A. D. Cousins

Ben Jonson and the politics of genre

While Ben Jonsons political visions have been well documented, this is the first study to consider how he threaded his views into the various literary genres in which he wrote. For Jonson, these genres were interactive and mutually affirming, necessary for negotiating the tempestuous politics of early modern society, and here some of the most renowned Jonson scholars provide a collection of essays that discuss his use of genre. They present new perspectives on many of Jonsons major works, from his epigrams and epistles, through to his Roman tragedies and satirical plays like Volpone. Other topics examined include Jonsons diverse representations of monarchy, his ambiguous celebrations of European commonwealths, his sexual politics, and his engagement with the issues of republicanism. These essays represent the forefront of critical thinking on Ben Jonson, and offer a timely reassessment of the authors political life in Jacobean and Caroline Britain.

Andrew Marvell's 'The Coronet': Doubleness, Conversion, and Meditation

Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Coronet’ is a meditation on conversion. It is also a poem where artistic self-consciousness and self-display at once convey and conflict with celebration or exploration of the sacred. A will to authorial power is inseparable from a will to reverence. In its knowing self-division and contrarieties the poem offers a revealing window onto Marvell’s poems of religious dialogue.

Desire, discontent, parody

If English Renaissance sonnet sequences are about anything they are about desire, but in order to appreciate the import of that word it might be worth, for a moment, transmuting it into a baser metal: to convert ‘desire’, that is, into the older and more native word, ‘want’. ‘Want’ derives from the Old Norse vant , which entered the language via the Viking invasions of the Dark Ages and, from the beginning, signified a lack or deficiency, the state of missing or not having something, as in – to cite the Oxford English Dictionary ’s example – var vant kýr , ‘a cow was missing’ (‘to wane’ – to reduce or diminish in size – derives, incidentally, from the same source). It was not until the eighteenth century, some thousand years later, that the verb ‘to want’ first came to develop the positive sense of yearning or longing for the missed object, while the noun never did, retaining its original negative sense to this day (as in ‘a want of delicacy’, ‘the war on want’, and so forth). When English Renaissance sonneteers use ‘want’, then, it is invariably to indicate a state of lack, as when Sidney’s Astrophil complains, for example, that, since his beloved Stella is absent, ‘I, alas, do want her sight’. If they wished to indicate a positive craving or wish, the sonneteers did, of course, have the word ‘desire’ available to them.

Refiguring the Donna Angelica and Rewriting Petrarch in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

ABSTRACT Especially in one respect throughout his sonnets, Shakespeare’s speaker imagines the Petrarchan discourse of love anew: by refiguring the topos of the donna angelica. In some of the initial 126 sonnets he portrays an aristocratic, transgendered male version of the donna angelica who precariously embodies grace, and whom we therefore discern to have an ambiguous relationship with the concept, at once moral and aesthetic, of “grace” deployed for example by Castiglione and Della Casa. In some of the so-called Dark Lady sonnets thereafter, Shakespeare’s speaker more negatively reconstitutes the donna angelica topos—imaging a desacralized female object of desire in terms of grace profaned, connecting her with concupiscence and with akrasia. He implies that the experience of love has exiled him from his normative understanding of who and what he should be, amplifying the power of sexual desire via allusion to the sovereignty of the Alexandrian Cupid.

The Donna Angelica in Disraeli’s The Young Duke

Medieval and early modern European literatures of courtly love often idealize a female object of desire as a donna angelica, or angelic lady. Notable examples include Dante’s Beatrice (in his La Vita Nuova and Divina Commedia) and Petrarch’s Laura (in his Canzoniere) as well as Spenser’s Elizabeth (in his Amoretti). The angelic lady’s role in fin’amor literature has essentially three aspects. First, she appears to varying degrees as an otherworldly inhabitant of this world inasmuch as she possesses a transcendently spiritual beauty that informs a supranatural physical attractiveness. Second, she inspires numinous desire. Finally, she confers grace upon those who behold her and therefore has the power to ennoble or even to mediate personal salvation. Her appearance is epiphanic; she inspires devotion, and that devotion may bring ennoblement or prove redemptive (Cousins 97–119). Benjamin Disraeli’s acquaintance with Dante and Petrarch, who, in effect, fashioned templates for subsequent representation of the angelic lady, is beyond doubt. His novels Henrietta Temple (1837), Venetia (1837), and Lothair (1870) make that explicit (Henrietta Temple 111; Venetia 408 and 457; Lothair 67). His novels also display both an implicit but unmistakable evocation and refiguring of the angelic lady. Here it is argued that the donna angelica topos is crucial to the plot and political argumentation of his early novel, The Young Duke (1831). In this text, a type of the angelic lady ennobles and redeems the protagonist. She completes the enhancement of his life, having become the object of his erotic desire and moral admiration, by agreeing at last to unite her life to his in marriage—a consummation usually impossible for the donna angelica of fin’amor tradition. She thus fulfills his quest for personal fulfillment. At the same time, she contributes to his political education and inspires (by instigating as well as morally affirming) his involvement in public affairs. She helps him to gain a more comprehensive understanding of, as well as a deeper insight into, his conflicted society and what he must do to contribute positively to it. That is to say, the angelic lady ennobles the male protagonist, bringing about his redemption from a life of trivialities and uselessness. Disraeli’s decision to deploy the angelic lady motif is appropriate, moreover, because its original religious affiliations are Catholic, its embodiment in the novel is a Catholic woman of long-established Catholic descent, and Disraeli connects it with sympathy for Catholic Emancipation. The donna angelica topos is thus put into the service of recent and contested sociopolitical reform—social and political change indirectly represented as an upholding of England’s cultural heritage. Early in The Young Duke, Disraeli describes the Duke of St. James’s preparation for visiting the Catholic household of his former guardian, Mr Dacre, in terms that echo those of Pope’s portrayal, in The Rape of the Lock, when Belinda prepares to begin her social engagements for the day. Disraeli writes: “His Grace’s toilet was already prepared: the magical dressing-box had been unpacked, and the shrine for his devotions was covered with richly-cut bottles of all sizes, [...] adroitly intermixed with the golden instruments, the china vases, and the ivory and rosewood brushes, which were worthy even of Delcroix’s exquisite inventions” (90–91; cf. Pope 155–58, 1. 121–44). The allusive description indicates and emphasizes the young aristocrat’s propensity for both narcissism and luxuriant as well as trivial consumption. It symbolizes, then, the life in society upon which he is embarking, one consciously displaying conspicuous consumption: an extravagant self-indulgence that is itself finally symbolized by the construction of his palatial residence, the aptly named

Monarchy, Home and Nation in Scott’s The Fortunes of Nigel and The Heart of Mid-Lothian

ABSTRACT For all their differences, Scott’s The Fortunes of Nigel and The Heart of Mid-Lothian have distinct similarities. Each has a morally upright protagonist and is set some years after a Scottish-English union has been effected. More important is that each depicts a journey from Scotland to England in search of justice at the monarch’s hand and, inseparably from that, the establishing of a secure domestic space – the creation of a home – that emblematises the concept of successfully co-existent English and Scottish cultural identities. Both novels are thus specifically concerned with the achievement of justice in Scotland by the then-British monarch located in England. The Fortunes of Nigel, set in the reign of James I, considers the factors – personal, political, theological and social – arguably contributing to the overthrow of Charles I’s sovereignty and the establishment of the Interregnum. The Heart of Mid-Lothian considers questions of rebellion and societal injustice within the framework of the Hanoverian dynastic rule over Britain, after the English Revolution and the Glorious Revolution. In that context of political upheaval, what is of particular interest is therefore the exploration of what could be called the continuum between home and nation in the two novels: the experiences of an insecure domestic space and of an unstable national identity by members of two different social classes, in two different historical periods, under two different yet sequent monarchies.

Marvell's Religious Dialogues: The Ordo Salutis, Home and Doubleness

Andrew Marvells religious dialogues are often discussed separately but are not often considered together. When they are, what connects them and what differentiates them are seldom closely examined. Although they are all dialogues spoken by different participants with more or less religious concerns, what else might be said of the poems, taken as a group? Here I argue that to contextualize them in terms of the ordo salutis, the idea of home, and what I describe as Marvells doubleness in his religious verse illuminates what connects them—especially, problematic connections—and also what distinguishes them from each other.

Marvell's Devout Mythology of the New World: Homeland and Home in 'Bermudas'

Andrew Marvell’s ‘Bermudas’ contributes to debates in Interregnum Britain about colonization of the New World, the idea of the ‘homeland’, and the identity of ‘true religion’. He creates what is in effect a sacred fable – a re-telling of the Exodus narrative – related not only to the Psalms and to psalm-paraphrase, but also to the theology of contemptus mundi that John Calvin articulates throughout his commentary on the Book of Psalms. In doing so, Marvell attempts to supplant Edmund Waller’s mock-heroic account of the Bermudas with his own devout mythos of the colony.

The sonnet and the lyric mode

‘Let us inspect the lyre’ (Keats): introduction At first glance the relationship between the sonnet and lyric seems transparent: if one adopts the common definition of a mode as an overarching and transhistorical category encompassing many genres, surely the sonnet is not merely an instance but also a textbook example, even a prototype, of the lyric mode. Lyric is, for example, often defined in terms of its length, and, according to common though not unchallenged definitions, the sonnet weighs in at fourteen lines; lyric is frequently represented as the genre of internal and individualized emotions, and the principal subject traditionally associated with the sonnet is love; lyric is typically associated with song and music, as is the sonnet. To be sure, many critics have claimed that prototypical status for elegy, maintaining that its emphasis on death and loss renders it a prime example of the preoccupation with absence often attributed to lyric. But the candidacy of that genre for the status of prototype does not preclude and may even support another contender, since the sonnet too often dwells in and on loss, whether it be the death of the lady in the originary sonnets by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), her loss in poems by many of his followers, or the permutations on disappearance and absence in numerous later sonnets (‘So help / me God to another dollop of death, / come on strong with the gravy and black-eyed peas’, Rosanna Warren implores in her witty sonnet ‘Necrophiliac’, 2–4).

European beginnings and transmissions

Within the relatively short span of 100 years, southern Italian poets developed the enduring structural properties of sonnet form, northern Italian poets appropriated their invention and expanded its range, and two particular poets with vastly different outlooks and agendas – Dante and Petrarch – exploited its potentials with a lasting impact upon western literature. During these years, the conventional topics addressed by the sonnet form expanded from guileful entreaties of sexual seduction to more complex expressions of tangled erotic yearning, tumultuous sexual impulse and exalted amatory devotion, in associated ways laden with statements of religious conversion, philosophical conviction, political sentiment and even scientific insight. With so many possibilities at hand, the sonnet form carried within it seeds of experiment among poets old and young, male and female, amateur and professional. My chapter will explore the sonnet’s early development from its invention in the thirteenth century to its dissemination throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. It will emphasize the sonnet’s propensity for expressing self-awareness; for affirming local, communal and emergently national sentiment; and for enabling poets to chart a career path that intersects with public as well as private ambitions.