,
Soe very wise, yet soe impertinent.
One, who knew ev'ry thinge, who, God thought fitt,
Should bee an Asse through choyce, not want of Witt. (lines 147-5 J )
It is not insignificant that Artemiza is a poet, for Rochester ascribes a
negative aesthetics to female sexuality which might be paralleled to the
image of male writing as excretive substitute for the failed mechanics of
coition. Artemiza figures poetry as a form of madness in pursuit of
insubstantial gratification for women. This image might be paralleled with
that conjured in "A Ramble in Saint James's Parke" of Corinna's impossible
desire for the north wind:
Deare Artemiza, poetry's a snare:
Bedlam has many Mansions: have a Care.
Your Muse diverts you, makes the Reader sad;
You Fancy, you'r inspir'd, he thinkes, you mad.
Consider too, 'twill be discreetly done,
To make your Selfe the Fiddle of the Towne,
To fynd th'ill-humour'd pleasure att their need,
Curst, if you fayle, and scorn'd, though you succeede. (lines 16-23)
Although writing by women can be figured as a form of agency which
transgresses cultural taboo, like maids wooing or men marrying (line 28), it
results in a more familiar objectification and passivity, making the writer
into "the Fiddle of the Towne" not far removed from the "passive Pott for
men to spend in" ("A Ramble in Saint James's Parke," line 102).
215

ROS BALLASTER
If women themselves rarely figure as linguistic agents in Rochester's

poetry (recall Corinna's only speech act in "A Ramble in Saint James's
Parke": "at her Mouth her Cunt cries yes" [line 78]), the emissions of the
female body do provide a source for male writing. "On Mistress Willis"
imagines the poet as drawing on the excess materials of the female body,
and in particular female sexuality, to produce his own bawdy writing:
Whom that I may describe throughout

Assist me Bawdy Powers
Pie write upon a double Clowt
And dipp my Pen in Flowers. (lines 5-8)
The poet here writes on a sanitary towel and dips his pen in menstrual
blood in order to produce his image of the court prostitute, Sue Willis, yet
that image comes surprisingly, and uncomfortably, close to that of the
author himself:19
A Prostitute to all the Town

And yet with no man Freinds
She rails and scolds when she lyes down
And Curses when she Spends. (lines 13-16)
The attempt to draw the fine line between promiscuity and indiscrimi-
nacy proves a task less easy for Rochester's poetic speakers than might first
appear, not least when applied to male aesthetic activity in the analogy
with female sexuality. In the satire known as "Timon," in imitation of a
satire by Rochester's favorite poet, Nicholas Boileau,20 the speaker encoun-
ters a man who invites him to a dinner on the basis of a libel he admires
and wrongly believes to be written by the speaker. The speaker admits his
own error in keeping silent rather than vigorously denying authorship:
Which he, by this, has spread o're the whole Town,

And me, with an officious Lye, undone.
Of a well meaning Fool, I'm most afraid,
Who sillily repeats, what was well said. (lines 29-32)
He joins his host, the host's wife, and group of ignorant and loud-mouthed
friends for dinner to find himself regaled with precisely the silly repetitions
of the "well said" lines of Orrery, Etherege, Settle, Crowne, and Dryden.
The poet, Rochester, manages by contrast with these pretentious literati, to
do more than passively imitate; he transforms his favorite poet's lines,
ending, not as Boileau does, on a dispute about literary value but rather
one about military glory: the company comes to blows over the question of
whether the French army is courageous or not. Mechanical repetition,
216

passive imitation, are the marks of folly in Rochester's poetry, and these
vices magically slip from association with femininity to male protagonists,
even in all-male social groupings; the host's wife whose only interest is in
discussing love and love poetry (by contrast with the men who take more
pleasure in the martial lines of heroic tragedy) has departed from the scene
by line n o of the 177-line poem.
At other points in Rochester's writing, the distinction between male and
female desire and sexuality dissolves and reverses. If the cunt is seen as an
inexhaustible repository of liquid in Rochester's obscene poetry, it might be
paralleled with the male drinker of his anacreontic verse (poetry in praise
of love and wine in imitation of the Greek lyric poet, Anacreon). In a letter
to George Savile of 22 June (})I6JI, Rochester famously observed:
I have seriously considerd one thinge, that of the three Buisnisses of this Age,
Woemen, Polliticks & drinking, the last is the only exercise att wch you & I
have nott prouv'd our selves Errant fumblers; if you have the vanity to thinke
otherwise, when we meete next lett us appeale to freinds of both sexes & as
they shall determine, live & dye sheere drunkards, or intire Lovers. (p. 67)
The song "How happy Cloris (were they free)" explicitly equates female
appetite for sperm with male capacity for drink, encouraging a fair trade
with Chloris:
Whilst I, my Passion to pursue

Am whole Nights takeing in
The lusty Juice of Grapes, take you
The lusty Juice of Men. (lines 21-24)
Again, an attempt is made to distinguish between an indiscriminacy

associated with female as opposed to male consumption. The three versions
of this "Song" not only demonstrate the care with which Rochester crafted
his verse but also the consistent slippage between mercenary and sexual
metaphor through association with promiscuous female sexuality, against
which is pitted the true liberty of the male wit devoted to wine and boys.
Stanza 4 of "How happy Cloris (were they free)," stanza 4 of "How perfect
Cloris, and how free," and stanza 6 of "Such perfect Blisse fair Chloris,
wee" (also known as "To a Lady in a Letter" and the only version to be
published in Rochester's lifetime, anonymously in the 1676 A New Collec-
tion of the Choicest Songs) are virtually identical except for a significant
choice of word in the last line. The first version runs:
You never thinke it worth your care,

How empty nor how dull,
217

ROS BALLASTER
The heads of your Admirers are,

Soe that their Codds be full. (lines 13-16)
The second version, a manuscript text, replaces "Codds" with "backs"
written above an uncanceled "purse" and the third version offers "bags,"
with "Codds" preferred again in a manuscript variant of the same version.
"Codds," "bags," and "purse" thus seem interchangeable, not only as slang
terms for the testes but in terms of Cloris's sexual pursuit, which is covetous
(whether of sperm or money) by contrast with her lover's pursuit of drink,
figured as a form of homosocial bonding which excludes women and can
be indulged to excess without ill-effect.
However, the desire for surfeit associated with the female cunt and
imitated in homosocial drinking ultimately induces a state of indiscrimi-
nacy or chaos which Rochester designates as nothingness. "Upon his
Drinking a Bowl" concludes on the inescapable return to "cunt" which
recognises the temporary nature of the retreat to boys and the goblet:
Cupid, and Bacchus, my Saints are,
May drink, and Love, still reign,
With Wine, I wash away my cares,
And then to Cunt again. (lines 21-24)
And it is this paradox of nothingness as the product of the pursuit of
material sensuous pleasure that finally confounds the attempt to designate
Rochester's writing Utopian or Epicurean.
Nothing
Conventional though the paradox of the creation of the world from
nothing may be, Rochester's "Upon Nothing," when considered in the
context of his other writings, reveals echoes of the gendered distribution of
symbolism discussed earlier.21 Though described as "Elder Brother even to
Shade" (line 1), "Nothing" is figured as sharing the attributes of the
boundless female cunt, activating the familiar Renaissance pun on whores
and female sex organs as "Nothing"; the pun on "twat" in the phrase "all
proceeded from the great united what" (line 6) 22 leads on to references to
"Nothing's" "boundless selfe" (line 9), its "fruitfull Emptinesses" (line 11),
and "hungry wombe" (line 21). Similarly, Rochester expands the allusion in
the second chorus of Act 2 of Seneca's "Troas" to original chaos into an
image of a vast nihilistic womb:
Dead, wee become the Lumber of the World,
And to that Masse of matter shall be swept,
Where things destroy'd, with things unborne, are kept, (lines 8-10)
218

Rochester's poetry insistently demonstrates itself to be grounded upon, and

to conclude in, nothingness. Apostrophizing "Nothing" in "Upon
Nothing," the speaker explains that, "Thou hadst a being ere the world was
made / And (well fixt) art alone of ending not afraid" (lines 2-3). The failed
dialectic of the argument - Nothing produces Something which reverts
back to Nothing - is mimicked in the very structure of the poem written in
rhymed triplets, whereby the third line repeatedly fails to deliver anything
but a collapse back into the "nothing" of the first.
The only sure and certain "knowledge" in Rochester's universe is of
"Nothingness." Rochester takes Hobbes's grounding argument that man's
life is "nasty, brutish and short" a step further, toward a representation of
culture as unremitting chaos and nihilism. In this bleak cosmos, pain
provides the only source of "truth" and it is this insight into pain as
knowledge that colors so much of Rochester's poetry. The song "Insulting
Beauty, you mispend" concludes with a characteristic piece of assertion
through negativity. His mistress, the speaker claims, should not frown upon
him, because he gives full credit to the power of her beauty, where others
claim to be protected from it by their preference for rival women. Her
rejection of him, however, makes him the victor in defeat:
Nor am I unreveng'd, though lost;

Nor are you unpunish'd, though unjust,
When I alone, who love you most,
Am kill'd with your Disdain. (lines 15-18)
Indeed, Rochester's aesthetics and morality seem to center on reserve and

pain. 23 Ultimately, the void of the vagina or anus figures as no more than
an empty space into which the speaker projects his fantasies of identity and
power. If Rochester is consistent it is in his critique of forms of egotism and
self-assertion; in "A Very Heroicall Epistle in Answer to Ephelia," Mulgrave
is satirized through the mouth of Bajazet, who declares: "In my deare self, I
center ev'ry thing" (line 7) and " 'tis my Maxim, to avoyd all paine" (line
13). Pain, "The Mistress" asserts, is the only site where a "truth" derived
from the senses can be found:
Fantastick Fancies fondly move;

And in frail Joys believe:
Taking false Pleasure for true Love;
But Pain can ne're deceive. (lines 29-32)
This logic of necessary pain at the heart of Rochester's libertinism extends to

his representation of political order, and kingship in particular. Valentinian,
Rochester's reworking of Fletcher's Tragedy of Valentinian (1610-14),
219

ROS BALLASTER
provides the tragic equivalent to the comic treatment of despotism in

Sodom. Written between 1675 a n ^ 1676? but not performed until 1684,
the play criticizes Charles II through the figure of Valentinian not so much
for his sexual appetite as for his love of ease. Maximus, at the play's
opening, comments that "the whole world, dissolved into, a peace, / Owes
its security to this man's pleasures" (Act 1, lines 96-97, Lyons [ed.],
Complete Poems and Plays, p. 162). When Valentinian, with the collusion
of his councilors, rapes Maximus's wife, the army rebels and kills him,
notwithstanding the loyalty of the general, Aecius. As the satire of "A Very
Heroicall Epistle" reinforces, Rochester's libertinism did not extend to an
admiration for a sovereign's exploitation of absolute power for purely
selfish ends:
Oh happy Sultan! whom wee Barb'rous call!

How much refin'd art thou above us all?
Who Envys not the joys of thy Seraill?
Thee, like some God, the trembling Crowd adore,
Each Man's thy Slave, and Woman-kind, thy Whore.
Methinkes I see thee underneath the shade,
Of Golden Cannopies, supinely laid:
Thy crowching Slaves, all silent as the Night,
But at the Nod, all Active as the Light!
Secure in Solid Sloth, thou there dost Reigne,
And feel'st the joys of Love, without the paine. (lines 32-42)
If pain is the source of "truth" in erotic and civil relations, the with-
holding of egotism and virtual retreat from language, particularly public
language, is the key to aesthetic value in Rochester's writing. The "Allusion
to Horace," which might be seen to represent Rochester's manifesto for
culture, criticizes Dryden for overexposing his talent: "forbeare / With
uselesse Words, t'oppresse the wearyed Eare" (lines 22-23). By contrast,
Shadwell is admired for his "Shewing great Mastery with little care" (line
47). Rochester's aesthetic centers on creating an impression of not trying
and a satirical style that brilliantly mimics the rhythms of speech.24
Modeling himself on the urbane courtier satirist, Horace, the speaker of
"An Allusion" makes the argument for economy and restraint, the avoid-
ance of surfeit and excess, in both words and audience. Once more,
assertion comes about through negative disclaimer and the positive claim
for pain. The poem concludes:
I loath the Rabble, 'tis enough for me,

If Sidley, Shadwell, Shepherd, Witcherley,
Godolphin, Buttler, Buckhurst, Buckingham,
220

And some few more, whom I omit to name

Approve my Sense, I count their Censure Fame. (lines 120-24)
Omission and censure become markers of "value." This conventional claim

of the aristocratic courtier-poet acquires larger significance once the
threads of Rochester's writing life are laid alongside each other. In
representing aesthetic as well as sexual and political life, Rochester
consistently inquires into the failure of an active masculine agency to
produce positive value as it oscillates between waste - copious but
exhaustible non-generative emission - and surfeit - indiscriminate and
equally non-generative absorption of all matter.
This most fragmentary, restless, and intellectual of Restoration authors
subjects his modern-day reader, as he did his contemporaries, to a series of
reversals and logical paradoxes under the guise of an accessible hedonism.
We are left convinced of a powerful intelligence, but one which keeps itself
hidden behind the deft invocations of and allusions to others' arguments,
techniques, and materials. From his letters we discern an idealism em-
bedded in friendship, and true affection for his wife and children as well as
passion for his mistress. Yet his poetry and dramatic writing reveal a
waspish cynicism which can turn swiftly against friends and patrons in the
service of its skeptical convictions. In a hand-bill, one of Rochester's many
personae, the mountebank Alexander Bendo announces: "if I appear to
anyone like a counterfeit, even for the sake of that chiefly ought I to be
construed a true man. Who is the counterfeit's example, his original, and
that which he employs his industry and pains to imitate and copy? Is it
therefore my fault if the cheat by his wits and endeavours makes himself so
like me that consequently I cannot avoid resembing of him?"25 Such acts of
impersonation and self-invention must trouble any attempt at conclusive
reading of either Rochester's text or life.
NOTES
1 Carr Scroope, "In Defence of Satyr," Appendix 11 in The Poems of John Wilmot,
Earl of Rochester, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 137,
lines 48-59. All poetry by Rochester cited in this article is from Walker's edition
and referenced by line. Walker identifies three poems by Rochester targeting
Scroope (1649-80): "The Mock Song," parodying Scroope's song "I cannot
change as others do" (itself ascribed to Rochester in the editions of his Poems
that appeared in 1680); "On the suppos'd Authour of a late Poem in defence of
Satyr" in response to Scroope's poem quoted here; and "On Poet Ninny." David
M. Vieth argues for Scroope's authorship and attempts to date the personal and
literary rivalry of the two writers in chapters 5, 8, and 13 of his Attribution in
Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester's Poems of 1680 (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1963).
221

ROS BALLASTER
2 See The Letters of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed. Jeremy Treglown
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 166. Savile was a highly successful diplomat,
a Member of Parliament for Newark, Nottinghamshire, and shared Rochester's
critical stance toward James, Duke of York, despite (or perhaps because of)
having served as groom of the bedchamber to the duke. His regular mistress was
Carr Scroope's widowed mother.
3 Bernard Beatty, "The Present Moment' and Times Whiter Series': Rochester
and Dryden," in Edward Burns (ed.), Reading Rochester (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 1995), PP- 2.07-26, esp. p. 214.
4 Stephen Clark, "'Something Genrous in Meer Lust?' Rochester and Misogyny,"
in Burns (ed.), Reading Rochester, pp. 21-41, esp. p. 23.
5 See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), Part 11, chapter 29: "what is it to divide
the Power of a Commonwealth, but to Dissolve it; for Powers divided mutually
destroy each other" (ed. C. B. MacPherson [London: Penguin, 1968], p. 368).
6 See Frank H. Ellis in his edition of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester: The
Complete Works (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 239.
7 James G. Turner, "The Properties of Libertinism," in Robert Purk Maccubbin
(ed.), 3Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 75-87, esp. p. 80.
8 Numerous critics have noticed the skepticism, colored by a philosophical
materialism inherited from Hobbes, Lucretius, and Seneca, which informs
Rochester's writing, and results in a position of negativity. See, in particular,
Barbara Everett, "The Sense of Nothing," in Jeremy Treglown (ed.), Spirit of
Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982), pp. 1-
41; Simon Dentith, "Negativity and Affirmation in Rochester's Lyric Poetry,"
and Tony Barley, "'Upon Nothing': Rochester and the Fear of Non-Entity,"
both in Burns (ed.), Reading Rochester, pp. 84-97, a n d pp. 98-113.
9 For discussions of Rochester's misogyny (and not all concur with the accusation
of misogyny), see Sarah Wintle, "Libertinism and Sexual Politics," in Treglown
(ed.), Spirit of Wit, pp. 133-65; Clark, "'Something Genrous in Meer Lust?',"
pp. 21-41; Reba Wilcoxon, "Rochester's Sexual Politics," Studies in Eighteenth-
Century Culture, 8 (1979), pp. 137-49, rpt. in David M. Vieth (ed.), John
Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1988), pp.
113-26.
10 Marianne Thormahlen, Rochester: The Poems in Context (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993), p. 83.
11 Richard E. Quaintance, "French Sources of the Restoration 'Imperfect Enjoy-
ment' Poem," Philological Quarterly, 42 (1963), pp. 190-99.
12 David Trotter, "Wanton Expressions," in Treglown (ed.), Spirit of Wit, pp. 111-
32.
13 See Vieth, Attribution, pp. 119-36.
14 Harold Weber, "'Drudging in Fair Aurelia's Womb': Constructing Homosexual
Economies in Rochester's Poetry," The Eighteenth Century, 33 (1992), pp. 99-
117, esp. pp. 114-15-
15 The pedophilic aspect of the process whereby anus is metamorphosed into cunt
by the adult male penis has been somewhat obscured as Marianne Thormahlen
notes, by the editorial decision on the part of both Vieth and Walker to

substitute in line 42 the "boy" of their copy-text (the 1680 Poems) with the
"Man" of the extant manuscripts they consult {Rochester, p. 21).
16 Paddy Lyons (ed.), Rochester: Complete Poems and Plays (London: Everyman,
1993). See Lyons's comment in his Introduction which associates the play with
the sodomitical circle, known to Rochester, of Monsieur, brother of Louis XIV
and husband to Charles IPs sister, Henrietta-Anne (pp. xv-xvi); and his notes on
the play's authorship, that three of the seven early manuscripts identify
Rochester as author (p. 314).
17 Charles IPs inability to father a child with his wife, Catherine of Braganza,
remained the single most disturbing aspect of his reign in particular to an anti-
Yorkist such as Rochester, who aligned himself with Buckingham against the
prospect of James's Catholic succession, more on the grounds of James's
temperament than his religion it seems (see Thormahlen, Rochester, pp. 291-
94)-
18 See ibid., pp. 289-91.
19 See Clark, "'Something Genrous in Meer Lust?5," p. 36.
20 On the similarities and differences between "Timon" and Boileau's third satire,
see Dustin Griffin, Satires against Man: The Poems of Rochester (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 36-41; David Farley-
Hills's Rochester's Poetry (London: Bell and Hyman, 1978), pp. 150-55 and
186-90; and Harold Love, "Rochester and the Traditions of Satire," in Harold
Love (ed.), Restoration Literature: Critical Approaches (London: Methuen,
1972), pp. 158-63.
21 For the tradition of the paradox of the creation of the world from "Nothing"
from Erasmus's Praise of Polly (1511) onward, see Farley-Hills, Rochester's
Poetry, p. 170. For Rochester's reworking of accounts of Genesis in Milton's
Paradise Lost and Cowley's Davideis, see Griffin, Satires against Man, pp. 266-
80.
22 For this suggestion, see Kristoffer Paulson, "Pun Intended: Rochester's 'Upon
Nothing'," English Language Notes, 9 (1971), pp. 118-21.
23 See Thormahlen, Rochester, pp. J6-JJ.
24 Jeremy Treglown, "'He knew my style, he swore'," in Treglown (ed.), Spirit of
Wit, pp. 75-91.
25 "To all Gentlemen, Ladies and Others, whether of City, Town or Country,
Alexander Bendo wisheth all Health and Prosperity," in The Complete Works,
ed. Ellis, lines 48-51, p. 93.
FURTHER READING
Braudy, Leo, "Remembering Masculinity: Premature Ejaculation Poetry of the
Seventeenth Century," Michigan Quarterly Review, 33 (1994), pp. 177-201.
Burns, Edward (ed.), Reading Rochester (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
1995)-
Donaldson, Ian, "The Argument of 'The Disabled Debauchee'," Modern Language
Review, 82 (1987), pp. 30-34.
Farley-Hills, David, Rochester's Poetry (London: Bell and Hyman, 1978).
Love, Harold, "Refining Rochester," Harvard Library Bulletin, 7 (1996), pp. 40-49.
223

ROS BALLASTER
Thormahlen, Marianne, Rochester: The Poems in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge

Treglown, Jeremy (ed.), The Letters of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1980).
(ed.), Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester (Hamden, CT: Archon Books,
1982).
Vieth, David M., Attribution in Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester's Poems
of 1680 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963).
Rochester Studies, 1925-1982: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland,
1984).
Vieth, David M. and Griffin, Dustin, Rochester and Court Poetry: Papers Presented
at a Clark Library Seminar (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial
Library, University of California, 1988).
224

II
MARGARET FERGUSON
The authorial ciphers of Aphra Behn
"Aphra Behn has always been an enigma," Paul Salzman observes at the
outset of his introduction to a new edition of her novella Oroonoko.1 The
wild fluctuations in her literary reputation, tied to changing sexual mores,
changing views of women writers, and changing moral and political
judgments of the Restoration period itself, comprise one part of this
enigma.2 Another (and related) part is comprised of the problem of her
biography. This problem arises from the many shady moments in her life
story, moments that have teased readers from her own time to ours to fill in
and thus to "master" the gaps. The problem this poses for the critic has
both theoretical and strategic implications: how much and what kind of
attention should the serious student of her writing expend on the story (or
rather, competing stories) of her life?
For some the debates about Behn's biography have contributed substan-
tially "to the devaluation - and neglect - of [her] ... writing."3 Even the
recent feminist focus on "reconstructing" her life has not remedied the
neglect of her literary techniques typical of older critical emphases on her
alleged moral "looseness" and on the question of whether or not she was
"truthful" ("realistic").4 Robert Chibka wittily wonders why critics have
been so doggedly concerned with the historical truth or falsity of Behn's
claim, at the beginning of Oroonoko, that "I was myself an eye-witness to a
great part of what you will find here set down,"5 when similar autobio-
graphical truth-claims - by Defoe, for instance, in Robinson Crusoe, or by
Swift, in Gulliver's Travels - have tended to prompt sophisticated attention
to the feints and ruses of seventeenth-century prose-fictional narrators
("Oh! Do Not Fear," p. 511). Chibka contrasts the many studies of
Oroonoko focusing on whether Behn "really" went to the British colony of
Surinam with the history of criticism of Robinson Crusoe; it is, he remarks,
"hard to imagine an article concerning whether Defoe lived in goatskins
near the mouth of the Orinoco River entitled, 'New Evidence of the
Realism of Mr. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe'" (p. 512).
225

MARGARET FERGUSON
While I agree with Chibka that Behn's gender - and other (related)
aspects of her biography - have colored critical approaches to her works in
all sorts of troublesome ways, I do not think that separating the author
from the works is the solution to the problem. "Believe the tale, not the
teller," said Henry James - but in a Jamesian text like The Turn of the
Screw, as in many of Aphra Behn's texts, the "authority" of the tale is
intimately bound up with the representation of a narrator with a distinct
"interest" (psychological and economic) in her materials. While it is true
that attention to Behn's biography has often worked to impede analyses of
"the premises and structure" of the quite remarkable body of writing -
prose fiction, translation, drama, and lyric poetry - which she produced
between 1670 and her death in 1688, it nonetheless seems possible, at this
historical juncture when sophisticated criticism of Behn's works is bur-
geoning, to repose the question of biography in a way that can not only
notice but also attempt critically to account for her numerous if always
partial self-representations. These occur not only in her prose fictions and
poetry, but also in her translations of others' works and even in her drama,
that most apparently non-autobiographical of genres. The Restoration
theatre, however, had a socioeconomic structure that solicited, even
depended on, authorial self-advertisement in the small world of London's
theatre-goers. Behn, as Catherine Gallagher has forcefully shown, devel-
oped dramatic personae designed to attract spectators and sustain their
interest in a production until the "third night" of the run, when playwrights
finally received house receipts.6 Behn's authorial personae both build on
and seek to revise contemporary images (mostly negative) of the female
playwright, especially the image of the "public" woman writer as a
prostitute: "Punk and Poesie agree so pat," one of Behn's male contempor-
aries wrote in 1691, "you cannot well be this, and not be that."7 Making
some of her authorial personae complement characters represented in her
plays (mostly comedies, but also some tragicomedies and one tragedy), she
sought to transform the liability of her gender into an asset. Quite
insistently in the prologues, epilogues, and epistles that frame her plays; in
her unusual preoccupation with sexualized "discovery" scenes in which an
actor or actress is revealed - undressing for bed - behind painted "Scenes";
and in her construction of striking "breeches" parts for actresses,8 Behn
invited her contemporary readers and spectators to perceive authorial self-
references and to enjoy the titillating pleasures of decoding those allusions,
recognizing "likenesses" in the texts to the shape-shifting public character
known variously as "A." or "Astrea" or "Aphra" Behn.9 Moreover, the
question of whether the spectator or reader should believe a given persona
created by Behn's "female pen" is central to the interpretive knots she so
226

often creates by tying fictional images with ones that seem to be drawn
from the (authorial) life, itself being constructed and constantly altered in
texts by Behn and others.
In this essay, I propose, then, to look at some of the ways in which she
creates what might be called "cipher" or "enigma" effects; I will also look
at some of the reasons - both social and aesthetic - for her fashioning of
herself as a "cipher" in two senses of that term. The first is the meaning of
"nothing" or zero (from the Arabic sifr), a meaning traditionally associated
with the female genitals.10 The second meaning of cipher relevant to my
essay - and to Behn's many literary allusions to her biographical experience
as a spy - is that of a type of code or secret writing that invites (but may
also resist) full deciphering by readers and spectators with varying amounts
of information about the authorial subject(s). This is the meaning elabo-
rated by several Renaissance men of letters who seem to have regarded
cipher-systems as a second-order mode of literacy, like Latin, which had for
centuries served as a social as well as an epistemological marker dis-
tinguishing elite literate men, priestly or secular, from others.11 As vernac-
ular literacy spread in the early modern period, as scripts became
standardized and easier to read through the technology of print, and as
even women and some lower-class men were able to pick up some Latin,
the men of letters who served as diplomats, letter-writers, and spies for the
monarchs of Europe grew increasingly interested in a "Renaissance" of the
ancient art of ciphers. Behn participated in this Renaissance, I argue, albeit
from a necessarily eccentric subject position and in ways that have been
little remarked.
There is no scholarly consensus about Behn's parents' identity, their social
class, the year of her birth,12 or how she acquired the unusually good
education her writings display. Like most seventeenth-century women, she
seems not to have had access to the education in classical languages that gave
one "full" literacy in her era; Dryden says that she knew no Latin, but his
statement, like many about Behn by contemporaries, raises more questions
than it answers: "I was desired to say that the author, who is of the fair sex,
understood not Latin. But if she does not, I am afraid she has given us
occasion to be ashamed who do," Dryden wrote in his preface to a
collaborative translation of Ovid's Epistles; his preface is a sort of advertise-
ment for the volume at a moment in the early 1680s when he like Behn and
other dramatists had fallen on hard economic times.13 If Behn herself
"desired" Dryden to say that she understood no Latin, she may have been
slyly displaying herself both as a "typically" uneducated person and as an
unusual scholar; and Dryden's gallant rhetoric may well signal his awareness
of this female writer's value in advertising his book to a range of readers.14
227

MARGARET FERGUSON
Despite her alleged lack of Latin, Behn was mysteriously able to add
classical allusions absent from the original to her translation of the Abbe
Paul Tallement's A Voyage to the Island of Love; and she seems,
intriguingly, to have known enough of the Greek alphabet to make the
code she invented for her Netherlands spying activities resemble Greek
characters.15
Her early history has provoked much scholarly speculation; so have
many other moments in the life story she herself did much to shape as a
mystery and, probably, as one of those socially "self-improving" stories so
common in her era.16 Shakespeare made himself a second-generation
gentleman by purchasing a knighthood for his father, and Behn was
suspected early on, it seems, of not truly being (as she claimed in
Oroonoko) the daughter of a gentleman named Johnson with high aristo-
cratic connections. Behn's self-positioning in her fictions was confirmed by
a biography written soon after her death. The anonymous biographer
described her as a "gentlewoman by birth, of a good family in the city of
Canterbury in Kent";17 her father or adoptive father, Mr. Johnson, is said
to have been related to Lord Willoughby, through which connection
Johnson acquired the position he was about to assume when he died at sea:
the position of deputy governor of the colony of Surinam.
Behn's (and her biographer's) claims about her gentle birth were disputed
in a rhetorical sequence that uncannily anticipates much subsequent
criticism of Behn: in a poem called "The Circuit of Apollo," Anne Finch,
Countess of Winchilsea praised the wit but deprecated the loose morals
displayed in Behn's writings ("amongst women," says Finch's Apollo,
"there was none on earth / Her superior in fancy, in language, or wit, / Yet
owned that a little too loosely she writ"); a marginal note to Finch's poem
completes the sequence by suggesting that Behn's biographer, and by
implication the author of Oroonoko who claims gentle birth, are liars:
"Mrs Behn was daughter to a barber, who lived formerly in Wye, a little
market town in Kent. Though the account of her life before her works
pretends otherwise, some persons now alive do testify upon their knowl-
edge that to be her original."18 Lying, pretense, and the problem of belief or
"credit": these are themes that recur again and again in Behn's oeuvre, as
they do in the historical documents that would-be decoders of her
biography have unearthed to make various and competing cases for (and
against) her. Although she was, after Dryden, "the most prolific and
probably the most popular writer of her time, with at least eighteen plays,
several volumes of poetry, and numerous works of fiction that were in
vogue for decades after her death,"19 she was more like Defoe than Dryden
in keeping her "true" identity an enigma.
228

Critical debate has swirled not only around the circumstances of her
birth but also, as I have already suggested, around her (alleged) voyage to
Surinam in the early 1660s, during which sojourn, novelistically re-
presented by Behn herself in the year of her death, she was said by a hostile
observer - William Byam, the man who replaced her supposed father as
deputy governor of the colony - to have had a love affair in the colony with
the Republican William Scot. I consider Scot, the son of a regicide executed
for treason after the Restoration, a significant albeit shadowy presence in
Oroonoko. Although Scot is not named in that text, other Republicans are,
and in a remarkably favorable light, given Behn's apparent Tory loyalism
and ardent Royalism in the 1670s and 1680s.20 Behn's memory of Scot
arguably colors the novella's concern with epistemological and economic
credit - a key issue for Oroonoko himself and for the white female narrator
who tells his story in Behn's exercise in "memorial reconstruction." The
black prince loses his freedom because he naively accepts the invitation of
an English sea captain - with whom Oroonoko has engaged in slave
trading - to dine aboard ship. Behn excoriates the "treachery" of the
captain, who entraps the too-credulous prince and transports him to
Surinam. There he is bought by Trefry, the manager of the absent
governor's plantation. Although Trefry and the narrator assure Oroonoko
that he will be freed when the governor arrives, the promised emancipation
never occurs; instead Oroonoko leads a slave revolt against the deputy
governor, Byam, and is punished by torture and execution.
Oroonoko's story alludes cryptically to that of the historical Scot, for
though we know little about Behn's youthful encounter with Scot in
Surinam (nothing other than Byam's mocking testimony to a romance
between "Celadon" and "Astrea," as he called Scot and Behn), we do have
holograph letters from Behn describing later encounters with Scot when she
was in the Netherlands in 1666, shortly after her return from Surinam. Her
epistolary rhetoric in reports home, describing her efforts to persuade Scot
to give information against the Dutch and the exiled English Republicans
in Holland, suggests that the question of who should believe whom in an
erotically charged and tensely dangerous game of "ciphers" - a game in
which neither player could be quite sure of the other's intentions - made a
profound impression on Behn. The experience of spying with (and perhaps
against) Scot had a strong effect on the woman who would turn to writing
for her living upon discovering that she herself had been financially duped
in her labors as a spy for the Crown, and the memory of her complex
relations to Scot haunted her particularly when she imaginatively revisited
Surinam in the year of her own death, writing about the dead and betrayed
Oroonoko.
229

MARGARET FERGUSON
It was highly uncommon for a young woman of ambiguous class origins

to be recruited for intelligence work in this era, as Behn herself pointed out
in a late poem:
by the Arcadian King's Commands

I left these Shores, to visit Foreign Lands;
Employed in public toils of State Affairs,
Unusual with my Sex, or to my Years.21
Her acquaintance with Scot in Surinam may well have led Thomas Killi-
grew, Groom of the Bedchamber, to recruit her for the king's spying service
(see Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra, pp. 93-94). Under the code-name
"Astrea," ironically, the very name given her by her enemy Byam, she
sought to convince Scot (code name "Celadon") that the Royalists would
protect and - equally important - reward him for information about his
fellow Republicans and about the Dutch, who were supporting the anti-
Royalist English forces in the second Anglo-Dutch War. In her reports
Aphra calls Scot a "Rogue" and at one point says she "must not trust him
in Holland"; but at another point she assures her handlers, and perhaps
herself, that "I really do believe that his intentt is very reall and will be very
diligent in the way of doing you all the service in the world for the ffuter
[future]; he expresses him self very hansomly: and I beleeve him in all
things: I am sure he wants no witt nor adress: nor anything to manage this
affaire with, but money."22 If Oroonoko dramatizes a naive hero's "educa-
tion in skepticism," as Robert Chibka calls it ("Oh! Do Not Fear," p. 515),
the education is tragic because the hero learns too late that the "good"
Christians - the apparently admiring estate manager Trefry, for instance, or
the narrator herself, who is explicitly enlisted to spy on him and to distract
him from thoughts of rebellion - have repeatedly if perhaps not fully
consciously deceived him. The narrator herself doesn't trust Oroonoko as
fully (or as foolishly) as he trusts her: although she says that he had "entire
confidence" in her and called her his "great mistress" (Oroonoko, pp. 46,
45), she tells the reader that she did not think "it convenient to trust him
much out of our view, nor did the country, who feared him" (p. 46); she
arranges to have him "accompanied by some that should be rather in
appearance attendants than spies" (p. 47). Is Oroonoko playing Scot's role
to Aphra's recreation of Astrea the spy's role - or vice versa? Do we believe
her when she says Oroonoko believed her? He was of course long dead in
1688, so we have no way of knowing if she altered anything that came
"from [his] mouth" (p. 6); Scot too was long dead by 1688, and hence
could not challenge any refraction of his relation to her in Oroonoko's
complex relation to the woman who appropriates his story. In any case,
230

one of her first letters about Scot to her Royalist employers describes his
movements as being extremely constricted - as Oroonoko's are - by the
spies who surround him.23
It is the narrative refraction of an epistemological and visual situation,
rather than any simple allegorical correspondence between characters in
Oroonoko and the characters in this episode of Behn's life, that seems
significant to me. Someone is looking at someone looking back (and over
his/her shoulder) - and neither party knows who exactly knows what,
although both are bound by affection as well as by political and economic
designs that may require each, at any moment, to "use" the other. The
spying chapter of her biography is enigmatically inscribed in Oroonoko;
and the enigma exists not only to titillate the reader but also to mirror a
still perplexing and libidinally unresolved situation for the narrator/author.
If in her representation of Oroonoko's and the narrator's vexed relation to
each other and to other manipulators of words in the colonial setting Behn
represents aspects of her own youthful naivety vis-a-vis Scot (in Surinam as
well as a few years later, perhaps, in the Netherlands) and at the same time
probes the problems of her "credit" with the Royalists who hired her but
broke their promises to pay her, the authorial self-allusions Behn embeds in
her novella are neither politically nor psychologically straightforward;
sometimes the ciphers contain guilty or even self-critical charges, and
sometimes they are tinged by anger and hurt at the images of the female
author minted by others.
Many questions remain unanswered about Behn's spying mission to
Flanders and about the imprisonment for debt - or near-imprisonment -
that ensued upon her return to England.24 Between her return in 1666 and
1670, when her first play, The Forc'd Marriage, or the Jealous Bridegroom,
was produced by the Duke's Company in London (one of two licensed
theatre companies in the city), her biographers surmise that she married a
Mr. Behn (or Ben or Bhen or Beene). Some have speculated that he was one
of those wealthy, sexually greedy but repellant "old" husbands depicted so
often, and with such scathing irony, in Behn's comedies. There is, however,
not one shred of historical evidence for his existence, much less his
character, other than the posthumous biography, which describes him as "a
merchant of this city through Dutch extraction." Behn herself never
mentions a husband, and I suspect that he was an invention of convenience,
as was his apparently prompt demise;25 being a widow was more respect-
able than being an unmarried woman working in a public arena, and being
a widow certainly was less constricting than being someone's wife:
according to the Common Law doctrine of feme covert, the wife was
owned by the husband, her being literally "covered" by his.
231

MARGARET FERGUSON
A series of Love-Letters ("by Mrs. A. Behn," first published post-

humously as a short story in The Histories and Novels of the Late
Ingenious Mrs. Behn: In One Volume [1696]), dramatizes the difficulty of
distinguishing fiction from fact in Behn's life story or stories; in the second
edition of The Histories and Novels (1698), the Love-Letters - allegedly
addressed to a bisexual lawyer named John Hoyle, with whom Behn is
supposed to have had an affair in the 1670s - are no longer printed as a
piece of short fiction; rather, they have become part of the biography of
Behn prefacing (and advertising) the new edition of the works and probably
based - as the shorter version in the 1696 volume also was - on a two-and-
a-half page "Account of the Life of the Incomparable Mrs. BEHN" included
with the posthumously printed play, The Younger Brother (1696).26 All
subsequent biographies depend on these textually variable early bio-
graphies, published completely without authorial attribution in the
Younger Brother; ascribed to "A Gentlewoman of Her Acquaintance" in
the eighteen-page "Memoir on the Life" of the 1696 Histories and Novels,
and then ascribed, in the sixty-page version of the biography published in
1698 and entitled "Life and Memoirs," to "One of the Fair Sex."27
The ambiguity and gaps in the evidence provided by the early biographies
make it quite understandable that even twentieth-century accounts of
Behn's life, as well as assessments of her place in literary history, should
offer competing narratives; many modern as well as earlier accounts of her
life and works read like novels gemmed with clues that readers are invited
to pursue, with satisfaction of our curiosity a prize always just around the
next corner. Instead of defending or refuting absolute positions critics
would do well, I think, to analyze the possible aims as well as the aesthetic
and political effects of the intermixing of fiction and biography in works by
Behn and in many contemporary (not to mention later) works about her.
Given the strong likelihood that the early posthumous biographies were
based largely on materials written by Behn herself (and found among her
literary "remains"), it does indeed seem that many of that biography's lurid
details were part of her own economically, politically, aesthetically, and
erotically motivated efforts at self-fashioning. The early biography's denial
of a rumor that she had had a romantic liaison with the black hero of
Oroonoko, for instance (a denial present in the 1696 and 1698 versions of
the "Memoirs," and rearticulated both in the Dictionary of National
Biography article about her by Edmund Gosse and in the introduction to
the Norton edition of Oroonoko of 1973), is a striking example of a
narrative device that piques the reader's curiosity without satisfying it. The
rumor clearly builds on hints from the novella itself, which Thomas
Southerne had revised and produced as a play in the very year that the
232

posthumous edition of Behn's work, with the "advertising" biography, first

appeared.28 Critics often register some sense that Behn is deliberately
withholding information from them, but I propose that we take that refusal
to tell all - on Behn's part as well as on that of her first biographer, her
"intimate" acquaintance and perhaps her double - as part of an intriguing
authorial strategy aimed at generating "news" or, as Behn calls the
commodity, "novelty": "for where there is no novelty, there can be no
curiosity," as she remarks in Oroonoko (p. 8). The strategy of generating
curiosity and novelty is prompted both by individual authorial agency and
by the social circumstances of Behn's writing, circumstances shaped by her
gender and mysterious class origins among other factors.
Catherine Gallagher has taken just this interpretive tack by relating the
specific economic requirements of the Restoration London theatre - in
particular the requirement that a play "survive" until the third night's
performance - to Behn's development of a scandalous and intriguing
persona that Gallagher calls the "newfangled whore" (Nobody's Story, p.
14). To fashion this persona, and a related one based on the figure of the
(oppressed Stuart) monarch, Behn deliberately played on the "early modern
concept of female 'nothingness,'" what I have referred to as the first
meaning of "cipher." This concept encompasses both women's presumed
genital lack (with its bawdy figuration as a hole or zero) and women's
"secondary ontological status in relation to men" (p. xv). The idea of
woman as a "nothing" is famously articulated in canonical texts such as
Hamlet and Clarissa.29 In Gallagher's view, Behn plays in innovative ways
on the notion of female nothingness, portraying the author as a commodity
(and seller of commodities) in an expanding international market and
hence dramatizing the links between the female author and "the conceptual
disembodiment that all commodities achieve at the moment of exchange";
this overlap between different kinds of "nothingness" allows Behn to
construct remarkable composite personae that are characterized by iden-
tity-effects designed to pique and hold an audience's interest and, however
paradoxical it may seem, to generate outraged criticism from her political
opponents (p. 14).
Behn's use of autobiographical personae in her drama (including many
prologues and epilogues, some written for others' plays), her lyric poetry,
and her prose fiction, which ranges in length from short stories (e.g., "The
Black Lady") through novellas (Oroonoko, The Fair Jilt) to the long,
generically hybrid Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister (1683-
86?), is intricately bound up with her allegorical use of historical "facts"
for political purposes; what she writes might justly be called "factional" in
at least two senses of that word. Deliberately exploiting her reputation as a
2-33

MARGARET FERGUSON
Tory in many plays attacking Puritans or "Roundheads,"30 Behn none-

theless displays in some of her writings, especially, I think, those set in the
"American" colonies (the posthumously produced Widow Ranter, or the
History of Bacon in Virginia, and Oroonoko), a more complex political
perspective than most critics allowed until recently. The complexities arise
in part because Behn's dramatic representations of women's economic
oppression by patriarchal marriage make her views of male absolutism at
times more fractured than those of contemporaries like Thomas Hobbes or
Robert Filmer. And although she relentlessly satirizes Cromwell's followers
and their Whig descendants, she differs from Rochester and other Tory
writers in her analysis of the cost of masculine libertinism for the women
who fall for men like the rake Willmore in The Rover. Critics are beginning
to explore the ways in which "Behn's treatment of gender often seems to
complicate and refract, if not indeed to contradict, her party politics,
creating in her work the sense of multiple and incommensurate ideological
agenda."31 Moreover, as several recent critics have remarked, the differ-
ences between Whig and Tory views in the late seventeenth century were
not always clear; certainly the modern stereotype of the Tories as com-
mitted to "antiquated notions of hierarchy and patriarchy," in contrast to
Whigs committed to "bourgeois individualism"32 is challenged by Behn's
sympathy for characters oppressed by a "bad" monarch or monarchical
representative, as Oroonoko and his wife Imoinda are, for example, in the
part of the novella set in Oroonoko's grandfather's absolutist court, and as
Oroonoko, Imoinda, and the white female narrator all are in the Surinam
colony ruled by Byam, the English king's corrupt representative. Decoding
the political allegory of Oroonoko is in short very difficult: the black prince
has sometimes been read as a composite symbol for Stuart monarchs such
as the "martyred" Charles I and the soon-to-be-deposed James II;33 the
Stuarts' color was black, and there is no doubt that the novella attaches
complex and perhaps competing meanings to the "ebony" color of Oroono-
ko's and his wife Imoinda's skin. Parts of Oroonoko, moreover - the
opening depiction of innocent Indians living like Adam and Eve - remind
us that Behn's deep fascination with an ideal "golden age" - an ideal fueled
by her knowledge of South and North American colonial sites - sometimes
works against a coherent articulation of a recognizably Royalist political
view. In "The Golden Age: A Paraphrase on a Translation out of the
French" (1684), she elaborates on Tasso's evocation (in his pastoral drama,
the Aminta, 1573) of a paradisal realm in which "Each Swain was Lord
o'er his own will alone, / His Innocence Religion was, and Laws," and
neither "Right" nor "Property" - much less "Honour" - existed.34 Behn's
abiding concern with relations of erotic equality and her attacks on the
234

institution of marriage - a fundamental element in the patriarchal abso-

lutism advocated by Robert Filmer among others - make her at times a
highly idiosyncratic defender of the monarchy and the Tory party.
It remains difficult to decipher not only her party politics but also, on a
more local level, her politically charged relations with literary contempor-
aries. She is usually described as a great admirer of the free-thinking Tory
the Earl of Rochester, for instance - but since Behn encoded aspects of John
Wilmot, Earl of Rochester's character and name, especially with the pun on
"will" and the French "mot," word, in her portrait of Willmore in The
Rover Part i (1677) and Part 2 (1681),35 we may surmise that her
admiration was leavened with a certain critical irony. Willmore, the
penniless Cavalier "rover" of the play's title, is a witty, ebullient fortune-
hunter with great sexual charisma. The prostitute Angellica Bianca - who
bears Aphra Behn's initials and hangs out a "sign," significantly, a self-
portrait, to advertise her wares - swiftly falls in love with Willmore but
also interrogates some of his most egregiously self-serving and misogynist
views. Having fallen in love with her picture (which a man "may gaze on"
for "nothing," he bawdily remarks36), Willmore berates her for charging
money for her favors rather than offering them for free, as a true lover
would: "Though I admire you strangely for your beauty," he says to
Angellica, "Yet I condemn your mind" (p. 185). Specifically, he condemns
her mercenary practice as a prostitute, but his words place him in a long
tradition of men who criticize women's mental powers as inferior to men's
- a tradition that the historical Rochester had wittily illustrated in a poem
arguing for the superiority of men's erotic (and conversational) relations to
each other over relations to any woman:
Love a Womanl y'are an Ass,

Tis a most insipid Passion,
To choose out for your happiness
The idlest part of Gods creation!37
Behn's Angellica Bianca, whose name wittily inverts the traditional
association of prostitutes with the color black and with devils' agents,
clearly emerges from a cultural context that equated women writers and
actresses - public women - with whores. But Angellica's rhetorical skills,
like those of the author Angellica figures, allow her to parry if not perfectly
destroy Willmore's opinion of her "trade": he is the man with the mote in
his eye, she suggests, with a scathing glance at the rake who marries an
heiress to remedy a chronic absence of funds, as the historical Rochester
did, at the king's request: "Pray tell me, sir," says Angellica to Willmore,
"are not you guilty of the same mercenary crime [as what you accuse me of
235

MARGARET FERGUSON
committing], when a lady is proposed to you for a wife, you never ask, how
fair - discreet - or virtuous she is; but what's her fortune - which if but
small, you cry - she will not do my business - and basely leave her, though
she languish for you - say, is this as poor?" He grants that it is - but goes
on to marry the heiress Helena, who is reported dead from childbirth in the
first scene of The Rover, Part 2. Loving Willmore is dangerous to women, it
seems. But for those who can read her allegorical signs, Behn probes
Rochester/Willmore's character here (and perhaps also in the portrait of
Philander in Love-Letters) without offering any clear moral judgment for
or against it. Critique lurks in admiration until she comes to write her elegy
for Rochester, where - with the subject dead - the portrait becomes more
unequivocally positive - and completely silent on the supposed death-bed
conversion to Christianity that preoccupied Rochester's biographer Gilbert
Burnet.38 Perhaps she didn't credit it.
Her relations to Dryden were, in their lifetimes, even more complex than
her relations to Rochester. Critics disagree about whether she wrote a poem
satirizing Dryden's conversion to Catholicism, "A Satyr on Doctor
Dryden."39 Since Behn herself may have been raised as a Catholic - which
doesn't mean that as an adult she "believed" in Catholic doctrine - and
since we have a letter from her to the publisher Jacob Tonson stating that
she would rather be esteemed by Dryden than by anybody in the world,40
some critics have felt that she could not have written the satire, which is
quite bitterly critical of Dryden. The riddle of Behn's possible authorship of
the satire on Dryden cannot, I suspect, be empirically resolved.41 It does,
however, seem symptomatic of the problem of "deciphering," in the sense
of finding a single fixed meaning, Behn's political, religious, and social
views at various moments in her career. The satire on Dryden, unpublished
in Behn's lifetime, exists in only two manuscript copies, and only one of
these has Behn's name on it; does the name signal authorship or simply that
she copied it out in a book?42 I suspect that Behn could well have written
the satire - and could have regretted offending Dryden too. The poem is
quite within her stylistic register(s), and an author capable of mocking even
her revered king - as she does in a satire entitled "Caesar's Ghost"43 -
would have been perfectly able to criticize Dryden for what appeared to
many to be an opportunistic, even favor-currying act. A few courtiers
converted to Catholicism under the Catholic James II, and Dryden himself
had to protest, in The Hind and the Panther (111. lines 376-85), that such
conversion brought no worldly rewards. After the Glorious Revolution,
when the Protestant William of Orange and his wife Mary came to the
throne, Roman Catholicism once again became a serious social liability -
and indeed Dryden experienced it as such, but that was after Behn's death.
236

Hypocrisy in religious matters seems to have been something that deeply

angered Behn; herself accused of atheism by Rochester's pious biographer
Burnet, she excoriates the so-called "Christians" who break their word to
Oroonoko in her novella. The satire attacks Dryden for an act of
hypocritical opportunism unworthy of "a poet" of "great heroick
th[e]ames" and inspiration, and suggests that Dryden was content to be a
Protestant when the king was one, but converted after the king did: "for
when the act is done and finish't cleane / what should the poet doe but shift
the scene[?]" (Todd, Works, vol. I, p. 231).
Leaving the question of Behn's authorship of this poem open - as I think
we must, given the extant evidence - we can use the attribution problem to
address once more the larger question of her authorial ciphers: the fact
cited by Mary Ann O'Donnell as conclusive proof against Behn's author-
ship of the satire - namely that she copied satires not her own into a
miscellany 44 - seems to me to point precisely to a question central to her
writing career and its critical reception: how do we tell the difference
between a copy and an "original"? Several poems now attributed to Behn
(the witty poem on male impotence, for instance, entitled "The Disappoint-
ment") were originally published as Rochester's, and the question of her
"canon" is still highly unsettled, partly because so many of her poems and
fictional works were published posthumously. 45
The question of how to distinguish genuine from counterfeit texts clearly
preoccupied Behn's age, when works circulated in manuscript as well as in
print and multiple copies of anonymous works often made attribution very
difficult.46 In her Textual Introduction Janet Todd cites a note preceding a
poem in the March 1707 issue of The Muses Mercury, a miscellany printed
in 1707-08, inviting any suspicious reader "to inspect the manuscripts 'at
the Booksellers who publishes this Paper.'" The manuscripts in question
were by Behn, and contrary to the claim "Never before printed" on the title
page, "all but two of the twelve poems by Behn had already appeared,"
albeit in somewhat different forms (Todd, Works, vol. 1, pp. xliii-xliv). The
text included the following general note about the problem of "certifying"
Behn's texts as her property:
If it were proper to make publick what we have learnt of the Story of the
Author of the following Verses, 'twou'd be an unquestionable Proof of their
being genuine. For they are all writ with her own Hand in a Person's Book
who was very much her Friend; and from thence are now transcribed for the
Mercury. (cited in Todd, Works, vol. 1, p. xliii)
Behn often raises questions about what constitutes literary originality.

Forced, like other women writers (Katherine Philips and Anne Bradstreet,
237

MARGARET FERGUSON
for example), to defend herself against charges that she had "stolen"
material from men (the lines between translation, imitation, and plagiarism
being even blurrier in Behn's time, before copyright laws were formally
introduced, than they are today), she defended herself vigorously in various
prefaces and epistles to readers.47 In the epilogue to Sir Patient Fancy
(1678), she yoked a defense against "bawdiness" with a discussion of
"copying" that defines the latter as a positive (and original) act. In the
original production, the famous actress Nell Gwynne spoke Behn's words
defending her (their) play against a "coxcomb" who cried:
Ah, Rot it - 'tis a Woman's Comedy,
One, who because she lately chanc'd to please us,
With her damn'd Stuff, will never cease to teeze us.
What has poor Woman done, that she must be
Debar'd from Sense, and sacred Poetry?
Why in this Age has Heaven allow'd you more,
And Women less of Wit than heretofore?
We once were fam'd in story, and could write
Equal to Men; cou'd govern, nay, could fight.
We still have passive Valour, and can show,
Wou'd Custom give us leave, the active too ...
We'll let you see, whate'er besides we do,
How artfully we copy some of you:
And if you're drawn to th' Life, pray tell me then,
Why Women should not write as well as Men.48
With such a defense of the actress's or writer's right to "copy" men artfully,
the female author portrays her mimetic work positively while giving notice
that she will adopt different genders as well as different costumes for
different occasions. Indeed she often plays the role of a "hermaphrodite" or
member of what one contemporary called a "third sex," as, for instance, in
her witty poem "To the Fair Clarinda, who made love to me, imagin'd
more than a Woman."49
Behn's ciphers, as they pertain to the realms of national (and colonial)
politics, interpersonal relations, gender roles, and textual issues, are no less
difficult to interpret than are her biographical ciphers. And these various
strands, I have been arguing, are often complexly intertwined. The inter-
connections or allegorical "translations" among these realms seem, indeed,
to be at the heart of the verbal wit she used to delight - and covertly to
instruct - her theatre audiences and, in the last decade of her life, the
"unseen" public that comprised the (potential) audience for her lyrics,
translations, and prose fictions. The theatre itself functioned as a kind of
allegory for court politics; in Behn's era "political relationships were acted
238

out in tableaux in the boxes under the same illumination as the stage, while
references were made onstage to events in the bedrooms of Whitehall"
(Todd, Works, vol. I, p. xxv). Alert to the links between plots onstage and
at court, comically willing to suggest that masked prostitutes in the
audience were the "Poetess's spies," bringing her rich material for dramati-
zation and interpretation, Behn often constructed her prologues and
epilogues to frustrate readers' attempts neatly to define her views or identity
and to insinuate allegorical political messages to members of her audience
or readership. Plays, she wrote, "are secret instructions to the people, in
things that 'tis impossible to insinuate into them in other way."50
Behn's authorial personae are at once remarkably disembodied and
tantalizingly carnal; they frequently occupy an eroticized subject position
vis-a-vis the male or female spectator or reader.51 They include not only the
prostitute and the monarch so well analyzed by Gallagher but also the
lusty, economically independent widow (as in The Widow Ranter or the
City Heiress) and the related persona of the "scheming" woman who
manages the "property" of the female body, her own or another's. In
Oroonoko, for instance, the aging courtesan Onahal becomes a striking
figure for the author when she exclaims to a man, "Oh, do not fear a
woman's invention!" (p. 23). Onahal uses her inventive powers both to
manage Imoinda's body by smuggling her into Oroonoko's chamber so he
can take the prize of her maidenhead and to pursue a complex erotic and
epistemological game with a young man Onahal herself fancies - and upon
whom she spies, even as he thinks he is spying on her. Another example of a
woman who learns to manage the property of the female body is Sylvia in
Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister. Here Behn creates a
morally complex portrait of a lady: Sylvia's "education" in vice goes hand-
in-hand with an increasing awareness that she must depend on her wit and
counterfeiting talents to survive in a world where no man can or will
provide for her.
Behn's ciphers - in the sense both of figures for the author and a coded
type of writing - seem to amalgamate an emergent (Baconian) notion of a
cipher as a second order of literacy similar to the humanist man of letters'
ability to communicate in Latin or Greek with an older notion of allegorical
writing as a sugar-coating of difficult theological doctrines - or dangerous
philosophical ones. In this hybrid notion of cipher-allegory, aimed at an
audience mixed along lines of class as well as gender, the writer simulta-
neously deciphers problematic ideas for ordinary readers or spectators and
hides (reciphers) certain aspects of the meaning. The double hermeneutic
activity is as dangerous as spying, for the authorities may misconstrue one's
allegorical efforts, seeing in them ambitions to seduce and usurp. Behn
239

MARGARET FERGUSON
herself acknowledges the potential danger of a type of writing - vernacular

translation of the classics - that puts certain kinds of elite knowledge in the
hands of lower-class people and, in particular, of women. In a poem of
1683 commending Sir Thomas Creech on his translation of Lucretius's De
Rerum Naturae (On the Nature of Things), she initially depicts herself as
an "unlearn'd" woman who benefits from Creech's work; as she develops a
parallel between Creech's female reader and Eve, however, we realize that
the poem explores a relation between author and reader that could pertain
as well to her relations to her own readers as Creech's to her or Satan's to
Eve:
The god-like Virgil, and great Homers Muse,

Like Divine Mysteries are conceal'd from us.
We are forbid all grateful Theames,
No ravishing thoughts approach our Ear...
[until Creech comes]
... by this Translation ... [to] advance
our knowledge from the State of Ignorance
And Equallst Us to Man!
(Todd, Works, vol. 1, pp. 25-28, lines 29-32, 41-43)
Here she wittily and subversively plays on Milton's characterization of Eve

falling because of her ambition to equal Adam through the acquisition of
forbidden knowledge. In this poem and elsewhere in her writing, Behn
probes a fear that Creech himself articulated in his defensive preface to the
second edition of his translation. There he worried that the "pill" of his
translation might be covered in "venom" rather than in sugar for (some)
Christian readers. Lucretius's proto-libertine arguments that "there was no
life after death and that happiness should be gained on earth" (Todd,
Works, vol. 1, p. 384) clearly challenged Christian doctrines, as Behn
indicates when she compares the translation of the pagan philosopher to
something "As strong as Faiths resistless Oracles . . . / Faith the secure
Retreat of Routed Argument" (lines 56-58). Praising Creech for decking
"The Mystick Terms of Rough Philosophy" in "so soft and Gay a Dress, /
So Intelligent to each Capacity; / That They at once Instruct, and charm the
Sense" (lines 45, 47-49), Behn follows Sidney and Milton in exploring the
knotty aesthetic and social problem of the potentially amoral - or worse,
morally subversive - power of poetry or of rhetoric more generally. As a
kind of cipher, allegorical writing could protect the free-thinking writer
against censorship even as it allegedly supported that writer's traditional
claim to teach (in a socially acceptable fashion) through delighting. If in her
early writing Behn firmly eschewed a moral aim for her playwriting,
240

polemically aligning herself with Shakespeare as opposed to the "well-

educated" Jonson,52 by the time of Creech's translation of Lucretius, when
she herself had been attacked for a politically "incorrect" position ex-
pressed in the epilogue to the anonymous play Romulus and Hersilia, Behn
was evidently developing a notion of secret allegorical writing to define a
specifically political educative function for the drama. As she wrote in the
Dedicatory Epistle to The Lucky Chance (cited in note 50), " 'Tis example
that prevails above reason or DIVINE PRECEPTS ... I have myself known a
man, whom neither conscience nor religion cou'd perswade to loyalty, who
with beholding in our theatre a modern politician set forth in all his
colours, was converted ... and quitted the party." To promote herself and
her political agenda, she developed many tactics of partly exposing, partly
concealing "secrets" about her life and self in her writings. These tactics
constitute a symbolic cryptography that reveals Behn's fascination with
modes of disguise, deceit, and such para-cryptographic practices as "coun-
terfeiting" one's handwriting - her character Philander, for instance, in
Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, begs his illicit lover
Sylvia to burn one of his letters because "writing in haste I have not
counterfeited my hand."53
Approaching Behn as an adept in versions of cipher writing understood
broadly as including esoteric types of writing such as political and
autobiographical allegory decodable to greater and lesser degrees by
different members of the audience may help us gain a sharpened perspective
not only on some of her characteristic themes and writing practices, but
also on the vexed question of her names. "Name" had a double metapho-
rical meaning in Behn's time, signifying both personal virtue and renown.
Since, for women, personal virtue was defined as a sexual modesty
incompatible with any appearance in the public sphere of the sort that
would lead to "renown," women with literary ambitions could not pursue
fame without risking the loss of their "good name." This dilemma underlies
some women's decisions to write anonymously or to deny their responsi-
bility for their works' publication. Although Behn developed authorial
personae very different from those more "chaste" ones constructed by
aristocratic near-contemporaries such as Katherine Philips (the "matchless
Orinda") or Anne Finch ("Ardelia"), Behn like these other women assumed
a pen name to gain some of the prerogatives of naming ascribed to Adam
and exercised by many of his sons.54 Designated "A. Behn" or "Ann Behn"
on most title pages of her early printed works,55 she referred to herself as
"Astrea," as did her early biographer. Although the name had initially been
used as a weapon against her by Byam, in his letters from Surinam, Behn
appropriated it for new purposes, conjuring up not only the heroine of a
241

MARGARET FERGUSON
popular French romance by Honore d'Urfe but also the historical Elizabeth
Tudor. That famous queen had been honorifically associated with Astraea,
the classical and virgin goddess of justice who fled the earth after the end of
the Golden Age and whose imagined return was celebrated by Virgil in his
Fourth Eclogue.56
Although most readers have assumed that "Astrea" is somehow more
fictional than "Aphra" is, a few recent critics share my suspicion that
"Aphra" is also a nom de plume.57 However the name came to be attached
to the writer, "Aphra" works as a particularly appropriate and ironic
counter to "Astrea," for the latter name is associated with royal virgins,
while the former is associated with prostitutes. A third-century courtesan
named "Afra" or "Aphra" was worshipped as the patron saint of prosti-
tutes during the Renaissance, although her existence (and hence her
popular cult) was deemed a fiction by the Counter-reformation church -
another detail Aphra Behn might have relished.58
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, had remarked that daugh-
ters were like "moveable goods," unable to keep or preserve a family
"name" (in the sense of honor).59 I want to conclude by suggesting that
Behn's last name as well as her first ones are part of the specular and
rhetorical cipher-field we have been exploring. In one of the first documents
mentioning "Behn" as her surname, a syntactically enigmatic diary entry by
one Thomas Culpepper probably made in the 1690s, the name is the
occasion for a witty allusion to the Hebrew word for son and to an earlier
writer in whose footsteps Behn hoped that her "masculine part, the poet"
(preface to The Lucky Chance) would be able to tread: "BEENE the famos
female Poet di[e]d 29 April 1689," Culpepper remarks. "Her mother was
Colonell Culpeper's nurse and gave him suck for some-time, Mrs. Been was
Borne at Sturry or Canterbury, her name was Johnson, so that she might be
called Ben Johnson, she has also a fayer sister maryed to Capt. [there
follows an illegible name which could be Wrils, Eris, Erile, or Write] their
names were frfranck, & Aphora, was Mr. Beene."60 "Mr. Beene," perhaps a
scribal error for "Mrs. Behn," since it is in apposition to "Aphora," seems
like a curious and tenuous grammatical appendage to this sentence. Most
scholars who cite the diary entry have done so to argue for the historical
existence not of Mr. Behn but of a father named "Johnson";61 I want to
focus attention, however, on Culpepper's play on "Ben Johnson," with its
suggestions of a literary identification based on the past tense of the verb
"to be" and on the notion of a literary genealogy: Aphra son of ("ben")
Johnson. For Astrea or Aphra Behn seems to me quite capable of presenting
herself as a somewhat unruly son of Ben by using a name that plays on his
Christian one and that, moreover, neatly rhymes with the instrument both
242

writers deployed to construct their name in the sense of fame: the pen. That
Behn pronounced her name to rhyme with "pen" seems likely, on the
evidence of Culpepper's play with "Ben Johnson."
The author who for some still mysterious reason took the name Behn,
and who, in Oroonoko, called attention to the power of her "female pen"
to make a subject live beyond death, had a playfully Oedipal relation to the
historical Ben Jonson. In The Amorous Prince of 1671 she defiantly
anticipated criticism from educated male readers and spectators who
admired "rule-bound" authors like Jonson and Dryden: "you grave Dons,
who love no Play / But what is regular, Great Johnson's way." 62 None-
theless, although she set her mode of playwriting against Jonson's in
various polemical passages, she also aspired to a professional renown like
Jonson's, and mockingly suggested that he was not so different from
Shakespeare and herself (the "unlearned" dramatists) as one might think.
She yoked Jonson's and Shakespeare's great names together in the "Epistle
to the Reader" prefixed to her early play The Dutch Lover; there she
remarked that "Plays have no great room for that which is men's great
advantage over women, that is Learning. We all well know that the
immortal Shakespeare's plays (who was not guilty of much more of that
[i.e., learning] than often falls to women's share) have better pleas'd the
World than Johnson's works, though by the way 'tis said that Benjamin was
no such Rabbi neither, for I am inform'd that his Learning was but
Grammar high; (sufficient indeed to rob poor Salust of his best orations"). 63
Through the playful undermining of Jonson's claims to be a learned poet -
by accusing him of plagiarizing Sallust Behn actually brings Jonson closer
to herself and Shakespeare, both of whom were accused of stealing others'
materials - Behn assumes just that "hermaphroditical authority" Jonson
had attacked in his play Epicoene, or the Silent Woman.64 Anything but a
"silent woman," Behn is nonetheless a writer whose authentic voice is hard
to find, for she changes her voices and names with Shakespearean or
Ovidian finesse. And since, as Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus says, quoting
Ovid, "Terras Astraea reliquit" ("Astrea has left the earth," Metamorphoses
Book 1, line 150), the modern quest for Aphra Behn takes us inevitably to
the ciphers of identity she left us in the products of her pen.
NOTES
1 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and Other Writings, ed. Paul Salzman (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), p. ix.
2 For discussions of her reputation, see Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The
Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, i6yo-i8zo (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), pp. 1-4; Jacqueline Pearson, "History of
243

MARGARET FERGUSON
the History of the Nun," in Heidi Hutner (ed.), Rereading Aphra Behn: History,
Theory, and Criticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), pp.
234-52; Pearson, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women
Dramatists, 1642-1737 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1988); Jeslyn Medoff, "The
Daughters of Behn and the Problem of Reputation," in Isobel Grundy and Susan
Wiseman (eds.), Women, Writing, and History 1640-1740 (London: B. T.
Batsford, 1992); Nancy Cotton, Women Playwrights in England, c. 1363-1750
(London: Associated University Presses, 1980); Frederick M. Link, Aphra Behn
(New York: Twayne Publishers, 1968), chapter 9; Angeline Goreau, Recon-
structing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York: Dial Press,
1980); and Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: Andre
Deutsch, 1996).
3 Quoted from Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel: One Hundred Good Women
Writers Before ]ane Austen (London: Pandora, 1956), p. 50. See also Robert
Chibka, "Oh! Do Not Fear a Woman's Invention: Truth, Falsehood, and Fiction
in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 30, 4
(1988), p. 511.
4 "As contemporary standards of female chastity often overshadowed Behn's
work" in the past, Robert Chibka remarks, "so our century's fear that she
lacked another sort of fidelity, to the ideal of historical truth, has distracted
attention from her work" ("Oh! Do Not Fear," p. 511).
5 All quotations from Oroonoko are from the text edited by Paul Salzman, cited
above, note 1.
6 See Gallagher, Nobody's Story, pp. 10-11, and the introduction by Emmett L.
Avery and Arthur H. Scouten to The London Stage, 1600-1800, Part 1: 1660-
1700, ed. William Van Lennep (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1965), pp. lxxix-lxxxiv.
7 Robert Gould, "Satirical Epistle to the Female Author of a Poem called 'Sylvia's
Revenge'"; the connection between female writer and whore is a commonplace
of the age, as Catherine Gallagher, who quotes these lines, notes in Nobody's
Story, p. 23.
8 In The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 41, Peter Holland argues
that no other Restoration dramatist is "even half as preoccupied with bedroom
scenes" as Behn is. Gallagher discusses the significance of Holland's observation
in Nobody's Story, p. 32, and Elin Diamond, in "Gestus and Signature in Aphra
Behn's The Rover," ELH, 56 (1989), pp. 519-41, discusses the technical
innovation of discovery scenes. See also Pat Rogers, "The Breeches Part," in
Gabriel Bouce (ed.), Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. 244-58.
9 My argument here parallels that of Diamond, "Gestus and Signature," although
I seek to historicize the notion of "deciphering" an authorial "signature" more
than she does.
10 This meaning has recently been explored by Edward Tayler, "King Lear and
Negation," English Literary Renaissance, 20 (1990), pp. 17-39; by Terry
Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's Clarissa
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); and by Catherine Gallagher in No-
body's Story.
244

11 The best-known Renaissance cryptographer was John Trithemius, whose Poly-

graphia, published in 1518, inspired Francis Bacon's work on the "double
cipher" system of cryptography. For a useful general history of cryptography, see
David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York:
Macmillan, 1967).
12 Maureen Duffy thinks Behn was born in 1640 (The Passionate Shepherdess:
Aphra Behn, 1640-89 [New York: Dial Press, 1980]), p. 16, whereas Sara
Mendelson proposes 1649 in The Mental World of Stuart Women (Brighton:
Harvester Press, 1987), p. 2. Behn's grave in Westminster Abbey states that she
died on 16 April 1689.
13 The theatrical depression was the result, in part, of the amalgamation of the
two great theatre companies (the King's Company and the Duke's Company, for
which latter Behn chiefly wrote) in 1682. With the lessening demand for new
plays, many playwrights turned to translation.
14 Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, etc., ed. George Watson (London, 1692), p. 273.
Janet Todd also suspects that Behn knew some Latin; see Todd's introduction to
Seneca Unmasqued and Other Prose Translations, in The Works of Aphra
Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992-
96), vol. iv, p. x.
15 Introduction to The Poems of Aphra Behn: A Selection, ed. Janet Todd
(London: Pickering, 1994), pp. xviii-xix. On Behn's code, see Duffy, The
Passionate Shepherdess, p. 76.
16 For a discussion of her mysterious origins see Mendelson, The Mental World of
Stuart Women, pp. ii7ff.
17 On the Life of Mrs. Behn, Written by a Gentlewoman of her Acquaintance, in
Histories and Novels (London: printed for S. Briscoe, 1696), sig. A7V.
18 Cited and discussed in Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra, p. 9.
19 Gallagher, Nobody's Story, p. 3. Gallagher also remarks that four of her plays
were produced at court - an accomplishment only Dryden, again, surpassed. See
Fidelis Morgan (ed.), The Female Wits: Women Playwrights of the Restoration
(London: Virago, 1981), p. 12.
20 See Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women, p. 123, for a discussion of
the "unexpected" Republican perspective in Oroonoko. Mendelson, however,
oversimplifies the question of the novella's political allegory by explaining the
republicanism of the narrative just as a function of Behn's youth and the fact
that she loved William Scot.
21 Entitled "A Pastoral to Mr. Stafford, Under the Name of Silvio, on his
Translation of the Death of Camilla: Out of Virgil," the poem is addressed to
John, son of William Howard, Viscount Stafford and is printed in full in Janet
Todd (ed.), Works, vol. 1, pp. 185-98 (no. 64).
22 Public Record Office, State Papers, 29/169, 117; cited in Goreau, Recon-
structing Aphra, p. 101.
23 Scot is "not suffered to go out of [Colonel Bampfield's] ... sight," according to
the letter (cited in Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra, p. 96).
24 For information on Behn's spying activities, including reprinted documents, see
William J. Cameron, New Light on Aphra Behn (Auckland: University of
Auckland Press, 1961); Janet Todd and Francis McKee, "The Shee Spy' and
The Younger Brother," Times Literary Supplement, July 1993.
245

MARGARET FERGUSON
25 Maureen Duffy, who has expended much labor in trying to track Mr. Behn
down in shipping records and other documents, rightly remarks that he has
"less substance than any character [Behn] . . . invented" (The Passionate
Shepherdess, p. 48).
26 On the "Account" and the 1696 "Life," see Poems, A Selection, ed. Todd, pp.
viii-ix; for a detailed description of the different versions of the biography in
different editions of the Histories and Novels, see Robert Day Adams, "Aphra
Behn's First Biographer," Studies in Bibliography, 22 (1969), pp. 227-40.
27 Janet Todd follows Behn's previous editor, Montague Summers, in suspecting
that all three accounts were written by Charles Gilden, "the main editor of the
posthumous Aphra Behn and himself a playwright, manipulator of the literary
marketplace, and author of well-known 'fictional letters and tales'" (Todd,
Works, vol. 1, p. x).
28 See On the Life of Mrs. Behn by a "Gentlewoman of Her Acquaintance," in
Histories and Novels, 1696, sig. bir: "I knew her intimately well, and I believe
she wo'd not have conceal'd any Love-affair from me . . . which makes me
assure the World, there was no Affair between that Prince and Astraea." Behn
hints in her own story of Oroonoko at the possibility of a romance between
herself and the hero; for an elaboration of this argument, see my "News from
the New World: Miscegenous Romance in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and The
Widow Ranter," in David Lee Miller, Sharon O'Dair, and Harold Weber (eds.),
The Production of English Renaissance Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1994), esp. pp. 185-86.
29 Terry Castle's study of Clarissa take its title from the heroine's statement, "I am
but a cypher, to give him [Lovelace] significance, and myself pain." See
Clarissa's Ciphers, p. 15; see also Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2, lines 117-18, where
Hamlet plays with bawdy double meanings and entraps Ophelia into saying "I
think nothing" - to which Hamlet responds, "That's a fair thought to lie
between maids' legs" (cited from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore
Evans et al. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974], p. 1163).
30 See Robert Markley, "'Be Impudent, Be Saucy, Forward, Bold, Touzing, and
Leud': The Politics of Masculine Sexuality and Feminine Desire in Behn's Tory
Comedies," in J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne (eds.), Cultural
Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theater (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1995), pp. 115-40.
31 Ellen Pollak, "Beyond Incest: Gender and the Politics of Transgression in Aphra
Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister," in Hutner (ed.),
Rereading Aphra Behn, p. 155; see also Robert Markley and Molly Rothenberg,
"Contestations of Nature; Aphra Behn's 'The Golden Age' and the Sexualizing
of Politics," in Hutner (ed.), Rereading Aphra Behn, pp. 301-21.
32 Ros Ballaster, "Aphra Behn and the Female Plot," in Hutner (ed.), Rereading
Aphra Behn, p. 189; see also Susan Staves, Players' Scepters: Fictions of
Authority in the Restoration (London and Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1979)-
33 For a reading of the novella as a Stuart allegory, see George Guffey, "Aphra
Behn's Oroonoko: Occasion and Accomplishment," in George Guffey and
Andrew White, Two English Novelists: Aphra Behn and Anthony Trollope (Los
Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1975).
246

34 Cited from Todd (ed.), Works, vol. i, pp. 31-32 (the poem is no. 12 in her
edition); she notes that Behn expanded from Tasso's play's the famous opening
chorus evoking a primitive paradise where the only law was pleasure.
35 See Diamond's "Gestus and Signature," p. 528; for a longer discussion of
Rochester's place in Behn's life and works - and for a discussion of the
accusations against Behn made by Rochester's biographer Burnet - see Duffy,
Passionate Shepherdess, pp. 195-203.
36 The Rover, in Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd
(London: Penguin, 1992), p. 175. All citations are to this edition of the play.
37 Rochester, "Song," in The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Keith
Walker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 25.
38 For a text of the Rochester elegy, see Todd (ed.), Works, vol. 1, pp. 161-63 (no.
53); although she wrote a moving "pindarick" to Burnet at the end of her life,
after he had inquired about her health, her earlier relations to him were
troubled; he wrote to Anne Wharton, Rochester's cousin, whom Behn had
commended in verse, that "some of Mrs. Behn's songs are very tender; but she is
so abominably vile a woman, and rallies not only all religion but all virtue in so
odious and obscene a manner, that I am heartily sorry she has writ anything in
your commendation" (cited in Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra, p. 245).
39 For a text of this poem, which is sometimes printed under the title "On Doctor
Dry den, Renegade," see Todd (ed.), Works, vol. 1, p. 231.
40 See Todd, Works, vol. 1, p. xxiii. Dryden's relations to Behn were certainly marked
by an ambivalence equal to that which she displayed toward him, if indeed she
wrote the "Satyr": his commissioning of her work for his volume of Ovid's Epistles
indicates some degree of esteem, and he wrote a prologue and epilogue after Behn's
death for her play The Widow Ranter; on the other hand, he advised Elizabeth
Thomas in a letter not to write so "loosely" as Behn had. The letter is quoted and
discussed in James A. Winn, "When Beauty Fires the Blood": Love and the Arts
in the Age of Dry den (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 430.
41 Mary Ann O'Donnell argues that the poem's "mistaken" attribution to Behn
"probably came about because of the presence of this poem in... a commonplace
book into which Behn copied many contemporary satires, of which only a few
are hers" (Mary Ann O'Donnell, Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography [New
York: Garland, 1986], p. 308). Janet Todd (Works, vol. 1, p. xxiii), however,
follows Montague Summers in printing the poem as Behn's, though she notes that
it seems "at odds" with Behn's other expressions of admiration for Dryden.
42 Although in her introduction to the Works Todd suggests that Behn's failure to
publish the satire may be evidence that she regretted writing it, in her headnote
on the poem itself (no. 71 in her edition of the Works, vol. 1, p. 427), she notes
that many satires were circulated in manuscript in this era, often unsigned.
43 See Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women, p. 174, for a discussion of
this poem and its implications for an understanding of Behn's complex political
stance.
44 See O'Donnell, Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography, pp. 308-10.
45 Todd discusses for instance the "eight rather dubious letters, supposedly by
Behn," printed in 1718 in a volume entitled Familiar Letters of Love, Gallantry,
and Several Occasions, by the Wits of the last and present Age ... (Works, vol.
1, p. xliv).
247

MARGARET FERGUSON
46 See Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1993) and also Arthur E Marotti, "Malleable and Fixed Texts:
Manuscript and Printed Miscellanies and the Transmission of Lyric Poetry in
the English Renaissance," in W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old
Texts, Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985-93 (Binghamton,
NY: Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993), pp. 159-73.
47 See, e.g., her defense against charges of plagiarism in the postscript to The
Rover Part 1; the "sign of Angellica," Behn claims, is the "only stolen object"
from the play she was charged with appropriating, Thomas Killigrew's
Thomaso (cited from The Rover, ed. Todd, p. 248).
48 Cited from The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers, 6 vols. (1915;
rpt. New York: Phaeton Press, 1967), vol. iv, pp. 115-16.
49 For a text of "To the Fair Clarinda," see Todd (ed.), Works, vol. 1, p. 2.88 (no.
80); for the poem (by Daniel Kendrick) praising Behn as the sole exemplar of a
super "Third Sex," see Montague Summers (ed.), Works, vol. vi, p. 363.
50 Dedicatory Epistle to The Lucky Chance, Works, ed. Summers, vol. m, p. 183.
51 See Jessica Munns, "'Good Sweet, Honey, Sugar-Candied Reader': Aphra
Behn's Foreplay in Forewords," in Hutner (ed.), Rereading Aphra Behn, pp. 44-
62; Gallagher studies some of the same erotic dynamics in "Who Was that
Masked Woman: The Prostitute and Playwright in Aphra Behn," chapter 1 of
Nobody's Story and also reproduced in Hutner (ed.), Rereading Aphra Behn.
52 For a discussion of this self-positioning passage, from Behn's preface to The
Dutch Lover, see below, p. 243.
53 Cited from Maureen Duffy's edition of the Love-Letters between a Nobleman
and his Sister (London: Virago, 1987), p. 41. Ellen Pollak discusses an
analogous instance of semiotic disguising in Love-Letters-, see her "Beyond
Incest," cited above n. 1, p. 178.
54 See Dorothy Mermin, "Women Becoming Poets: Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn,
Anne Finch," ELH, 57 (1990), pp. 335-55.
55 See O'Donnell, Aphra Behn, p. 2, on the appearance of "Ann."
56 See Frances Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 9-10.
57 Both Janet Todd and Sara Mendelson suggest that "Aphra" (variously spelled)
may be an assumed name, despite literary historians' efforts to link "Aphra
Behn" with an Aphra mentioned in baptismal records in the 1640s.
58 Angeline Goreau notes that the original "Aphra" had been a "sacred prostitute
in the temple of Venus in Augsburg on the Rhine in the third century A.D. until
her conversion by Saint Narcissus" (Reconstructing Aphra, p. 17), but Goreau
does not link the name with Behn's own creation of "virtuous" prostitute figures
in her plays, figures like Angellica Bianca and La Nuche in Part I and Part II of
The Rover respectively.
59 Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Sociable Letters (London, 1664),
pp. 183-84.
60 Adversaria, MS. Harley 75988, f. 453V. Cited from Todd (ed.), Poems: A
Selection, p. vii; see also Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women,
p. 16, and n. 3, p. 208.
61 See, e.g., Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess, pp. 18-21.
62 Works, ed. Summers, vol. iv, p. 121.
248

63 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 224.

64 See Epicoene, Act 1, scene i, line 76, and Paula Backsheider's discussion of the
passage in Spectacular Poetics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early
Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 27.
FURTHER READING
Behn, Aphra, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, ed. Maureen Duffy
(London: Virago, 1986).
Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin,
1992).
Cotton, Nancy, Women Playwrights in England, c. 1363-17 50 (London: Associated
University Presses, 1980).
Diamond, Elin, uGestus and Signature in Aphra Behn's The Rover," ELH, 56
(1989), pp. 519-41-
Duffy, Maureen, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640-89 (New York:
Dial Press, 1980).
Ferguson, Margaret, "News from the New World: Miscegenous Romance in Aphra
Behn's Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter," in David Lee Miller, Sharon
O'Dair, and Harold Weber (eds.), The Production of English Renaissance
Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Gallagher, Catherine, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the
Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
Goreau, Angeline, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New
York: Dial Press, 1980).
Holland, Peter, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration
Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Hutner, Heidi (ed.), Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993).
Kahn, David, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York: Mac-
millan, 1967).
Medoff, Jeslyn, "The Daughters of Behn and the Problem of Reputation," in Isobel
Grundy and Susan Wisemen (eds.), Women, Writing, and History 1640-1740
(London: B. T. Batsford, 1992).
Mendelson, Sara, The Mental World of Stuart Women (Brighton: Harvester Press,
1987).
Pearson, Jacqueline, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Drama-
tists, 1642-1737 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1988).
Todd, Janet, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: Andre Deutsch, 1996).
249

12
JOHN MULLAN
Swift, Defoe, and narrative forms

I walk'd about on the Shore, lifting up my Hands, and my whole Being, as I
may say, wrapt up in the Contemplation of my Deliverance, making a
Thousand Gestures and Motions which I cannot describe, reflecting upon all
my Comerades that were drown'd, and that there should be not one Soul
sav'd but my self; for, as for them, I never saw them afterwards, or any Sign
of them, except three of their Hats, one Cap, and two Shoes that were not
Fellows.1
What became of my Companions in the Boat, as well as of those who escaped

on the Rock, or were left in the Vessel, I cannot tell; but conclude they were
all lost. For my own Part, I swam as Fortune directed me, and was pushed
forward by Wind and Tide. I often let my Legs drop; and could feel no
Bottom: But when I was almost gone, and able to struggle no longer, I found
myself within my Depth; and this Time the Storm was much abated. The
Declivity was so small, that I walked near a Mile before I got to the Shore,
which I conjectured was about Eight o'Clock in the Evening.2
Two of literature's most famous adventurers have struggled ashore. Both

have been singled out; both live to tell stories of self-reliance. Washed up
alone in an alien place, each brings to his predicament an undauntedness
that we often hear in the very rhythm of narration. Each will go on to tell
us of the means by which he managed to survive, and even prosper, in a
strange land, ruefully reflecting on his weakness and vulnerability, as well
as proudly recalling his resourcefulness. Practicality and determination also
shape their narrations. The drama of their stories is not so much in what
they contain as in how they are told. We read of their struggles to survive,
but we also listen to their struggles to get their stories to make sense - their
struggles to form a narrative.
These two imagined travelers, Robinson Crusoe and Lemuel Gulliver, are
also imagined narrators. Each tries to find level tones to tell us of the
strangest things (the original title page of Robinson Crusoe announced its
hero's "strange surprizing adventures"). In the first of the passages above,
Crusoe characteristically "cannot describe" his reactions; elsewhere in his
narrative, he frequently marks his recollection of feelings he cannot exactly
represent. "I believe it is impossible to express to the Life what the Extasies
250

and Transports of the Soul are, when it is so sav'd, as I may say, out of the
very Grave."3 Yet, in all these "Transports of the Soul," there is something
else that can be recalled: the sharply remembered, palpable world of
objects - "three of their Hats, one Cap, and two Shoes that were not
Fellows." Crusoe could notice, and can remember noticing, that those two
shoes on the beach were sadly and ludicrously mismatched. The details he
offers are evidence of his concern for authenticity, and so his story - like the
stories told by all Defoe's other resilient adventurers - is full of measure-
ments and inventories.
Gulliver too likes to think about facts ("... near a Mile ... about Eight
o'Clock ..."), and his tale of shrunken and expanded dimensions will
supply plenty of its own incredible but pedantically recorded measure-
ments. We might say that both Gulliver and Crusoe are pragmatic Enlight-
enment Englishmen, and that each is representative of the values of his age
and nation in keeping a steady head for facts in the face of the unknown.
Except that Gulliver's prose, apparently fashioned like Crusoe's to subdue
the world to its particulars, leads to an amazing failure to be amazed.
Crusoe's sentences set off in exploratory fashion, adding details and
qualifications as they occur; Gulliver's aim at solid testimony - a string of
factual statements. His narrative rhythm is bizarrely undistracted by what
he narrates: "I was extremely tired ... I lay down on the Grass, which was
very short and soft... when I awaked, it was just Day-light. I attempted to
rise, but was not able to stir ... I found my Arms and Legs were strongly
fastened on each Side to the Ground ... I could only look upwards ... I
heard a confused Noise about me ... I felt something alive moving on my
left Leg ... I perceived it to be a human Creature not six Inches high, with a
Bow and Arrow in his Hands, and a Quiver at his Back."4
This is the point at which Gulliver's narrative becomes something
radically different from Crusoe's. In part, this is simply because we have
left behind us the world of "probability" that Defoe's protagonists inhabit
(whatever their supernatural beliefs). It is also because we must now realize
that the very steadiness of the narrative ("the style is very plain and simple"
writes the supposed "Publisher") is what is most disturbing and ludicrous
about it.5 It is not a novel but a mock-travel book; it is a satire whose
object is its narrator. It is quite possible that, to the modern reader,
Gulliver's narration of his arrival in Lilliput would have seemed unremark-
able until his first encounter with a Lilliputian, but, alongside Crusoe's
narrative, we might see something else that is perturbing about its flatness.
Crusoe senses that his "Deliverance," as the word implies, might have been
more than fortuitous. As well as the natural laws that a novel must obey,
there is Providence. His narrative will tell of the saving not just of a person,
251

JOHN MULLAN
but of a "Soul" - the word that he cannot help using of himself. Gulliver
simply says, "I swam as Fortune directed me." Nowhere is he to be surprised,
as Crusoe often is, by the strange evidence of God's will. There is no God in
his prose. On that fact, we will find, Swift's satirical experiment is based. In
contrast, the coherence of Defoe's fictional autobiographies requires the
presence of God to his sinful narrators. It is on this sense of Providence that
the development of what we now call "the novel" is founded.
It seems natural to begin a discussion of the narrative forms adapted or
invented by Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift with Robinson Crusoe and
Gulliver's Travels. These two works, which epitomize their authors'
narrative innovations, became famous beyond any of their other writings,
and probably beyond any other books first published during the eighteenth
century. Measured by numbers of editions and adaptations, Robinson
Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels have no rivals from this period. Over 70
different editions of Robinson Crusoe had been published by 1800; over
100 separate editions of Gulliver's Travels had appeared by 1815/ (These
figures do not include the cheap, hugely simplified chap-book versions,
illustrated with crude woodcuts, in which both tales circulated amongst
readers who did not belong to the polite classes.)7 The standard catalogue
of eighteenth-century publications in English, the Eighteenth-Century Short
Title Catalogue, lists over 200 editions and abridgments of Robinson
Crusoe by 1800, if we include Defoe's own sequels to his book. Both were
soon translated in many other European languages, and new translations
continue to appear.
Measured in this way - rather than by actual numbers of copies - they
are two of the most reproduced works in history. Figures for the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries are harder to ascertain, but the British Library
catalogue lists 330 versions of Gulliver's Travels since 1815 and almost
300 versions of Robinson Crusoe (excluding translations).8 Many editions
of both books are illustrated, and many are adaptations for children.9
Given its notorious misanthropy and scatology (Thackeray called it "filthy
in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene") Gulliver's Travels has
a particularly interesting history of being, in the words of a 1908 title,
"Retold for little folk."10 In the nineteenth century, typical editions
declared themselves "Carefully edited by a Clergyman" or "Revised for
family reading."11 As one Victorian editor said in his preface to a typical
adaptation, Swift had "a liking for saying nasty things ... such as are in bad
taste and offensive. These have been omitted in this publication."12
These two works stand for the achievements of their two authors
because they have become mythical narratives, known in some of their
elements by many who have never read what Defoe and Swift actually
252

wrote. It is natural to put them together because they display both the
proximity and the antagonism of the two writers' narrative forms. In their
different imitations of what we might call "factuality," they both draw on a
contemporary fascination for detailed accounts of voyages.13 These
voyages provided writers as well as readers with new imaginative opportu-
nities, but opportunities sanctioned by their concern for matters-of-fact.
"As the fresh wonders of travel opened a more credible escape than the
faded wonders of romance, the way was paved with factual exactitude."14
The philosopher Shaftesbury remarked in 1710 that voyages "are in our
present days what books of chivalry were in those of our forefathers."15
Narratives, he implied, no longer appealed by being fantastic. In a world in
which factual report had a high status, readers were learning to delight in
what seemed strange but true.
Defoe's and Swift's imaginary voyages have outlived the factual accounts
that they imitated. The vogue for voyages was set in motion by William
Dampier's A New Voyage Round the Worlds first published in 1697.16 In
the prefatory "Letter from Capt. Gulliver, to His Cousin Sympson," which
Swift added to the 1735 edition of Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver writes of
having given directions "to hire some young Gentleman of either Univer-
sity" to "correct the Style" of his account "as my Cousin Dampier did by
my Advice, in his Book called A Voyage round the World."17 It is indeed
the style of Dampier that we can hear in Gulliver's Travels. Dampier tells
of a voyage, or series of voyages, lasting some twelve years and taking him
buccaneering around the globe. Yet, as he says in his Dedication, though he
brings knowledge of "Remote Regions," his account is "this plain piece of
mine."18 This is not just conventional modesty. Plainness is the guarantee
of what his Preface calls "the Truth and Sincerity of my Relation."
However exotic the places visited and however strange the peoples
encountered, the mariner sets down "such Observables as I met with."
"Choosing to be more particular than might be needful," the undistracted
narrator has stuck to the facts. At the beginning of the final chapter of
Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver declares that he has "not been so studious of
Ornament as of Truth." "I could perhaps, like others, have astonished thee
with strange improbable Tales; but I rather chose to relate plain Matter of
Fact in the simplest Manner and Style; because my principal Design was to
inform, and not to amuse thee."19 He might be remembering the proud
plainness of his "cousin" Dampier in A New Voyage: "As to my Stile, it
cannot be expected, that a Seaman should affect Politeness; for were I able
to do it, yet I think I should be little sollicitous about it, in a work of this
Nature."20
"Politeness," by which Dampier means literary refinement and elegance
253

JOHN MULLAN
of expression, was, as he well knew, an important value of the age. His

own writing presented itself as credible by having no room for considera-
tions of taste. (As a joke at the expense of such proud inelegance, Swift
inserted an unreadable paragraph from Samuel Sturmy's Mariner's Maga-
zine into Gulliver's narration of the storm at sea in Part n of his Travels.)21
Dampier says in his Preface to his later Voyage to New Holland (1703) that
he offers, instead of "a Polite and Rhetorical Narrative," only "a Plain and
Just Account of the true Nature and State of the Things described." The
"true Nature" of what has been seen includes what we might call
"scientific" information. Dampier dedicated his New Voyage to the Pre-
sident of the Royal Society, the official body that represented the prestige of
what was then called "natural philosophy." Dampier hoped that his
"Gleanings" could be added to its "general Magazine, of the knowledge of
Foreign Parts," and his book is full of descriptions of exotic plants and
animals, as well as of observations of tides and winds. (We might notice
Gulliver promising, as a sequel to his Travels, "a greater Work" - "a
particular Account" of the Lilliputians and their history: "their Plants and
Animals, their peculiar Manners and Customs, with other Matters very
curious and useful."22) In pursuit of "curious" facts, Dampier lies hidden to
observe the nesting habits of flamingoes on the Cape Verde islands,
calculates the weight of turtles on the Gallapagos, and measures the
wingspans of "great Batts, with Bodies as big as Ducks" in the Philip-
pines.23 It is as if he were inspired to travel by a love of natural history (if it
were not for his habit of eating most of the strange animals that he
describes). In reality, Dampier had been a buccaneer, who traveled around
the world in search of profit, attacking Spanish possessions. His account
may seem a dogged record of all that he saw, but is not quite the
uncontrived log that it purports to be - it took him several years after he
returned to turn his notes into this New Voyage.24
The attachment to the factual (however careful a fiction) is what Defoe
and Swift exploit. The Preface to Robinson Crusoe declares that "The
Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact," just as the prefaces to
Defoe's other novels claim that we are about to read actual records of
events (albeit, in the case of Moll Flanders, records that have had to be
rewritten in "Language fit to be read").25 These prefaces are themselves
part of the fiction - part of the apparatus of authenticity - just like Swift's
publisher's note at the front of Gulliver's Travels. Yet, though they are
fictional, they do guide us to the sense of probability that Defoe creates. In
these works of fiction as in Dampier's travel narratives, detail is presented
as if it were synonymous with credibility. In Defoe's case, one can see the
writer's earlier experience as what we might call a "reporter" informing his

fiction. A work like The Storm, Defoe's account of the great storm of 1703,
seems close to a fiction like his Journal of the Plague Year in its sense of
particularity, by turns vivid and plodding. The narrator of the former tells
us, as he counts fallen trees, that "the Author of this was an Eye-Witness
and Sharer of the Particulars." 26 The narrator of the latter, H.F., tries to
sort fact from the fantastic stories that spread through plague-stricken
London by looking for the circumstantial details that constitute a tale's
"probability." Defoe's narratives are full of what De Quincey called "little
circumstantiations of any character or incident as seem, by their apparent
inertness of effect, to verify themselves":
where the reader is told that such a person was the posthumous son of a
tanner, that his mother married afterwards a Presbyterian schoolmaster, who
gave him a smattering of Latin, but, the schoolmaster dying of the plague,
that he was compelled at sixteen to enlist for bread - in all this, as there is
nothing at all amusing, we conclude that the author could have no reason to
detain us with such particulars but simply because they were true.27
Defoe's preface to his Memoirs of a Cavalier tells us that, while "the Facts"
of history that it contains "are confirmed for their general Part by all the
Writers of those Times," "the Beauty" of the account is that it is "embel-
lished with Particulars, which are no where else to be found." 28 The
ambition of his fiction is to be fact-like.
We associate the particularity of Defoe's narrators with this ambition.
Crusoe and the rest measure and count and catalogue because Defoe seems
to be trying to do justice to the particularity of the material world.
Whatever the debates of literary historians, he will always seem the pioneer
novelist because he makes "probability" his creed and has his protagonists,
who are also his narrators, provide all the detail and exactitude that will
testify to that probability. Crusoe-the-narrator details the provisions that he
recovered from his ship as carefully as Crusoe-the-protagonist once
paddled them ashore. Telling his story, he sees again each valuable object:
those "two very good Fowling-pieces" and the "three Dutch cheeses." 29 As
both narrator and character in her own story, Moll Flanders has the same
"tenacity of the realist," as Peter Conrad puts it - she "will only believe in
things if she can grasp them. That is why she pilfers." 30 Narrating her
transactions with "my Mother Midnight," midwife to "Ladies" with some-
thing to conceal, she provides copies of the woman's itemized bills for her
"Lying-Inn" - as if "the particulars of her Bill" were what made the episode
vivid again. 31 Roxana cannot individualize her various lovers (the Jeweler,
the Prince, and so on), but she seems to recall exactly how many crowns,
2-55

JOHN MULLAN
pistoles, and livres each of them gave her, and to count them up lovingly all
over again in the business of narration.
In Gulliver's Travels, the ambition to be fact-like is the object as well as
the means of Swift's satire, and in a work of deadly attention to the forms
of human pride, Gulliver's proudest boast in his "Veracity" - his faithful-
ness to "Matter of Fact."32 At the end of his travels, after his stay with the
Houyhnhnms, this sustains the misanthropy that is the logical consequence
of the collapse of his vanity: he prides himself on sparing the reader
nothing. This is also true in his accounts of his first three voyages. When he
has told us of having "discharged the Necessities of Nature" between two
sorrel leaves in a Brobdingnagian garden, his apologia is ludicrously close
to Dampier's preface to New Voyage (see above).
I hope, the gentle Reader will excuse me for dwelling on these and the like
Particulars; which however insignificant they may appear to grovelling vulgar
Minds, yet will certainly help a Philosopher to enlarge his Thoughts and
Imagination, and apply them to the Benefit of publick as well as private Life;
which was my sole Design in presenting this and other Accounts of my
Travels to the World; wherein I have been chiefly studious of Truth, without
affecting any Ornaments of Learning, or of Style.33
Gulliver's sense of the factual truth of what he tells is what enables him
not to recognize the worlds that he visits. Since the book's first publica-
tion, readers have felt compelled to identify the particular characters and
events that it mirrors, and today's standard edition has seventy-three
pages of notes pursuing this compulsion. At the end of the Travels, the
narrator dismisses "the Tribes of Answerers, Considerers, Observers,
Reflecters, Detecters, Remarkers" who are ready to find references to
eighteenth-century England in the book: "what Objections can be made
against a Writer who relates only plain Facts that happened in such distant
Countries...?" 34
So it is that the same influences can have such different effects in the
narratives of Swift and of Defoe. Defoe imitates factual accounts to provide
us with the means of believing in his stories. In his composition of
Robinson Crusoe he was probably influenced by a "true story" that had
become well known a few years earlier: the case of Alexander Selkirk, who
had been marooned for four years on the Pacific island of Juan Fernandez.
Several had told Selkirk's story, including the captain of the ship that had
rescued him, Woodes Rogers, in his A Cruising Voyage Round the World
(1712). Here too Dampier, the father of such accounts, was involved. He
had captained the ship accompanying that by which Selkirk had originally
been abandoned, and four years later he was a member of Roger's crew
256

when Selkirk was picked up. What is more, in his New Voyage he had
himself told of "a Moskito Indian" who had been marooned on the same
island from 1681 to 1684 and had survived by his great "sagacity."35 Defoe
seemed to acknowledge his debt to both these voyage writers when he
declared in his Compleat English Gentleman that an inquisitive person
"may go round the globe with Dampier and Rogers, and kno' a thousand
times more in doing it than all those illiterate sailors."36 Likely sources can
be found for all Defoe's novels: he used historical accounts for Memoirs of
a Cavalier; he probably based some of Moll Flanders on the exploits of a
notorious thief of the period; he drew on bills of mortality for A Journal of
the Plague Year?7 Later eighteenth-century novels do not have sources in
this way. Even when, like the novels of Richardson, they are presented as
authentic documents, they do not reach out for other, known histories. In
this sense, Defoe builds the bridge from fact to fiction.38 Identification of
his sources is important only inasmuch as it confirms the ambition of that
fiction: to find the factual "particulars" that make a narrative individual -
and thence the shapes of providential design that his narrators must
discover amidst all the details.
Defoe was so successful that some of what we now call his "novels" were
only recognized as fiction long after his death. Late in the eighteenth
century, there was still discussion of the authorship of both Memoirs of a
Cavalier and A Journal of the Plague Year that clearly indicates that they
were widely considered to be "genuine" recollections, written in the
seventeenth century.39 In 1724, he published a "voyage," directly in the line
of Dampier and Rogers: A New Voyage Round the World. Only in the
1770s did this begin to be treated as a work of the imagination ("plagi-
arism" would be more accurate) written by Defoe. Of course, he did not
put his name to any of his novels (Moll Flanders and the rest are presented
as authors of their own narratives), but he was not necessarily trying to
impose on his readers, even if he sometimes did so. In his (also anonymous)
Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson
Crusoe (1720), he acknowledges that the original is an "imaginary story,"
but says that there is a "real History" behind it. It may be "Allegorical," but
it is not "Romance." What he calls "allegorick History" is morally justifi-
able: "Such are the historical Parables in the Holy Scripture, such the
Pilgrim's Progress, and such in a Word the Adventures of your fugitive
Friend, Robinson Crusoe."40
This disavowal of "Romance" is a deep-seated need of eighteenth-
century fiction. "Romance" stands for an older kind of fictional narrative,
with no allegiance to probability. When Fielding, in Tom Jones, wishes to
justify his fiction, he writes that "truth distinguishes our writings from
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JOHN MULLAN
those idle romances which are filled with monsters."41 The style is mock-
self-important, but relies on the contrast between "truth" and "romance."
When Clara Reeve published the first history of the novel in 1785, she
called it The Progress of Romance to indicate that an entertaining but
childish genre had indeed "progressed," and, by discovering a new rigor
and new scruples, become, in effect, a new genre. "Romance" elements
remain part of this new fiction: the magical transformation of Richardson's
Pamela from servant to lady; the discovery of the birthmarks that tell us
that Fielding's Joseph Andrews is really a gentleman.42 Yet Defoe's striving
after both factual accuracy and "allegorick" moralism, even if it did not
directly influence these later novelists, does tell of a project whose develop-
ment we can call "the rise of the novel" - even if, of course, Defoe himself
cannot have known that he was inventing this genre.
We can better understand the novelty of both Defoe and Swift by
returning to some of the narrative forms and conventions that they were
adapting (and that the triumphant march of the novel has long since left
behind). As well as the new "voyages," with their facts and observations
there were journeys of the imagination. Defoe wrote one himself, earlier in
his career. In 1705 he published an anonymous prose satire, The consoli-
dator: or, memoirs of sundry transactions from the world in the moon.
Defoe's "consolidator" is the name for the machine that flies him to the
moon, where he observes a society whose political squabbles and religious
disputes crudely but vividly parallel the divisions in post-Glorious Revolu-
tion England. Defoe's satirical purposes are always so clear that the world
he imagines cannot come to life for the modern reader. In large measure,
the work is a Whiggish polemic about the dangers of "Absolute Submis-
sion" to a monarch (the lunar Prince is "bubl'd" by those who advise him
to assume absolute sovereignty) and religious intolerance (Defoe even
dramatizes himself as "A certain Author" who defends Dissenters against
"high Solunarian Zeal").43 Yet, even if it has no aspiration to escape mere
topicality, this "voyage" of Defoe's seems to belong to a literary tradition -
one much older than the proudly prosaic accounts of Dampier and his ilk.
The imaginary voyage, to places beyond belief as well as beyond experi-
ence, had been a natural vehicle for satire from classical times.44 While the
determinedly factual accounts of voyages that began with Dampier have a
genealogical relationships to novels, novels have no such kinship with the
fantastic journeys of which The consolidator might have reminded eight-
eenth-century readers.
The earliest of these that has survived is "A True Story" by Lucian, a
satirist who wrote in Greek in the second century A.D. and who was one of
Swift's favorite authors.45 Lucian's also tells of a journey to the moon. The
258

account contains much that is outlandish mischief in the guise of diligent

report ("Moonmen have artificial penises, generally of ivory but, in the case
of the poor, of wood") and a certain amount that exploits the satirical
possibilities of relativism (on the moon "A bald pate or no hair at all is
considered a mark of beauty"46 - clearly an amusingly incredible notion for
Lucian). As in Gulliver's Travels, there is the constant possibility - in
Defoe's The consolidator this is a simple necessity - that the narrative is
glancing at "real" historical events. In Lucian's case, unlike Swift's, the
events are safely distant: the history of Ancient Greece rather than of the
Roman Empire in which he lived. As also in Gulliver's Travels, the fantastic
voyage allows for a celebratory or, more interestingly, debunking encounter
with historical characters. In an episode on which Swift must have drawn
for Gulliver's visit to Glubbdubdrib in Part in of Gulliver's Travels,
Lucian's narrator visits "the Isle of the Blest," where he encounters the
spirits of great men and can compare them with their reputations.
Lucian greatly influenced a famous English adaptor of the fantastic
voyage, Thomas More. More's Utopia, first published in 1516, is in the
same tradition of serio ludere - learned playfulness - as much of Lucian's
work, including "A True Story." In modern times it has been called "the
tradition of learned wit"47 - a tradition in which allusive learning is
deployed facetiously or deflatingly. In such writings scholarly authors can
abandon the religious or political commitments that their scholarship
would usually serve. Utopia begins with a fiction that licenses its author's
purposeful irresponsibility. More's Preface says that his "little book" has
avoided stylistic sophistication and merely reproduced the "casual simpli-
city" of the account of Utopia given him by a traveler, Raphael Hythloday.
"Truth in fact is the only quality at which I should have aimed, or did aim,
in writing this book."48 It is a satirical assertion that Swift might have
remembered when he invented his proudly truthful Gulliver, having his
"publisher" tell us that Gulliver "was so distinguished for his veracity, that
it became a sort of proverb amongst his neighbours at Redriff, when any
one affirmed a thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoke
it."49 The point of More's irony is that he can write as if he were dutifully
repeating what he has been told of the Utopian commonwealth. "Truthful-
ness" is a mischief-making disclaimer. Hythloday has told him in simple
terms of a happy land without Christianity (and the "lazy gang of priests
and so-called religious men") and without landlords.50 Its citizens ration-
ally adopt some practices which More himself, in his own world, would
have condemned (public officials encouraging the terminally ill to commit
suicide, for instance). But "truth" is what is offered us, however uncomfor-
table or difficult to square with our own ways.
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JOHN MULLAN
Hythloday's description of Utopia takes up almost all of Book n of

More's work. As in Swift's prose satires, the text relies on the distance of
the author from what he has imagined. Hythloday (from a Greek
compound meaning "expert in nonsense") describes an ideal common-
wealth long dreamt of by Ancient, as well as humanist, thinkers. It is a
place where vanity and superfluity are renounced. He admiringly tells More
and his friend Peter Giles that, in Utopia, "The chief aim of their constitu-
tion is that . . . all citizens should be free to withdraw as much time as
possible from the service of the body and devote them selves to the freedom
and culture of the mind." 51 The Utopians are stoics: virtuous ascetics who
disdain luxury and who treasure only what is useful. In Utopia, iron is
valued, but not gold and silver; children play with pearls and diamonds,
but adults scorn them. Utopians never waste time in idling; there are no
taverns or brothels, no corruption (because no secrecy), no envy or
competition, because all "life's good things" are shared equally (so, without
luxury, there is no poverty).
This particular dream - which has, of course, given its name to the very
act of dreaming of a better world - is recognizable in Part iv of Gulliver's
Travels, where Gulliver readily learns to love the rational frugality of the
Houyhnhnms. These talking horses are another version of the stoic ideal:
passions conquered, appetites subjugated, reason revered. As in Utopia,
what readers will recognize as worldly wealth is valueless:
in some fields of his country, there are certain shining stones of several
colours, whereof the Yahoos are violently fond ... My master said, he could
never discover the reason of this unnatural appetite, or how these stones
could be of any use to a Yahoo ... My master further assured me, which I
also observed my self; that in the fields where these shining stones abound,
the fiercest and most frequent battles are fought, occasioned by perpetual
inroads of the neighbouring Yahoos.52
What Swift has learned from More is not, however, the thought that gold
and jewels are but "shining stones." Rather, he has learned the art of satire
as intellectual experiment, where a narrator tells us in wonder of a
wonderful land, but the author is lost. Utopia is (literally, in Greek) "no
place," and there is no place for Gulliver in the land of ever-truthful,
dispassionate horses. More invented Utopia not as a proposal, but as a
provocation. The reader is left to see why it might be admirable, and to
understand why it is impossible. "I was left thinking that quite a few of the
laws and customs he had described as existing among the Utopians were
really absurd," comments More at the end of Hythloday's "afternoon
discourse." 53 Yet we cannot be sure that even this conclusion is unironical.
260

More pretends to reject Utopia on the grounds that its economic egalitar-
ianism "utterly subverts all the nobility, magnificence, splendour and
majesty which (in the popular view) are the true ornaments and glory of
any commonwealth." But does this not invite us to rise above the "popular
view," knowing - as More's Christian humanist readers would know - the
true smallness of worldly "magnificence"? The better world that More has
invented is not a true alternative to the one in which he lived and made his
worldly career; it is a satirical counterpart. In Gulliver's Travels, Swift has
learned from this device. Yet, in his hands, the absurdity of that gap
between the Utopian and the real becomes something terrible. Gulliver too
sees a better world, and his return to reality, to the world of his fellow
yahoos, drives him to live in a stable with herbs up his nose.
A couple of years after Utopia was first published, an edition that was
almost certainly authorized by More appeared with marginal annotations
by one of his friends, perhaps Erasmus. At the point in the book where
Raphael Hythloday tells how the Utopians work hard, avoid all senseless
pleasures, and hide nothing from each other, the annotator cries "O sacred
society, worthy of imitation, especially by Christians!"54 Influenced by
Lucian (who, we are told, is a favorite author in Utopia)55 More's method
allows him to make Utopia a salutary counter-example of the workings of a
commonwealth. He invents his traveler, Hythloday, so that his account of
the perfect commonwealth can tease the reader into recognition of the
corruption or irrationality of his own commonwealth. The separation of
author and narrator is as important here as it was in In Praise of Folly,
written by More's friend Erasmus, six years earlier. In Erasmus's most
famous work, Folly herself celebrates folly. Again, we have a text in which
mischief is married to learning - an experiment upon the values of its
readers. Writings in such a tradition of learned wit were entirely congenial
to Swift. It is a tradition to which A Tale of A Tub and Gulliver's Travels
belong. (Later in the eighteenth century, Laurence Sterne, in Tristram
Shandy, would recover some of the resources of this tradition for the
novel.) Defoe's fiction is something new and different because it sets itself
different rules. The playfully learned narratives of Lucian, More, Erasmus,
Rabelais, or Swift have no regard to the standard of "probability" that
Defoe's narrators expect to apply to their stories. Their truth is intellectual,
not circumstantial. They bend all their details to their satirical purposes.
The non-novelistic character of Swift's prose satires can also be seen if
one thinks about their infamous (if only occasional) scatology. While
novels may deal with the facts of life, it is not until Joyce's Ulysses that
these include defecating. Gulliver, of course, feels impelled to inform us
how he dealt with "the Necessities of Nature," hoping that the "candid
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JOHN MULLAN
Reader" will approve the "Cleanliness" of his behavior.56 (Gulliver likes to

feel that there is nothing that he shirks telling us.) Elsewhere in Swift's
satires, pissing, shitting, farting, and belching feature as natural analogies
for what we might otherwise like to think of as intellectual processes. In his
Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1704), an
unknown author purports to find the material causes of "Enthusiasm" -
what we might call "divine inspiration." It is both a satirical parody of
materialist explanations of human action, offered in particular by the
philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and an attack on Protestant sects that trusted
to the "Inward Light" of individual believers. Such congregations will be
easily possessed by an "inspired" preacher.
A Master Work-man shall blow his Nose so powerfully, as to pierce the

Hearts of his People, who are disposed to receive the Excrements of his Brain
with the same Reverence, as the Issue of it. Hawking, Spitting, and Belching,
the Defects of other Mens Rhetorick, are the Flowers, and Figures, and
Ornaments of his.57
In A Tale of A Tub, religious enthusiasts are taken literally when they

speak of the breath of inspiration, and all their ecstasies are treated as
"Effluviums of Wind"58 These "Wise Aeolists" as the Tale dubs them,
"affirm the gift of BELCHING, to be the noblest Act of a Rational
Creature." 59 The "author" of the Tale treats the bodily spasms and
"eructations" that accompany inspiration as its causes rather than its
symptoms. Prophetic convulsion is just breaking wind.
Swift has an important model for his reduction of human vanity and
folly to the body's baser functions. Perhaps his favorite writer was the
learned, facetious French satirist, Francois Rabelais. When Alexander
Pope, Swift's friend and erstwhile collaborator, wished to compliment him
at the opening of The Dunciad, he imagined him laughing at the world
from "Rabelais' easy chair," while Voltaire described Swift as "Rabelais
perfectionne." 60 In his satirical application of learning, Rabelais has some-
thing in common with his contemporaries More and Erasmus (significantly,
all three men translated Lucian, the father of this tradition), although they
had neither his taste for vulgarity nor quite his enjoyment of dense parodies
of erudition - both features of Swift's satire. Rabelais's "chronicle" of the
adventures of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel was a series of books
published over the course of some thirty years, the last of them appearing
eleven years after the author's death. This fact of its publishing history is
itself some indication of how Rabelais's "chronicle" was something
different from what we usually think of as a novel: it was held together not
by a plot, but by its capacity to find new opportunities for parody; not by
262

the inner life of its characters but by their capacity to make mischief. As in
A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels these characters are just ways of
encountering arguments, follies, beliefs, and vices.
It is not surprising, then, that one of the Books of Rabelais's chronicle,
his "Quart Livre," is an imaginary voyage. In search of advice about
marriage, Pantagruel and his companions travel to find the Oracle of the
Holy Bottle. In the lands they visit, values or vices are embodied; Rabelais's
readers are invited, like eighteenth-century readers of Gulliver's Travels, to
recognize what they already know in these strange beings and places: the
"land of Clerkship," inhabited by the Chiquanous (those who live off "la
chicane" - legal chicanery), "men who will hang their fathers for a
shilling";61 the country of the "Papimanes," who have forgotten the Bible
because of their reverence for papal law - the decretals - and adore the
Pope ("We would kiss his bare bum and his ballocks into the bargain. For
he's got ballocks, has the Holy Father. We found that out from our great
Decretals");62 the island of Messer Gaster (Signor Belly), whose subjects,
possessed by gluttony, "looked up to Gaster as their great God, worshipped
him as a God, sacrificed to him as their God almighty."63 This voyage
through follies and vices, personified in grotesque forms, is behind Gulli-
ver's Travels in particular. More generally, Swift has learned from Rabelais
a style of incongruity. He has none of Rabelais's celebratory enjoyment of
absurdity, which is why Coleridge referred to him as "anima Rabelaisii in
sicco, - the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place."64 But his narratives,
just like Rabelais', conspire to combine the intellectual and the bodily, the
elevated and the ignominious, the spirit and the bowels. In this way too
they are unlike Defoe's narratives, or indeed later novels, which purchase
the right to tell us of sexual passion by keeping clear, as the Preface to
Roxana has it, of all "Indecencies, and immodest Expressions."65
Yet, while Swift's satires and Defoe's novels may seem opposites, they are
as intimately related as all antagonists. The narrative forms that they
develop are, we might say, alternative responses to the same challenges. So
Gulliver's Travels mocks the trust in fact that makes the world credible in
Robinson Crusoe. A Tale of A Tub and The Mechanical Operation of the
Spirit hold up to (perhaps horrified) ridicule that confidence in an indivi-
dual's immediate commerce with God that is learned by all Defoe's
protagonists and that was essential to their inventor's dissenting Protes-
tantism. Most fundamentally, Swift turns an enthusiasm for progress,
improvement, and innovation that seems characteristic of the period, and
that we find expressed in many of Defoe's writings, into dark comedy. In
one of Swift's earliest satires, The Battle of the Books, he brings to life in
ludicrous miniature a war between Ancients and Moderns - books-as-
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JOHN MULLAN
warriors, fighting for precedence in the library - whose echoes rumble on

through his later works. Swift is with the Ancients (all too clearly, in The
Battle of the Books, many "modern" readers might feel). The Moderns are
the writers of the post-classical world; those "of the Modern party" are
those who are ready to believe that the achievements of Modern learning
outdo those of the Ancients. Such enthusiasts for intellectual progress
"being light-headed ... have in Speculation a wonderful Agility, and
conceive nothing too high for them to mount."66 The nameless "author" of
A Tale of A Tub is proud to be one of those "whom the World is pleased to
honor with the Title of Modern Authors."67 He belongs to an "Illustrious
Age" in which learning is not remembered and imitated, but newly coined;
in which "the Learned ... deal entirely with Invention, and strike all Things
out of themselves, or at least, by Collision, from each other."68 It is an age
of "Wit," but then even the enthusiastic "author" of the Tale ruefully
acknowledges that "nothing is so very tender as a Modern Piece of Wit":
"Some things are extreamly witty to day, or fasting, or in this place, or at
eight a clock, or over a Bottle, or spoke by Mr. What d'y'call'm, or in a
Summer's Morning: Any of which, by the smallest Transposal or Misappli-
cation, is utterly annihilate."69 A Tale of A Tub, with its layers of preface
and apology, its mock-footnotes and inventively substanceless digressions,
is not just a description of this modern world but a product of it. It is the
most extreme of the mock-books composed by Swift and his fellow
"Scriblerians," Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot.70
The modernity to which Swift was an enemy included, of course,
"natural philosophy" - what we would call "science." In Part in of
Gulliver's Travels, the narrator tells us how, on the island of Glubbdubdrib,
the ghost of Aristotle talked of the various scientific theories that have been
"exploded" over the centuries, and "predicted the same fate to attraction,
whereof the present learned are such zealous asserters."71 "Attraction" was
the name given, in Newtonian mechanics, to what we now call "gravity."
Gulliver reports, from Aristotle's own mouth, the attitude of an advocate of
the Ancients to new theories of the workings of nature. "He said, that new
systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age;
and even those who pretend to demonstrate them from mathematical
principles, would flourish but a short period of time, and be out of vogue
when that was determined."72 Newtonian theory is still in mind, for
Aristotle's ghost, referring to "mathematical principles," reminds the eight-
eenth-century reader of the title of Newton's greatest work: Philosophiae
naturalis principia mathematica. A Tale of A Tub mockingly declares itself,
on its title page, to be "Written for the Universal Improvement of
Mankind," for it is the fantasy of "improvement" that characterizes
264

modernity. Those who believed in "improvement," whether it be intellec-

tual or economic, were called "projectors," and Swift's preoccupation with
the energies of projectors gave shape to several of his satires.
Swift mocked projectors, most famously in his account of the experimen-
ters in the Academy of Lagado. Defoe, on the other hand, wrote a hopeful
Essay upon Projects, first published in 1697. "Necessity," he says in the
Introduction to this book, "has so violently agitated the Wits of men at this
time, that it seems not at all improper, by way of distinction, to call it, The
Projecting Age."73 He calls "Projecting and Inventing" a "Modern Art,"
and while happy to pay his respects to the wisdom of "our Forefathers," is
even happier to declare that "some parts of Knowledge in Science as well as
Art, has [sic] received Improvements in this Age, altogether conceaPd from
the former."74 Appropriately given the acquisitive ingenuity of the protago-
nists of his fiction, Defoe sees the age's, and the nation's, inventive energies
largely in economic terms. Several of the projects that he outlines in the
Essay - state pensions, Friendly Societies, provincial banks - are designed
to improve the country's economy. The best kind of projector is, indeed, a
merchant, whose business ensures that he "converses with all Parts of the
known World." "This, and Travel, makes a True-bred Merchant the most
Intelligent Man in the World, and consequently the most capable, when
urg'd by Necessity, to Contrive New Ways to live."75
Projectors can be dangerous, especially those who excite other men's
hopes with impossible schemes. A new invention is proposed; the projector
"gets a Patent for it, divides it into Shares, and they must be Sold; ways and
means are not wanting to Swell the new Whim to a vast Magnitude;
Thousands, and Hundreds of thousands are the least of his discourse, and
sometimes Millions; till the Ambition of some honest Coxcomb is wheedl'd
to part with his Money for it."76 The "Honest Projector," however, is
someone like Defoe, who proceeds to fill his book with honest projects: a
state commission for bankruptcies, a lunatic asylum funded by a tax on
books, schemes for the education of women, an academy "to polish and
refine the English Tongue."77 A few years later, Swift was to echo the last of
these with a project of his own. In 1712 he published A proposal for
correcting, improving and ascertaining the English tongue, in which he too
proposed a national academy, empowered to pronounce on the use and
misuse of the English language. "I see no absolute Necessity why any
Language should be perpetually changing," writes Swift.78 Even here,
where his imagined academy is a new scheme, it is designed to stand
against innovation.
Swift's project is framed as a letter to the Earl of Oxford, who was the
leading minister in the government and a personal friend. (He was also
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JOHN MULLAN
intimate with Defoe, whom he employed at various times as a propagandist

and secret agent.) 79 Swift has to trust to this friendship to distinguish his
scheme from all the other projects of the age, and ends his text, therefore,
as "Humble Servant" to a legislator wiser than himself: "But I forget my
Province; and find my self turning Projector before I am aware; although it
be one of the last Characters under which I should desire to appear before
your Lordship." 80 For all his conservative purposes, his academy is
designed, as he says, for "the improvement of Knowledge and Politeness." 81
Swift uneasily recognizes that he lives in an age of "improvement." Three
years earlier, he had anonymously published A project for the advancement
of religion, and the reformation of manners which is full of this uneasiness.
Among all the Schemes offered to the Publick in this projecting Age, I have
observed with some Displeasure, that there have never been any for the
Improvement of Religion and Morals: Which beside the Piety of the Design
from the Consequences of such a Reformation in a future Life, would be the
best natural Means for advancing the Publick Felicity of the State, as well as
the present Happyness of every Individual.82
The idealist proposals that make up this "project" would more probably
belong in Brobdingnag than Britain: commissioners should inquire into the
"Morals and Religion" of all office-holders; only persons of "distinguisht
Piety" should be allowed to become ministers; all plays should be subject to
the harshest censorship.
It is strange to find Swift writing with a projector's hopeful enthusiasm,
even if it has a characteristic edge of desperation. His sense of the dangers
of that enthusiasm forms his satirical personae; they are invented to
demonstrate the deadly vanity of those who would improve the world and
all our knowledge - those who would, in Defoe's optimistic words,
"contrive New Ways to live." It is not just that projectors are often Swift's
targets, though indeed they are. It is also that several of his most brilliant
satires are, in effect, mock projects. The best known is A Modest Proposal,
an argument for feeding their own babies to the starving Irish, written by
one who has "turned my thoughts for many years upon this important
subject and maturely weighed the several schemes of other projectors."83
This projector, with his proud show of modesty ("I shall now therefore
humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the
least objection") 84 is buoyed up by his sense of his own ingenuity. As often
in Swift's satires, an argument, once set loose, begins to discover justifica-
tions. This projector is supported in his "computation" by his professions
of humanity - anything "bordering upon cruelty" would be, he says, "the
strongest objection against any project, however so well intended." 85 He is
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also carried along simply by the projector's occupational zeal,findingmore

reasons to support his proposal the more he thinks about it.
Similarly, when Swift attacks the religious skeptic William Collins it is by
writing a mock-proposal for spreading his ideas more widely, Mr. C ns's
discourse of free-thinking put into plain English, by way of abstract for use
of the poor (1713). "I have another Project in my Head which ought to be
put in execution, in order to make us Free-thinkers" announces Swift's
invented author, as he mulls over schemes to persuade the clergy out of any
old-fashioned belief in the divinity of Christ.86 When he turns to the
debasement of the language that once spurred him to his scheme of a
national academy, he produces a mock-instruction book: A complete
collection of genteel and ingenious conversation, according to the most
polite mode and method now used at court, and in the best companies of
England (1738). The work's introduction offers this collection of jargon,
neologism, cliche, pretended wit, and linguistic affectation as a "standard
Grammar in the publick Schools" that it proposes for the nation's benefit.
The author ("Simon Wagstaff, Esq.") adds that he has a living to earn and
therefore claims for his scheme "a Patent, granted of Course to all useful
Projectors."87 More dizzyingly, his Argument against abolishing Chris-
tianity (1708) is a mock-reply to an imagined "project," in which the
proposer recruits a series of merely pragmatic or fatalistic reasons for
sustaining, nominally at least, Christian religion. "I hope no Reader
imagines me so weak to stand up in the Defence of real Christianity, such as
used in primitive Times (if we may believe the Authors of those Ages) to
have an influence upon men's beliefs and actions. To offer at the restoring
of that would indeed be a wild Project."88
The imaginative achievement of the Argument against abolishing Chris-
tianity, as of many of Swift's satires, is the scandal of its very existence.
Things must be bad indeed if such an argument is even possible. It is as if
modernity (rather than Swift) makes these texts. The very title of The
Mechanical Operation of the Spirit tells us that it should be an offense to
our religious sensibilities - and yet, like the Argument against abolishing
Christianity or the Modest Proposal, the speculation ("narrative" seems
hardly the right word), once set going, has a momentum all its own. A Tale
of A Tub, declaring itself one of the "Productions of the Grub-street
Brotherhood,"89 is composed of such a variety of origin-less writings as to
seem a bewildering, inadvertently inventive testimony to a debased culture.
All Swift's satires were at first anonymous, and, thanks to the "modern"
world of pseudo-learning that it mocks, A Tale of A Tub seems the most
anonymous of all - a truly authorless work of the imagination. (Arguments
about its authorship indeed continued long after Swift's death.)90 It takes to
267

JOHN MULLAN
an extreme what was always Swift's method: to let loose his satirical
inventions, severed from authorial responsibility.
Swift and Defoe both used anonymity (or pseudonymity) creatively. By
absenting themselves from their narratives they both brought to life the
failings and limitations of their narrators. In Swift's satire, the effect is what
is usually called "irony" (Gulliver's failures to recognize his own world in
what he encounters - and then his overpowering readiness to recognize the
Yahoos as his own species in his last voyage). In Defoe's novels, the
narrators' limitations testify to the authenticity of their experiences. H.F.,
in A Journal of the Plague Year, tells of the day when "my Curiosity led, or
rather drove me" to see one of the huge burial pits into which victims of the
plague were tipped. He attempts a description "tho' it is impossible to say
any Thing that is able to give a true Idea of it to those who did not see it,
other than this; that it was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such as no
Tongue can express."91 Defoe's narrators grapple with their recollections of
their experiences, and often the drama of their engagement with their own
histories is in their not being able to describe things. Defoe was a
resourceful writer, and has managed to create a narrator who can only say
"very, very, very dreadful."
Defoe's narrators look back in amazement at their lives, struggling to
explain themselves and their destinies. Though protagonist and narrator
are one and the same person, there is a gap between them. Invariably, the
protagonist is a sinner, the narrator a penitent. To some, Defoe has seemed
to be turning into fiction a genre of "spiritual autobiography": an account
of the self in which the devout Protestant, like Bunyan in Grace Abounding,
religiously examines his or her past life.92 Perhaps even closer to works like
Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana were the tales of criminals
popular in the early eighteenth century, and in particular the supposed
confessions of condemned criminals published by the Ordinary (i.e. chap-
lain) of Newgate (in Moll Flanders he is depicted as a drunk who keeps
telling Moll to confess). These criminal biographies were distinguished by
what John Richetti has called "religious sensationalism."93 Their point was
to register the horror with which the malefactor now recognized how he
had ignored Providence. In his fiction, Defoe went beyond criminal
biography of the period, with its "lack of fusion between the two narrative
purposes of realistic depiction and moral generalization."94 Defoe's peni-
tent narrators condemn themselves, but also explain themselves. They
sinned, but they had reasons. Moll sums up the complexity of this in her
dry reference to "the wise Man's Prayer, Give me not Poverty least I
Steal"95 Realism and moralism fuse in her story because, though she has
repented, no reader could be more suspicious than her of the opportunism
268

of conscience. As she says when she recalls being sent to Newgate, "I
repented heartily of all my Life past," but "it was repenting after the Power
of farther Sinning was taken away." 96
Penitent narration also means detecting Providence in the small accidents
of one's life. The sense that the will of God was at work is what makes
incident into narrative. "How strange a Chequer Work of Providence is the
Life of Man!" exclaims Crusoe as he recalls his adventures. 97 "Strange"
and "surprizing" are the words he uses to recognize the "secret Intimations
of Providence." 98 When Moll receives the "strange News" that her mother
has left her a valuable plantation in Virginia, she recognizes "the Hand of
Providence." 99 Narration often means finding "Providences" amongst
remembered particulars. Crusoe even manages this when he records the key
dates in his life: "I remember that there was a strange Concurrence of Days,
in the various Providences which befel me." 100 Memoirs of a Cavalier ends
with a list of such "Providences," in which the "just Judgment of God" is
visible. 101 A Journal of the Plague Year, describing a city in which plague-
inspired terror of divine retribution is everywhere, is largely given over to
the narrator's attempts to recognize "Intimation from Heaven," whilst not
succumbing to superstition and credulity.102 Defoe's protagonists cannot
make either their destinies as individuals or their stories without "Provi-
dence." Truly to rely on yourself is to rely on God. Here we can return to
that initial contrast between Crusoe and Gulliver. For Swift's most famous
book is a satirical, pessimistic enactment of self-reliance. With only his own
resources, Gulliver knows only pride (Parts i—in) or the misanthropy that is
one step away from pride (Part iv). Gulliver's Travels is an experiment in
godlessness that leaves its narrator without humility or hope. It is a
mockery of individualism. In this respect, as in so many others, Swift seems
to ridicule the modern world, the world to which Defoe's narratives look
forward - the world of novels.
NOTES
1 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. J. Donald Crowley (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, World's Classics,
1990), p. 46.
2 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, ed. Paul Turner (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1971; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1991), p. 5.
3 Robinson Crusoe, p. 46.
4 Gulliver's Travels, pp. 5-6.
5 Ibid., p. xl.
6 In the absence of actual sales figures, and with a relatively tiny book-buying
public, it is customary to measure the success of works in this period by
numbers of editions. A typical work of fiction might be printed in an edition of
269

JOHN MULLAN
1,000 copies; one that was expected to sell particularly well in an edition of
2,000 copies. The figure for Robinson Crusoe is for editions recorded in James
Raven, British Fiction 1750-1J70, A Chronological Check-List of Prose Fiction
Printed in Britain and Ireland (London &c Toronto: Associated University
Presses, 1987). Raven indicates that there are certainly editions that he has not
traced. The figure for Gulliver's Travels is based on editions recorded in H.
Teerink, A Bibliography of the Writings of Jonathan Swift (Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1937); second edn., revised by A. H. Scouten (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1963) and includes versions published in editions of
Swift's Works.
7 See, for instance, Pat Rogers, "Moll in the Chapbooks," in Literature and
Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (Brighton: Harvester Press,
1985). It is notable that the only now-canonical works of the period that made
their way into these "penny histories" were Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe,
Gulliver's Travels, and Pilgrim's Progress. I am grateful to David Goldthorpe
for this observation.
8 See also Robert W. Lovett (ed.), A Bibliographical Checklist of English
Language Editions of Robinson Crusoe (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991).
9 For discussion of illustrations of Robinson Crusoe, see David Blewett, "The
Illustration of Robinson Crusoe," in Joachim Moller (ed.), Imagination on a
Long Rein: English Literature Illustrated (Marburg: Jonas, 1988). For Gulli-
ver's Travels, see Jeanne K. Welcher, "Eighteenth-Century Views of Gulliver:
Some Contrasts between Illustrations and Prints," also in Moller (ed.), Imagina-
tion on a Long Rein.
10 Gulliver's Travels, "Retold for little folk by Agnes P. Herberton" (London:
Blackie and Son, 1908).
11 The first is an illustrated abridgment of Gulliver's Travels, ed. James Lupton,
published in 1867. The second is an abridgment published in 1873. From the
late nineteenth century onwards, there are more abridged versions of Swift's
book than "full" ones.
12 Gulliver's Travels, "An Illustrated Edition for the Rising Generation" (London
and New York: G. Routledge &c Sons, 1874), p. viii.
13 Two recent accounts have explored this fascination: Philip Edwards, The Story
of the Voyage. Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Neil Rennie, Far-Fetch ed Facts. The
Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995). The former is largely descriptive, and gives a good sense of the number
and variety of "voyages" published in the eighteenth century. The latter is
intellectually more ambitious and challenging, exploring the relations between
"voyages" and the works of fiction that used or imitated them.
14 Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts, p. 59.
15 See Edwards, The Story of the Voyage, p. 3.
16 Swift owned a copy of this, as well as of other "voyages." See Harold Williams,
Dean Swift's Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), p. 72.
17 Gulliver's Travels, p. xxxv.
18 William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, ed. Sir Albert Gray
(London: The Argonaut Press, 1927), p. 1.
19 Gulliver's Travels, p. 299.
270

20 Dampier, A New Voyage, 1697 edn., sig. A3V.

21 Gulliver's Travels, p. 74, and Paul Turner's note, p. 324.
22 Ibid., p. 34.
23 Dampier, A New Voyage, pp. 56-57, 77 and 258.
24 From manuscript evidence, Philip Edwards gives a convincing account of
Dampier's "manipulation of the record" to make a satisfying narrative: see
Edwards, The Story of the Voyage, pp. 20-28.
25 Daniel Defoe, "The Preface," Moll Flanders (London: Penguin, 1989).
26 [Danie Defoe,] The Storm (1704), p. 83.
27 In Pat Rogers (ed.), Defoe. The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 117-18.
28 Daniel Defoe, Memoirs of a Cavalier, ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford: Oxford
i99i),p. 4.
30 Peter Conrad, "Inventing the Novel: Defoe," in The Everyman History of
English Literature (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1985, rpt. 1987), p. 333.
31 Moll Flanders, pp. 223-24.
33 Ibid., pp. 84-85.
34 Ibid., p. 301.
35 Dampier, A New Voyage, pp. 65-67.
36 Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1967, rpt. 1975), P- 2 55-
37 For sources of Memoirs of a Cavalier, see Arthur W. Secord, "The Origins of
Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier," in Robert Drury's Journal and Other Studies
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961). For Moll Flanders and the life of
Moll King, see Gerald Howson, Thief-Taker General: The Rise and Fall of
Jonathan Wild (London: Hutchinson, 1970), chapter 16. For A Journal of the
Plague Year, see Watson Nicholson, The Historical Sources of Defoe's Journal
of the Plague Year (Boston: Stratford Company, 1919).
3 8 This idea is imaginatively pursued in Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: Origins
of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
39 See my introduction to Memoirs of a Cavalier, ed. Boulton.
40 [Daniel Defoe,] Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures
of Robinson Crusoe (1720), Preface and pp. 115-16.
41 Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. John Bender and Simon Stern (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, World's Classics, 1996), iv, i, p. 131.
42 The persisting power of "romance" in eighteenth-century fiction is argued in
Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987). See especially chapter 1, "The Destabilization of
Generic Categories," pp. 25-64.
43 [Daniel Defoe,] The consolidator: or, memoirs of sundry transactions from the
world in the moon (1705), pp. 170 and 208.
44 For renewed interest in the seventeenth century, see Howard Erskine-Hill,
Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993 )5PP- 12-20.
45 See Williams, Dean Swift's Library, p. 46.
271

JOHN MULLAN
46 Selected Satires of Lucian, ed. and trans. Lionel Casson (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1962; rpt. New York: Norton, 1968), p. 24.
47 See D. W. Jefferson, "Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit,"
Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951), pp. 225-48.
48 Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 3.
49 Gulliver's Travels, p. xl.
50 Utopia, p. 52.
51 Ibid., p. 55.
53 Utopia, p. n o .
54 Ibid., p. 60.
5 5 "They... are delighted with the witty persiflage of Lucian," ibid., p. 78.
56 Gulliver's Travels, pp. 14-15.
57 Both the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit and The Battle of the Books were
published in a volume also containing A Tale of A Tub in 1704. The standard
modern edition also contains all three: A Tale of A Tub, to which is added, the
Battle of the Books, and, The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed. David
Nichol Smith and A. C. Guthkelch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950). This
passage is on p. 279.
58 Ibid., p. 157.
59 Ibid., p. 153.
60 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad. In Four Books (1743) Book 1, line 22, and
Williams, Dean Swift's Library, p. 64. Pope's address to Swift is also to be
found in the three-book Dunciad of 1727.
61 Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1955), p. 475.
62 Ibid., p. 551.
63 Ibid., p. 574.
64 Cited in Denis Donoghue, Jonathan Swift. A Critical Introduction (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 24. Rabelais' influence on Swift has not
been adequately described, perhaps because of what the modern Anglophone
reader finds Rabelais' intellectual and linguistic obscurity. For such a reader, a
useful introduction is M. A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979).
65 Daniel Defoe, Roxana, ed. John Mullan (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
World's Classics, 1996), p. 2.
66 A Tale of A Tub, ed. Nichol Smith and Guthkelch, p. 225.
67 Ibid., p. 123.
68 Ibid., pp. 134-35.
69 Ibid., p. 43.
70 Their most notable collective work was The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, a
parody of stupid learnedness published in 1741, though mostly written a good
deal earlier. A modern edition is edited by Charles Kerby-Miller (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1950; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
73 Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects i6^y, Scolar Press Facsimile (Menston:
The Scolar Press, 1969), p. 1.
272

74 Ibid., p. 2.
75 Ibid., p. 8.
76 I W i , p. 34.
77 IWd., p. 233. Near the end of his career, Defoe was still fancying himself such a
useful innovator, publishing a collection of projects under the title Augusta
Triumphans: or, the Way to Make London the Most Flourishing City in the
Universe (1728). This included projects for a university in the capital, a hospital
for foundlings, a national academy of music, the suppression of prostitution and
gambling, and the provision of adequate street lighting. In its second edition it
was retitled The Generous Projector.
78 Jonathan Swift, The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis et al., 14
vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939-68), vol. iv, p. 9.
J9 See J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press. Propaganda and Public Opinion
in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
80 Swift, Prose Works, ed. Davis, vol. iv, pp. 20-21.
81 Ibid., p. 5.
82 [Jonathan Swift,] A project for the advancement of religion, and the reforma-
tion of manners. By a person of quality (London, 1709), p. 7.
83 [Jonathan Swift,] A modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people
from being a burden to their parents or the country, and for making them
beneficial to the public (1729), in Swift, Prose Works, ed. Davis, vol. xn, p.
no.
84 Ibid., p. i n .
85 Ibid.
86 Mr. C ns's discourse of free-thinking put into plain English, by way of
abstract for use of the poor (1713), in Swift, Prose Works, ed. Davis, vol. iv, p.
31-
87 Swift, Prose Works, ed. Davis, vol. iv, pp. 112-22.
88 Swift, Prose Works, ed. Davis, vol. 11, p. 27.
89 A Tale of A Tub, ed. Nichol Smith and Guthkelch, p. 66.
90 In his "Life of Swift," first published in 1781, Samuel Johnson can still write of
the authorship of A Tale of a Tub being open to doubt. See Lives of the English
Poets, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), vol. 111, p.
10.
91 Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa (Oxford: Oxford
1990), p. 60.
92 See G. A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
93 John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson. Narrative Patterns: iyoo-
I
739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, rpt. 1992), p. 30. His chapter in this
book, "Rogues and Whores: Heroes and Anti-Heroes," is an excellent introduc-
tion to the topic.
94 Ibid., p. 32.
95 Moll Flanders, p. 191.
^6 Ibid., p. 274.
98 Ibid., p. 176.
273

JOHN MULLAN
99 Moll Flanders, p. 336.

101 Memoirs of a Cavalier, p. 272.
102 Journal, p. 11.
FURTHER READING
Primary texts
Defoe's novels have been published individually by Oxford University Press in the
World's Classics series, and these are the editions to which reference is made in this
essay. In the same series is Swift's Gulliver's Travels, ed. Paul Turner (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1971; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, World's
Classics, 1991). The standard edition of Swift's prose is The Prose Works of
Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis et al., 14 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939-68),
and reference has been made to individual volumes of this edition. Individual
satirical essays can found in many anthologies; particularly useful is the volume in
The Oxford Authors series: Jonathan Swift, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). A Discourse upon the Mechanical
Operation of the Spirit and The Battle of the Books can be found together with A
Tale of a Tub in the standard edition of all three works: A Tale of a Tub, to which is
added, the Battle of the Books, and, The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed.
David Nichol Smith and A. C. Guthkelch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950).
Secondary texts
For Swift, two biographies are invaluable: I. Ehrenpreis, Swift: the Man, his Works
and the Age, 3 vols. (London: Methuen, 1962-83) is authoritative; David Nokes,
Jonathan Swift. A Hypocrite Reversed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) is
briefer but more accessible. An introduction to the history of the reception of Swift's
satire is Kathleen Williams, Swift. The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1970). General treatments of Swift's narrative devices are Denis
Donoghue, Jonathan Swift. A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1969); R. Quintana, The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift (London
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1936; rpt. London: Methuen, 1953); E.
Zimmerman, Swiffs Narrative Strategies: Author and Authority (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1983). Amongst many books and essays on Gulliver's
Travels, Angus Ross, Gulliver's Travels (London: Edward Arnold, 1968); Howard
Erskine-Hill, Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993); and Richard Gravil (ed.), Swift: Gulliver's Travels, Casebook Series
(London: Macmillan, 1974) are all good introductions. For discussions that relate
Gulliver's Travels to the development of the eighteenth-century novel, see Ronald
Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1967) and J. Paul Hunter, "Gulliver's Travels and the Novel," in
Frederick N. Smith (ed.), The Genres of Gulliver's Travels (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 1990).
For Defoe, Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe. A Life (Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) is now standard, though James Sutherland,
Daniel Defoe (London: Methuen, 1937) is readable and good. Maximillian E.
Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963)

treats Defoe's fiction in relation to other genres in which he wrote. The structure
and artfulness of his narratives began to be treated with a new respect in the 1970s.
Stimulating studies are John J. Richetti, Defoe's Narratives: Situations and Struc-
tures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Everett Zimmerman, Defoe and the
Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975); Paul Alkon,
Defoe and Fictional Time (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979); and David
Blewett, Defoe's Art of Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). Highly
influential are two books by G. A. Starr on the religious patterning of Defoe's
novels: Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1965) and Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1971). Lincoln B. Faller, Crime and Defoe. A New Kind of Writing (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993) compares Defoe's novels with criminal biogra-
phies of the time.
Defoe plays a pioneering role in Ian Watt's hugely influential, much challenged,
still impressive The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1957). Good alternative accounts, in which Defoe has an impor-
tant part, are Lennard J. Davis's idiosyncratic Factual Fictions: Origins of the
English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) and Michael
McKeon's challenging, sometimes dense, The Origins of the English Novel (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). John Richetti's Popular Fiction before
Richardson. Narrative Patterns: iyoo-iy^^ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, rpt.
1992) is the best account of the nature and range of English prosefictionin the early
decades of the eighteenth century.
Interesting discussion of the importance and popularity of travel narratives in the
period is to be found in Philip Edwards, The Story of the Voyage. Sea-narratives in
Eighteenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and
Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts. The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South
Seas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
2-75

13
PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
Mary Astell and John Locke
A poor Northern English gentlewoman, Mary Astell was born in 1666 of a

mother from an old Newcastle Catholic gentry family, and of a father who
had barely completed his apprenticeship with the company of Hostman of
Newcastle upon Tyne, before he died leaving the family debt-ridden when
Mary was twelve. With customary spiritedness Mary Astell moved to
London when she was twenty, making her literary debut by presenting to
the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, a collection of her
girlhood poems, dedicated to him, accompanied by a request for financial
assistance.1 Whether or not the Archbishop, who numbered among the
prominent members of the clergy who had refused to swear allegiance to
William and Mary, became Astell's patron in fact, we do not know. But
Astell entered a circle of High Church prelates and intellectual and
aristocratic women, including Lady Anne Coventry, Lady Elizabeth Hast-
ings, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Lady Catherine Jones. To Lady
Catherine Jones Astell dedicated the Letters Concerning the Love of God
(1695) a n d n e r magnum opus, The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a
Daughter of the Church (1705). Later, as a known literary figure, Astell
was to contribute a preface to Mary Wortley Montagu's Embassy Letters:
The Travels of an English Lady in Europe, Asia and Africa (1724, 1725), a
work now famous in the literature surrounding the "invention" of Eastern
Europe.
Astell established herself with an impressively diverse array of canonical
works, beginning with a tract on women's education, A Serious Proposal to
the Ladies (1694, 1697),2 which very nearly won funding support for an
exclusively female academy from Queen Anne. In Reflections upon Mar-
riage (1700), written in response to the scandalous divorce of Hortense
Mazarin, Astell displayed her powers as a social critic, for which she was
emulated and imitated. Meanwhile the philosophical and theological
seriousness of a carefully focused and strongly centered writer was mani-
fested in correspondence with the Cambridge Platonist, John Norris,
276

Rector of Bemerton, begun in 1693, and published at his instigation in

1695 as Letters Concerning the Love of God.3
On the strength of these credentials Astell entered the political and
constitutional controversy over Occasional Conformity. Her three pamph-
lets of 1704, published, and probably commissioned by, the High Church
printer Richard Wilkin, Moderation truly Stated, A Fair Way with the
Dissenters and their Patrons, and An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of
Rebellion and Civil War,4 entered the Tory canon as specific responses to
Whiggish works by James Owen, Daniel Defoe, and Bishop White Kennett,
respectively.5 And in 1705 Astell published what she herself regarded as her
magnum opus, her long and systematic philosophical and theological
critique of Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity, entitled The Christian
Religion as Profess3d by a Daughter of the Church.6
Astell's last major published work, Barflemy Fair of 1709, is in a
different genre altogether, an essay in Augustan belles lettres. Subtitled An
Enquiry after Wit in which due Respect is had to a Letter Concerning
Enthusiasm, Barflemy Fair directly addressed the Letter, a work by the
third Earl of Shaftesbury, Locke's pupil. But Astell took it in fact to be the
work of Jonathan Swift and so wrote under the name of William Wotton,
the author parodied by Swift in A Tale of A Tub. She thus entered the
Battle of the Books, that literary controversy, begun in France and then
transported to England, which marked the watershed between modernity
and pre-modernity, as a self-conscious contender on the side of the
moderns.7 Astell lived on until 1731, seeing her works reissued and
debated. We have evidence that she continued to pursue Tory causes,
although not in published works of her own, but in the research (for which
she is acknowledged) for John Walker's massive study, The Sufferings of the
Clergy (1-714).s
Commentators have noted the capacity of Restoration women to live in
the interstices of social institutions, in new literary and critical spaces
created out of the great upheaval of the Civil War, as novelists, dramatists,
and political pamphleteers. Astell's is a curious case. On the one hand she
undertook a self-conscious critique of the very institutions at the root of
female oppression: contemporary education and marriage practices. On the
other she was a commissioned Tory pamphleteer. How do we explain this?
It does little justice to the capacity of women to fabricate an existence amid
the legal and structural constraints within which they found themselves to
harp too much on their absence from the official record, if this were even
true. To some extent the problem is definitional. But that we so readily
acquiesce to a definition of the public realm that restricts it to the polis and
its forms, is a story in itself. For this narrowness in the definition of public
2-77

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
life excludes not only women. The Elizabethan period, one of the richest
flowerings of commentary on the changing forms of public life in all their
social and political dimensions, has been virtually expunged from the
history of political thought. This is due to exclusions on the basis of genre,
rather than gender. The works of Marlowe, Kyd, Spenser, and Shakespeare,
intensely "political" in the broad sense, were cast for the stage or in verse,
for a complex of reasons which included forms of lyric expression favored
by Renaissance writers, a preference for "veiled allegory" due to religious
and magical beliefs, involvement in foreign and sometimes treasonable
causes and, not least, the activities of Elizabethan secret police under
Secretary of State Walsingham. The New Historicists9 have sought to
rectify the loss for which the Old Historians are guilty. But political
theorists have yet to leap into the fray.
As further testimony to the power of our categories to frame history,
early modern liberal theory set out to entrench the public/private split
which had the consequence of expunging women from the public record.
Mary Astell stands as a living witness to the artificiality of this distinction
and the untruthfulness of its ramifications. For in Astell we have the
curious case of a mainstream religious thinker and political pamphleteer,
celebrated in her day, whose works in some cases ran through four editions
and only gradually lost currency. Her most celebrated persona was as
"Madonella," the founder of an academy for "superannuated virgins" in
Steele's satire of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies in Tatler, nos. 32 and
63. 10 As author of a project to "erect a monastery or religious retirement"
for women, Astell was lampooned on the stage by Mrs. Centlivre in Basset
Table,11 although lionized by Samuel Richardson in Sir Charles Grand-
ison11 and as the model for Clarissa.13 It was this persona to which Alfred,
Lord Tennyson's Lilia of The Princess (1847) refers, imitated in turn by
Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida, their lampoon of a female academy
over whose doors was emblazoned the motto "Let no man enter on pain of
death."14
To give some indication of the reception and circulation of Astell's
works, Part 1 of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, of 1694, was reprinted
four times and plagiarized at least as many. A Serious Proposal to the
Ladies, Part 11, which followed in 1697, was even more notoriously
pirated. Some 147 pages of chapter three, sections 1-5 of the 1697 edition
of A Serious Proposal, Part 11, were excerpted without acknowledgment in
The Ladies' Library of 1714, a work widely circulated, which went
through eight impressions up to 1772 and was translated into French and
Dutch. Steele was until recently believed to be the compiler of The Ladies3
Library, and the man to whom Astell herself, in the 1722 Preface to
278

Barflemy Fair, attributed the plagiarism. But The Ladies3 Library, ac-
cording to the title page, "published by Mr. R[ichard] Steele," who supplied
a preface, and "written by a Lady," was in fact compiled by George
Berkeley (1685-1753), Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, philosopher, and
polymath, as recent scholarship establishes.15 Meanwhile, AstelPs Reflec-
tions upon Marriage16 was to run to four editions, to the third of which
(1706) she added a controversial preface, expanding her arguments of 1697
and 1700 to furnish one of the earliest and most percipient critiques of
John Locke's political arguments.
Astell's revival as a positive model has largely been the work of feminists;
Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, and their associates, in the first
instance; and the great wave of late twentieth-century feminists, in the
second. Here we will briefly review the contexts for Mary Astell's feminism,
her contribution to political debates in the Augustan age, her religiosity,
and her enduring contribution to Augustan letters.
Mary Astell had an overwhelming concern to persuade general citizens
of the sanity of Tory arguments and the dangers to the public interest of
theories of social contract and resistance; theories that had ever gained but
a little advocacy. New ideas were abroad, unsettling to old Tory views, and
it is a mark of the complexity of Astell's thought that she reflects these
tendencies also. John Pocock17 and Mark Goldie18 both remark on the
inroads made in the second half of the seventeenth century by doctrines of
natural right. They intruded into an environment of fairly parochial
argument about the legitimacy of monarchy, where case and counter-case
were argued in terms of English history: the ancient constitution, whether
king or parliament were the true repository of immemorial custom, and
claims made for the English common law as a fund of equity and justice
and on behalf of the lawyer practitioners who articulated it. To the
Continental legal tradition belonged the great European natural rights
theorists, Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and Samuel Pufendorf (1632-94), the
former of whom Astell cites,19 along with their English counterparts,
Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, whose sojourns on the Continent had
acquainted them with their European contemporaries.
It would oversimplify the position to argue that the English legal
tradition had been parochial for long. As Pocock in his Ancient Constitu-
tion and the Feudal Law well shows, the Continental feudal law tradition
had early been inserted into the debate against the common law parliamen-
tarians. The "ancient constitution" lived on as a conceit, which it may
always have been, against the onslaught of the rationalists, whether they be
canon law proponents of popular sovereignty, earlier, or Whiggish adher-
ents of natural rights, latterly, whom Astell wisely lumps together. And
2-79

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
many conservative arguments, including those of Astell, were philoso-

phical, not historical, and grounded in an appeal to reason.20
Natural rights doctrines, although less immediately recognized, and
more narrowly subscribed to, were to prove more devastating. Drawn in
initially as resources in the constitutional crisis of 1688 and developed in
the refinement of the Whig position, they were to open a new chapter in
political debate. Notwithstanding the fact that she uses it to entrench
traditional positions, Astell participates in a rationalism that is ultimately
corrosive of Tory causes, to the extent - which is not as great as sometimes
claimed - that they depended on historicist arguments. Here we have the
anomaly of a theorist contributing to the very movement that was to render
her political philosophy obsolete - supplying perhaps an explanation for
the removal from the political theory canon of a woman whose works in
her day regularly ran tofiveeditions.
Astell is among the most trenchant critics of Locke and Hobbes. Yet she
participated in the Continental philosophical tradition out of which
Hobbism and Lockeanism grew. Under the tutelage of John Norris, and
through the medium of such contemporary popularizers as Richard Alles-
tree (1619-81), Astell was an early convert to the view of Descartes that
introspection, complemented by faith, provided the fundamental truths of
philosophy.21 English philosophy of her day represented commentary on
Descartes. Hobbes, most famous of the early modern atomists and materi-
alists, had supplied Objections to Descartes's Discourse on Method (1637),
later published with the French philosopher's Meditations on First Philo-
sophy (1641). It was in exile in France, as a member of the circle gathered
around Marin Mersenne, that Hobbes had first sought to establish his
credentials as a philosopher, in the company of the like-minded Epicurean
and sceptic, Pierre Gassendi and others. To a greater extent than is usually
acknowledged Hobbes's metaphysics belong to the history of the reception
of Descartes, so many of whose ideas he absorbed. It was this tradition of
epistemology to which Locke contributed so greatly with his Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690): an epistemology, like that of
Hobbes, which laid the foundations of modern behaviorism, pioneering the
notion of the mind as a black box, which processed sensations as inputs
and produced ideas, simple and complex, as outputs.
Astell satirized Locke's theory of the association of ideas, atomist,
materialist, and Gassendist, as it was.22 Too frequently modern commenta-
tors have missed this, tracing Astell's feminist reformism, like that of Mary
Wollstonecraft and Harriet Taylor, whose views are otherwise so different,
to an epistemology founded on Lockean principles. For the philosophies of
both Descartes and Locke provided the foundations for a gender-neutral
280

theory of mind. If, as Descartes maintained, the great truths of existence

were affirmed by the solitary thinking subject, and if the mental processes
of the thinking subject facilitated reason, the claims of men to rule women
were baseless. The equality of all believers, which Protestantism preached,
and to which Descartes was responding, had to include women or its very
foundations were breached. Alternatively, if as Locke maintained, Des-
cartes was wrong about ideas of existence being pre-theoretically imprinted
in the human mind; and if, as Locke asserted, the mind was a clean slate
receptive to sense impressions, gendered mind was once again an inco-
herent concept. It was Descartes, whose Platonist idealism Locke followed
Hobbes in rejecting, who so profoundly influenced Astell.23 And Astell's
critique of Locke on "thinking matter" in The Christian Religion as
Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church, lies at the heart of her refutation of
Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity in particular and his episte-
mology in general.24
In the realm of social theory, Astell made that particular politico-
juridical legacy of Hobbes and Locke, the theory of social contract, the
target of her attack. Designed to explain the relation between subjects and
rulers as the outcome of a pact by which subjects exchanged obedience
for protection, social contract relied for its force on the only form of legal
contract with which ordinary people had experience, the marriage con-
tract. In doing so, social contract theory drew an implicit parallel between
the voluntary submission of wives, who enter the marriage contract as
free and equal partners but emerge as radical unequals in the marriage
estate; and subjects, who contract as free and equal individuals, but enter
the political estate bound to an absolute sovereign. The marriage contract/
social contract homology, which Hobbes and Locke bequeathed to
liberalism as a paradigm for the future,25 was subject to Astell's assault in
Reflections Upon Marriage; a sortie as deadly as her assault on the Whig
fabrications of a Popish Plot and the French alliance in An Impartial
Enquiry.26 She thus attacked the program of Locke and the Shaftesbury
circle on all fronts.
Astell, Locke, and the problem of resistance

Astell's critique of social contract may well be one of the first published
critiques of arguments central to Locke's Two Treatises of Government.
Certain it is that Astell's Impartial Enquiry belongs to a genre that deals no
less with the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution, and the succession
crises in the reign of Anne, than it does with the Civil War of the mid-
seventeenth century. Thus Locke's and Astell's works belong to the same
281

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
political milieu, a politics which, from the Exclusion Crisis to the end of
Anne's reign is, in many respects, a seamless whole.
The greater issues on which these particular debates turned were the
following. The ultimate source of law: was it customary right enshrined in
common law, or the will of the prince? The true guardian of the law: was it
the parliament as representative of the people, or the Crown, with its duty
of protection in exchange for allegiance? The provenance of the ancient
constitution: did it lie in immemorial custom or the institutions of the
Crown? The nature of the relationship between the Crown and its subjects:
was it contractual, or was it defined by submission to providential rights or
rights of conquest? The entitlement rights of subjects in their own person
and to their property: did they exist by nature, or by contract? Another set
of questions concerned the respective antiquity of the institutions under
contest and their historical status. Were they relatively indigenous, native
to Englishmen; were they feudal, or rooted in Roman Law; or were they
ahistorical, originating in the "natural right" of individuals, belonging to
the human condition itself?
The long contest begun in the 1640s between parliament and the Crown
had seen a disaggregation of customary rights and the ancient constitu-
tion.27 The upshot of the contest was the hijacking of customary right by
the parliamentary party (later the Whigs) and of the ancient constitution by
the Royalists (later the Tories). If such a characterization seems too crude,
it is worth noting that party politics in the age of Anne, in which Astell
participated, turned on just these principles, and are barely comprehensible
without them. From Sir Edward Coke's time on, juridical thought had
conceived of the ancient constitution as comprising the Crown, its institu-
tions, and the entirety of common law, and statutory law enacted by
parliament sitting as a high court. But the heightening conflict between the
Crown and the parliament over the royal prerogative brought with it a
contest over their antiquity and, therefore, the superior claims of one
against the other.
The long process of disaggregating the ancient constitution and cus-
tomary rights, marked the juridically most sophisticated, perhaps the
politically most participatory, certainly the party-politically most polarized,
and the most vigorous pamphlet war in the history of the early modern
English state. It was ultimately won by the Whig side, with limitations on
royal prerogative put in place successively from 1649 to 1702. Goldie, in
his review of politics and the press for the period concludes, "Between
1689 and 1714, newspapers apart, the figure of five to six thousand, or on
average four per week, would not be an unrealistic guess at the total
number of polemical pieces coming off the presses."28
282

Astell was implacably opposed to the removal of James II from the

throne and hostile to William and Mary as imposters. Her allies numbered
prominent non-jurors, and her early works are replete with double entendre
aimed at William III and his apologists. Much of Astell's case against the
fickleness with which men treat their marriage vows in Reflections upon
Marriage can be read at another level as criticism of theficklenessof those
who undertook oaths of allegiance to William and Mary despite solemn
and binding oaths to James II still in force. In this way Astell character-
istically turned to her advantage the marriage contract/social contract
homology. So for instance in the famous 1706 Introduction to Reflections
upon Marriage^ Astell combines insistence on the rule of queens as affirmed
by Salic Law in general, and endorsement of the rule of Queen Anne in
particular, with jibes at Locke, Defoe, and William's propagandists who, in
forsaking James II, forsook the lineage of the great Queen Elizabeth I:
If they mean that some Men are superior to some Women this is no great
Discovery;29 had they turn'd the Tables they might have seen that some
Women are Superior to some Men. Or had they been pleased to remember
their Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, they might have known that One
Woman is superior to All the Men in these Nations, or else they have sworn
to very little purpose. And it must not be suppos'd, that their Reason and
Religion wou'd suffer them to take Oaths, contrary to the Law of Nature and
Reason of things.30
Only the radical Whigs, among whom Locke of the Two Treatises of
Government belongs, along with Tyrrell, Samuel Johnson, Atwood, Blount,
and Defoe, "used a natural law case for resistance or right of deposition" -
although a Whig middle group used contractual resistance in some form.31
Astell mounts against them a brilliant case, calling upon distinctions
between authorization and designation that are to be found in Hobbes and
Filmer, drawn ultimately from scholastic debate and now put to similar use
by thinkers otherwise very much at odds, to deny a right to dethrone kings,
even bad kings.
In this, as in other instances, Astell demonstrated her consistency and
care in argumentation preparatory to her great attack by ridicule on the
social contract/marriage contract analogue in Reflections upon Marriage
and An Impartial Enquiry. The attempt, in scholastic theory, to drive a
wedge between authorization and consent as sanctions for institutions
public and private, had its legacy in Hobbes's finely crafted theory of
simultaneous authorization and consent in the moment of social contract.
If for Hobbes popular consent was the necessary but not sufficient condi-
tion for legitimacy, the fabric of social institutions could nevertheless not be
283

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
allowed to hang by such slender threads. Mainstream scholastic theory had

sought to secure the social power of even secular institutions, the magis-
tracies of state, and semi-secular ones, notably the family, by separating out
as different acts the authorizing of an institution and the appointment of an
incumbent to it. Authorization fell to God alone, but in the act of
designation the people had their day. Where the Roman Catholics Robert
Cardinal Bellarmine and Francisco Suarez took the more radical position
that only a community could authorize the transfer of power from a
community to a ruler, Hobbes fell back on the older scholastic position that
vests power to authorize with the author (in this case God), leaving only
the designation of an incumbent to popular choice.32 Hobbes's extension of
contract theory to the recesses of household and family was not necessarily
inconsistent. Scholastic theory held, correspondingly, that entry to the
estate of marriage could only be divinely authorized, as registered in the
marriage vows, but that the choice of incumbents could be left to consent,
as recognized by the marriage contract between the parties.
Astell, who tipped her hand against the marriage contract/social contract
analogue in Reflections upon Marriage, argued her case systematically in An
Impartial Enquiry and The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of
the Church. Themes from contemporary parliamentary and pamphlet con-
troversy dominate these works. In An Impartial Enquiry, she proceeded to
invoke Paul, Romans 13, 33 although not by name, the very text canonically
recited by the rationalists and pragmatists of her day, who claimed as a
practical necessity of government that God, while ordaining good governors,
also permitted bad ones to be obeyed. It was once again an argument only
permitted on the grounds of the scholastic distinction between ordinatio
commissionis, and ordinatio permissionis34 which absolved the Deity of
whatever bad choices the people might make in choosing incumbents to
offices. Since these were offices that only God could authorize, and because
their continued stability was in his care, the consent of the people was a non-
revocable act: once made it could not be withdrawn. This was precisely the
argument made by Hobbes. It was also the basis for the Christian case
against divorce. Astell in Reflections upon Marriage, by no accident, used
the opportunity of a celebrated divorce case between the courtesan Hortense
Mazarine and her husband, a close relative of Louis XIV's famous
Cardinal, to reflect on duty and contract in the public and private spheres.
Astell and the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688

It is ironic that Locke's Two Treatises, written, it is now argued, between
1681 and 1683, constantly revised and secretly guarded until their release
284

was safe after 1689, may have been disguised as the mysterious work
Tractatus de Morbo Gallico, "Concerning the French Disease," which had
a double meaning: syphilis in one sense, despotism in another, both
considered by the English to be peculiarly French.35 But then the Whigs
trumped up threats of a French alliance, popery, and despotism, as
justifications for the deposition of James II and grounds for continuing
fears of reinstatement of the Pretender, latterly in exile in France. Mary
Astell reserved her most stinging invective for such subterfuges. Presbyters,
not Popes, were the greatest threats to the prevailing civil order, she
charged; and Presbyterians were more than popish in their tactics. Just as
Whigs charged Tories with popery and francophilia, so Tories charged
Whigs with Presbyterian-Calvinist plots against church and state.
The Act of Allegiance of 1689, in its first wording, had raised the specter
of "Jesuits and other wicked persons" advising James II "to subvert the
constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original contract between king
and people."36 It was on the basis of such calumnies, admittedly moderated
somewhat in the final form of the bill, that clerics mindful of their oaths to
the Stuarts had been deprived of their livings. Among them Mary Astell
numbered her most revered authorities, Archbishop Sancroft, her earliest
patron, Lord Clarendon, upon whose History she relied, Henry Dodwell,
and Bishop George Hickes. Astell's anti-Whig treatise, An Impartial
Enquiry, the weightiest rebuttal that White Kennett's inflammatory sermon
to commemorate the death of Charles I ever received, is firmly anchored in
the politics of the Glorious Revolution.
Political events in 1701 had conspired to give Lockean arguments a
rerun, heralded by the reissue of radical tracts from 1649 and 1689. The
Tories, enjoying the heady powers conceded to the parliament by the
Revolution of 1688 which fell to them after their electoral victory of
1701, provided the conditions. They sought to curtail William Ill's
campaign against the French by denying him funds and by seeking to
impeach the Lords Somers, Halifax, Portland, and Orford for their
Continental involvement. The Kentish Petitioners, who demanded the
Crown fund a new war with France and were jailed for their efforts, were
the catalyst.37 Somers and the indefatigable Daniel Defoe, a publicist for
Locke, leapt to the defense of the right of subjects to petition. Somers,
citing Locke's Two Treatises, argued precisely for government as a pact
between property-owners, whereby consent of the governed to govern-
ment as a species of protection agency entailed that the people might also
submit grievances where their liberties seemed to be jeopardized. Charles
Davenant, in Essays upon Peace at Home and War Abroad (1704), on
which Mary Astell comments in the long prefatory discourse to her
285

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
pamphlet Moderation Truly Stated (1704), pointed out that, in the Civil
War itself, radical proponents of consent had not more loudly proclaimed
rights of resistance and parliamentary accountability.38 Davenant, preoc-
cupied with Machiavellian theories on corruption engendered by war,
followed up with the trenchant True Picture of the Modern Whig, which
showed modern Whigs to be careerists prosecuting war with France to
gain political place and personal profit,39 just the line of argument
followed by Astell in An Impartial Enquiry. This was also the argument
made by Astell, in Moderation Truly Stated, where her target appears to
be Locke, although her tract was read by contemporaries as a refutation
of Davenant. 40
The Kentish Petitioners had raised in the minds of pamphleteers on both
sides constitutional issues which never lay far beneath the surface. But
Whig strategies to keep alive the threat of French despotism and the
Pretender as a pretext for war, cast serious doubt on their credentials as
defenders of immemorial rights, while "Tory writers manipulated the
ancient constitution myth by levelling it at its perpetrators." 41 Hence we
have Charles Davenant, and even Mary Astell, declaring the English
constitution to be a mixed constitution consisting of "the harmony of a
prince 'who is Head of the Republick', the lords and the commons." 42
Davenant, using Machiavellian language, speaks of a constitution balanced
between arbitrary government and democracy (Crown and Commons),
arguing that a fourth estate for the common people with separate rights,
such as the Kentish Petitioners had pressed for, would be destabilizing.
Mary Astell, in An Impartial Enquiry, argues similarly against "the People's
Supremacy":
And since our Constitution lodges the Legislative Power in the Prince and the
Three Estates assembled in Parliament; as it is not in the Power of the Prince
and one of the Houses, to Make or Abrogate any Law, without the
Concurrence of the other House, so neither can it be Lawfully done by the
Prince alone, or by the two Houses without the Prince.43
Whatever Locke's position on the ancient constitution may have been -

and his official position is, as usual, silence, despite the role he played in
drafting a constitution for the American Carolinas - Mary Astell was quick
to convict him of opportunism. She observed the antinomy between the
reductionism of his sensationalist psychology that placed collectivities for
ever out of reach, and his predilection for the fictions of the "state of
nature" and "natural rights." This was the point of her constant parody of
appeals to "the rights of freeborn Englishmen" made by Locke, Defoe, and
John Tutchin. 44 If Locke in fact endorsed a "mixed constitution," 45 he
286

would not have endorsed that peculiar version of "mixarchy" to which

Lord Clarendon or Astell subscribed, a version of the ancient constitution
as comprised of king, Lords, and Commons. For Clarendon, like the
bishops who promulgated the theory under Charles II, the Lords included
the bishops of the Anglican Church, jealous in the protection of their
ecclesiastical power,46 something Astell supported and Locke denied. If
Locke's constitutional monarchy looked down the centuries in its anticipa-
tion of modern constitutional forms, it did so precisely by virtue of a lack
of commitment to the constitutional niceties of which Astell and Clar-
endon, along with those Whigs who tried to reconcile contract and
conquest, were zealously protective.
Mary Astell's political pamphlets gravitate around the twin pillars of
Toryism: abhorrence of the doctrine of right of resistance and abhorrence
of Nonconformity. They also represent a response to the upsurge of
Lockean language occasioned by the two events already mentioned as
critical: the demands of the Kentish Petitioners, who raised again the
question of Ancient Liberties, a constitutional myth which the Whigs
defended and the Tories manipulated; and the Occasional Conformity Bill,
introduced into parliament in 1703, but not passed until 1711. For Mary
Astell, the Occasional Conformity crisis presented the true test of theolo-
gical seriousness. On this subject two of her three important pamphlets of
1704 turn. In Moderation Truly Stated (1704), her 185-page rebuttal of
James Owen's pamphlet, Moderation a Virtue (1703), whose defense of
Occasional Conformity was not unreasonable, Astell adopts the extreme
tactic of representing this sort of reasonableness as treason. If the Church
of England was established by law, then attempts to bypass the requirement
that office-holders must be communing Anglicans were unconstitutional at
the very least, she maintained. Astell dealt a particularly stinging and
belittling riposte to Daniel Defoe, himself a Dissenter, whose string of
satirical pamphlets on the hysterical harangues of Henry Sacheverell,
Charles Leslie, and others drew her ire in A Fair Way with Dissenters and
their Patrons.
On the issue of Occasional Conformity Astell was at one with some of
the most conservative writers. Goldie has suggested that the real roots of
Tory constitutionalism in the revolt against James lay in the choice of
church over king.47 Archbishop Sancroft and Edward Hyde (1609-74),
first Earl of Clarendon, the former Mary Astell's patron, the latter her
intellectual mentor and much cited source, were representative of the
Anglican hierarchy of the 1680s, uncompromising on the status and
independence of Anglicanism, and hostile to Presbyterianism and popery.48
The language of toleration was, to Astell, the language of schism: schism in
287

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
religion and schism in politics. Occasional Conformity meant opening the

door to religious and patriotic slackness, one of her most sustained
objections to it. Thomas Edwards, author of Gangraena, and "the most
voluble opponent" of the religious sects,49 is among her most cited sources.
Astell agrees with John Nalson, whom she cites in An Impartial Enquiry,
that religion, in the household as in the commonwealth, is what makes
people observe the covenants they have made. The moderate Earl of
Clarendon, Astell's intellectual mentor, who also lay the disorder of the
Great Rebellion at the door of the Protestant sects, saw the same con-
sequences: "Children asked not blessing of their parents ... The young
women conversed without any circumspection or modesty ... Parents had
no manner of authority over their children."50
In An Impartial Enquiry, Astell introduces her onslaught on Lockean
principles, for which White Kennett is the surrogate. It is no accident that
the occasion of Mary Astell's pamphlet should have been the memorial day
for the commemoration of the death of "the Royal King and Martyr." Tory
iconography depicting Charles I "as a mythological but appealing figure"51
dates in fact to the work Eikon Basilike of 1649 - a sentimental and
embroidered version of Charles's last reflections. Its authorship was en-
tangled in debates over the Civil War to which Mary Astell contributed, for
glorification of "the Royal Martyr" had been a calculated Tory stratagem.52
Astell, Locke, Sherlock, and the allegiance debate

Astell entered public debate at the end of a century of biblical patriarch-
alism which had never been more baldly stated than in Sir Robert Filmer's
Patriarcha of 1680, the work of a man desperate to restore his standing
with the Crown.53 Filmer categorically denied the view argued by Aristotle
and entrenched by Aristotelianism that different power sets establish
qualitatively different spheres. Aristotle, in his distinctions in the Politics
between forms of paternal, marital, despotic, and political power (as the
power of a father, husband, slave owner, and magistrate, respectively) had
created a distinction between private and public spheres that Hobbes and
Locke, for different reasons, were keen to revive. Ignoring Aristotle's
caution against confusing the rule of a large household for that of a small
kingdom,54 Filmer claimed in fact that men were born into states by being
born into families and that the power of kings was the power of fathers and
nothing more. Filmer's claim raised the counter-claim that if fathers were
indeed kings, the sovereign was superfluous.
Not only was such a notion intolerable to Hobbes and Locke, but so
were the assumptions of biblical fundamentalism associated with Puri-
288

tanism that underpinned it. Moreover, the separation of public and private
spheres on which they insisted had a larger purpose. The great stress
Hobbes laid on the state being "artificial" rather than natural was designed
to erode any self-authenticating powers the Scriptures may be claimed to
have in the Protestant community of believers. At the same time it prepared
the way for an analysis of the particular artifice in terms of which the
creation of the state was brought about: a contract. Scripture had its uses in
acclimating people to negotiation by covenant or contract, of which
marriage was the most immediate experience in the everyday life of most
people. For the marriage contract to function as an analogue for social
contract as an institution-creating artifice, the spheres had to be categori-
cally distinct.
Astell, who had much in common with Filmer, and whose mentor,
Archbishop Sancroft, had assisted Edmund Bohun in arranging the 1685
publication of Patriarcha, was nevertheless gravely offended by his patri-
archalism. She shared Filmer's concern to distinguish the separate moments
of authorization and designation, noting however the propensity of the
Presbyterians to borrow scholastic casuistry:
Yet upon the grounds of this doctrine both Jesuits and some over zealous
favourers of the Geneva discipline have built a perilous conclusion, which is
"that the people or multitude have power to punish or deprive the prince if he
transgress the laws of the kingdom". Witness Parsons and Buchanan ...
Cardinal Bellarmine and Mr Calvin both look asquint this way.55
Like Filmer she supported the notion of a unitary state, divided not into
spheres but into power zones in which power was distributed hierarchi-
cally. But she marshaled an impressive line of biblical women to remon-
strate against the misogyny of the Apostle Paul and those adherents who
argued the natural inferiority of women. 56 And here Astell appealed to
canons of reason established by Descartes and vouchsafed by Hobbes and
Locke, for whom men and women were naturally equal but made radically
unequal by the marriage contract, as the model for the radical inequality of
citizen and sovereign powers achieved by the social contract.
Astell with characteristic irony enlisted the support of Bishop William
Sherlock (i64i}-iyoy), Dean of St. Paul's, against Locke. Sherlock, whom
she names among the three Whig bishops who preached the 31 January
memorial sermon for Charles I, 57 might have been thought of as in Locke's
camp. But Astell invokes him for his distinction between authority and title
made against Locke. She phrases the distinction thus: "For, allowing that
the People have a Right to Design the Person of their Governour; it does by
289

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
no means follow that they Give him his Authority, or that they may when
they please resume it."58
Astell could not have known that Locke had actually put into print a
rebuttal of Sherlock's distinction, which he considered it important to
refute. Sherlock had argued quite cogently that the necessity of government
was logically prior to the title of any particular sovereign. If authority was
the right to command obedience, decided, it turned out, on de facto
grounds, legitimate title was a question of constitutional law, de jure.59
Sherlock then carefully distinguished three modes of political empower-
ment: patriarchal, on the grant of authority made to Adam, Noah, Moses,
and all subsequent fathers; by divine command (as to a Chosen People);
and by consent. He dismissed the patriarchal argument and the argument
from consent; the former because it ignored all the usurpations, beginning
with Nimrod; the latter because consent, once given, could be withdrawn.
He dismissed any historical arguments concerning legitimate title as
"carrying men into such dark Labyrinths of Law and History, etc., as very
few know how to find their way out of again."60 He came down rather on
the side of the Hobbesian reciprocity of protection/allegiance, citing Paul,
Romans 13, and concluding, "If the prince can't Govern, the Subject can't
Obey,"61 a view shared by the secular Engagers, Anthony Ascham and
Marchmont Nedham. Sherlock tried to distance himself from the contro-
versial Hobbes, however, for whom "dominion is naturally annexed to
Power," whereas he, Sherlock, was at pains to stress the moral duty of
allegiance.62
Locke, whose comments on Sherlock constitute his only recorded
remarks on political obedience postdating the Two Treatises of 1689,
ridiculed Sherlock for attempting to separate legal title and God's authority
- as if the law could breach the latter - seeming certainly to subscribe to
obedience and non-resistance in this instance: "Q. Does not godf's]
authority whch the actuall K[ing] has bar all other human claims & are not
the subjects bound to maintain the right of such a prince as far as they
can."63
Locke, like Sherlock, distanced himself from Hobbism, but this time
Sherlock's "submission" was not enough for legal title; it had to be consent:
"Where there is noe resistance ther is a generall Submission, but there may
be a general submission without a general consent wch is an other thing."64
Sherlock had argued, quite to the contrary, and indistinguishably from
Hobbes on conquest: "All Mankind have this natural Right to submit for
their own preservation"; a submission that "is a voluntary Consent, tho'
extorted by Force."65 Astell does not even deal with Sherlock's argument,
but she demolishes Locke's, turning against him exactly the argument he
290

uses against slavery. Locke's case for freedom was based on the eloquently
expressed argument against slavery:
For a Man, not having the Power of his own Life, cannot, by Compact, or his
own Consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the Absolute,
Arbitrary Power of another, to take away his Life, when he pleases. No body
can give more power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his
own Life cannot give another power over it.66
This is just the argument that Astell uses to make the case for a
distinction between authority and title, but on assumptions that are
otherwise directly contrary to Locke on authorization. People may choose
the person of the governor, but they cannot empower him, because: "None
can give what they have not: The People have no Authority over their own
Lives, consequently they can't invest such an Authority in their Govern-
ours." 67 The argument with which Astell then proceeds seems to be
explicitly aimed at Locke:
And tho' we shou'd grant that People, when they first enter into Society, may
frame their Laws as they think fit; yet these Laws being once Establish'd, they
can't Legally and Honestly be chang'd, but by that Authority in which the
Founders of the Society thought fit to place the Legislature. Otherwise we
have been miserably impos'd upon by all those Arguments that were urg'd
against a Dispensing Power.68
Astell on the inconsistencies of contractarianism

Astell cogently argues the Tory case, interspersing her exegesis of the Tory
canon, in the form of her authorities, the Bible, the Earl of Clarendon, and
Henry Foulis, with broadsides in all directions. On the subject of factious-
ness she lashes out at fanatics: "Malignants, High-flyers and what not."69
She takes a shot at Hobbesian mechanism as voiced by White Kennett: "we
are told, that the Prime Engines were Men of Craft, dreadful Dissemblers
with GOD (what is meant by adding and Heaven, I know not, for the Dr. is
too zealous against Popery, to suffer us to imagine that he takes in Angels
and Saints)."70 Then she dares to turn against Dissenters and regicides
Hobbesian charges of demonology: "They shou'd not suffer Men to infect
the Peoples Minds with evil Principles and Representations, with Speeches
that have double Meanings and Equivocal Expressions, Innuendo's and
secret Hints and Insinuations."71 It is not the only time that she uses
explicitly Hobbesian language to hoist the famous author on his own
petard. Nowhere is her parody of Hobbes more explicit than in her defense
of popery against the worst charges of the Presbyterians, notoriously
291

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
popish casuists. There she echoes the great master's comments about hay
and stubble and straw men: 72
Now they who are curious to know what Popery is, and who do not rail at it
at a venture, know very well, that every Doctrine which is profess'd by the
Church of Rome, is not Popish; GOD forbid it shou'd, for they receive the
Holy Scriptures, and teach the Creeds. But that Superstructure of Hay and
Stubble, those Doctrines of Men or Devils, which they have built upon this
good Foundation, this is Popery.73
Having demolished faction, Astell recommends against democracy: "For

we have the sad Experience of our Civil Wars to inform us, that all the
Concessions the King and his Loyal Subjects cou'd make to the Factious
and Rebellious, cou'd not satisfie."74 She even suggests that the outspoken,
and presumably the press, should be muzzled: "Governours therefore may
very justly animadvert upon, and suppress it. For it is as much their Duty,
and as necessary a Service to the Public, to restrain the Turbulent and
Seditious, as it is to protect the Innocent, and to reward the Deserving." 75
Astell's charge that the Scots, John Pym, and the French Cardinal
Richelieu had conspired to trump up the French threat in the 1630s and
1640s is a constant refrain. At one point she even enlists Grotius against
"factious, turbulent, and Rebellious Spirits," by which she means Pym and
company, otherwise known as "Presbyterians, or Whiggs, or whatever you
will call them." 76 Having produced a litany of offenders against political
obedience and supporters of passive resistance outstanding in this parti-
cular debate, she proceeds to give an equally impressive list of evil
ministers, intent on "appeas[ing] the Party . . . obstructing] the King's
Business, and . . . weakening] his authority"; the cause, as Henry Foulis
instructs us, of " 'perpetual Hurly-burly . . . and . . . Leap-frog Govern-
ment.'" 7 7 She does not mention Locke by name, but he could well be chief
among "those Mercenary Scriblers whom all sober Men condemn, and
who only write after the Fact, or in order to it, to make their own Fortunes,
or to justifie their own Wickedness." 78 Locke it was who, in his anonymous
and unpublished Minute for Edward Clarke, declared:
Every one, and that with reason, begins our delivery from popery and
slavery from the arrival of the prince of Orange and the compleating of it is,
by all that wish well to him and it, dated from King William's settlement in
the throne. This is the fence set up against popery and France, for King
James's name, however made use of, can be but a stale to these two. If ever he
returne, under what pretences soever, Jesuits must governe and France be our
master. He is too much wedded to the one and relyes too much on the other
ever to part with either. He that has ventured and lost three crowns for his
292

blinde obedience to those guides of his conscience and for his following the
counsels and pattern of the French King cannot be hoped, after the provoca-
tions he has had to heighten his natural aversion, should ever returne with
calme thoughts and good intentions to Englishmen, their libertys, and
religion. And then I desire the boldest or most negligent amongst us, who can
not resolve to be a contemned popish convert and a miserable French
peasant, to consider with himself what security, what help, what hopes he can
have, if by the ambition and artifice of any great man he depends on and is
led by, he be once brought to this market, a poore, innocent sheepe to this
shambles; for whatever advantageous bargains the leaders may make for
them selves, tis eternally true that the dull heard of followers are always
bought and sold.79
These do not sound like the words of a democrat, or even of an abstract

political theorist. Locke's reputation for being overly philosophical is not
something he necessarily enjoyed in his own day. Astell quite clearly sees
him as a polemical political theorist, whatever the undoubted merits of his
psychological theory might be. As James Farr and Clayton Roberts note,
even passages in the Two Treatises apparently concerned with obligation in
the abstract take on a different significance, seen in the light of this private
document. And so do apparently contradictory statements, such as his
claim in his criticism of Sherlock's The case of allegiance due to soveraign
powers, that, "Allegiance is neither due nor paid to Right or to Government
which are abstract notions but only to persons having right of govern-
ment."80 While such a statement might seem to deny all attempts to
provide a de jure rather than de facto basis for government, more closely
scrutinized it reads differently. The "Right or ... Government" deemed
abstract are in fact Divine Right and hereditary monarchy.
The virtue of the Williamite settlement was that it could be presented as
virtually an elective monarchy if the right construction was put upon the
empowering oaths; in other words, the notoriously unstable Stuart patri-
lineal line had suffered an interloper in the form of William III, on the
strength of popular sentiment. Much of Locke's effort in the brief to Clarke
was to ensure that the Whig project to convert a de facto into a de jure
settlement was accomplished.81 Such a purpose casts Locke's claims in the
Two Treatises concerning de facto power and the basis of citizenship in a
new light. There he asserted both that "An Usurper... [can never] have a
Title, till the People are both at liberty to consent, and have actually
consented,"82 and concerning how individuals "come to be Subjects or
Members of [any] Commonwealth" that, "Nothing can make any Man so,
but his actually entering into it by positive Engagement, and express
Promise and Compact."83
293

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
Locke's critique of Sherlock, and his political behavior more generally,

might seem to fly in the face of his claim in the Two Treatises, that "there
cannot be done a greater Mischief to Prince and People, than the Propa-
gating wrong Notions concerning Government." But he was consistent in
his view, as the brief to Clarke demonstrates, that royal claims to rule by
divine right should be treated with "public condemnation and abhor-
rence."84 His critique of Sherlock merely affirmed what he elsewhere
asserted, that oaths of allegiance took precedence over hereditary right, as
supplying that element of consent prerequisite to social contract. However,
for those who were not willing to swear allegiance, the alternative was
"separation from the Government"85 - a position perilously close to the
sanctions against Occasional Conformity which Locke could not have
approved. The more immediate problem was to cut a swathe through the
conflicting oaths that tied the non-jurors to the Stuart dynasty, and this
Locke could do.
It had been the accomplishment of Thomas Hobbes to justify govern-
ment on non-providential grounds.86 Locke was in this respect a successor
to Hobbes, but one who argued less for the necessity of government than
for its conventionality - both prongs of the Hobbesian position - empha-
sizing not the injunction of reason on citizens to obey, but the motivations
for governments to contract and citizens to consent. The elaborate juridical
artifice by means of which citizens, like wives, children, and servants, were
deemed voluntarily to have contracted into subordination had as little
credibility in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as it does
today, but for different reasons. In the early modern era providential
arguments still reigned supreme; in ours different conclusions are drawn
from contractarian arguments, which seem to have won the day.
NOTES
i Mary Astell's Collections of Poems Dedicated to the most Reverend Father in
God William by Divine Providence Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (1689),
Rawlinson MSS poet. 154:50, Oxford: The Bodleian Library; excerpted in
Bridget Hill, The First English Feminist: "Reflections Upon Marriage" and
other Writings by Mary Astell (Aldershot: Gower Publishing, 1986), pp. 183-
84, and printed in full in Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early
English Feminist (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), pp. 400-54. I
would like to thank Bridget Hill, Mark Goldie, John Pocock, Quentin Skinner,
and Lois Schwoerer, and my editor, Steven Zwicker, for their comments on an
earlier version of this piece. Sincere thanks to the Australian Research Council,
the Folger Shakespeare Library, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars, and The John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur Foundation, under
whose joint auspices it was written.
294

2 Mary AstelPs A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their
True and Greatest Interest, London, Printed for R. Wilkin, 1694 (Folger
Library, 140765 [Wing A4063]). Second edition corrected, 1695, London,
Printed for R. Wilkin (Folger Library, 145912 [Wing A4063]). Fourth edition,
1701, London, Printed by J.R. for R. Wilkin (Folger Library,
PR3316.A655.S3.Cage).
3 Mary Astell, Letters Concerning the Love of God, between the Author of the
Proposal to the Ladies and Mr. John Norris, Published by J. Norris, Rector of
Bemerton nr. Sarum, London, Printed for Samuel Manship, 1695 (Wing 1254).
4 AstelPs three commissioned Tory tracts of 1704 are in order of publication:
Moderation truly Stated: or a Review of a Late Pamphlet, EntituVd Moderation
a Virtue, or, The Occasional Conformist Justified from the Imputation of
Hypocricy ... With a Prefatory Discourse to Dr. D'Avenant, Concerning His
Late Essays on Peace and War, London, Printed by J.L. for Richard Wilkin, at
the King's-Head, in St. Paul's Church-yard, 1704 (Folger Library,
BX5202.A8.Cage); A Fair Way with the Dissenters and their Patrons, London,
Printed by E.P. for R. Wilkin, at the King's Head in St. Paul's Church-yard, 1704
(Folger Library, BX5202.A7.Cage); and An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes
of Rebellion and Civil War in this Kingdom in an Examination of Dr. Kennetfs
Sermon, Jan. 31, 1703/4, and Vindication of the Royal Martyr, London, Printed
by E.P. for R. Wilkin, at the King's Head in St. Paul's Churchyard, 1704 (Folger
Library, BV 4253.K4.C75.Cage).
5 See James Owen, Moderation a Vertue: Or, the Occasional Conformist Justify3 d
from the Imputation of Hypocrisy (London, 1703); Daniel Defoe, The Shortest
Way with the Dissenters: Or Proposals for the Establishment of the Church
(London, 1702) and More Short-Ways with the Dissenters (London, 1703); and
White Kennett's A Compassionate Enquiry into the Causes of the Civil War: In
a Sermon Preached in the Church of St. Botolph Aldgate, On January 31, 1704,
the Day of the Fast of the Martyrdom of King Charles I (London, 1704).
6 Mary Astell, The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church
of England in a Letter to the Right Honourable T.L., C.I., London, Printed by
S.H. for R. Wilkin, at the King's Head in St. Paul's Churchyard, 1705 (Folger
Library, 216595).
7 See Joseph M. Levine's magisterial The Battle of the Books: History and
Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). It
is symptomatic that women should have participated in pathbreaking ways in
this discourse on the cusp of modernity. Astell recognized the particular
contribution of her acknowledged role model, Anne Lefvre Dacier (1654-
1720), a French scholar and classics translator (see A Serious Proposal, p. 10).
And she must have valued the contribution of her Chelsea acquaintance, the
English antiquarian and linguist, Elizabeth Elstob (see Levine, The Battle of the
Books, pp. 378-79)-
8 Hill, The First English Feminist, p. 48.
9 Formative works of the New Historicists include Stephen Greenblatt's Renais-
sance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980) and Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of
Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987); the Shakespearean studies of contributors to Jean E. Howard and
295

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
Marian R O'Connor (eds.), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and

Ideology (London: Routledge, 1987); and Don Wayne's work on Renaissance
country-house poetry, especially that of Ben Jonson, in Penshurst: The Semiotics
of Place and the Poetics of History (London: Methuen, 1984). "Cultural
Materialism," in the works of British scholars such as Alan Sinfield and
Jonathan Dollimore shares a similar emphasis on the material circumstances of
texts, their social function in society, and the ways in which cultural texts enact
the work of subversion and containment. See Sinfield and Dollimore (eds.),
Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Man-
chester University Press; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). I owe
these observations to Steven Zwicker and thank him for his kind assistance.
10 See Astell's Forward to the second edition of Barflemy Fair, 1722 (p. A2a), on
how Swift put Steele up to the satire of her A Serious Proposal to the Ladies in
Tatler, No. 32, from White's Chocolate-house, 22 June 1709, "a little after the
Enquiry [Barflemy Fair] appear'd." See also Tatler, No. 63, 1-3 September
1709. Ruth Perry, in The Celebrated Mary Astell (pp. 229-30, 516 n. 81), and
Bridget Hill, in "A Refuge from Men: The Idea of a Protestant Nunnery," Past
and Present, 117 (1987), pp. 107-30 (esp. p. 118, nn. 47 and 48), ascribe
authorship of the Tatler pieces to Swift, but the revised Tatler does not, and
Astell clearly believes them to be the work of Steele:
But tho' the Enquirer had offended the Tatler, and his great Friends, on
whom he so liberally bestows his Panegyrics, by turning their Ridicule very
justly upon themselves; what had any of her Acquaintances done to provoke
him? Who does he point at? For she knows of none who ever attempted to
erect a Nunnery, or declar'd That Virginity was to he their State of Life.
11 The Works of the Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre, 3 vols. (London, 1761), vol. 1, pp.
210, 218, cited in Hill, "A Refuge from Men," p. 120. Susannah Centlivre, a
gentlewoman whose family fled to Ireland at the Restoration, may have disliked
Astell's politics, Basset Table having been written after the publication of
Astell's Royalist political pamphlets of 1704. The widow of two husbands,
Centlivre had raised herself from obscurity by writing plays, was a friend of
Richard Steele, and in 1706 married Queen Anne's chief cook, Joseph Centlivre
(Encyclopaedia Britannica, n t h edn., vol. v, p. 674).
12 The Works of Samuel Richardson, 19 vols. (London, 1811), vol. xvi, pp. 155-
56, cited in Hill, "A Refuge from Men," p. 121. See also the authoritative
modern edition of Richardson's History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn
Harris, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), vol. 11, pp. 255-56 and
notes.
13 See A. H. Upham, "A Parallel Case for Richardson's Clarissa," Modern
Language Notes, 28 (1913), pp. 103-05. It is notable, however, that standard
works on Richardson, including the authoritative biography by T. C. Duncan
Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1971), and Tom Keymer's study Clarissa and the Eighteenth
Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), do not even
include Astell in the index.
14 The Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (London, 1905), pp. 167, 176, cited by
Hill, "A Refuge from Men," p. 107.
296

15 See E.J.F. and D.B., "George Berkeley and The Ladies Library," Berkeley
Newsletter (Dublin), (1980), pp. 5-13; and G. A. Aitken, in "Steele's 'Ladies'
Library'," The Athenaeum, 2958 (1884), pp. 16-17.
16 Mary Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage, Occasioned by the Duke &
Dutchess of Mazarine's Case ..., London, Printed for John Nutt, 1700 (Wing
A4067). Second edition (no known copies extant). Third edition, Reflections
Upon Marriage. To which is added a Preface in Answer to Some Objections,
London, Printed for R. Wilkin, at the King's Head in St. Paul's Church Yard,
1706. Fourth edition, 1730.
17 J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1957).
18 Mark Goldie, "Tory Political Thought 1689-1714," Ph.D. dissertation, Uni-
versity of Cambridge (1978).
19 Astell in An Impartial Enquiry, p. 48, cites Henry Foulis, The History of the
Wicked Plots and Conspiracies of Our Pretended Saints . . . 2nd edn., Oxford,
Printed by Henry Hall for Ric. Davis, 1674 (Folger Library, F1643, 2O4> 2O 5) :
"The Blood of many thousand Christians, shed in these Wars and before, crieth
aloud against Presbytery, as the People only guilty of the first occasion of
Quarrel . . . Of whom Grotius says, That he looks upon them as factious,
turbulent, and Rebellious Spirits.'"
20 This is emphasized in Johann Sommerville, "History and Theory: the Norman
Conquest in Early Stuart Political Thought," Political Studies, 34 (1986), pp.
249-61.
21 For instance, Astell both cites and paraphrases Richard Allestree's The Ladies
Calling in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, as on pp. 4, 9, 37, 122, 148, 153ff.
of the 1694 edition, which correspond to the following sections of Allestree:
part 1, section 5 (1673), I 7°5 edition, p. 100; part 2, sections 2 and 3, "Of
Wives" and "Of Widows," 1703 edition, pp. 2Oiff., 23iff.; part 2, section 3,
1705 edition, p. 257; part 2, section 1, "Of Virgins," 1705 edition, p. 172; part
2, section 3, 1705 edition, p. 232; part 2, section 3, 1705 edition, p. 125,
respectively. On many substantive points Astell's program for women echoes
Allestree, who in The Ladies Calling had remonstrated against the reduction of
women, denied education, to menial status and had argued in favor of "Home-
education" and against sending children abroad.
22 See for instance her sarcastic remark in An Impartial Enquiry, p. 40: "Only let
me recommend to all such Thinkers, Mr. Lock's Chapter of the Association of
Ideas; they need not be afraid to read it, for that ingenious Author is on the
right side, and by no means in a French Interest!"
23 Astell in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part 1, 1694 edn., pp. 85-86,
recommends Englishwomen were better to improve themselves with the "study
of Philosophy (as I hear the French Ladies do) Des Cartes, Malebranch and
others." In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part 11, she draws heavily on
Descartes, citing uLes Principes del la Philosofie de M. Des Cartes, Pt. I. 45," at
some length on p. 134 (1697 edn.), declaring on pp. 250-51: "But this being
already accounted for by Des Cartes [Les Passions de I'Ame] and Dr. More, in
his excellent Account of Vertue, I cannot pretend to add any thing to what they
have so well Discours'd."
24 "Mr. Locke's Supposition that it is possible for Matter to Think, consider'd"
297

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
comprises sections 259 to 271 of Astell's The Christian Religion as Profess'd by

a Daughter of the Church, pp. 250-63, the first two parts of which (sections 1-
105, pp. 1-95) are devoted to establishing "What it is that a late Book
concerning the Reasonableness of Christianity, etc., pretends to drive at." For
commentary by modern philosophers see the excellent articles by K. M.
Squadrito, "Mary Astell's Critique of Locke's View of Thinking Matter,"
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 25 (1987), pp. 433-40; and Patricia Ward
Scaltas, "Women as Ends - Women as Means in the Enlightenment," in A. J.
Arnaud and E. Kingdom (eds.), Women's Rights and the Rights of Man
(Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1990).
25 See R. W. K. Hinton, "Husbands, Fathers and Conquerors," Political Studies,
15, 3 (1967), pp. 291-300 and 16, 1 (1968), pp. 55-67; Mary Lyndon Shanley,
"Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth-Century English Poli-
tical Thought," Western Political Quarterly, 32 (1979), pp. 79-91; Carole
Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
26 See Patricia Springborg, "Mary Astell (1666-1731), Critic of Locke," American
Political Science Review, 89, 3 (1995), pp. 621-33; and my introductions to
Mary Astell (1666-1731): Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996) and Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts 1 and 11
(London, Pickering and Chatto: 1997).
27 See Pocock, The Ancient Constitution, pp. 233ff.
28 Goldie, "Tory Political Thought," p. 38.
29 Astell may well be referring to theories of Nicolas Malebranche, 1638-1715,
De la Recherche de la Verit, ou Von traitte de la nature de Vesprit de Vhomme,
& de Vusage qu'il en doit faire pour viter Verreur dans les sciences, 4th revised
and enlarged edn. (Folger Library B 1893.R.3.1678.Cage). Astell treats Male-
branche's principle of "seeing all things in God" at length in her correspondence
with John Norris, Letters Concerning the Love of God, of 1693, published in
1695. She addresses Malebranche's revisions to Descartes in A Serious Proposal
to the Ladies, Part 11, of 1697, and no more critically than on the subject of sex
differences. Malebranche deals with the different structures of mind between
the sexes in part 2 of the The Search for Truth, "Concerning the Imagination,"
1.1, "Of the Imagination of Women." See the 1700 translation by Thomas
Taylor, Father Malebranche his treatise concerning the search after truth . . .
Printed by W. Bowyer, for Thomas Bennet, and T. Leigh and D. Midwinter, 2nd
corrected edn., London (Folger Library M318), which Astell may well have
used. Discussing the greater excitability of women, Taylor, Father Malebranche,
p. 64, accurately translates Malebranche, 1678 edn., pp. 105-06:
But though it be certain, that this Delicacy of the Fibres of the Brain is the
principal Cause of all these Effects; yet it is not equally certain, that it is
universally to be found in all women. Or if it be to be found, yet their
Animal Spirits are sometimes so exactly proportion'd to the Fibres of their
Brain, that there are women to be met with, who have a greater solidity of
Mind than some Men. 'Tis in a certain Temperature of the Largeness and
Agitation of the Animal Spirits, and Conformity with the Fibres of the Brain,
that the strength of parts consists: And Women have sometimes that just
Temperature. There are women Strong and constant, and there are Men that
298

are Weak and Fickle. There are Women that are Learned, Couragious, and
capable of every thing. And on the contrary, there are men that are Soft
Effeminate, incapable of any Penetration, or dispatch of any Business. In
Fine, when we attribute any Failures to a certain Sex, Age, or Condition,
they are only to be understood of the generality; it being ever suppos'd, there
is no general Rule without Exception.
30 Preface to the third edition of Reflections upon Marriage, p. iv.
31 See Mark Goldie, "The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political
Argument," Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 83 (1980), pp. 473-564,
esp. pp. 508-09.
32 See Patricia Springborg, "Thomas Hobbes and Cardinal Bellarmine: Leviathan
and the Ghost of the Roman Empire," History of Political Thought, 16, 4
(1995), PP- 5O3-31-
33 "Let every person render obedience to the governing authorities; for there is no
authority except from God, and those in authority are divinely constituted,"
The Holy Bible (Nashville, Tennessee: Giddeons International, 1986), p. 843.
34 Goldie, "Tory Political Thought," p. 100. See especially Johann Sommerville's
perceptive treatment of Hobbes and Bellarmine in Thomas Hobbes: Political
Ideas in Context (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 113-19, which complements
his overview of papalist theory and Anglican responses in his Politics and
Ideology in England, 1603-40 (London: Longman, 1986), pp. 189-203. On the
perceived convergence of Presbyterianism and popery on the power to depose
kings, see Sommerville's "From Suarez to Filmer: a Reappraisal," Historical
Journal, 25 (1982), pp. 525-40; and the Introduction to his edition of Sir
Robert Filmer, Patriarch a and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1991), esp. pp. xv, xxi-xxiv. On the medieval roots of consent theory
see Francis Oakley, "Legitimation by Consent: the Question of the Medieval
Roots," Viator, 14 (1983), pp. 303-35, and Omnipotence, Covenants, and
Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 48-91.
35 See Peter Laslett's Introduction to his edition of Locke's Two Treatises of
Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 62-65.
36 See Goldie, "The Revolution of 1689," pp. 473-564, esp. p. 476.
37 Goldie, "Tory Political Thought," p. 167. For the more general political context
see Lois Schwoerer, "The Right to Resist: Whig Resistance Theory, 1688 to
1694," in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in
Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.
232-52; and on the legal ramifications of the Kentish Petitioners' claims, see
Philip A. Hamburger, "Revolution and Judicial Review: Chief Justice Holt's
Opinion in City of London v. Wood," Columbia Law Review, 94, 7 (1994), pp.
2091-153.
39 See John Pocock, The Ancient Constitution, pp. 436-48; Goldie, "Tory Political
Thought," p. 168.
40 See the remarks of the eighteenth-century commentator George Ballard, in his
Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who have been Celebrated for their
Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts and Sciences (1752), cited by
Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell, p. 196.
299

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
41 Goldie, "Tory Political Thought," pp. 169, 173.

42 Davenant, Essays upon Peace at Home and War Abroad, 1704, in Works, 5
vols. (London, 1771), vol. iv, sections 1 and 13.
43 Astell, An Impartial Enquiry, p. 34.
44 Ibid., pp. 8, 14, 30, etc., mocks the language of the country Whig, exemplified
in particular by John Tutchin (166 I ? - I 707) who combined reverence for the
ancient constitution, parliament, and "native right" with xenophobia, de-
claring of the constitution "she's as well beloved now by all true Englishmen,
as she was by our Forefathers a Thousand Years ago" (Observator, 7-10 April
1703). His views were set out in the Observator from 29 September to 7
November 1703, focusing on resistance and targeted at Charles Leslie (see
Phillipson and Skinner [eds.], Political Discourse, p. 217). They were bound
for this reason to have come to the attention of Astell, who includes a poke at
Leslie in the title to A Fair Way with the Dissenters, claiming her work "Not
Writ by Mr. L y, or any other Furious Jacobite, whether Clergyman or
Layman; but by a very Moderate Person and Dutiful Subject to the QUEEN."
Astell complained in her Postscript to that work (A Fair Way with the
Dissenters, pp. 24-27), that the "High Flyer" Leslie had gotten the credit for
her own Moderation truly Stated. And in An Impartial Enquiry (pp. 8ff.)
Astell gives the impression that Kennett held the same views as Tutchin.
Tutchin, it is true, admired "those two great men, Mr. Sidney and Mr. Locke,"
defenders of ancient liberty, "the one against Sir Robert Filmer, and the other
against a whole Company of Slaves." (See Tutchin, Observator, 14-18
September 1706, cited in Nicholas Phillipson, "Politeness and Politics in the
Reigns of Anne and the Early Hanoverians," in J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon J.
Schochet, and Lois G. Schwoerer [eds.], The Varieties of British Political
Thought, 1500-1800 [Washington, DC: Folger Institute, 1993], pp. 211-45,
esp. p. 218.) But this, the only occasion on which Tutchin names Locke, is too
late for Astell's pamphlet.
45 See Martin Thompson, "Significant Silences in Locke's Two Treatises of
Government: Constitutional History, Contract and Law," The Historical
Journal, 31 (1987), pp. 275-94, esp. pp. 291-92; and Lois Schwoerer, "Locke,
Lockean Ideas and the Glorious Revolution," Journal of the History of Ideas,
51, 4 (1990), pp. 531-48, esp. pp. 540-41.
46 See Richard Tuck's Review of Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed
Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Answer to the xix Propositions
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), Journal of Modern History,
59,3 (1987), PP- 57O-2.
48 Ibid., p. 63.
49 Keith Thomas, "Women and the Civil War Sects," Past and Present, 13 (1958),
pp. 42-62, esp. p. 55.
50 Clarendon, Life, vol. 1 (London, 1827), pp. 358-59, cited in ibid., p. 57.
51 See Quentin Skinner, "Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engage-
ment Controversy," in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum: the Quest for
Settlement 1646-1660 (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 85.
53 See Sommerville, Introduction to Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other
300

Writings. See also Gordon Schochet's authoritative treatment, Patriarchalism

and Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975).
54 Aristotle, Politics, Book 1, paragraph 2, 1252a 9-15, Loeb Classical Library
edn., ed. H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1932), p. 3:
Those then who think that the natures of the statesman [politikon], the royal
ruler [basilikon], the head of an estate [oikonomikon] and the master of a
family [despotikon] are the same, are mistaken (they imagine that the
difference between these various forms of authority is between greater and
smaller numbers, not a difference in kind - that is, that the ruler over a few
people is a master, over more the head of an estate, over more still a
statesman or royal ruler, as if there were no difference between a large
household and a small city.)
55 Filmer, Patriarcha, p. 3. Astell in An Impartial Enquiry, pp. 24-28, undertook
to supply chapter and verse, drawing on Henry Foulis, The History of Romish
Treasons ... 1681 edn. (Book 2, ch. 3, pp. 75ff.) who had analyzed the specific
indebtedness of Presbyterian advocates of popular sovereignty to the Scholastics
and Jesuits, a claim which Astell repeated, to target Locke and the Whigs.
56 See William Nicholls (1664-1712), The Duty of Inferiors towards their Super-
iors, in Five Practical Discourses, 1701, London (Folger Library, i78-6ioq),
Discourse iv, "The Duty of Wives to their Husbands," which Astell attacks in the
opening pages of the Preface to the 1706 edition of Reflections upon Marriage.
57 Astell, An Impartial Enquiry, p. 16: "Since a Dr. Binks, a Mr. Sherlock, a Bishop
of St. Asaph, and some few more, take occasion to Preach upon this Day such
antiquated Truths as might have past upon the Nation in the Reign of K.
Charles II. or in Monmouth's Rebellion."
58 Ibid., p. 34.
59 William Sherlock, A Vindication of the Case of Allegiance, 1691, p. 11, cited in
Goldie, "Tory Political Thought," p. 93.
60 Sherlock, The Case of Allegiance due to Sovereign Powers, 1691, p. 2, cited in
ibid.
61 Sherlock, ibid., pp. 21, 14, 45, 42, cited in Goldie, ibid., p. 94.
62 Sherlock, ibid., p. 15, cited in Goldie, ibid., p. 95.
63 Oxford, The Bodleian Library, Locke MSS c.28, fo. 91V, cited in Goldie, ibid.,
p. 103.
64 Bodl. Locke MSS c.28, fo. 96r, cited in Goldie, ibid., p. 104.
65 Sherlock, Vindication of the Case of Allegiance, pp. 18, 13, cited in Goldie,
ibid., p. 104.
66 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), Book 2, paragraphs 23, 24, p. 284.
6j Astell, An Impartial Enquiry, p. 34.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., p. 7.
70 Ibid., p. 5.
71 Ibid., p. 8. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 29-30, for Hobbes's famous account of
words as counters. Hobbes attributes "insignificant" speech to an ignorance of
the relation between sign and signifier:
301

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
Nature it selfe cannot erre: and as men abound in copiousnesse of language;

so they become more wise, or more mad than ordinary. Nor is it possible
without Letters for any man to become either excellently wise, or ...
excellently foolish. For words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by
them: but they are the mony of fooles, that value them by the authority of an
Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other Doctor whatsoever, if but a
man.
Hobbes's marvelous images for "insignificant" speech often involve the entrap-
ment of birds, as in Leviathan, p. 28. If 'truth consisteth in the right ordering of
names in our affirmations," he says, then "a man that seeketh precise truth, had
need to remember what every name he uses stands for; and to place it
accordingly, or else he will find himselfe entangled in words, as a bird in lime-
twigges; the more he struggles, the more belimed." And, again, Leviathan, p.
28:
For the errours of Definitions multiply themselves, according as the reck-

oning proceeds; and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see, but
cannot avoyd, without reckoning anew from the beginning, in which lyes the
foundation of their errours. From whence it happens, that they which trust
to books, do as they that cast up many little summs into a greater, without
considering whether those little summes were rightly cast up or not; and at
last finding the errour visible, and not mistrusting their first grounds, know
not which way to cleere themselves; but spend time in fluttering over their
bookes; as birds that entring by the chimney, andfindingthemselves inclosed
in a chamber, flutter at the false light of a glasse window, for want of wit to
consider which way they came in.
72 Hobbes frequently invokes the scarecrows and straw men created by Catholic
casuistry, that, "built on the Vain Philosophy of Aristotle, would fright [men]
from Obeying the Laws of their Country, with empty names; as men fright Birds
from the Corn with an empty doublet, a hat, and a crooked stick." Leviathan,
p. 465.
73 Astell, An Impartial Enquiry, p. 22.
74 Ibid., p. 9.
75 Ibid., p. 8.
76 Ibid., p. 48.
77 Ibid., p. ^z.
78 Ibid., p. 29.
79 Bodleian MS Locke e.18, reprinted in James Farr and Clayton Roberts, "John
Locke on the Glorious Revolution: A Rediscovered Document," The Historical
Journal, 28 (1985), pp. 385-98, esp. pp. 395-98.
80 Ibid., p. 292.
81 See Mark Goldie, "John Locke's Circle and James II," The Historical Journal,
35,3 (1992), pp. 557-86.
82 Locke, Two Treatises, book 2, section 198, p. 398.
83 Ibid., book 2, section 122, p. 349.
84 Bodleian MS Locke e.18, fo. 5, reprinted in Farr and Roberts, "John Locke,"
pp. 395-98.
302

85 Ibid.
86 See Quentin Skinner, "Conquest and Consent"; and Mark Goldie, "Tory
Political Thought," p. 98.
FURTHER READING
Ashcraft, Richard, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Govern-
ment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
"The Radical Dimensions of Locke's Political Thought: A Dialogic Essay on Some
Problems of Interpretation," History of Political Thought, 13, 4 (1992), pp.
703-72.
"Simple Objections and Complex Reality: Theorizing Political Radicalism in
Seventeenth-century England," Political Studies, 40 (1992), pp. 99-117.
Astell, Mary, Letters Concerning the Love of God, between the Author of the
Proposal to the Ladies and Mr. John Norris, Published by J. Norris, Rector of
Bemerton nr. Sarum. London, Printed for Samuel Manship, 1695 (Wing
12.54).
Ballard, George (1752), Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who have been
Celebrated for their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts and
Sciences, ed. Ruth Perry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985).
Blanchard, Rae, "Richard Steele and the Status of Women," Studies in Philology,
26,3 (1929), pp. 325-55.
Brown, Irene Q., "Domesticity, Feminism, and Friendship: Female Aristocratic
Culture and Marriage in England, 1660-1761," Journal of Family History, 7
(1982), pp. 406-24.
Butler, Melissa, "Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the Attack on
Patriarchy," American Political Science Review, 72, 1 (1978), pp. 135-50.
Defoe, Daniel (1697), "An Academy for Women," in An Essay upon Projects.
London, Printed by R.R. for Theo. Cockerill at the Corner of Warwick-Lane,
near Paternoster Row (Folger Library, 145226).
(1702), The Shortest Way with the Dissenters: Or Proposals for the Establish-
ment of the Church, London (Folger Library, i34~622q).
(1704), More Short-Ways with the Dissenters, London (Library of Congress,
BX5202.D36).
George, Margaret, "From 'Goodwife' to 'Mistress': The Transformation of the
Female in Bourgeois Culture," Science and Society, 37 (1973), pp. 152-77.
Goldie, Mark, "Tory Political Thought 1689-1714," Ph.D. dissertation, University
of Cambridge (1978).
"The Roots of True Whiggism, 1688-1694," History of Political Thought, 1
(1980), pp. 195-236.
"The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument," Bulletin of
Research in the Humanities, 83 (1980), pp. 473-564.
"Danby, the Bishops and the Whigs," in T. Harris, Paul Seaward, and M. A.
Goldie (eds.), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford: Black-
well, 1990).
"The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England," in O. P. Grell, J. I.
Israel, and N. Tyacke (eds.), From Persecution to Toleration (Oxford: Oxford
303

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
"John Locke's Circle and James II," The Historical Journal, 35, 3 (1992.), pp.
557-86.
Harrison, John and Laslett, Peter, The Library of John Locke, 2nd edn. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1971).
Higgins, Patricia, "The Reactions of Women, with Special Reference to Women
Petitioners," in Brian Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil
War (London: Edward Arnold, 1973).
Hill, Bridget, The First English Feminist: "Reflections Upon Marriage" and Other
Writings by Mary Astell (Aldershot: Gower Publishing, 1986).
"A Refuge from Men: The Idea of a Protestant Nunnery," Fast and Present, 117
(1987), pp. 107-30.
Hinton, R. W. K., "Husbands, Fathers and Conquerors," Political Studies, 15, 3
(1967), pp. 291-300; 16, 1 (1968), pp. 55-67.
Hutton, Sarah, "Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham: Between Platonism and
Enlightenment," British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 1, 1 (1993), pp.
29-54.
James, Regina, "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, Or, Mary Astell and Mary Wollstone-
craft Compared," Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 5 (1976), pp. 121-39.
Kennett, White (1704), A Compassionate Enquiry into the Causes of the Civil War:
In a Sermon Preached in the Church of St. Botolph Aldgate, On January 31,
1704. the Day of the Fast of the Martyrdom of King Charles the First, London,
Printed for A. and J. Churchil in Pater-Noster Row.
Laslett, Peter, John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge
Locke, John (1693) X823, "Remarks upon some of Mr. Norris's Books, wherein he
asserts P. Malebranche's Opinion of seeing all Things in God," in The Works of
John Locke, London, printed for Thomas Tegg, W. Sharpe and son, et al., vol.
ix, pp. 247-59.
(1695) I 823, "The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scrip-
tures," in The Works of John Locke, London, printed for Thomas Tegg, W.
Sharpe and son, et al., vol. vn, pp. 1-158.
McCrystal, John Williams, "An Inadvertant Feminist: Mary Astell (1666-1731),"
MA thesis, Auckland University, New Zealand (1992).
"A Lady's Calling: Mary Astell's Notion of Women," Political Theory Newsletter,
4 (1992), pp. 156-70.
Mack, Phyllis, "Women as Prophets during the English Civil War," in Margaret
Jacob and James Jacob (eds.), The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), pp. 214-31.
Masham, Damaris (1696), Discourse Concerning the Love of God, London, Printed
for Awnsham and John Churchill.
(1705), Occasional Thoughts In Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life,
London, Printed for A. and J. Churchil at the Black Swann in Paternoster-Row.
Myers, Mitzi, "Domesticating Minerva: Bathusa Makin's 'Curious' Argument for
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304

Norton, J. E., "Some Uncollected Authors xxvii; Mary Astell, 1666-1731," The
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Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
"God Hath Ordained to Man a Helper: Hobbes, Patriarchy and Conjugal Right,"
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Perry, Ruth, "Mary Astell's Response to the Enlightenment," Women in History, 9
(1984), pp. 13-40.
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"Locke, Lockean Ideas and the Glorious Revolution," Journal of the History of
Ideas, 51, 4 (1990), pp. 531-48.
"The Right to Resist: Whig Resistance Theory, 1688 to 1694," in Nicholas
Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern
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Shanley, Mary Lyndon, "Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth-
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305

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG
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G.K. Hall 8c Co., 1985).
306

14
DONNA LANDRY
Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley

Montagu, and the literature of social
comment
Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were both born in the
year of the Glorious Revolution, 1688-89. Divided by family circumstance
and political allegiance, they have been coupled by literary history. Pope
was a Catholic linen merchant's son, born in the City of London, who had
to make his own fortune in the literary marketplace by means of such
ventures as translating Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into English for a
distinguished list of wealthy subscribers, who paid in installments to
receive their multi-volumed sets over several years. Pope earned about
£5000 each from these translations, or, at a "conservative estimate," the
equivalent in today's money of about £100,000 from each.1 Lady Mary
Pierrepont, daughter of the Earl (later Duke) of Kingston, married in 1712
a fellow Whig, Edward Wortley Montagu, who would soon become
ambassador to Constantinople. "A strong sense of propriety led her, as a
woman and an aristocrat, not to publish any of her writings under her own
name."2 Pope was a Tory with Jacobite leanings; Montagu supported Sir
Robert Walpole.
Pope never traveled to Turkey, while Montagu's journey there as the wife
of the British ambassador from 1716 to 1718 secured her literary fame.
Her posthumously published letters of 1763, Written, during her Travels in
Europe, Asia and Africa, To Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, &c. in
different Parts of Europe. Which Contain, Among other Curious Relations,
Accounts of the Policy and Manners of the Turks, established her reputa-
tion as a woman of letters, since people from Samuel Johnson to Lord
Byron read and praised them.3 Johnson is supposed to have said that
Montagu's letters were the only book he ever read for pure pleasure, while
Byron claimed to have practically memorized them by the age of ten.
Eventually Montagu would leave England and her husband for a wan-
dering life in Italy and France.4
If Pope, master of five rented acres at Twickenham, figures the suburban
intellectual, Montagu epitomizes the expatriate adventurer, whose aristo-
307

DONNA LANDRY
cratic rank enabled her independence but also meant she could only really
practice it abroad. As an adventurer-writer, with a strong influence on Lord
Byron, she comes to signify a gender-bending kind of English expatriate
eccentricity often named "Byronic," but nearly a century before Byron first
left the British Isles. Both Pope and Montagu represent two forms of
Englishness that came into being during British imperial expansion. Despite
their differences, their lives and writings tell us much about the forging of a
national and imperial identity that would become disseminated around the
globe.
Such fundamentally differing social views as theirs could well have
proved an unbridgeable gap, but once upon a time Pope and Mary Wortley
Montagu became friends and neighbors in Twickenham after she returned
from Turkey. Then they quarreled - about what, exactly, no one is certain -
and ended up celebrated enemies. Horace Walpole delighted in airing their
dirty linen in public: "Their quarrel is said to have sprung from a pair of
sheets, which, coming down suddenly to her house at Twickenham, she
borrowed; and not returning, he sent for, and she sent them back
unwashed. Her dirt, and their mutual economy, make the story not quite
incredible."5 Now about those unwashed sheets: dirt, filth, blood, the state
of unwashed gameiness, is always attaching itself to Montagu in the
anecdotal record. How much of this attributed filth is empirically verifiable,
and how much might constitute the revenge of certain men of letters on a
witty writing woman who flouted public opinion and condescended to
them? Ironically, when Pope satirizes Montagu, he often represents her as
wallowing in dirt of the dirtiest sort, namely country filth: he strips her of
her aristocratic taste and metropolitan sophistication and portrays her as
that lowest form of life, from a suburban point of view, the backward
hunting gentry:
Avidien or his Wife (no Matter which,

For him you'll call a dog, and her a bitch)
Sell their presented Partridges, and Fruits,
And humbly live on rabbits and on roots.
(Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace Paraphrased, lines 49-5 2 )6
Montagu herself was much more infuriated by the double-barreled slur

that could always be claimed to be a double-edged compliment in Pope's
First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated: "From furious Sappho
scarce a milder Fate, / P-x'd by her Love, or libell'd by her Hate" (lines 83-
84). In other words, expect no less from intimacy with Montagu than
slander, poison, or hanging. "P-x'd" here quickly glances off syphilis, the
308

Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
obvious general referent for "pox," to light upon the disease of smallpox
with which she was widely associated. Having suffered from smallpox as a
young woman, she still bore the scars, but by writing "P-x'd by her love,"
Pope assures us that only Montagu - the woman who had popularized the
Ottoman practice of inoculation against smallpox in England by inocu-
lating her own children - could be meant. Pope deviously covers himself by
disguising his attack as a potential compliment.
Such passionate disavowal intimates the heat that had gone before.
Byron believed that after Lady Mary's return from Turkey, Pope declared
his amorous designs upon her person, and she laughed in his face, a story
supported by Montagu's own granddaughter, Lady Louisa Stuart. 7 Reading
Pope's poem to Gay of 1720, it is tempting to agree he might well have
declared a passion for "WORTLEY," hoping to attract her "eyes" to his
"structures" - his perfect grounds at Twickenham, and his verse:
Ah friend, 'tis true - this truth you lovers know -

In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow,
In vain fair Thames reflects the double scenes
Of hanging mountains, and of sloping greens:
Joy lives not here; to happier seats it flies,
And only dwells where WORTLEY casts her eyes.
What are the gay parterre, the chequer'd shade,

The morning bower, the ev'ning colonade,
But soft recesses of uneasy minds,
To sigh unheard in, to the passing winds?
So the struck deer in some sequestered part

Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart;
There, stretch'd unseen in coverts hid from day,
Bleeds drop by drop, and pants his life away.
("To Mr. Gay, who wrote him a congratulatory letter on thefinishinghis house")
Stimulated by his desire for (Mary Wortley) Montagu, Pope constructs an

erotic landscape in which to fantasize about her. The "hanging mountains"
and "sloping greens" owe their inspiration to an image of a female body. As
so often in landscape poetry, the topography becomes eroticized and
feminized, and the male poet is held hostage by the projections of his own
imagination. As in Marvell's "The Garden" and Rochester's "A Ramble in
Saint James's Parke," such erotic encounters are doomed to incompletion.
We notice that only the poet's image of Wortley, projected as the topo-
graphy of his garden, and not her body itself, is reflected in the Thames.
309

DONNA LANDRY
His imagination is feverishly dominated by her absence, her absent

presence.
Having failed to draw Wortley into his grounds, his designs, his private
world, Pope represents himself as a wounded deer, the victim of blood
sports. She is the huntress, and he the hunted, she the predator, and he the
prey. In her absence he is, like the deer, driven to seclusion, where,
"stretch'd" out "unseen," he "bleeds" away his life "drop by drop," and
"pants" "his life away," while thinking of her. These lines are a little orgy of
onanistic imagery. But the wounded deer alsofiguresas more than a merely
conventional erotic metaphor, as we shall see. This matter of blood sports
will prove a further marker of difference between Pope and Montagu, a
point to which we shall return.
The literature of social comment during this period, whether in prose or
verse, was very much the currency of polite culture, an important
commodity in its own right. And increasingly, in the course of the eight-
eenth century, the authoritative polite voice came to be associated not so
much with London itself as with the environs of London, the suburbs, and
a metropolitan culture that claimed to know - and to seek to regulate - the
countryside as well as the urban scene. Regulation, or good stewardship as
Pope would have it, often meant removing blood from the landscape,
tidying away the effluvia of game- and livestock-rearing and killing, of field
sports and agriculture, in order that the sanctity of picturesque greenness,
of English verdure, might be perceived undisturbed.
Coupled as friends, coupled as enemies: Pope and Montagu have been

biographically linked, but they have not been ranked equally within early
eighteenth-century literary culture. Pope has long been regarded as the
supremely canonical poet of the early eighteenth century; he succeeded in
making himself into a monument, the very icon of the major poet, in his
own time and has never disappeared from view since. For most twentieth-
century critics, Montagu has merely figured as a woman writer and
epistolary stylist, as remarkable for her appearances in Pope's satire as for
her learning. That Montagu's works are now available in authoritative
scholarly editions owes something to feminist interest in recovering
neglected women writers during the past twenty-five years. While scholars
working in feminist literary history, colonial discourse, and postcolonial
theory have recently latched onto Montagu, some Pope scholars have re-
evaluated his works in ways influenced by these new fields.
For Laura Brown, Pope is a master tropologist of the discourse of
imperialism and the fetishism of commodities. Building on the work of
Reuben A. Brower and Louis A. Landa,8 Brown represents Belinda in The
310

Rape of the Lock, arming herself at her dressing-table for combat in the
marketplace of sexuality, as a touchstone at the very heart of eighteenth-
century literary culture: "The image of female dressing and adornment has
a very specific, consistent historical referent in the early eighteenth century
- the products of mercantile capitalism ... Women wear the products of
accumulation, and thus by metonymy they are made to bear responsibility
for the system by which they are adorned."9 Brown is particularly
interested in discovering how the very structures, conventions, and syntax
of literary works bear the marks of the psychic and social anxieties
generated by capitalism and empire-building. Thus Brown reworks earlier
formalist studies of Pope to achieve a new level of engagement with history
and political ideology.
Ellen Pollak's Poetics of Sexual Myth and Brean S. Hammond's Pope
similarly attend to questions of ideology and history as they figure in poetic
forms.10 For Pollak, ideology means the ideology of gender and sexual
difference. Her feminist study finds Pope an upholder of ideas of sexual
difference and women's inferiority, while Swift emerges as an iconoclastic
naysayer to gender ideology, despite the misogyny of some of his poems.
Applying a form of Marxist ideology critique - derived from Pierre
Macherey - to the contradictions of Pope's writing, Hammond gives us a
sense of Pope's simultaneous wielding of cultural authority and exclusion
from social power.11
This line of inquiry presents a Pope positioned at the center of elite
literary culture. Yet his social position was in many ways marginal rather
than typical, as Hammond indicates, and his satires directed at the Walpole
administration and the Hanoverian dynasty shimmer with the peculiar
energy of disaffection. Yet how politically disaffected was Pope? Had he
any Utopian longings for a radical subversion of contemporary society? It is
tempting to read the very furtiveness and political risks involved in Jacobite
discourse as a sign of a form of Utopian social critique.
For some years there has been a growing interest in the possibility of
Pope's Jacobitism, his continuing loyalty to the house of Stuart, over and
above his openly Oppositional stance toward the Hanoverian succession
and Walpole. If Pope were a Jacobite, he would have been committed to
seeing the German Protestant house of Hanover replaced by the English but
Catholic house of Stuart. Being Catholic, Pope was an obvious target of
suspicion of treasonable Jacobite sympathies, so it would have been only
prudent for him to keep any involvement in Jacobite activities secret.
Besides, like his close, and most notoriously disaffected friend, Henry St.
John, Lord Bolingbroke, Pope also seems to have been keen to advance the
cause of Frederick, Prince of Wales, the hero of the so-called "Patriot
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Opposition," as Christine Gerrard has most recently shown.12 The Patriot

Opposition consisted of Whigs loyal to the Hanoverian succession, hence
"patriotic," and opposed to the leadership of Sir Robert Walpole, therefore
in "opposition" to the current government. So there is considerable
evidence for Pope having played both sides against the middle in his hope
for some dramatic change in English politics.
Yet there remains to be explained that violent energy in much of Pope's
social and political commentary, an energy which we might associate with
political subversion, even radicalism, in spite of the conservatism of many
of his ideas - such as his belief, shared with Bolingbroke, who wrote a
treatise on the subject, that a "Patriot" king, such as the Prince of Wales, or
more riskily, a Stuart returned to the throne, could transform English
culture. It is tempting to attach to Pope something of the romance of
adherence to lost causes, at least to what Douglas Brooks-Davies calls an
"emotional Jacobitism," rather than a commitment to a program of
political action.13 Two very persuasive articles by Howard Erskine-Hill
offer readings of Pope's poetry according to a Jacobite code, in which
knowing readers would have delighted.14 Once the case for such a code has
been made, images of conquest, rape, or violent seizure, whether by scissors
or swords, and mentions of William I, "the Conqueror," in Pope's poetry,
offer themselves as charged with a furtive allusiveness to the Revolution of
1688-89 and William III.15
A debate in the Times Literary Supplement in 1973 between the literary
critic Pat Rogers and the social historian E. P. Thompson raised the issue of
whether or not Pope's helping his half-sister, Magdalen Racketts, and her
husband and son, who were prosecuted for deer-stealing and Jacobite
agitation in the early 1720s, might help document that he was a Jacobite
sympathizer. Rogers didn't and still doesn't think so, and he has recently
published an incisive review of the evidence,16 but in Whigs and Hunters:
The Origin of the Black Act, Thompson makes a persuasive case for Pope's
alignment with the Windsor and Waltham "Blacks," those deer-stealers
who blackened their faces for better cover by night and were so harshly
prosecuted by Walpole on the grounds of Jacobite conspiracy.17
According to Thompson, Pope might have been a bit more radical in his
sympathies than most literary critics have seen fit to observe. Thompson
finds Pope's poem Windsor-Forest of 1713 a premonition of things to come
under the Hanoverian dispensation (George I accedes in 1714), in which
forest law would soon come back into force and the new Black Act would
make deer-stealing and associated suspicious activities capital crimes.
Within crown forests, the protection of deer was the overriding considera-
tion, and forest inhabitants could expect to have their crops eaten by deer.
312

Forest law, if strictly enforced, assured the deer free passage at the
inhabitants' expense and could also prevent the cutting of timber or peat or
turf without a special license. "At least, this was so in theory," as Thompson
puts it. "Claim and counter-claim had been the condition of forest life for
centuries."18 As Thompson explains, a forest may appear to be simply
woodland and heath, uncultivated land, but in fact it has its own complex
economy, providing for royal sport through deer-keeping but also tradition-
ally allowing extensive compensatory common rights to forest inhabitants,
including rights to pasturage of livestock, timber and firewood, the cutting
of peat, turf, heath, fern, and furze, and the digging of sand and gravel.19
According to Thompson, Pope's vindication of Queen Anne's relaxed
attitude toward forest law and commoners' cultivation and use of the forest
aligns him with poachers and resisters of the repressive Walpole machine.
Thompson's Pope does not emerge exactly as a poet of the people -
Windsor-Forest may endorse Blacking, but in order to celebrate Queen
Anne as legitimate, and congenial, monarch: "And Peace and Plenty tell, a
STUART reigns" (line 42). But having once read Thompson's presentation of
the documentary evidence of Pope's involvement with the Racketts along-
side his analysis of Windsor-Forest, few readers will remain unswayed in
the direction of a Pope whose social comment on the Hanoverians and the
Walpole regime should be read as an arrow "expertly flighted and with a
shaft of solid information."20
Pope was a master of self-promotion, as well as of self-preservation. He
perfected turning political disenfranchisement into satirical literary tri-
umphs. This technique made him appealing to some women writers of the
time, for who better could serve as a model of the disenfranchised still
succeeding in the literary marketplace?21 As a London linen merchant's
son, a Catholic, a Jacobite sympathizer, if not an active conspirator, and a
sufferer from Pott's disease, or tuberculosis of the spine, Pope had many
disadvantages to overcome to enter into polite society. He stood only four
feet six inches high, and was very hunchbacked, requiring in middle age a
stiff set of linen stays to hold himself upright. The disease also brought him
severe headaches, fevers, sensitivity to cold, and respiratory difficulties as
his spine collapsed. His biographer Maynard Mack observes that by the
time Pope had become a successful poet, "he was already established in his
own mind and in the minds of others as a dwarf and a cripple."22
According to Kristina Straub, anti-Catholic bigotry often combined with
homophobia, so that Pope was also at particular pains to distance himself
from homoerotic associations and sexual ambiguity.23 Yet Pope counted
among his friends some of the wealthiest and most influential members of
the aristocracy and gentry. How did he manage it?
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Pope's ideas about the proper conduct of the country gentleman as a

landowner and shaper of the countryside were crucial for his social rise,
overriding his sometimes unpopular political sympathies. Fashioning the
English countryside and becoming an exponent of fashionable aesthetics
became for Pope a ticket to dining at some of the most admired country
houses in the land.24 And he had the nerve to advise lords and great
landowners about the landscaping design of their estates from the perspec-
tive of his leased five acres at Twickenham, even then a suburb of
London.25 And so we have a paradoxical figure, Pope as the influential
gardening advisor and embodiment of polite literary culture, stamping
more than one generation of landowning toffs with his own peculiarly
London-merchant-middle-class, Catholic, politically disaffected, physically
disabled, image and aesthetic preferences. Thus does the Twickenhamiza-
tion of the English countryside come into being, a movement largely
attributable to the influence of suburban intellectuals like Pope.
Beyond having been meticulously edited by Robert Halsband and Isobel

Grundy, Montagu's work has not received the same kind of scholarly
attention as Pope's. There is no Montagu industry - as yet. Indeed such
scholarly finds as Montagu's marginalia in a set of the fourth edition of
Robert Dodsley's A Collection of Poems in four volumes by Several Hands
(1755) that belonged to the British Consul at Venice, Joseph Smith, have
only recently come to light.26 In "The Politics of Female Authorship,"
Isobel Grundy examines these marginal notes, enabling us to observe
closely the tension Montagu felt regarding her poetic gifts - on the one
hand, the desire to claim her own poems when they appeared in print
("mine," she writes, or "wrote 2 months after my marriage"); on the other,
indignation at appearing in print without either knowledge of it or
permission for it, and even greater indignation at misattribution ("I
renounce &C never saw till this year 1758"). Discovering that without either
her permission or her knowledge, a number of her poems had been in print
for ten years in the century's most popular anthology, made her furious. By
1758, when Montagu wrote her marginalia, she was, according to Grundy,
"an old woman" "unhappily" involved in too many battles and thus "too
insecure to accept willingly the role of published poet."27
What Robert Halsband labels the "Turkish Embassy Letters" in his
complete edition of Montagu's correspondence have become once again, as
she wished, her chief bid for literary fame. Three books and a cluster of
recent essays28 testify to a resurgence of interest in Montagu under the
rubric of colonial discourse and Orientalism, within the terms described by
Edward Said.29 Analyzing the various portraits of herself in Turkish dress
314

that Montagu commissioned, Marcia Pointon constructs a complex model

of aesthetic agency for Montagu: "The spectacle of Ottoman culture - of
feminized Ottoman culture - enabled Montagu to be both viewer and
viewed, to bridge the gap between self as object of another's pleasure and
self as narcissistic, a gap that was a powerful ingredient of eighteenth-
century social discourse and social function." 30 Pointon answers the ques-
tion of what Montagu was seeking in Turkey, and in having herself figured
in Turkish dress, in terms of pleasure and compensation for losses suffered
elsewhere, through smallpox and aging.
Questions such as these will always return us to the imperial observer,
not the colonized, or more subtly, the unheard or repressed Oriental other
within the texts of western imperialism.31 In an abstruse but provocative
essay, Srinivas Aravamudan has coined the term "Levantinization" for the
mechanism by which Montagu attempts to escape from pure Englishness
into Turkishness, but fails. "To run or throw a levant was to make a bet
with the intention of absconding if it was lost," Aravamudan observes. He
attributes to Montagu a form of "intellectual wagering without account-
ability." 32 Montagu must abandon her fantasy of assimilation to Ottoman
culture, her fantasy of going Levantine. The letters of ambassadorial travel
close with a definite return home to Englishness. Aravamudan proposes
that we attempt to read Montagu from the position of occluded postcolo-
nial others, that we "tropicalize" her imperial text as we read it.
No scholarly consensus is likely to be reached regarding the critical force
of Montagu's celebration of cultural difference during her stay in the
Ottoman empire. I am inclined to agree with Meyda Yegenoglu that we
should not underestimate the effect of Montagu's positioning within a
system of Orientalist representations, however much she might have wished
to celebrate the differences between Turkish and English culture. In typically
imperial fashion, Montagu regards the purpose of travel to foreign parts as
escape from domestic conventions, from scandal and the social demands of
home. In "Constantinople, To [William Feilding]," Montagu writes first of
her delight in finding a very English form of rural retirement in Turkey, the
picturesque little farm that is like a suburban garden:
Give me, Great God (said I) a Little Farm

In summer shady and in Winter warm,
Where a clear Spring gives birth to a cool brook
By nature sliding down a Mossy rock,
Not artfully in Leaden Pipes convey'd
Nor greatly falling in a forc'd Cascade,
Pure and unsulli'd winding through the Shade.
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All-Bounteous Heaven has added to my Prayer

A softer Climat and a Purer air. (lines 1-9)33
Then, having established herself comfortably in an English-style retreat,

but with a warmer climate and less damp and sooty air than England could
offer, she sets her sights on the Ottoman splendor of Constantinople, only
to return quickly to the pleasures of retirement:
Yet not these prospects, all profusely Gay,
The gilded Navy that adorns the Sea,
The rising City in Confusion fair,
Magnificently form'd irregular,
Where Woods and Palaces at once surprise,
Gardens on Gardens, Domes on Domes arise,
And endless Beauties tire the wandring Eyes,
So sooths my wishes or so charms my Mind
As this retreat, secure from Human kind,
No Knave's successfull craft does Spleen excite,
No Coxcomb's Tawdry Splendour shocks my sight,
No Mob Alarm awakes my Female Fears,
No unrewarded Merit asks my Tears,
Nor Praise my Mind, nor Envy hurts my Ear,
Even Fame it selfe can hardly reach me here,
Impertinence with all her tattling train,
Fair sounding Flattery's delicious bane,
Censorious Folly, noisy Party rage,
The thousand Tongues with which she must engage
Who dare have Virtue in a vicious Age. (lines 92-111)
The pleasures of Turkey are largely its absences, its differences from home.
Obviously, Montagu has sought a foreign field that is forever not England,
thank God, and where the weather's better, because the sun shines much
more often. Montagu glories in her ideal Turkish retreat precisely because
it is so far removed from English social demands. She imagines from a
pleasing distance exactly what she is escaping from in London, where her
rank and marriage would always assure a certain stark publicity.
When the letters from the Turkish embassy were published, Montagu
was posthumously subjected to intense public scrutiny. Reception of her
letters in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century tended
to focus on whether or not readers agreed with her reports of Turkish
places and customs. Following most immediately in Montagu's footsteps,
Elizabeth, Lady Craven, who traveled to Constantinople in 1786 and
published her own journal in letters in 1789, so disliked Lady Mary's letters
that she dismissed them as forgeries, observing "that whoever wrote L.
316

M 's Letters (for she never wrote a line of them) misrepresents things
most terribly - I do really believe, in most things they wished to impose
upon the credulity of their readers, and laugh at them." 34
In 1813, Byron's friend and traveling companion, John Cam Hobhouse,
annotated his copy of Montagu's letters so contentiously that he seems to
have delighted in attempting to refute her point by point, especially with
regard to Turkish manners, proclaiming that:
her representations are not to be depended upon - Some of her assertions

none but a female traveller can contradict, but what a man who has seen
Turkey can controvert, I am myself capable of proving to be unfounded -
From what I have seen of the country, and from what I have read of her book,
I am sure that her ladyship would not stick at a little fibbing; and as I know
part of her accounts to be altogether false I have a right to suppose she has
exaggerated other particulars - 35
Hobhouse's disputes with Montagu revolve around issues of taste, in which

he figures as a traditional anti-Turkish Englishman. On page 149 of the
letters, for instance, when Montagu praises the Turks for having "a right
notion of life" because "They consume it in music, gardens, wine, and
delicate eating, while we are tormenting our brains with some scheme of
politics, or studying some science to which we can never attain," Hobhouse
adds a penciled note: " - vile music, bad wine &c in such eating as would
disgust any but a Turk." If Montagu relished her experiences of Ottoman
culture to the point of near Levantinization, Hobhouse, by contrast, seems
to have had such a miserable time in Constantinople that he merely
confirmed his anti-Turkish prejudices at every turn. His is the more typical
experience of English travelers in the period, in itself evidence of the
unusually culturally relativist nature of Montagu's vision.
Today Montagu is read primarily as an aristocratic foremother of
feminist inquiry, with all the problems this entails. As a woman with an
inherited title, she spurned the vulgarity of the commercial marketplace,
yet her desire for applause and fame made her continuously seek it in
devious ways. Her satiric impulse was as strong as Pope's, and although it
was more respectable than his in coming from an aristocrat, such an
impulse was simultaneously much less acceptable coming from a woman.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's cultural heirs include such twentieth-
century English women travelers to Turkey as Freya Stark and Christina
Dodwell.
Pope's legacy can be seen today in the National Trust taste for stately
homes and gardens, the Tory garden festivals of the 1980s and 1990s, 36 the
"Heritage Industry" generally, and less obviously, much of the propaganda
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DONNA LANDRY
against hunting. Because along with the industries of countryside-worship

and tourism, 37 Pope helped to create a suburban attitude toward the
ecology of rural life, from game laws and field sports to the proper attitude
toward animals as sentient beings and the desirability of vegetarianism.38 If
we take Thompson's case seriously, then Pope's criticism of aristocratic and
moneyed excess, his squeamishness at blood sports, his interest in vegetar-
ianism, and his hoping to make all estates, even the countryside at large, as
tame and picturesque as a suburban garden, point in the direction, however
covert or tenuous, of what today would take the form of an alignment with
class struggle from below.
Notice Pope's ambivalent representation in Windsor-Forest of the sea-
sonal round as one bloody field sport after another, with vigorous young
Englishmen, their own blood "fermented" by youthful spirits, forever
seeking something or someone to kill:
Ye vig'rous Swains! while Youth ferments your Blood,
And purer Spirits swell the sprightly Flood,
Now range the Hills, the gameful Woods beset,
Wind the shrill Horn, or spread the waving Net. (lines 93-96)
After the harvest at summer's end, autumnal partridge-netting (lines 97-
104) and pheasant-shooting (lines 111-18) give way to wintry hare-
hunting and woodcock- and songbird-shooting (lapwings and larks) (lines
119-34), while spring brings fishing (lines 135-46), and summer returns
with the pursuit of the hart, the royal chase (lines 147-64):
See! the bold Youth strain up the threatning Steep,
Rush thro' the Thickets, down the Vallies sweep,
Hang o'er their Coursers Heads with eager Speed,
And Earth rolls back beneath the flying Steed.
Let old Arcadia boast her ample Plain,
Th'Immortal Huntress, and her Virgin Train;
Nor envy Windsorl since thy Shades have seen
As bright a Goddess, and as chast a Queen;
Whose Care, like hers, protects the Sylvan Reign,
The Earth's fair Light, and Empress of the Main, (lines 15 5-64)
That seasonal round of blood sport is how we know all's right with
England, the empire, and the world. The shot larks may "fall, and leave
their little Lives in Air" (line 134), the glorious plumage of the pheasant
may make his death peculiarly poignant, and the human desire to kill
something may even corrupt other species: "Beasts, urg'd by us, their
Fellow Beasts pursue, / And learn of Man each other to undo" (lines 123-
24). But however philosophically ambivalent Pope may sound, his criticism
318

of the bloodiness of field sports functions both literally, as in these two

lines, and more metaphorically elsewhere, as a parenthetical intrusion. The
ultimate argument of the poem is that these sports are preferable to war.
Father Thames is succinctly explicit in his prophecy regarding a future Pax
Britannica: "The shady Empire shall retain no Trace / Of War or Blood, but
in the Sylvan Chace" (lines 371-72). Imperial Britain demands that "Arms"
be employed on somebody, so let them be "employ'd on Birds and Beasts
alone" (line 374).
Blood sports may just be preferable to war, and the unfolding of hunting
seasons for game may assure social harmony in the realm at a regrettable
price, but one thing is unambiguously clear: the ideology of governance as
good stewardship. This preoccupation recurs throughout Pope's writing,
including his praise of Anne as lax enforcer of forest law in Windsor-
Forest. In previous reigns - William Fs, and by coded insinuation, William
Ill's - the tyranny of forest law laid waste to vast tracts of land for royal
pleasure in the chase, and subjects were as expendable as, though less well
fed than, his majesty's deer:
What wonder then, a Beast or Subject slain

Were equal Crimes in a Despotick Reign;
Both doom'd alike for sportive Tyrants bled,
But while the Subject starv'd, the Beast was fed. (lines 57-60)
The return of a Stuart to the throne has not only restored hunting to its
proper place in the cycle of things, but allowed commoners to repossess
their rights in the forest. Because Anne has not been "displeas'd" to see "the
peaceful Cottage rise" or "gath'ring Flocks on unknown Mountains fed,"
or "yellow Harvests spread" "O'er sandy Wilds":
The Forests wonder'd at th'unusual Grain,
And secret Transport touch'd the conscious Swain.
Fair Liberty, Britannia's Goddess, rears
Her chearful Head, and leads the golden Years. (lines 86-92)
Pope's praise of Anne as a good steward, summarized in the punning line

"And Peace and Plenty tell, a STUART reigns" (line 42), parallels his self-
praise as generous host in The Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace
Paraphrased twenty years later:
Content with little, I can piddle here

On Broccoli and mutton, round the year;
But ancient friends, (tho' poor, or out of play)
That touch my Bell, I cannot turn away.
Tis true, no Turbots dignify my boards,
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But gudgeons, flounders, what my Thames affords.

To Hounslow-heath I point, and Bansted-down,
Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own. (lines 137-44)
Pope's poetic support for this principle of stewardship was most crucial, I
think, in making his work appeal to his aristocratic patrons and friends -
the Bathursts, Burlingtons, Bolingbrokes, Cobhams, etc.:
Who then shall grace, or who improve the Soil?

Who plants like BATHURST, or who builds like BOYLE.
'Tis Use alone that sanctifies Expence,
And Splendour borrows all her rays from Sense.
His Father's Acres who enjoys in peace,
Or makes his Neighbours glad, if he encrease;
Whose chearful Tenants bless their yearly toil,
Yet to their Lord owe more than to the soil;
Whose ample Lawns are not asham'd to feed
The milky heifer and deserving steed;
Whose rising Forests, not for pride or show,
But future Buildings, future Navies grow:
Let his plantations stretch from down to down,
First shade a Country, and then raise a Town.
(Epistle to Burlington, lines 177-90)
And this ideology of the proper good stewardship of land involves a

managerial relation to the rural and the natural world. So does the
suburban desire to tidy up the countryside as if it were one's own garden.
A suburban consumer's attitude like Pope's often proffers a sensitivity
toward animal sensibilities that makes one peculiarly likely to find things in
the country - still the scene of food production and animal excretion as
well as extermination - less than lovely. The suburbanite itches to manage
and regulate such things, such flows, that the country might be generally
picturesque and pleasant to walk in. Visiting the countryside even today is
second only to watching television as Britain's favorite pastime: "On a
summer Sunday afternoon, the Countryside Commission estimate that
eighteen million people, two fifths of the population, like to get away from
it all and go to the country."39 The historical triumph of walking in the
countryside over hunting, riding, and field sports is bound up with the
Twickenhamization of the countryside, and in Pope and Montagu we can
see some of this conflict being played out, as it is still being played out,
however residually, in social antagonisms and debates in Britain today.
So let us keep in mind Pope as a figure of exclusion mainstreamed, as a
Jacobite canonized, and as a suburban intellectual. For the land-improving
32.0

classes, Pope served as a legitimating arbiter of taste. Thanks to his

influence, the standards applied to country estates were increasingly
suburban. As a poet of social criticism and satire, as a promoter of the
industry of domestic tourism, particularly of the stately home and country
park variety, and as a critic of blood sports and a would-be vegetarian
pronouncer upon the proper management of the English countryside, Pope
often sounds oddly like our contemporary, despite some obvious differ-
ences. He insinuates Montagu into his satires as filthy Sappho or a rustic, if
not plebeian, poacher, living off rabbits and roots; and she ventriloquizes
him incriminating himself as a toady, a snob, and a seditious fool.
When Montagu takes her revenge on Pope, she does so by ventrilo-
quizing his own verse, with its mannerisms and pretensions made absurdly
self-revealing. She so closely shares a certain metropolitan social space
around Twickenham that she can twist Pope's own texts inside out. He is
for her the chief symptom of the very commercialization and vulgar
cheapening of the culture he himself affects to deplore. Her satirical
strategy exposes Pope's self-proclaimed superior taste as a cloak for the
envy felt by members of the middle-class like himself toward social super-
iors. Through her ventriloquization of his voice in a poetic epistle to
Bolingbroke, we observe how Pope's greed and his perpetual financial
cramp drive him to write splenetic attacks on other people's feasts.
According to Montagu, his sycophantic relation to Bolingbroke is based on
snobbery as well as bad politics - Opposition to the Hanoverians, Whigs
(such as Edward Wortley Montagu and Lady Mary), and Sir Robert
Walpole; possibly Jacobite treason. Far from being content to "piddle here /
On Broccoli and mutton, round the year," Pope envies the rich their
elaborate repasts:
When I see smoaking on a Booby's board

Fat Ortalans, and Pies of Perigord,
My self am mov'd to high poetick rage
(The Homer, and the Horace of the Age).
Puppies! who have the insolence to dine
With smiling beauties, and with sparkling wine,
While I retire, plagu'd with an Empty Purse,
Eat Brocoli, and kiss my antient Nurse.
But had we flourish'd when stern Henry reign'[d]
Our good Designs had been but ill explain'd;
The Ax had cut your solid Reasoning short,
I, in the Porter's Lodge, been scourg'd at Court,
To better Times kind heaven reserv'd our Bir[th,]
Happy for us that Coxcombs are on Earth.
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DONNA LANDRY
Mean spirits seek their Villany to hide,

We shew our venom'd Souls with noble Pride,
And, in bold strokes, have all Mankind defy'd;
Past o'er the bounds that keep Mankind in aw[e,]
And laugh'd at Justice, Gratitude and Law:
While our Admirers stare with dumb surprize
Treason, and Scandal, we monopolize.
Yet this remains our more peculiar boast,
You scape the Block, and I the Whipping-Post.
(P[ope] to Bolingbroke^ lines 76-98)
From Montagu's point of view, it is evidence of the absurdity of the times

that Pope and Bolingbroke can command the attention of the reading
public with a seeming monopoly on the literature of impolite comment -
treason and scandal - while denouncing the current government so openly.
Once upon a time, during the reign of Henry VIII, Bolingbroke would have
been beheaded for such treason, and Pope merely horse-whipped, as
appropriate for one from the meaner, servile classes.
I think we have to admit that Lady Mary gives as good as she gets. It is
hard not to credit much of her portrait of Pope, though the picture might
be abhorrent to some Pope fans. Now where is she positioning herself,
exactly, in order to ventriloquize Pope's self-incrimination? I think that
much of her identity is staked on a certain kind of upper-class female
identification with the culture of hunting and blood sports. Precisely what
antagonizes Pope and gives him profound ambivalence about hunting
culture is what gives her a sense of superiority, in spite of the official
gender-ban on women speaking their minds in this period. The semiotics of
riding the country, or surveying the nation from a position of dominance
and horse-mastery, seems crucial to her identity - even to her bodily
integrity and her health, as she reiterates over the years:
You'l wonder to hear that short silence is occasion'd by not having a moment
unemploy'd at Twictnam, but I pass many hours on Horseback, and I'll assure
you ride stag hunting, which I know you stare to hear of. I have arriv'd to vast
courrage and skill that way, and am as well pleas'd with it as with the
Acquisition of a new sense. His Royal Highness hunts in Richmond Park, and
I make one of the Beau monde in his Train. I desire you after this Account not
to name the Word old Woman to me any more; I approach to 15 nearer than I
did 10 year ago, and am in hopes to improve ev'ry year in Health and Vivacity.
(letter to Lady Mar, August 1725)40
Proficiency at riding to stag-hounds gives Montagu the pleasure of "the

Acquisition of a new sense." She is happier making "one of the Beau
322

monde" in the Prince's train out hunting than in more urban or domestic
settings. She is the English type of hunter-gatherer, not the settled agricul-
tural type. The stewardship of land, dynastic preservation of the large
estate, don't really come into it. She writes of riding and hunting sounding
more like a pleased insider within English culture than she does almost
anywhere else in her writing.
What is striking in this picture is the absence - are they an excluded
middle? - of the rural lower classes, some of whom do participate in
hunting and country sports, and some of whom do still hunt-and-gather, if
not poach, and eat rabbits and root vegetables. They are the modern
representatives of the use-rights-seeking, poaching, hunting-without-prop-
erty-qualification Blacks, with whom Pope may have sympathized more
than he was prepared to say openly. A gardener who could identify, to a
certain extent, with gatherers and hunters of the lower classes, he was at
least ambivalent about the importance of field or blood sports within
English culture. And about hunting as a rural lower-class activity he had
something, however covert or brief, to say.
The compensations which a Pope and a Montagu sought through literary

production differed. Pope's writing must be connected with a desire to
acquire symbolic as well as commercial capital, with upward mobility, in
short, while Montagu's writing seems often to have served her as a
compensation for failed romance and thwarted desires - political, sexual,
and touristic.41 In spite of being a woman and resenting gender restrictions,
Montagu has more scope for acting than Pope; she can see the point in
physical dash, and riding and hunting as sport and exercise; and, as a
consequence, she seems to resent other people's pleasures less than he does.
Pope becomes much more fanatical as he is more restricted in his outlets,
and more dependent upon the generosity, if not charity, of others, for his
pleasures than is Montagu. By my definition, he is more thoroughly
"suburban" than she is, much more likely to seem like our contemporary,
unless we make a habit of nomadic tourism or take up the life of expatriate
exile.
Yet both Pope and Montagu seek to aestheticize and immortalize the
minutiae of their very existences in writing, to compose an aesthetics of the
everyday. This desire for control over one's own landscape, one's own small
patch, is a profoundly domestic and self-righteous way of viewing the
world. And the more one seeks to make one's life and its terrain one's own,
each consumer purchase reflective of one's tastes and politics, the more
vegetarianism and animal rights seem to come into play, and the more the
notion of field sports and hunting as part of a national identity comes to
323

DONNA LANDRY
seem abhorrent. Some protesters may advocate the rights of foxes over the
rights of farmers or riders to hounds, but is there not also a desire to be
forever rid of the symbolic privilege of toffs on horseback? To be a plain
Alexander Pope getting his own back at a Lady Mary Wortley Montagu?
The literature of social comment has usually been dependent upon such
breaches.
NOTES
1 See David Foxon and James McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century
Book Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 51-101; this passage p. 101.
2 Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics,
iyi6-i8i8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), P- 2 4-
3 LETTERS of the Right Honourable Lady M — y W yM e: Written,
during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, To Persons of Distinction, Men
of Letters, &c. in different Parts of Europe. Which Contain, Among other
Curious Relations, Accounts of the Policy and Manners of the Turks; Drawn
from Sources that have been inaccessible to other Travellers, 3 vols. (London:
Printed for T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1763). The modern scholarly edition,
which labels these the "Turkish Embassy Letters," is The Complete Letters of
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1965-67).
4 The recent publication of Montagu's Romance Writings, ed. Isobel Grundy
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), provides new autobiographical evidence of
this period of Montagu's life, in the "Italian Memoir," pp. 81-105.
5 The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis and A.
Dayle Wallace with the assistance of Edwine M. Martz (London and New
Haven: Oxford University Press and Yale University Press, 1965), vol. xxxiv, p.
2-55-
6 All quotations from Pope's verse are taken from The Poems of Alexander Pope:
A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text With Selected Annotations,
ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963). See also The Twickenham Edition of
the Poems of Alexander Pope, gen. ed. John Butt, 11 vols. (London: Methuen,
and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939-69).
7 "Her own statement . . . was this; that at some ill-chosen time, when she least
expected what romances call a declaration, he made such passionate love to her,
as, in spite of her utmost endeavours to be angry and look grave, provoked an
immoderate fit of laughter; from which moment he became her implacable
enemy," "Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M. W. Montagu," in Essays and
Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 37.
8 See Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1959) and Louis A. Landa, "Pope's Belinda, the General
Emporie of the World, and the Wondrous Worm," in Essays in Eighteenth-
Century English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp.
178-98.
9 Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-
324

Century English Literature (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press,
1993), pp. 1 i z , 118. See also Brown, Alexander Pope (Oxford: Blackwell,
1985).
10 Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of
Swift and Pope (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985) and
Brean S. Hammond, Pope (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986).
11 Three studies illustrate the value of bringing explicitly politicized forms of
literary inquiry to bear on eighteenth-century texts, a movement that began in
the mid-1980s. See Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown's introductory essay in
The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (London and
New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 1-22, and the essay in that volume by John
Barrell and Harriet Guest, "On the Use of Contradiction: Economics and
Morality in the Eighteenth-Century Long Poem," pp. 121-43. Most recently,
Colin Nicholson has investigated Pope's own financial investments in relation to
his satires in Writing & the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early
Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
12 Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and
National Myth, 1725-1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
13 See Douglas Brooks-Davies, Pope's Dunciad and the Queen of Night: A Study
in Emotional Jacobitism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985) and
The Mercurian Monarch: Magical Politics from Spenser to Pope (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1983).
14 Howard Erskine-Hill, "Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in His Time," Eight-
eenth-Century Studies, 15, 2 (1981-82), pp. 123-48, and "Literature and the
Jacobite Cause: Was There a Rhetoric of Jacobitism?," in Eveline Cruickshanks
(ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of jacobitism, 1689-1759 (Edinburgh:
John Donald, 1982), pp. 49-69.
15 The most recent study in this vein is Murray G. H. Pittock's Poetry and Jacobite
Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge
16 See Pat Rogers, Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993). PP. 168-83.
17 E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York:
Pantheon, 1975).
18 Ibid., p. 31.
19 Ibid., pp. 29-32.
20 Ibid., p. 294.
21 See Claudia N. Thomas, Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women
Readers (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press,
1994), and my The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in
Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 43-55.
22 Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press; New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1985), p. 153. See also
Marjorie Hope Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau, (tThis long Disease, my Life":
Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968),
pp. 7-82.
23 See Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual
Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 69-88.
32.5

DONNA LANDRY
24 See Peter Martin, Pursuing Innocent Pleasures: The Gardening World of

Alexander Pope (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1984); John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in
the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), and Gardens
and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cam-
bridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992); and Morris R. Brownell, Alexander
Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).
25 Malcolm Kelsall, The Great Good Place: The Country House and English
Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 59, 78.
26 Robert Dodsley, A Collection of Poems in four volumes by Several Hands, 4th
edn. (London: Printed by J. Hughs for R. and R. Dodsley, 1755). In 1982 the set
was held by the Pforzheimer Library, New York, but it has since moved to the
British Library (shelfmark C107.dg.28).
27 Isobel Grundy, "The Politics of Female Authorship: Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu's Reaction to the Printing of her Poems," The Book Collector, 31, 1
(1982), pp. 19-37; this passage on p. 37. The set contains six volumes in all,
though Montagu seems to have annotated only the original four from 1755.
Volumes v and vi were published in March 1758, the year in which Montagu
made her notes, but Grundy opines that, given the slowness of the mails
between London and Venice, she probably never saw them (pp. 22-23).
28 See Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY,
and London: Cornell University Press, 1991); Cynthia Lowenthal, Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter (Athens: Univer-
sity of Georgia Press, 1994); Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers-, and
Meyda Yegenoglu, "Supplementing the Orientalist Lack: European Ladies in the
Harem," in Mahmut Mutman and Meyda Yegenoglu (eds.), Inscriptions 6:
Orientalism and Cultural Differences (Santa Cruz: Center for Cultural Studies,
University of California, Santa Cruz, 1993), pp. 45-80. Lowe gives us a
Montagu whose feminist identification with Turkish women in the hamam
disrupts the monolithic othering of Orientalism (Critical Terrains, pp. 40-52).
Yegenoglu counters with a sharp critique that reveals how inescapable certain
Orientalist assumptions remain, even for so unconventional an Englishwoman
as Montagu. In order to position herself in the women's baths, Montagu has to
assume a masculine, Orientalizing, voyeuristic gaze. Any possible homoeroti-
cism is overcome by Montagu's assuming the position of a colonial male
observer ("Supplementing the Orientalist Lack," pp. 67-70).
29 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1978; London and New York: Penguin, 1995).
30 Marcia Pointon, "Killing Pictures," in John Barrell (ed.), Painting and the
Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art iy00-1850 (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 39-72; this passage p. 63.
31 Yegenoglu is the best and most incisive critic on this question, in "Supple-
menting the Orientalist Lack."
32 Srinivas Aravamudan, "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Hammam: Mas-
querade, Womanliness, and Levantinization," ELH, 62, 1 (1995), pp. 69-104;
this passage p. 70.
33 All quotations from Montagu's poetry are taken from Essays and Poems, ed.
Halsband and Grundy.
326

34 A JOURNEY through The Crimea to Constantinople. In A Series Of Letters from

the right honourable Elizabeth Lady Craven, to his serene highness The
Margrave Of Brandenbourg, Anspach, and Bareith. Written In the Year M
DCC LXXXVI (London: Printed for G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1789), p. 105.
3 5 Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M — y W yM e: Written,
during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, To Persons of Distinction, Men
of Letters, &c. in different Parts of Europe. Which Contain, among other
curious Relations, Accounts of the Policy and Manners of the Turks. Drawn
from Sources that have been inaccessible to other Travellers, A New Edition,
Complete in One Volume (London: Printed for John Taylor, 1790), MS. notes
by John C. Hobhouse, AM, 1813. British Library shelfmark: 1477.^29.
3 6 See John Roberts, "The Greening of Capitalism: The Political Economy of the
Tory Garden Festivals," in Simon Pugh (ed.), Reading Landscape: Country-
City-Capital (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990),
pp. 231-45.
37 See Carole Fabricant, "The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Public
Consumption of Private Property," in Nussbaum and Brown (eds.), The New
Eighteenth Century, pp. 254-75.
38 See Pope's contribution to The Guardian, no. 61, "Against Barbarity to
Animals" (21 May 1713) in The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1. The
Earlier Works, ijii-iyzo, ed. Norman Ault (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press
and Basil Blackwell, 1936; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968); and Epistle
in of the Essay on Man (lines 152-68 and 241-68).
39 Nigel Duckers and Huw Davies, A Place in the Country: Social Change in Rural
England (London: Michael Joseph, 1990), p. 155.
40 The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Halsband, vol. 11,
PP- 54-55-
41 Here I agree with Elizabeth Bohls: "The most painful, deeply repressed,
inarticulate and virtually inarticulable longings of eighteenth-century British
women were, I suspect, not sexual but finally political," Women Travel Writers,
P-45-
FURTHER READING
Aravamudan, Srinivas, "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Hammam: Mas-
querade, Womanliness, and Levantinization," ELH, 62, 1 (1995), pp. 69-104.
Barrell, John, and Guest, Harriet, "On the Use of Contradiction: Economics and
Morality in the Eighteenth-Century Long Poem," in Felicity Nussbaum and
Laura Brown (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English
Literature (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 121-43.
Brower, Reuben A., Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1959).
Brown, Laura, Alexander Pope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English
Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993).
Erskine-Hill, Howard, "Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in His Time," Eight-
eenth-Century Studies, 15, 2 (1981-82), pp. 123-48.
"Literature and the Jacobite Cause: Was There a Rhetoric of Jacobitism?," in
327

DONNA LANDRY
Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism,

1689-1759 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), pp. 49-69.
The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example and the Poetic Response
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).
Fabricant, Carole, "The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Consumption of
Private Property," in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (eds.), The New
Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York and
London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 254-75.
Foxon, David, and McLaverty, James, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century
Book Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
Gerrard, Christine, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and
National Myth, 17x5-1742. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
Grundy, Isobel, "The Politics of Female Authorship: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's
Reaction to the Printing of her Poems," The Book Collector, 31, 1 (1982), pp.
19-37-
Grundy, Isobel, ed., Romance Writings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Halsband, Robert, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1956).
Hammond, Brean S., Pope (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986).
Hunt, John Dixon, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening
during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Uni-
Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture
(Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992).
Kelsall, Malcolm, The Great Good Place: The Country House and English
Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Landa, Louis A., "Pope's Belinda, the General Emporie of the World, and the
Wondrous Worm," in Essays in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Prin-
ceton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 178-98.
Lowe, Lisa, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY, and
London: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Lowenthal, Cynthia, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century
Familiar Letter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994).
Mack, Maynard, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later
Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969).
Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press; New
York and London: W. W. Norton, 1985).
Martin, Peter, Pursuing Innocent Pleasures: The Gardening World of Alexander
Pope (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1984).
Pointon, Marcia, "Killing Pictures," in John Barrell (ed.), Painting and the Politics
of Culture: New Essays on British Art 1700-1850 (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 39-72.
Pollak, Ellen, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of
Swift and Pope (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Rogers, Pat, Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Rumbold, Valerie, Women's Place in Pope's World (Cambridge: Cambridge
328

Sherburn, George (ed.), The Correspondence of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clar-

endon Press, 1956).
The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934).
Straub, Kristina, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Thomas, Claudia N., Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women Readers
(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994).
Thompson, E. P., Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York:
Pantheon, 1975).
Yegenoglu, Meyda, "Supplementing the Orientalist Lack: European Ladies in the
Harem," in Mahmut Mutman and Meyda Yegenoglu (eds.), Inscriptions 6:
Orientalism and Cultural Differences (Santa Cruz: Center for Cultural Studies,
University of California, Santa Cruz, 1993), pp. 45-80.
329

978-0-521-56488-5 - The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740
Edited by Steven N. Zwicker
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This volume offers an account of English literary culture in one of its most

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The Cambridge Companion to Old English The Cambridge Companion to Faulkner

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© Cambridge University Press 1998

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First published 1998

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The Cambridge companion to English Literature, 1650-1740, / edited by Steven N. Zwicker

ISBN-10 0-521-56379-8 hardback

Transferred to digital printing 2005

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List of illustrations page ix

Part i : Contexts and modes

1 England 1 6 4 9 - 1 7 5 0 : differences contained? 3

2 Satire, l a m p o o n , libel, slander 33

3 Gender, literature, and gendering literature in the Restoration 58

4 Theatrical culture 1: politics and theatre 82

5 Theatrical culture 2: theatre and music 104

6 Lyric forms 120

7 Classical texts: translations and transformations 143

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8 "This Islands watchful Centinel": anti-Catholicism and proto-Whiggery

9 John Dry den 185

10 John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester 204

11 The authorial ciphers of Aphra Behn 225

12 Swift, Defoe, and narrative forms 250

13 Mary Astell and John Locke 276

14 Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the literature of

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2.1 Contrivance, from Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726), page 54

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ROS BALLASTER, Mansfield College, Oxford

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The aim of this volume is to introduce students to English literary culture in

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definitions of masculinity and femininity to conceptions of style, to the

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EVENTS AND TEXTS

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1660 Charles Stuart enters London on his thirtieth birthday

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of James, Duke of York to the throne, defeated in the Lords

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1696 Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious; Vanbrugh, The Relapse

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Gay, Shepherd's Week; Mandeville, Fable of the Bees; Pope,

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1741 Fielding, Shamela; Handel, Messiah; Hume, Essays, Moral

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Thomas Hobbes 1588-1679

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John Tillotson 163o-1694

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